The Socket and the Snow

The winter my family moved to my grandmother’s house, the cold crept into the bones of the place like a living thing. The house sat at the edge of a town that was little more than a gas station and a church, and the snow fell so thick and so often that the world outside the windows was a white, silent void. My grandmother had left for Arizona before we arrived, but the house remembered her presence: the smell of her lavender sachets, the crocheted doilies on the armchairs, the ticking of the grandfather clock that seemed to count down to something we couldn’t name.

There were four of us kids–my brother Marcus, my sisters Lily and June, and myself, the youngest at twelve. Two bedrooms, but we all crowded into the smaller one with a pair of twin beds and a heap of sleeping bags on the floor. It was temporary, my parents said, just until the cabin on the new property was finished. But the walls were thin, and the house was full of odd noises: the groan of settling timbers, the skitter of something in the walls, the occasional hum from the light fixtures that made my teeth ache.

One night, I woke from a dream about drowning. The room was dark, but the moon outside cast a pale blue stripe across the floor. I saw Lily, the sister just above me, sitting up in the bed she shared with June. She moved stiffly, like a marionette, and swung her feet to the floor. Without a word, she shuffled to the bathroom at the end of the hall. I listened to the click of the lock, the groan of the plumbing, but she didn’t come back. I lay there, counting the seconds, but the minutes stretched. Then I saw her silhouette emerge from the bathroom door and pad back to the foot of the bed. I assumed it was her, and I closed my eyes, expecting the rustle of blankets.

But the rustle never came. I opened my eyes again. The figure stood at the foot of the bed, perfectly still. I whispered, ‘Lily, get back in bed.’ No response. The figure was too tall, its shoulders too broad, and its head tilted at an angle that made my stomach drop. It wasn’t Lily. It was something wearing the shape of a girl, but with darkness pooling inside its sockets, like the places where eyes should be had been scooped out and filled with the cold, dead air of the house.

I wanted to scream, but my throat was dry. I buried my face in my pillow, my heart hammering, and I listened. The floorboards creaked, one, two, three steps. The sound came closer, stopped right beside my mattress. I felt a cold draft, as if a window had opened, but there was no window there. Then a whisper, so soft I almost missed it: ‘Mine.’ The voice was like the crackle of static, like a radio between stations.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but I woke to the gray light of morning. My parents were already up, making coffee. I looked at the bed where the figure had stood. Nothing there. Lily was asleep in her bed, and June was tangled in her covers. I told myself it was a dream. But that evening, I noticed something that made my blood run cold: the electrical outlet on the wall beside the bathroom door, the one that had been there since before we arrived, was covered in a thick layer of dust–except for one spot, a perfect circle right in the center, as if something had pressed a face against it, breathing in the stale air of the house. The circle was the exact diameter of my sister’s head.

I said nothing. I didn’t want to be the one who broke the fragile peace of our temporary home. But that night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my sleeping bag, watching the door to the bathroom, and I saw it again: a shadow slipping out from behind the door, moving with a fluid, gliding motion, not walking but flowing across the floor. It stopped at the foot of my sister’s bed, and this time, I saw it more clearly. It was a woman, or the ghost of one, with hair that dripped like wet rope, and a dress that hung in tatters. Her face was a pale, featureless oval, and when she turned toward me, I saw that her eyes were not empty, but full of snow–a swirling, white blizzard storming inside her sockets, and from her mouth came the sound of a thousand whispers, all saying the same thing: ‘Mine, mine, mine.’

I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my hockey stick that leaned against the wall, and swung it at her. The stick passed through her like smoke, and she laughed, a sound like the shattering of ice. ‘I was here first,’ she said. ‘This house is mine. Your sister’s soul is a warm socket, and I need its current.’ She raised a hand, and the lights in the room flickered, sparked, and went out. In the darkness, I felt something cold wrap around my ankle, and I yanked back, stumbling into the hall.

My parents heard the commotion and came running, flicking on the hall light. The woman was gone. But when they looked into the room, I saw Lily’s face, pale as the snow outside, her eyes open and unblinking, her lips moving in a silent chant. She no longer recognized me. She only pointed at the wall, at the outlet, and mouthed, ‘I hear her now.’

The next morning, we found the house had no power. The circuit was dead. My father called an electrician, but he said every wire in the house was corroded, as if soaked in salt water for a century. My parents decided to move us to a motel that night, but as we were packing, Lily grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘She’s in the walls. All the sockets are her eyes. She’s been waiting for a girl to keep her company, and I’m her new voice.’ I looked at her, and for a moment, I saw not my sister, but the snow-filled thing staring out from behind her pupils.

We left the town that night, and I never went back. But even now, years later, when I plug something into an outlet in my own home, I hold my breath, listening for a whisper that might slip through the tiny cracks of our world, brought by the current, remembered by the snow.