Jonah came at noon. He was weaker than I had ever seen him, walking with a stick now, stopping every few steps to catch his breath. But he came.
“Heard about the weather,” he said. “Thought you might need help.”
“I need to finish the outer section, the part by the cave mouth.”
“Then we better start.”
We worked through the day and into the night. By lantern light we nailed boards and stuffed gaps and sealed seams with every scrap of mortar we had left. My hands bled. Jonah’s cough grew so bad he had to sit for 10 minutes between each task. But we kept working. By dawn, the outer section was done. Not pretty, not as tight as the rest of the corridor, but done. The system was complete: a sealed passage from cabin to cave with double doors and baffles at both ends. The mountain’s breath was connected to my living space in a way that Silas had dreamed about for 30 years.
The storm arrived that afternoon.
I have lived through hard winters. I have seen cold that killed livestock and snow that buried houses to their eaves. But I have never before or since seen anything like the February of 1899.
The wind came first. It came from the north like something that had been waiting. It hit the hollow with a sound like the whole world screaming. The temperature, which had been cold but normal that morning, dropped 30 degrees in 3 hours. By nightfall it was below 0. By midnight it was 20 below. By the next morning, the thermometer I had hung outside the cabin had frozen solid and I could not read it anymore.
But I did not need to read it. I could feel it. The cold was a physical thing. It pressed against the walls. It seeped through every crack I had not sealed. It found gaps I did not know existed. But inside the cabin, connected to the corridor connected to the cave, the temperature held: 44 degrees. Not warm, not comfortable, but livable, the kind of cold that makes you wear a coat indoors and sleep under every blanket you own, not the kind of cold that kills you.
I kept a fire burning in the stove, small, just enough to take the worst edge off. I used perhaps a double handful of kindling each day. The cave did the rest. The mountain did the rest. That steady breath of 50-degree air flowed through the corridor, mixing with the cabin air, keeping the temperature from plunging into the depths where flesh freezes and blood stops moving.
Outside, the world was dying.
