Click on image to enlarge.

	Regular				Club
You Pay:	$8.99				$7.64

eBook Category: Horror
eBook Description: Horror master Melanie Tem takes readers to the limit of terror and back with THE ICE DOWNSTREAM a collection of nineteen of her greatest short stories.

eBook Publisher: e-reads, Published: 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2001

3 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.2 MB], eReader (PDB) [263 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [256 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [224 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [241 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [271 KB], hiebook (KML) [567 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [321 KB], iSilo (PDB) [210 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [263 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [56 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [342 KB]
Words: 79783
Reading time: 227-319 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Downstream, the ice on French Creek was starting to break up. It rumbled and rasped all the way up past Torey's house. It shook the world.

"Ice breaking up downstream," her father warned, as if she didn't know.

Torey frowned and nodded, kicked restlessly at the rungs of her chair. She'd finished her supper a long time ago, but if she left her father at the table alone he'd forget to eat. She knew his food must already be cold.

The leafless grapevines on the arbor outside the kitchen window screeched across the glass, a cold sound that set her teeth on edge. "Ice breaking up," her father said again. He mumbled and was hard to understand these days, but she could see his breath in the chilly air of the kitchen, and she imagined that she could see his words and even his thoughts, no two of them alike and all of them about Ryan. "Sure sign of spring." His tone made spring this year sound dangerous, and Torey understood why.

Her father pushed his chair back stiffly and stood up, leaving most of the food on his plate untouched. Torey resented that, even though she cooked as much to get warm as to please him. She stood up, too, and scraped the leftovers into the pan. She would throw them out onto the snow for the birds, who couldn't possibly be finding enough to eat when this winter had gone on so long. Earlier, her father had objected to her doing that, saying the birds had better get used to winter weather. Now he didn't seem to notice.

"It's hot in here," he said, and turned the thermostat down even more. Torey heard the click of the furnace shutting off.

She wanted to yell at him but since Ryan had died she didn't dare. Instead she said, almost under her breath, "I'm freezing."

"We don't need the heat on so high at night," he said, and Torey was surprised that he'd heard her. "There are plenty of blankets."

She put more blankets on her bed and was, in fact, warm enough, but still she didn't sleep well. The ice kept waking her up, and her father's cries for Ryan. She wished the dreams would come to her instead. All she could dream about was the ice breaking up downstream, when she should have been dreaming about Ryan.

She'd expected him to haunt her. He must still be mad at her for that time last year when, just to bug him, she'd sneaked into his room and messed up his baseball card collection; Dad hadn't believed that somebody almost fifteen years old would do something so mean and childish to an eight-year-old, and so she never had been blamed, except by Ryan, who knew. He must still be mad at her for not having been the one to fall through the ice that morning, even though she'd yelled at him that it was stupid to go so far out so early in the winter. Her father was mad at her for that, too, although he didn't say so. They must both still love her; she was still, after all, her brother's big sister and her father's daughter. They must both, she thought, have a lot left to say to her.