Desperation forced his hand. He vividly remembered the hushed, fearful stories of a strange widow and her gigantic sons living deep in the nearby Copperhead Hollow. Seeking refuge with the deeply anti-social, mythic Ballard family might have seemed like an act of madness under normal, clear skies. But with the blizzard actively freezing the blood in his veins, Toliver understood the absolute imperatives of survival. Blinded by the driving snow, he painstakingly followed the freezing creek that cut directly into the heart of the hollow. He advanced inch by agonizing inch through snow that was already drifting past his knees, hyper-aware of hidden, deadly crevices and treacherous, icy footing.
When the hollow finally materialized from the howling, white chaos, it was even more isolated and deeply forbidding than the darkest legends had suggested. The massive limestone cliffs loomed oppressively on three sides, closing him in like a rocky tomb. Freezing fog clung desperately to the stone faces like a ghostly, suffocating shroud. The ambient noise of the rushing water was completely muted beneath the deafening, white roar of the blizzard. By dusk, exhausted and half-frozen, Toliver reached the perimeter of the Ballard cabin.
Even from the outside, the scale of the structure immediately struck the preacher as deeply abnormal. The door was excessively large, the roofline pitched unusually high. Shivering violently, he pounded on the heavy timber door, loudly identifying himself over the wind as a man of God seeking emergency, life-saving shelter.
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