The Lantern in the Snowfield

My great-grandmother, Elara, was not a woman given to fear. She had weathered prairie winters that could freeze a man’s breath mid-sentence, and she had borne six children in a sod house with nothing but a midwife’s steady hands. So when she came back from the washhouse that night, her face as white as the drifts outside, her children knew something was profoundly wrong. She said nothing, just stood in the doorway with her shawl dripping meltwater, her eyes fixed on the far wall as if she were seeing something beyond it. It was my grandmother, then a girl of twelve, who finally asked, ‘Mother, what is it?’ Elara did not answer. She simply walked to the fire and held her hands over the flames until they trembled.

It was the winter of 1917, and the Great War had emptied the world of young men, but the prairie was indifferent. The snow had come early that year, burying the homesteads in a silence so complete that the crack of a frozen branch sounded like a gunshot. Elara’s husband, Tomas, was away in the next county, helping a neighbor pull a stuck wagon. He would not be back until late, and she had sent the children to bed early, as she often did on such nights, to save the last of the tallow candles. She sat alone in the kitchen, mending a torn shirt by the light of a single flame, when she heard a knock at the door.

It was not a common sound. The nearest neighbor was three miles away, and no one traveled in such weather unless it was an emergency. Elara set down her needle and went to the door, her hand resting on the iron bolt. She called out, ‘Who’s there?’ There was no answer, only the wind. She unlatched the door and peered into the darkness. The snow had stopped falling, and the sky was clear, filled with stars so bright they seemed to burn. In the white expanse that stretched from the dooryard to the horizon, she saw a figure. It was a woman, dressed in a long coat that looked too thin for the cold, standing at the edge of the lantern light, her face shadowed.

Elara’s first thought was that it was a neighbor’s wife, lost in the storm. She called out, ‘Come in, you’ll freeze!’ But the woman did not move. Elara stepped outside, the cold biting through her own coat, and walked toward the figure. The woman remained still, and as Elara drew closer, she saw that the coat was not wool but something like canvas, and the face beneath the hood was not a face at all, but a smooth, white void, like the inside of an egg. Elara stopped. The figure raised an arm and pointed toward the barn. Elara turned to look, and when she turned back, the figure was gone, leaving only a faint impression in the snow that looked like a bare footprint.

She stood there for a long moment, her breath clouding the air, and then she felt a cold unlike any she had known. It was not the cold of the wind, but a cold that seemed to rise from the ground, seeping through her boots. She hurried back inside, bolted the door, and built up the fire, but she could not shake the image of that pointing arm. She decided to check on the children. They were all asleep, their faces peaceful in the dim light. She went to the window and looked out toward the barn. It was a small structure, built last summer, and through the gap in the door she saw a faint glow, as if someone had lit a lantern inside.

She had not lit any lantern in the barn. She also knew that the only lantern they owned was hanging by the back door, and it was unlit. She watched the glow for a while, trying to reason with herself. Perhaps a stray spark from the chimney had caught some hay. But there was no chimney in the barn, and the storm had soaked everything. She took the lantern from its hook, lit it with a trembling hand, and went out into the yard. The snow crunched under her feet, and her breath frosted in the light. When she reached the barn, she pushed the door open with her shoulder. The glow was coming from the far corner, behind a stack of hay bales. She raised her lantern, and the shadows swung, and she saw that the glow was not from a physical flame but from the air itself, shimmering like heat over a stove.

In the center of that shimmer stood the figure again, but now it was closer, and Elara could see that it was not a woman at all, but a shape that only suggested a woman, with arms and a head but no features. It was holding something in its hands, a small object that caught the light and reflected it back in a way that hurt her eyes. Elara took a step back, and the figure tilted its head. It spoke, and its voice was not a sound but a vibration in her chest, like the low note of a cello. It said, ‘You have it. You must return it.’ Elara did not know what it meant. She backed out of the barn, and the shimmer faded, and the cold returned to its usual sharpness.

She ran back to the house and spent the rest of the night awake, her back against the door, a butcher knife in her hand. When Tomas came home at dawn, he found her there, pale and shaking. She told him what she had seen, but he dismissed it as a trick of the light and the cold. He told her she had been dreaming. But she knew better. Over the next weeks, she began to notice things. Small items in the house would move on their own. A comb would be found in a place she had never left it. A child’s shoe would appear on the kitchen table. And every night, at the same hour, she would see the light in the barn, pulsing like a heartbeat.

She tried to ignore it, but it wore on her. She grew thin. The children became fearful, though they did not know why. Finally, on a night when the wind was still and the stars were the brightest they had ever shone, she decided to confront the presence. She told Tomas she was going to the barn to feed the animals, but instead she went empty-handed into the dark. She stood in the center of the barn, where the hay bales had been disturbed, and she said, ‘I don’t know what you want. But I have nothing of yours.’ The air in front of her rippled, and the figure appeared, closer than ever. It pointed at her chest, at the locket she wore, a silver locket that had belonged to her mother, who had died when Elara was young. She had never taken it off, even in sleep.

She clutched the locket. ‘This is mine,’ she said. The figure did not speak, but she felt a wave of understanding, cold and ancient. The locket had been found in the snow by her own mother, who had taken it from a frozen hand. Elara had known the story, but she had never thought of it as important. Now she saw the truth. The locket was a vessel. It held a soul, or a part of one, and the presence outside was not a ghost but a collector, one of many that roamed the earth, seeking the fragments that had been lost to time. She unclasped the locket and laid it on a hay bale. ‘Take it,’ she said. The figure reached out, and its hand passed through the locket, and the locket began to glow, and then the light faded, and the figure was gone.

Elara stood there for a while, feeling the cold seep into her bones. She picked up the locket. It was now just a piece of silver, empty. She walked back to the house, and when she entered, the warmth of the fire seemed to embrace her. She never saw the figure again. But she was never the same. She kept the locket, but she wore it under her dress, and she never spoke of that night until my grandmother asked, decades later, why her mother had once looked so pale and scared. Elara told her the story, and my grandmother always thought it was just a tale to frighten children. But she kept the locket, and it passed down to me.

I have never seen the figure. But I have felt the cold. It comes when I am alone at night, in the quiet of my own house, and I think of Elara standing in the snow, facing the unknown. She took a risk, and she survived. But I wonder, sometimes, if the locket is truly empty, or if it still carries a spark, waiting for the right hand to open it again. I keep it in a drawer now, wrapped in cloth. But some nights, I swear I can hear a sound from it, like a distant bell, and I know not to open the drawer.