The silence in the house was the first thing Mathew noticed. It wasn’t the peaceful quiet of a mountain village afternoon; it was a heavy, unnatural void. He had been in the shed a little while, sharpening the blades of the snowblower. He had left six-year-old Michael sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of Lego bricks. But when Mathew stepped inside, the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator.
“Mike? Buddy, you done already?” Mathew called out, wiping grease from his hands with a rag. There was no answer. He walked into the living room, expecting to find the boy hiding behind the sofa or glued to a book. The room was empty. A single red Lego brick sat on the rug, looking strangely abandoned. Mathew’s pulse began to quicken, a small spark of unease lighting in his chest.
He checked the upstairs bedrooms, then the basement. Each empty room made his heart beat a little faster. He ran back to the kitchen and noticed what he had missed before. The heavy wooden back door wasn’t latched. A thin drift of snow had already piled up on the floor, a white finger pointing toward the vast, unforgiving woods of the mountain.