The Last Cold Sunday

The gravel road unraveled like a frayed nerve through the brush, and Elian kept his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, watching the dust plume swallow the town of Kittery Falls behind them. It was late June, but the air had a bite that belonged to October, and the sky was a bruised purple as the sun dropped behind the ridges. He had made this trip a hundred times, but never with his mother. She was going to see an old friend, a woman named Hilda, who lived in a crumbling homestead deep in the folds of the Monongahela National Forest. Elian had agreed to drive her, mostly to escape the silence of the house they’d inherited from his father, a silence that had grown teeth after the funeral.

As they descended the winding pass, the forest thickened, the pines pressing in like curious onlookers. Elian’s mother, Mara, clutched a worn wooden rosary, her lips moving in a whisper too faint to hear. She had been like this since the spring, a woman who had aged a decade in months. ‘We should turn back,’ Elian said, his knuckles white on the wheel. ‘The weather’s turning.’ He pointed to the sky, where clouds were stacking like dirty laundry. But Mara shook her head, her gaze fixed on the road ahead. ‘Hilda needs us. She’s the last one.’

The last one of what, she never explained. Elian had heard the stories about the homestead—how it was built on a site where a church had burned down in the 1800s, how the land had a memory. He’d always dismissed them as rural gossip. But as they pulled into the clearing, the house stood like a tooth in a gum of weeds, its windows dark, its porch sagging. There was no sign of Hilda. The door was unlocked, and inside, the air was thick with the smell of dust and old wood. They found Hilda in the back room, sitting in a rocking chair that moved on its own, creaking against the floorboards. She was a skeleton wrapped in skin, her eyes milky, her hands gripping a photograph. ‘You came,’ she rasped. ‘Good. The ground is waking.’

Elian felt a cold draft seep through the floorboards, and the hairs on his arms stood up. Mara knelt beside Hilda, taking her hands. ‘Hilda, what’s happening?’ But Hilda just pointed to a trapdoor in the corner of the room. ‘They’ve been down there since the snow. They’re hungry.’ Elian had never seen that trapdoor before, and he would have sworn it hadn’t been there when they entered. But there it was, a dark rectangle set into the wood, a rusted ring in the center. He stepped toward it, and the temperature dropped further. The rocking chair stopped.

‘Don’t open it,’ Hilda whispered, but her voice was not her own—it was a man’s, deep and hollow. Elian froze. ‘Mother, we need to leave.’ But Mara was already standing, her face pale, her eyes fixed on the trapdoor. ‘You heard her,’ Mara said. ‘We have to see.’ She knelt and pulled the ring. The wood groaned as the door lifted, revealing a set of stone steps descending into absolute black. From below came a sound—not a scream, not a voice, but a rhythmic tapping, like fingernails on stone. Elian wanted to run, but his legs wouldn’t move. His mother began to descend, and the tapping grew faster.

He followed her, driven by a force he didn’t understand. The steps led to a cellar unlike any he’d seen—the walls were lined with jars, each filled with a murky liquid that held something floating, too indistinct to identify. In the center of the room was a deep well, its mouth gaping. The tapping came from within. As they approached, a hand—pale, elongated, with nails like talons—gripped the edge of the well. Then another. And another. They were climbing out, these things, their bodies thin and damp, their faces pressed against the dark as if they had no eyes. Elian heard his mother whisper, ‘The last cold Sunday,’ and then she stepped forward, as if to greet them.

Elian grabbed her arm, pulling her back. ‘What are you doing? We have to go!’ But the creatures were already out of the well, seven in total, circling them like wolves. The one that had emerged first stopped in front of Mara, and it reached out a hand that was too long at the wrist, its fingers brushing her cheek. Mara didn’t flinch. She looked at Elian, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘They’re not here to hurt us. They’re here to leave.’

That was when Elian noticed the holes in the ceiling, the shafts of light from the house above filtering down. The creatures were heading toward a corner where the wall had crumbled, leading to a narrow tunnel. As they crawled through, one by one, the tapping stopped. The last one paused, turned its head—a face that was almost human but not quite—and it seemed to nod at Elian, as if giving thanks. Then it too disappeared into the tunnel.

When they returned to the main room, Hilda was dead in the rocking chair, a smile on her gaunt face. And on the floor, where the trapdoor had been, was a patch of bare earth, damp and dark, smelling of minerals and rot. Elian looked out the window, and the snow that had threatened had begun to fall, large flakes that blurred the world outside. His mother knelt, pressing her palm into the dirt. ‘He was one of them,’ she said. ‘Your father. He came back that winter, but not as himself. He was a door. They’ve been waiting for you, to let them go.’

That was two years ago. Elian and his mother never spoke of that afternoon again, and they moved to the coast, leaving Kittery Falls and all its secrets behind. But sometimes, on cold winter nights when the wind taps against the window, Elian finds himself listening for that rhythmic sound, and he wonders if he did the right thing. The creatures are gone—he believes that—but something else has taken their place, something that watches from the edges of his vision, waiting for the last cold Sunday when the ground will open again. He doesn’t know if he’ll be ready. But he knows the story is not over, and that is his warning to anyone who drives down that old gravel road, past the burnt church, into the deep folds of the forest: if you see a white horse in the field, do not stop. Do not listen to its call. Because the ground is not as solid as you think, and the things that sleep beneath it are always hungry for a way out.