Winter can come early in the mountains. We can get snow here in The Corners as early as September, though it never lasts.
All of us kids growing up would still run out to play in it while it lasted though. Snow meant that the narrow mountain roads would be unsafe for buses, so as soon as the flakes fell, freedom rang out across the hills for us.
The crisp, cold air would be split by the shrieks of all ages, throwing balls of the white at each other, or of sleds crashing into the very ditches and brush that the adults feared would be the resting place for the buses.
But all of us, every one, would be told "No snowmen! No snow angels either!"
Those early snows rarely held long enough for forts and other construction, but those were not banned. Only shapes in human form, and only right around Halloween. This isn't to say that every kid always obeyed. Plenty of us did, but we'd knock them over or scratch them out once we were done.
Until the blizzard of 2024.
The Corners is known for the weird. We have our own necromancer, we have witches and even a werewolf family. There was a man that got kidnapped by aliens at a football game back in 2018.
But that blizzard? It was beyond weird. It came in late October, days before Halloween
The day started like any other snow day. Kids yelling, parents exasperated, dogs barking, and that almost crystalline air cutting our lungs. We played hard. The snow was piling up fast by the time a group of us made our way to the edges of the tree farm over in Ashe county, just down from the tri-point marker. Big, flat area perfect for snow fights. Nobody bothered kids there; the owner didn't even live on the land and didn't care as long as nobody wrecked the trees.
We erected walls and forts, piles of ammunition behind them, knowing from the forecasts that the snow would be falling all night and at least part of the next day. It was afternoon before any of us got the idea of making "sentries", snowmen to hide behind in forays outside of the bases.
We decorated them garishly and with horrific gusto. Twisted faces, demonic wings made of pine branches, horns and tails. It became a competition to see who could make the scariest guardian. But night came before we could make more than a few dozen. We tramped our way back up the hills and down the rutted paths we called roads.
And the storm came on. All that night, it fell hard. There were explosions in the night as trees froze and branches cracked. By the time morning came, I couldn't see my dad's truck in the drive. Big dodge diesel with the lift kit, and it was covered in snow. Snow that kept falling. My mom was getting scared, making ready for when the power failed. My dad was busy clearing a path to the truck, and another to the shed where our generator was set up. Me and my sister got put to work moving extra firewood to the porch. We forgot about the forts and the planned snow fight.
Had we remembered, nothing would have changed, as there was no way to reach the tree farm. The roads were piled high, drifts making walls of snow against the trees by their sides. No kid could have climbed and dug their way through that.
We forgot about all of it that day, and the next. By the time Halloween came, we had forgotten that any of it had been done. After all, the snow would have buried what we built.
There was no trick or treating that year. There were calls made and plans put in place for after the snow went away to set up a gathering at the crossroads where the general store and diner sat. Those plans amounted to naught.
Evening came on. As the light crept away, a howling rose. Not the howling of dogs, they huddled, shaking and whining in fear once the sound started. Not even the howling of Terry the werewolf, not that he was rude enough to howl that close to where people live.
No, this was a howl that scraped along nerves. It sparked it's way down the spine and into the guts, spreading terror in its wake. My little sister peed herself. I had to run to the toilet to throw up, my knees folding and my body trembling as that sound echoed through the hills and ripped at our souls.
And it did. I was young, had never thought about my soul, or anything like that. But the feeling of that wailing, shrieking howl tearing at something inside of me, something more than meat and bone proved my soul to me. I've never been able to abide arguments about the soul since that day. Mine had been molested by that sound.
The howl felt like forever. It felt like it had always been, and always would be, and the terror of facing am eternity of it was too much. After everything, six people took their own lives from that sound alone, across The Corners. We still consider them part of the body count from that night.
But the howl didn't last forever. It was only moments. The silence after crashed against us almost as hard as the howl. Whatever had made that sound didn't stop because it was just done howling. No, we knew the silence meant it was present. We could feel the evil ring out across the world. We just didn't know what it was going to do.
They got the Jepson family first. That's what old Mr Byrnes said later, when all the police and federal people showed up.
All of them, three adults and two kids. Something had ripped the door of their house away. Inside, only trails of water leading to pools of blood and piles of meat.
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