From "The Cycle of The Sisters": Cailleach.

She sighed a cold white blizzard over the hills and glens. A freezing static, a swarm of ice crystals that clung to every living thing, suffocating it, drinking in the life and warmth and leaving only the silent empty paleness of death across the land. Under the frozen blanket she had woven nothing stirred. It was a web of which she was the centre. Through the eyes of a dying doe she saw the prey approach. A small red thing riding along the poisonous tarmac that had tracked out of the city into her pristine and unclaimed domain.

She had been waiting for it. The deer finally died, her vision flitted, she was looking from elsewhere, down over the carriage the creature drove. It unwittingly crossed over the border of the real and into her territory without even realising it.

Cailleach smiled and felt her stomach growl in anticipation.

Adam did not know when he had left the house. He'd been in another fury with Lesley and the kids and stormed out, that much he recalled. However his anger had been so total that he seemed to have lost some time. He did not know how long he'd been driving nor had he been paying much direction to the roads or traffic. His rage had kicked him into a state where his body seemed to have autonomous control, had veto over his petulant childish emotions. Which was just as well given he could have chopped the entire family to pieces with a fucking axe and then ploughed into an 18-wheeler if his mood had been left in control.

Who knew how many miles and hours he'd travelled out-with his notice? His attention had been distracted with ranting about the stupid fucking bitch and those dumb little parasites. He'd went through the whole martyr act, placed the blame for all the worlds ills at their feet, for his failures in life. Finally after several violent cathartic fantasies he found himself filled with shame and regret for his actions. Adam stopped the car and sat silently for a minute, staring out the windscreen but at nothing specific. Ahead of him was only white fading into the darkness of the oncoming night. Where the fuck was he?

The answer? Alone, lost on some single track black road wending through hilly, frozen countryside. He seemed so far from civilisation that it was unsettling. He parked up the car and turned on his phone to see if the GPS could clue him in to his current position. The thing couldn't find a signal, which came as no surprise. The cold was beginning to bite down as the sun set and Adam knew he had to find somewhere warm soon. The dull sky was spotted with heavy black snow clouds that looked like brutal contusions on dead grey flesh If he got stuck out here, they'd find him in the morning frozen to death in his car.

It was a cautious beast, she realised, tasting its fear and doubt. She sat behind the man, in its little carriage. It could not sense her but it somehow realised it had crossed a threshold. She wondered if its ritual had been deliberate.

She thought not. Few had ever chosen to approach her in her own domain. This one, like all the others, had transgressed. It now sat unknowing that the threshold had been passed long before. The road it was on was inevitable. There was a dying whimper from somewhere that sealed its fate. it was hers, she only had to wait.

His first instinct and his most reasonable choice was to do an 180, to turn around and go back home, but something, a noise, stopped him. His stomach squirmed and he could feel some mechanism inside him piss a bucket-load of bile into it as he thought of Lesley and the kids.

He couldn't go home, not yet, he wasn't ready for that yet. It was just too much. His behaviour had been inexcusable, monstrous and his shame too great to endure then. Instead he ordered himself to just keep driving, as if he could find a place to outrun his self loathing. He started up the car again and began to drive up the long serpentine road northwards but immediately knew it was no use. The self-recriminations berated him like harpies as night fell and he was swallowed by the bitter crystalline darkness.

Adam felt cold inside and out. He tried to recall what had set him off, why he and Lesley had be fighting again, but could not. All he could remember was closing the boot of the car and then getting in and driving away. It wasn't uncommon for him to forget why they'd fought. Probably something stupid, really really fucking stupid. He tried to figure out what had happened but Christ it was cold.

She gave the frozen pastures outside the carriage a pale florescence in the evening gloom. It looked like the ghost of landscape, vague yet visible against the black clouds above that suffocated any external light. It was a sight to behold, better than the creature deserved or could appreciate.

This one had shed a bouquet of emotion. The inside of the car stank of terrified human; of its hormonal sweats; pungent odours of fear and guilt. She could see them trail off its body like steam and could feel the juices sizzle in her mouth. He was so ripe she could hardly contain herself but not yet, she was not quite ready and it had yet to lose everything. She closed off her vision and left the small carriage behind. Breathing in the night she caused the damp air to turn into a freezing mist and pulled it towards her. The landscape crackled under its oppressive cold.

Though the heater was at the highest setting Adam could see his breath in the air and feel his knuckles tighten and go numb as they clenched the wheel. He realised a need to be careful, if the heater packed in and his battery was left flat he'd be fucked which considering his vocal contempt for folk found frozen in their vehicles (“stay at home you daft fucks”) would not be a particularly good way to be found dead. He turned it off and endured the sensation of an almost instantaneous, crushing cold attack his body. His mind took him back to earlier. In a flash he saw Lesley subdued and terrified as he railed at her. She was curled up on the couch, not looking at him. Why had he been so angry? What had she said?

As if symbolic of the freezing temperature surrounding him he drove into a thick fog bank, obscuring the haunted glow of countryside. The fences at either side of the road and even the road itself vanished a few mere feet in front of the vehicle. Adam slowed the vehicle to a crawl and hoped that something would turn up soon. Fronds of sparkling rime started to build up on the edge of the windows and Adam began to consider hypothermia a very real option if he didn't get moving. He flicked the heating back on and increased his speed slightly. His mind played back a residual childhood memory of a man staggering around in deep snow and a posh English voice-over telling him the man wasn't drunk, he was dying of hypothermia. The voice told him not to lie down and sleep. An old public information broadcast he'd forgotten until that moment a vague fragment of which was left in his brain. Do not lie down and sleep. Good advice.

Cailleach could tell the beast was, at some primitive level, aware of what was happening to it even if thousands of years of breeding had all but erased its senses and abilities. It didn't matter, there was nowhere left for it to go. It was an autonomic impulse of a dying animal struggling for life, nothing more.

Adam wondered why his mind had decided to project something he had not recalled in thirty odd years and decided it was just a stupid memory triggered by all the snow. Adam had never seen snow fall inside fog before, wasn't sure it was possible but remained unsurprised. It was as if the whole world wanted him to freeze to death in this forsaken place. He was not going to have that.

With a last gasp of conviction, he put his foot down a bit harder on the pedal, convinced he had to move quickly before the snowfall made it impossible to drive. His pinnae were stinging, his lips covered in the same thin feathery frost that were growing like ivy around the edges of the glass. He could not believe the cold, he just wanted to go home, to have a hot bath, to got to bed. He should have turned round hours before when he considered it but he did not, he kept going, now there was no return.

She admired its tenacity, Like that of the fox his carriage ran over earlier, dragging its bleeding, half crushed carcass from the road, to die in the grass. It would meet its fate on its own terms. Cailleach decided to test its resilience, to remove all hope. It would taste all the better for it.

Somewhere around midnight he began to ascend. The car groaned a bit at first but soon settled into the climb. Adam could have wept when the car broke the cover of the Fog. The snow was still heavy, visibility far from perfect, but it was still thin on the ground. Adam accelerated the vehicle to cut through the snow and continued upwards until he was high on a hillside looking down at the fog and snow covered farmlands below. As far as his eyes could see was blank cold wilderness, there were no hazy lights from farms or cars, no sign of life at all. Apart from his engine and the heater he could hear no other sounds. Adam began to become troubled, where the fuck was he? It was one thing not to expect a city around the corner but to be so far from anywhere in a country so small seemed unreasonable, absurd. Yet he could do nothing but push on, hopeful that over the next slope would be a town, a village, even a pub.

Eventually the slopes plateaued and he was driving in between two dark pine forests where the snow on the branches made the long road ahead look like some kind of chiaroscuro painting. If he hadn't been in danger of dying he'd wonder at the beauty of it but it was not the time, the wind had gotten up. The snowfall became increasingly chaotic and hypnotic. Adam felt like crying.

Again she sat behind him, drinking in his defeat, the brew was potent and she felt an exquisite stirring in her ancient loins. Cailleach reached out one spindly white twig of a finger and stroked the back of his neck. A lover's caress. He shuddered then, so did she, letting out a wail of cold dark pleasure that shook the world.

And then there was the scream.

To his hearing it was like the sound of thunder, in volume if not pitch; an anguished feminine sound roaring through the night; the wailing of the wind distilled and processed through the vocal cord of some vast desolate goddess. The wail caused the ice to spread across the windscreen like the glass was slowly cracking and caused the frozen piss and blood inside Adam to chill further. It was a fear like he'd never known, something that terrorised him at a genetic level. His heart began to thump harder and faster causing a momentary spurt of adrenaline which he used to put his foot down. If he was to die it would not be because he gave up. Adam held back the tears not out of any sense of masculinity but because he did not want them to freeze on his face.

The insane, swarming snow began sticking to the frozen glass and the wipers seemed to be giving up on their duty. He drove on, no longer caring if he plummeted off the side of a cliff or rammed into a lorry, he would not lie down and sleep. He would survive this, go home and apologise to Lesley, perhaps even go to the doctor, see if he could get some counselling for his rage. He was not going to be another fucking frozen idiot on whose obituary was a story on Reporting Scotland. He sped down the road at 60 mph occasionally hearing the squeak from the tyres as they failed to make purchase with the tarmac. He'd grip the wheel, shudder and drop off the acceleration when that happened. Adam had seen some programme about Rally driving once and had remembered them talking about how to drive in snow.

Cailleach's prey was in her grasp. It thought it had lost all hope. She would toy with it a while, before stripping it of its flesh, its clothes and its delusion of self before she devoured it. She pulled back her spells, withdrew the ice, the fog, the snow and left it only as night. She grinned as she heard the sounds of the other beasts. Something unexpected was happening, her ice of fear had shaken not only the creature in the carriage. The results, she realised, would be starkly poetic.

His spirits rocketed when finally he saw to the left of what could be the horizon, lights. Hazy orange lights, their glow tiny and frozen against the dark, but nevertheless there. He giggled and wept a bit, caught himself even bouncing up and down in his seat. It couldn't have been more than three or four miles away. He just needed to get out of the forest then he could phone home and tell her he was sorry and that he needed some time to work on his anger. He'd pushed on and survived. He'd make amends, he'd...

...There were suddenly lots of twinkling lights outside. It took him a second to realise they were rushing towards him. There was the sounds of dozens of hooves and panicked grunting noises as they ran past. Deer, dozens of deer. Stags, foals, does. One supple young thing leapt up onto the bonnet and over the roof, another followed. Adam saw the look in their eyes was one of insane terror. A third, a large stag attempted to copy the two others but managed only to get hit across the legs before it took off. With a squeal the beast crashed straight into the windscreen which was shattered by heavy antlers. Adam ground the car to a halt but the momentum of the creature forced him to be pinned by its horns. One prong stabbed in the right shoulder. The stag was roaring and snorting in pain, it's nose blew a spray of hot blood. As it struggled the prong of the antler inside Adam tore up and down, pain burst through him. The cold that flooded in after was worse.

Adam undid his seatbelt and using his left hand tried to pull the antler from out his shoulder. The Deer was not going down without a fight and pushed its head forward but Adam managed to detach himself from the Deer with only a scream. He opened the door of his vehicle and rolled and fell out onto the slushy road beneath. The snow was getting heavy on the ground and he just lay there. It was no use, the night had conspired to kill him, it was probably best to just give up, close his eyes and drift into frozen oblivion.

The beasts were dying. Her trap was sprung. She manifest herself from the frozen breath of a tree. An invisible mist that took form

“It would seem that stag is stuck in your contraption.”

Adam wondered if he had truly heard that voice. A woman's voice, with a heavy northern lilt, a touch Scandinavian almost. He looked up from the ground but saw no one. “Hello?”

“I'm afraid that's my fault, my arrival seems to have spooked the buggers.” The voice continued. Adam sure it said something else but the tortured noises from the dying stag flailing upon his bonnet drowned it out.

Adam picked himself up and looked around, spotting her instantly. She had been beautiful once, long ago, but that beauty had long faded leaving her pale ice-blue skin as wrinkled as tree-bark. Her long hair was as thin and white as frosted spiders webs and her scalp underneath mottled like dirty snow. Only her eyes held any evidence of her former beauty they shone like a watery sun, bright but with no heat. She wore nothing but bracelets on her wrists yet seemed comfortable in the frozen night.

Adam was still too much in shock to be surprised. “Are you not cold?”

“Yes” was her simple answer. She gave it with a smile and turned her gaze from the dying creature to Adam. She stepped forward through the snow and wind, her hair whipping up in front of her like a blizzard of its own. “The beast does not die easy.” She added.

Adam was still dazed, dumbfounded by the woman and the deer. How the hell would he explain all this to Lesley? The car was wrecked. “Look if we can get the deer out of there then I can drive us out of here before we freeze to death.”

The old woman did not look so old when she said “Then give it mercy.”

Adam thought about what she meant. “Kill it?” He asked unconvinced that was what she meant.

The woman nodded. “It is in torment and will die in torment, though the creature itself is oblivious to that. It exists only in this moment, and it wishes to escape, to run away from that which is torturing it.”

Adam shrugged and thought she was a bit weird and pretentious. He turned his mind to the stag. She wanted him to kill it. He couldn't kill it could he? Sure he had a temper, might have popped Lesley in the jaw or belly once too often but to kill something, something big and mammalian and really alive? It occurred to him that mercy or not, he had to get to safety or freeze to death. In the end it was kill or be killed. “I have an axe in my boot.”

Why did he say that? Why did he have an axe in his boot? The bile in his stomach turned to ice.

The woman chuckled, looked at his shoes and then back up at Adam. “Do you, indeed?”

Adam was in no mood for jokes, he crunched back through the snow which was getting deeper by the minute. He'd need to be quick. He popped the boot and walked round to where the axe was lying right on top of the filthy tarpaulin. He looked at the tarpaulin for a second with caution as if picking up the axe would cause someone to jump out from underneath it. Why the hell did he have an axe in the car?

“Well?” She said in his ear, so close he could feel her frosty breath.

Adam nodded and picked up the axe. There was a dirty clump of something on the blade which he removed before marching back to the front of the vehicle where the stag was now shuddering. He could see the fight in the animal's eyes dwindle as it went from wishing to run to wanting to lie down, lie down and sleep.

Adam brandished the axe but it felt clumsy, uncomfortable, he'd never done anything remotely like this. He stood immobile, physically unable to proceed. “Pitiful.” The woman snorted. She sounded just like Lesley when she did, so much that Adam turned to make sure his wife was not there.

“Shut up.” Adam said defensively, he glanced at her with a scowl. She looked younger somehow.

“Is this what mankind has been reduced to? Blubbering children incapable of killing even to maintain its own survival?” The woman mocked. “Or is it just you?”

She sounded so much like Lesley that it was like just being at home again. “Shut the fuck up woman.” He demanded, feeling his grip tighten on the handle of the axe. It felt comfortable, right.

She made that sound, that dismissive sound, that half-laugh half-snort that Lesley always derided him with. With a roar he swung the axe at the deer, felt the impact of the blow shake all the way up his arms. The deer screamed and he swung again and again, each blow harder and filled with more rage than the last. It was easy after all, so much easier than he had thought, so much easier than the last time.

The realisation knocked his feet from under him. He dropped the axe and looked at the remains on the bonnet, the bloody mess of hacked animal pouring steam into the sky as it cooled and Adam finally recalled what he'd been driving away from. What he was now driving toward.

“What's your name?” He asked as the woman walked back to the boot of the car.

“Cailleach, not that it matters to you, eh?” She said as she pulled the tarpaulin back and looked at the remains of a woman and two children, stuffed underneath it, in pieces. Heads and limbs tucked neatly around a perimeter of torsos.

Adam shrugged and looked down at his murdered family but could not bear to see the atrocity he'd created. He turned away, “I didn't mean it.” He pleaded.

“No, but that matters even less to me.” The woman smiled. She was a wraith, her eyes had gone, replaced by the black emptiness of the void. Her teeth visible between onionskin lips was a rigor mortis grin. “Your crimes are not my concern, nor your rationalisations. I am here to collect a toll, nothing more.”

She walked towards Adam and took his hand. It was the coldest thing Adam had ever touched, the kind of cold that the nerves could not process and instead switched off. Bringing a soothing, empty oblivion.

“So what happens now?” Adam said, the tears in his eyes solidifying on his eyelids as he wept.

Cailleach kissed him. He could feel the blood harden in his veins and burst the walls, slowly he was being ripped apart from the inside out. He gasped as his limbs lost all feeling becoming like heavy sacks attached to his body. His spit froze inside his throat then. He began to suffocate even as his eyes turned to balls of solid ice. He couldn't scream, couldn't breath, couldn't see. He could hear though, at least until she finally, mercifully stopped his heart. In that moment her arms slid up his body and all sensation was switched off by her terminal caress. He slumped into her and she held him like a mother holding her infant.

“Now you lie down and sleep.” She drooled.