The Thawing

I first noticed the change in the house the winter I came back from Maplewood Academy, four years after my mother left. My father had remarried, and his new wife, Eleanor, and her daughter, June, had moved into the old farmhouse we’d lived in since I was a kid. But it wasn’t just the new inhabitants that made the place feel foreign. It was the cold. Not the usual drafty chill of a country house in December, but a deep, bone-aching cold that seemed to seep up from the floorboards, as if the house itself had caught a fever and was shaking.

I remember the first night. I’d arrived in the late afternoon, the sky already a bruised purple, and the snow had started to fall, thick and silent. I’d barely said hello to my father and met Eleanor and June before I trudged upstairs to my old room. The room was exactly as I’d left it: the same posters, the same worn quilt, the same view of the frozen pond at the edge of the property. But as I stood in the doorway, a wave of nausea hit me, and I felt an overwhelming urge to turn around and leave. I dismissed it as exhaustion from the long train ride.

That night, I lay in bed, the house creaking and groaning like an old ship. The cold intensified, and I pulled the covers up to my chin. Around 2 a.m., I heard footsteps in the hallway—heavy, deliberate steps that made the floorboards protest. I held my breath, waiting. The footsteps stopped right outside my door. Then, after a long pause, I heard the door to June’s room open and close. I assumed it was my father checking on us, or perhaps June getting a glass of water. But the steps had been too heavy, too slow for a teenage girl.

The next morning, I mentioned it at breakfast. My father chuckled. ‘Probably just the furnace kicking in,’ he said. But June looked up from her cereal, her face pale. ‘I heard them too,’ she said softly. ‘Every night since we moved in.’ Eleanor didn’t say anything, but she gripped her coffee cup tightly, her knuckles white.

Over the next week, the events escalated. I began to notice the mirrors fogging up spontaneously, as if someone had just taken a hot shower in the room. The fog would form words in faint strokes, only to vanish before I could read them. Doors that I knew I’d closed would be open by a few inches, as if something was peeking through. And always, the cold—so intense that I could see my breath in my own bedroom, despite the heating vents blasting.

One afternoon, I decided to explore the basement, which I’d never been fond of even as a child. The stairs were steep and rickety, and the air down there was stale and damp. I found an old chest I didn’t remember, covered in a thick layer of dust. Curious, I pried it open. Inside, wrapped in moth-eaten wool, was a stack of letters tied with a frayed ribbon. They were addressed to a woman named Margaret, in handwriting I didn’t recognize. The dates were from the 1920s. I started reading one, and my blood ran cold. The letters were from a man who said he’d come to take her away from this ‘accursed place.’ He wrote of a hidden door in the wall of the master bedroom, and of something that lived beneath the ice of the pond, something that was waiting for her to join it.

I shoved the letters back into the chest and sprinted upstairs, my heart pounding. I told my father, who dismissed it as old junk. But my father never wanted to talk about the past. That was why my mother had left. And I had the horrible feeling that he was hiding something.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, eyes fixed on the door, listening to the constant ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. Around 3 a.m., the footsteps returned. They walked down the hallway, past my door, and then. . . stopped. I waited, sweat beading on my forehead. Then, from the direction of June’s room, I heard a soft, muffled sob. I threw off the covers and ran to her door. I knocked, but there was no answer. I slowly turned the knob and pushed it open.

The room was empty. The bed was unmade, the quilt on the floor. A window was wide open, and snow was blowing in, drifting onto the sill. I looked out, and in the pale light of the moon, I saw two sets of footprints in the snow below. One set was small, like June’s. The other was huge, with long, dragging toes—like claws. The footprints led toward the frozen pond.

I raced downstairs, screaming for my father. He came running, Eleanor behind him. We all stared out the back window. There, on the ice, was June, walking slowly toward the center of the pond, her arms outstretched as if in a trance. And beside her, the silhouette of a tall, thin figure, its head too large, its limbs too long, shambling beside her. My father swore and grabbed a flashlight, but by the time we reached the back door, the pond was empty. Only a large, dark circle of open water remained in the center of the ice, as if something had broken through from below.

The police searched for days, but they never found June. They dragged the pond, but it was too deep, and the water was icy cold. Eventually, they called off the search. My father and Eleanor moved away a few months later. I went back to school, trying to forget.

But I couldn’t forget. Just before I left, I went to the pond one last time. The ice had frozen over again, but there was a thin layer of frost on top, and in the frost, I swear I saw the faint outline of a face, with wide, pleading eyes. And as I stared, the frost seemed to swirl, forming the word ‘Come.’

I left, but I carried that word with me. And now, four years later, I’m back. My father has passed away, and I inherited the house. I told myself it was to settle the estate, to sell it. But deep down, I know why I came back. I need to find that hidden door. I need to open it, and see what lies beneath the ice. Because I can still hear the footsteps at night, in this empty house. And I can still feel the cold, seeping into my bones, as the pond outside begins to thaw.