Lightning That Lingers by Sharon Curtis, Tom Curtis

aimlessly into the swaying leaf-stripped trees above her head.
    I’m a penguin. I’m a penguin. I like cold weather, she thought, trying to dream it, believe in it.
    Night closed around her as the drive curved. The stars twinkled in a cloudless black sky, too distant for comfort. The trees arching over the drive seemed in their thrashing malevolence to want to deny her the small solace of the sight of the stars. The wind keened, a predatory chorus.
    She had expected the mansion to be close because the lake was out here somewhere, but the drive went on and on. Her breath came in dry puffs. Each step vibrated through her chilled joints in a shock wave.
    She pulled her hat over her ears as far as she could, and covered her mouth and nose with the muffler. Her breath made the cashmere damp, then ice-clogged, then raw agony on her flesh. The world was filled with harsh sound: the wind, her breathing, the fluttery scratch of her clothing. Her muscles had begun to contract rhythmically in shivers. As her eye fluids chilled, she tried to walk with her eyes closed but she stumbled in the darkness, falling twice. Even with her eyes open, she could barely make out the lane. The moon was dimmer than it had been a week ago when she was in the forest with Philip, but then, there were many sources of light in a night sky. Philip said so. She ought to be able to see.
    I’m a penguin. I don’t mind cold weather.
    She looked up suddenly and saw it. Lily Hill.
    Still distant, it rose from the hilltop, a hard forbidding silhouette. Faint light glowed from etched-glass windows on either side of a grand formal entrance. In the flat moonlight it appearedhuge, institutional, charmless. There must be someone home there. There must be. Relations, servants, Doberman pinschers.… People didn’t leave their mansions unprotected, did they? Her mind fastened on
Upstairs Downstairs
, cataloguing episodes, examining habits of the rich.
    The rich didn’t strip. Why did he do it? Rebellion? Hard times? How hard could times be if you owned a mansion?
    All at once, the snow heaved under her feet. She toppled through an underlying brittle ice crust into two feet of water. The pristine surface had hidden a spring-fed brook.
    Like frigid poison, the icy water bled through her clothes, lacerating her raw flesh, washing her in agony, convulsing her muscles. She tried to struggle up, but her burning wrists buckled and she slapped back into the water, her face filling with ice.
    When she stood at last, she could hear herself weeping. Pain came in racking paroxysms beyond any threshold she could have imagined. Winded, her body heaving with shudders, she tried to aim her clumsy steps toward the mansion and for the first time, she dazedly realized that she might die. Death. She rarely thought about it. It seemed like something removed from her mundane life, an exotic adventure. But if she didn’t get help, she really might die. Her picture would be in the newspapers and people with busy lives would scan the article beneath and say “how sad, she was so young.” But dumb. So dumb to have locked her keys in her car on a night when the chill factor was sixty below zero.
    There was no exact moment when she realizedthat her intellect had begun to malfunction. But distantly, she knew. Her actions pierced her awareness in sharp disconnected detail. Sorcery seemed to transport her from place to place.
    She was pounding her fists on the mansion door.
    She was trying to break in a window.
    She was walking down a country road looking for a mechanic to haul her car out of the ditch.
    I’m freezing to death, she thought. Me. Jennifer Hamilton. Won’t everyone be surprised.… She tried to cudgel her mind into coherency. She tried to recall whether she had actually knocked on his door. She tried to think. But thoughts vanished as though someone was plucking them like feathers from her mind.
    Where was she? A pretty night waved around her like a diorama in counted