This story appears in the pages of Silent Night, a collection of thriller-chiller tales published by Scholastic Books, as reccomended by The Observer.

"Snowblind" was the first time I dipped my toe in the horror fiction genre, a short piece written with a Wintry, yuletide setting for this seasonal anthology.

Even though it's something of a 'ghost' story, it still contains a car wreck and little gunplay, so I suppose you could say I still held fast to my action-adventure roots in the narrative. I'm pleased to be some in very good company in the Silent Night anthology, alongside authors like Joan Aiken (author of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase) and K. M. Peyton (Flambards).

Here's a brief passage from the tale; rich kid Stefan Harmsway and his bodyguard Doyle have been run off the road in the middle of an icy Christmas Eve by something coldly supernatural...

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Doyle rubbed his hands and tried very hard not to think about what he'd glimpsed in the darkness the second before the car crash. He had run the limo right into that woman standing in the road, but the instant she'd struck the bonnet, her body had vanished, like it had split into a billion particles of ice, flickering then gone. He glanced back at the road, following the tracks of the skid; no blood, no body. I must have imagined it.

"Wh-who's there?" the boy called out, and Doyle spun around.

"You see someone?" he snapped.

Stefan was having some difficulty speaking, his teeth chattering with the chill. "I thuh-thought I saw a person over there," he pointed. "In the tuh-trees."

"Get close to me-" Doyle began, but his words were suddenly ripped away from him by a huge gust of wind. A vast wall of cold air studded with flecks of ice and tiny bolts of hail crashed down upon them like a floodhead, and Stefan stumbled against a tree trunk. The branches rattled and cracked against each other in a thunder of snapping wood, and the dormant piles of snow were pitched into the sky. In an eye-blink, the still winter night transformed into a blizzard.

Doyle blinked owlishly through the razor-edged snowstorm as a shape defined itself out of the darkness, an approaching figure. He rubbed at his face, the skin on his hands and nose turning white and waxy, flicking away tiny icicles from his facial hair.

"Who's there?" He bellowed, feeling his stomach knot in fear. In most circumstances, the bodyguard was not a man given to fright. Doyle had been a soldier before he had become part of Louis Harmsway's private security force, and he'd seen action in many parts of the world, from the Philippines to the heat and dust of North Africa; but now those warm climes seemed like a dreamy fantasy and the sight of the woman advancing toward him terrified him like nothing before ever had.

It was the figure he had clipped with the limousine; her face was the colour of the snow she walked on, and her hair blew back over her shoulders like a mane of silver wire.

She matched gazes with Doyle and the big man felt his heart shrink in his chest.

© J.Swallow, 2002.

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