The Synopsis
During one of the worst blizzards in Western New York's history, a seemingly chance encounter between a reclusive caretaker and a mysterious drifter becomes a violent night of reckoning where no sin stands to go unpunished…
After anxious loner, Silas Kane, allows a mysterious drifter by the name of Nolan Miller into his remote duplex home, he's already troubled—caring for his stroke-victim mother and battling a power outage. Nolan’s strange request to be reported to police for shelter is alarming, but seems harmless enough. When Officer Stillman arrives, however, a shocking act of violence forces Silas into an unholy alliance with the drifter.
As the storm intensifies, Nolan reveals his true nature: a man with self-proclaimed second sight, gifted to him by the region's mystical "Burned-Over District.” Silas’s snowbound duplex becomes a deadly battlefield where the drifter's self-appointed role as arbiter of cosmic justice threatens to expose what lies beneath the tenant’s carefully constructed facade…
Snowdrifter is a contained psychological horror that uses the supernatural to explore the depths of loneliness, judgment, guilt, and the inescapable, gruesome consequences of our actions.
Part One: Cops ‘n Robbers
(Excerpt)
……And then there it is… Finally. As though she could hear his thoughts growing antsy. Bang, bang, bang… Gratitude and relief mix like two fluids, bottled and shaken in the tenant’s uncertainty, but they blend as recklessly as oil and water. That was only three taps. Unmistakably, three taps. But, three taps means she needs help with something, usually a mid-afternoon chore. Four taps means she’s tired. There should’ve been four.
Silas untangles his eyes from the frozen window, his ears from the game, and approaches the hallway that houses the attic hatch in the ceiling. His seasoned coffee mug is mostly empty, all but dangling in one hand, as he reaches for the rope loop above him. But first... Bang, bang, bang. Again. Three. And they’re a little closer together this time, too. But she never changes the pattern or succession of the taps in the system. She can’t. Not only does the system foster the bulk of their communication, it’s how they differentiate anything at all, much too fragile to be altered suddenly, on a whim.
Although it flusters his imagination to consider anything else, the tenant can’t deny that these taps are much louder than they should be, deeper, and a bit more muddled, floating through the airspace over the TV. These are missing the tin patter sound the space between the floor and ceiling typically provides. Somehow, if Silas is being honest with himself, they don’t even seem to be coming from the ceiling where taps belong.
But the indication of a human being standing outside on the deck, having traveled through this storm to get here, is ludicrous! The hypothetical human would’ve had to make it at least from the nearest house, more than a quarter-mile away, not to mention scale up thirteen steep, snow covered steps just to reach the door; feats that stretch the absurdity even further. Besides, anyone with a vehicle capable of getting here would not enter the driveway unseen. Nevertheless, there they are again… Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang…
