Ice and Candlelight

A Short Story, a Chilly Nightmare

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

It began around the same time my son, Josef, began returning home late — haggard, distracted, and covered in blood. The first time I saw him I nearly lost my breath, for I’d thought the blood was his own. He gave no reaction, only removed his snowy boots and sat down in that chair in the room’s center to stare at the wall for what seemed the whole night, though I find it increasingly difficult to tell exactly how long. In this northern land at this time of year when the sun does not rise the darkness toys with hearts and wits.

I said nothing to him, even when he returned the second time — and the third, and the fourth — soused in blood and blue eyes vacant. He is a man now, and I am his mother, and it’s not a mother’s place to question. Nobody likes a meddler, and Josef is a good boy. I ought to trust him — I’m sure whatever he is doing, he has his reasons. It could just as easily involve his job. Surely, that’s what it is. And, should I press him for an explanation… he might leave me.

So instead I stand at this sink, scrubbing still-wet blood stains out with cold water while he stares listlessly at the wall. If I look out this window, all the way across that black and frozen lake to the abandoned cabin on the other side, I can see that solitary candle guttering in the window, growing dimmer and dimmer until, I imagine, it drowns in its wax.

***

He thinks I cannot hear him. At night, the coughing shakes his body until he has to sit up and empty his frail lungs in violent heaves. He was always a sickly child–rain and snow would drive him inside wheezing and shivering like he’d been touched by a ghost. I think those days trapped indoors may have been what made him so morose. I tried to help him, Lord knows I did, but others didn’t understand. There are days like those I wish to not recall. Perhaps Josef likewise has memories better left to the darkness.

Or perhaps he too is kept awake by the incessant scratching noise that creeps through the air each night.

I tried to ignore it, but I’m increasingly certain it’s not my overactive imagination. I have risen in the darkness to check windows, thinking there might be some small and desperate animal with tiny, grasping claws working at the latches or scraping at the pane. I’ve peeked into the attic as well, should the source be somewhere above us, some black-winged bird with soulless eyes and restless, twitching head, sharpening its beak against the rafters. Once I even pulled away some floorboards, expecting to find skittering insects or scurrying rats inhabiting the darkness beneath our feet. The source eludes me again and again, until I am forced to return to bed and let the nocturnal noises have their way with my imagination. 

And when I do finally sleep, my dreams carry me across the frozen lake to that abandoned cabin with its wavering candle in the window just beside the door. As I approach, I find the door left open and only impenetrable blackness inside, a yawning abyss threatening to swallow me should I cross its threshold. My dream lingers there a few moments, long enough for me to feel the emptiness staring back at me, before I awaken with a start, perspiration standing on my face in spite of the chill draft that breathes through my room. Sleep does not return, even should I wish for it, for the phantasms of my dreams are just as soon replaced by the endless scratching, ever distant but ever near, stalking me through the night. Scratching. Scratching. Scratching.

Does Josef hear it too, I wonder? Sometimes, while he sits in his chair as I clean his clothes, he tilts his head just so, as though listening for something. He always was quicker to notice things than others, especially his siblings, when they were still around. Best not to ask him, though. It’s not a mother’s business, after all. And if he chose to leave me I’d be completely alone, and my only companion would be whatever inhabits this darkness.

***

It was the night he came back with one pant leg soaked in frigid water. I wouldn’t have noticed, save that I was rinsing them of blood and felt the overwhelming chill the moment I touched the fabric there. I tried to bury the thought, but the idea ate away at my mind, even after Josef got up from his chair and went to bed to wage war against his ragged lungs. I waited until his retching stopped and sleep found him, then I slipped on boots and coat and went outside.

The eye of the moon stared down at me between tattered clouds and the wind brushed my cheeks as I stole down the trodden path toward the lake, which shimmered with a thin blanket of snow laid across the ice. Now I could see where Josef’s footfalls had made a path straight across the lake. Beyond stood the abandoned cabin, the candle still dancing in its unseen mantle stand. Just the sight of that yellow flame filled my heart with unutterable fear, but some force within me compelled me to follow Josef’s tracks out onto the ice and toward that dreadful light.

So I walked, closer and closer across the expanse of lake, and all the while the wind tugged at me and the shreds of moonlight illuminated the snow so Josef’s tracks shone in dark relief like splotches of ink upon the gossamer canvas. How the breeze bit at me! How it stung my cheeks and whispered in my ears! How the light and shadow preyed upon my thoughts! I nearly did not notice the scratching growing louder and louder when I came into view of a larger patch of darkness along the path a little past midway to the abandoned cabin, a black spot not far ahead encircled by footprints. From ten feet away I could see its center, deep as starless sky, moving and scintillating with the moonlight. A hole in the ice, some three or four feet across, with the impenetrable water lapping restlessly underneath.

As I stared into its depths, the candle at the cabin winked out.

I stopped short, my breath fully gone and unable to be replaced. I stared for some time, for the cabin was still a distance away and I hoped I was mistaken. Perhaps a draft had touched it and put it out with its unseen, icy finger. Perhaps it would spring up again, having faltered momentarily in its waxen pool. Perhaps I, in my terror, had not noticed it growing smaller and fainter as it withered on its charred stem.

No, it is out. Surely and completely extinguished as by some resident of the darkness, replaced only by the moonlight, and the motion of the pool of water in the hole.

No more of this! My heart cannot bear it! Back away from this lake, out from beneath the moon glaring down at me from above like the eye of an owl fixed upon a mouse! Let these secrets slumber.

***

That night, when I’d returned to my bed and sleep had finally coiled around me, my dreams drew me across the lake again, past the hole I’d found, and all the way to the abandoned cabin where its candle still danced behind the filthy pane. But this time something greeted me there: at the window, by the candle’s scant glow, a woman’s face emerged from the gloom, with black and unkempt hair framing a face wrapped in pallor not of the living. She moved closer to the pane, staring at me with malicious black eyes. Then her bloodless lips curled and I knew — somehow in my heart, I knew — she was telling me to be silent. In another eyeblink she had blown the candle out, with nothing but a thin tendril of smoke where her hideous face had floated. Then I awoke.

I am not a woman given to dream interpretations, but something does not want me in that cabin.

***

I stood at the sink. He sat in his chair. The wind howled outside. I lifted the pants to check the stains I was scrubbing when a weight slipped from the pant pocket and something metallic clattered in the sink. I reached in and picked up his old skinning knife, with the hickory hilt and blade curved backward at the end into a barb. Like his clothes, this too was stained with blood, but not from that which had soaked through the fabric. I could see how it had run down the cutting edge and left that incriminating signature. Unmistakeably, it had been used on a body.

I stared at it for some time, turning it over and over in dull fascination, faintly aware that something was at work in my soul and all my blissful ignorance was being sloughed away on the wind, but still unable to tear my eyes away.

Before I could finish, the skinning knife was snatched out of my hands. Josef stood next to me, glaring down with a malign expression I’d never seen him wear before. My emotions got the better of me, and for the first time in my life I truly feared him.

He held this rictus, his gaze bearing down upon me and delivering the cold, unspoken threat. After far too long he slid the knife into his belt and turned away. He did not return to his chair, but instead went straight to bed.

A darker despair than I’d ever felt before weighed upon me. I sat at the edge of the bed for many hours, plagued by restless thoughts. My Josef is a good boy. Deep in his heart, he is, no matter what he might do and no matter what others might say. And even were he not, he is all I have left. Would that I could unsee the knife, or that it had not another’s blood upon it! Would that I could turn back the hours and stay my own hand from finding that cursed blade, or erase the memories of that moment.

Would that all memories could be scrubbed away as easily as bloodstains.

Oh, wretched emotions! How could I turn on my own dear son, the last good thing I have to cling to in this endless night! He is a good boy – he must have his reasons. He must.

And there it is again. The chorus of scratching. Louder tonight, and growing louder still. The incessant scraping, rasping, chafing… but this time not a few insidious notes, but a great orchestra of them, like a legion of dull claws working against stone.

I found myself again donning my boots and coat — quietly, for Josef still coughed occasionally — to steal out into the abyssal night. The pall of heavy clouds occluded the light of the moon this time, so once outside I paused for a few heartbeats, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and pointedly avoiding the yellow gaze of that distant candle across the water. From the front door, I took heavy steps through the snow and around the side of the house, shielding my face from the flurries shaken free from the roof, checking for footprints, claw marks, signs of man or beast… anything to hint at the source of that menacing sound. I found nothing. Nothing but Josef’s tracks heading off upon the lake toward that ominous light. I reached the door again having fully circumscribed my abode, and finally stared out at the abandoned cabin, and even above the grating wind my ears deduced with grave certainty that the source of the noise came from that direction, carried across the ice.

I thought once more of returning inside, of suffering the noise and secrets and memories and endless disturbances in this screaming darkness. But the candle waved to me like an old, forgotten friend, and I had no other choice.

As I took those first determined steps down the path, a creeping dread settled upon me, but against that came a sense that there was some vaporous truth lying just beyond, some slippery realization I could not quite apprehend. The wind pulled savagely at my coat, as if beckoning me in any direction but forward. And yet I felt my fate fixed by the lake, that light, and my dear Josef.

I stumbled momentarily on the ice, for the gale had clawed away the snow that lay across it, leaving the lake as smooth as a mirror. Flurries danced in mad swirls and patterns about my feet and ran up my legs beneath my coat. All along the banks, the trees writhed and crashed in a mighty symphony of horror, and even my ragged breaths and incautious steps added to the malign havoc that seemed to possess the whole of nature. But never was the cacophony loud enough to drown out the scratching, scraping, creaking noise, growing louder and louder as I walked. I kept my eyes fixed on that candle, ever on the candle, feeling now that if I lost sight of it I might be swept off the lake and my soul sheared from my body.

After so many steps I reached the hole in the ice I’d come to before. The restless water slapped against the thick ice surrounding it, as if it too were uneasy in the revelations to come. I did not stop, but kept my eyes ahead at the cabin and its menacing light, when I slipped again on the water spilled from the ice’s opening and fell hard to my hands. Pain leaped through my palms and knees, and I staggered to one leg, and then the other, when I caught whiff of a ferrous odor and realized it was not water I had slipped on.

I raised my hands to eye level, fingers stinging and exposed in the wind. Only shadows could I see, but even in that lightless place I could tell from the contrast of deep hue against my light skin and that unmistakable scent. I had placed my hands in blood. Blood, drawn across the tracks. Blood, running in a trail to the hole in the ice. Blood, dribbled from some body, dragged from the abandoned cabin and down to where I stood.

In the window pane of the cabin, there appeared the pallid face, staring at me from the gloom. Just as in my dream, it lingered there, regarding me with its impenetrable black eyes, before forming a circle with its lips to put out the tiny light.

At that moment, the clouds parted and the moon reared high above me, casting light upon the most monstrous horror I could imagine.

Corpses. Corpses beneath me. Corpses beneath the ice.

Scores of them. Skin snow white. Eyes wide. Lips peeled back above rotted gums. Hair suspended and undulating with the chill water. Crowding every foot of space just inches beneath me. Men and women and children. Young and old. And all of them, every single one of them, putting their palms against the ice above them, clawing with black fingernails. Scratching, scraping, chafing, clawing, hands bent and working against the glassy pane, mouths opening and clacking shut, eyes staring up at me, following me with their gaze like dead spirits peering through a mirror! Scratching scratching scratching scratching scratching.

All sense of myself was lost. I tore across the lake back to my dwelling, slammed the door behind me and collapsed against it, where my consciousness surrendered to unrestful stillness.

***

My eyes opened to darkness. I wasn’t certain of where I was – my senses dragged and my body did not immediately muster to my beckoning. Even the memories of the lake returned gradually, and with the wind still howling on the other side of the door I wasn’t sure whether it had all been dreamt, or if I was indeed still trapped in some liminal realm at this very moment. I rose to my feet slowly, the ache in my hands and knees giving testimony to the reality of what had transpired. How long had I been asleep? Everything felt different now, altered in an unsettling way, as if my mind were sluggish to recall my own house as well as the lake. Only then did I realize how unutterably cold I was, for a deep chill inhabited the room, deeper than I had ever felt.

No, not only a chill. A draft from the outside. There, on the floor beneath that window… shards of broken glass, glistening like knives scattered across the floor.

A window broken from the outside. Something is in the house.

Josef. My mind raced faster than my limbs could respond, but my instincts helped me rise and stagger across the room, occasionally stumbling on unseen objects littering the floor; bedlam from the intruder’s entry. Josef. Shallow breaths escaped me as my mind grasped singularly for my son. My dear, dear son. How could I have slept? What spell had that cabin and that lake placed upon me? Curse my senses for returning so slowly, I can hardly remember the path! Josef.

I came at last to his bed, but glancing out the window caught the visage of that ghostly woman leering at me from outside.

My breath left me. I lost my balance and grasped at the bedcovers in my descent. The blankets flew off and something clattered to the floor. I coughed as I inhaled a cloud of dust that had settled on the bedding, then pushed myself to my feet again to confront the specter.

But it was only my reflection.

My hideous, bloodless reflection in the grimy glass. Nothing outside, but only my face, staring back at me with black hair, bleached skin, and eyes corrupted with darkness.

I looked down, and Josef was not in the filthy bed. Instead there were only bones. A single set of bones. The bones of a child.

Fear rose in my chest as my mind tumbled toward the horrifying conclusion. In my delirium at the lake: which way had I run? Had my body remembered something before my mind had?... and now here I was, with the memories trickling back. Not in my home, but in the abandoned cabin, where I used to live. Where Josef died when he was only a small boy.

And these, scattered on the bed and lying at my feet, are his bones.

No. No. No! It cannot be! It was that revenant who made me recall this, that hag in the window with her candle. She tricked me into coming here to relive these memories. Josef… look at this bed, where as a child you coughed and coughed until bits of your precious lungs speckled these sheets! I must get out of here quickly, but now it’s all coming back… the memories are loosed and the vault will not shut! Over there, by the sink: that’s where my husband had turned on me, telling me my boy must go in the cold ground, and that I must say goodbye to him. And over there, by the front door: yes, that’s where he slid down the wall, eyes wide and mouth at work on nothing as blood pulsed and hissed from his opened throat. Next, young Gillaum tried to take the blade from me — the old, barb-tipped skinning knife — but I was quicker than he. Disobedient boy, he was always too much like his father for his own good! Neither of them could take my Josef from me.

Out the front door, quickly, out of this place!… I’ve lost my footing again. Was that Gillaum’s hand I tripped on, or only the unbidden memories of it? Look, over there: that’s where my older daughter Agnes tried to run into the woods. I caught her though, and when she was finished bleeding I took her to the lake with her father and brother. That too was during the lightless maw of winter, just like tonight, with wind screaming so violently it would snatch your breath from your mouth. Is my youngest, Anni, still in the cabin even now hiding under her bed? If I go back in there, will I still hear her whimpering? Will I still have to drag her out by her hair and down the bloody path to this hole in the ice?

Away from this place! Away… but here’s the hole in front of me even now. And look! There’s the specter again, staring up at me from the water’s disturbed surface. Look at her cheeks, her nose… does she really look just like I do? Is that what I looked like that night?

And here are all the bodies, watching me with their distended eyes and gaping mouths. None of you scratch anymore… why? Are you resigned to your final resting place, or do you feel some satisfaction that you’ve taken my Josef from me? Can’t you see I have nothing now?

I could have done more. I could have called for the doctor sooner when his coughing began. I could have kept him warmer at night. I could have made him drink the bone broth I’d boiled for him, or held him longer after his body turned cold. You must forgive him. He really is a good boy, truly he is. Please forgive him for what he’s done. You must. He’s only a boy, after all. A sick boy. My boy.

No! I won’t let it end like this! Back to my new home across the water, where I can wrap amnesia round myself like a blanket, just like I did all those years ago. There my Josef still lives, if only in my mind…

I’ve slipped on the blood again. Both hands go down to catch myself, but one plunges into suffocatingly cold water. Into the hole I fall and past the ice. The howl of wind vanishes, replaced only by the noise of my own subsurface thrashing. Beneath the ice, something grabs me, then something else, then something else. Dozens of gelid hands fix upon my limbs. The hands of the dead, of those who scratched in the night. They hold fast, and bear me down, down, down…

The candle drowns in its wax. 

Thanks for reading! I wrote this a few years ago for a competition based off a prompt, and enjoyed the highly subjective viewpoint and “silent film” ambience. I hope you did, too.

If you liked it, here’s another story you might enjoy:

The Ghost's Theatre

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