The Snow Factory: Chapter 2

The candle-topped gates of the snow factory

During Gateland winters, it doesn’t matter how much you hit the gas pedal, your car never moves faster than a hearse. The engine rattles for air on the hills and the flat plains, and the spin-spin of your tires promises you’ll never make it to nirvana. And so it took me what seemed like over 2 million reincarnations before I finally reached the front of the snow factory.

Those gates vow to be in anyone’s memories. Like something out of a child’s dark fantasy - the cold, twisted metal unrolled from the ground almost twenty feet up, each topped with a sconce and each sconce extending a bright candle at their peaks; when I was younger I swear you could see ghosts dancing around each of those candles at night, just touching the light, and thus just touching your eyes. I used to wonder what tricks they were up to, and why you couldn’t see them during the day; what did they have to hide from?

My wife thought I was crazy, and pleaded with me to stop telling that story. Our daughter was a little bit more reasonable; for awhile, she told me she could see them too. As she got older, and her mind balanced more between rigorous and studious, she stopped saying she could see them; and she stopped caring if she did or not.

I was staring so hard at the candles that I didn’t notice the car starting to roll backwards back down the hill. I cursed out the damn brakes - I was pretty sure it was them - and wedged the parking brake into position. The car succumbed to the brake and lurched to a stop.

I didn’t think it would be enough. I swung open the door, expecting it to open lightly; instead, it caught the wind and slammed into me as I tried to make my exit, and I cut my hand on the metal edge. From some reason, as I stood there in front of the giant metal-sculpted gates of the snow factory holding my bleeding hand and cursing, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the criminals of the city getting back at me in some way for all the times I’d busted them and handcuffed them and punched them. Like I said before, Gateland crime has a long history of being a tribute to pettiness.

I’d long lost track of how old the med kit in my glovebox was, but I used it anyway to patch up and bandage my hand, then wiped the tiny bit of blood on my car door. That was when a strange feeling started tingling up my spine. At first I blew it off, thinking it was the stress of my nerves and the heavy snow. But when I opened the trunk of the car to get my cinder blocks, I felt my hand go numb again the trunk hatch. And then that numbness traveled from the hatch through my hand all the way to my chest.

And rightfully so, because in learning what I’d learned about the case in the last hour, I’d completely forgotten about the bodies, and my memory seemed to placate me for it. The way they were found, tucked together; they could have fit in my trunk. The way some of their skin and bones were smashed in, like they’d been trapped in a tight box and neglected until their bodies finally carried out the death sentence their killers had placed on them.

I tried not to think about what their last moments might have been like as I lifted out the cinder blocks and put one behind both rear tires as extra brake insurance. Maybe they died quickly, I thought. Maybe that’s what the coroner found; I never read the report.

Against what should have been my better judgement, I pulled a cigar out of my pocket and walked toward the entrance to the gates. One thing in 41 years that hadn’t changed, and apparently didn’t need to change, was the entrance; just two barred, person-sized arches right at the center. Vehicles had never been allowed inside the gates in the factory’s entire history.

I lit the cigar and looked up and I swear I saw something appear next to one of the candles - a body shape, or a face - and then vanished.

I turned away from the gates and inhaled the first bit of flammable, tar-smelling material. I looked out into the endless snowfall.

“You okay, Gin?” I said to myself. “You’re supposed to managing this okay, remember?”

At that moment, I looked at the car, and I swear on all the heads of all the criminals in Gateland that I heard it say to me:

"Killing it, silver saltine.”

I sighed, finished the cigar, tossed it, unlocked the gates and went in.

(C) Bryan Ritchey June 28th 2026