The Frost of the Fern Room

I was sixteen when my father and brother flew to Norway to tend to my grandfather’s failing health. That left my mother and me alone in our sprawling, century-old house in the high desert of New Mexico, a place where the air itself seemed to hold its breath. My mother took the separation hard. She would sit up in the living room, wrapped in her grandmother’s quilt, staring at the fireplace as if the flames could conjure my father’s face. To keep her company, I moved my bedding into her room, even though that room had always made my skin prickle.

The room was called the Fern Room by the previous owners, because someone had once painted delicate ferns across the ceiling and above the windows. The paint had faded to a sickly green, but the pattern remained, like the memory of a plant that had long since died. Growing up, my brother and I had avoided that room. It wasn’t just the cold—though the cold was relentless. In the dead of summer, when the desert heat cracked the adobe walls, the Fern Room would be so frigid that my breath fogged before my face. The floor tiles felt like ice, even through socks. My mother had tried everything to warm it: space heaters, heavier curtains, even a small electric fireplace. Nothing worked. We simply accepted it, the way you accept the creak of an old house or the way the wind howls through the eaves.

The first night I slept in the Fern Room, I noticed something else. My mother fell asleep quickly, exhausted from weeping. I lay awake, listening to the house settle, and I heard a faint, rhythmic scratching—like fingernails on plaster. It came from the ceiling, directly above the bed. I told myself it was a rodent, but the sound was too deliberate, too steady. It would pause, then resume, as if waiting for me to respond. I pulled the covers over my head and tried to ignore it.

The next morning, I mentioned the sound to my mother. She gave me a strange, hollow look and said, ‘Oh, that’s just the house. It does that sometimes.’ She didn’t seem surprised. I let it go, but I noticed she avoided looking at the ceiling.

Over the next few days, the cold in the Fern Room grew worse. Even with three blankets and a heating pad, I shivered. My mother seemed unaffected, but she had started wearing a heavy sweater to bed. I began to notice something odd about the painted ferns. At first, I thought it was a trick of the light, but the ferns seemed to be changing. They were darker, more defined, as if the paint were slowly bleeding through. By the third night, I could have sworn the fronds were actually moving.

One night, I was too cold to sleep. I got up to get a glass of water, and as I walked past the vanity mirror, I caught a reflection. Behind me, on the ceiling, a dark shape was spreading across the ferns—a shape that looked like a hand, long and skeletal, with fingers stretching down the wall. I spun around, but the ceiling was clear. My heart hammered. I didn’t wake my mother. I just lay back down, staring at the darkness above me, and the scratching began again, this time closer, as if it were now coming from inside the wall.

The next day, I decided to do some research. I called my friend Maria, who knew local history. She told me that the house had been built in the 1920s by a botanist named Dr. Aldous Vane. He had a greenhouse on the property, where he cultivated rare plants. There were rumors that he’d been obsessed with a particular orchid, one that only bloomed at night and emitted a smell like wintergreen. When he died, the greenhouse was sealed off, and eventually the whole property was sold. I remembered seeing a small, locked door at the end of the hall—I’d always thought it was a closet, but now I wondered.

That evening, while my mother was taking a bath, I picked the lock on that old door. It swung open with a groan, revealing a narrow stairway that descended into the earth. The air that rushed out was sickly sweet and cold, like the breath of a frozen corpse. I grabbed a flashlight and went down. The stairs led to a long-forgotten greenhouse, its glass panes cracked and coated with frost. Even though it had been sealed for decades, the air inside was crisp and cold, and a faint green light pulsed from the far end. There, in a bed of dark soil, grew an orchid unlike any I had ever seen. Its petals were white as bone, and they seemed to shimmer with a cold, internal fire. Around it, the frost on the ground was thick, and I could see my breath, but also something else—a second exhale, close by my ear.

I turned, and there was nothing. But the orchid’s petals trembled, and a voice, like the whisper of dry leaves, filled my head. ‘You should not have come.’ I backed away, tripping over the roots that had spread across the floor. Roots that looked like veins, pulsing with that same green light.

I ran up the stairs and slammed the door behind me. My mother was standing at the top, wrapped in her robe. ‘You found it,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘I knew you would. It’s been calling to you, too.’ She told me that Dr. Vane had never died. He had become the orchid, or the orchid had become him. The cold in the Fern Room was his presence, watching us, and every night he would try to reach out, to find a new host. The scratching was his roots, restless beneath the plaster.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The cold was so intense that my teeth chattered. The ferns on the ceiling were now a solid black mass, and the hand was visible, reaching down toward me. I grabbed my mother’s hand, but she was fast asleep, her face peaceful for the first time in weeks. Then I realized she was dreaming, and in her dream she was smiling, and the hand in the ceiling was gently stroking her hair.

I knew what I had to do. I crept out of bed, went down to the greenhouse, and took the orchid. I brought it to the kitchen and placed it in the sink under scalding water, watching the petals wilt and steam. But as the plant died, the house screamed with a voice that was not human. The floor shook, and the cold vanished, replaced by a sudden, overwhelming warmth. I ran back to the Fern Room, and my mother was awake, screaming. The black mass was gone, but the hand had left ragged claw marks across the ceiling. The room was warm, warm enough to feel like a normal bedroom for the first time in decades.

We left the house that night and never returned. It was sold at a loss to a developer who planned to demolish it. But sometimes, when I’m in a cold room, I feel a faint scratching above me, and I remember the ferns, and I know that the frost of the Fern Room will always follow me, waiting for the day when I am too weak to resist.