We Who Walk in Winter
We Who Walk in Winter
We wear our futures like dark coats, bringing the snow with us, coming home to collect ourselves again and again.
The figure in the snow walked like it had all the time in the world. Perhaps it did.
Carissa Bennett first saw it the day after she arrived on a Tuesday. Or maybe it was Wednesday. The days blurred together in that way they do when you’re isolated in a cabin in Maine, with nothing but the murmur of the wind through the pines and the occasional crack of a snow-heavy branch to mark the passage of time. She came here to write. To finally finish the damn novel that sat in her laptop like a dead thing, cursor blinking accusingly at Chapter 12, Page 147, where her MC was about to discover the truth about her mother’s locket.
(What about the truth about Nana’s cabin?)
The thought shot through her mind, and she pushed it away. She was good at that, pushing away thoughts that didn’t fit her narrative. She did the same thing when she’d pushed away the memory of Nana’s last phone call, three days before they found her sitting frozen solid in her rocking chair. No, not just sitting. They found her sitting with her eyes fixed on the window, mouth open in what the coroner had called “a possible attempt to scream.”
The figure appeared at sunset that first day, just a smudge against the endless white, barely visible through the falling snow. She had been making tea when something forced her to look up. Later, she would wonder what it had been. It wasn’t a sound. Well, not exactly. More like… the absence of sound. As if winter itself had paused to listen.
The figure stood at the tree line, maybe half a mile out on the other side of the field — just standing there. Watching. She had blinked, and when she looked again, it wasn’t there. Easy to dismiss in the gathering gloom. Just a trick of the light, what happens when you spend too much time alone with your thoughts as your sole companions.
Except it came back the next day. Closer.
And the next day. Closer still.
And by Friday (was it Friday?), she started taking pictures with her phone. She told herself it was just to prove she was imagining things; it was the same thing as turning on the lights to prove there’s no monster in the room. But when she laid the photos side by side on her laptop screen, the truth was there in cold, digital clarity:
The figure moved about one hundred steps closer each night.
“Ok. You’re cracking, Bennett,” she said aloud, but instantly regretted it. Her voice was too loud in the quiet cabin, the words hung in the air like frozen breath, and the cabin groaned in agreement.
(Nana used to talk to herself too, in the end. Did anybody — or anything — ever listen?)
She slammed her laptop shut and went to make more tea. She’d been drinking a ton lately, plowing through Nana’s old stash of Earl Grey and chamomile and something in a tin with Chinese characters that smelled like smoke. The kitchen was small but functional. Gran had painted the mahogany wood cabinets white sometime in the seventies. The paint was peeling now, the wood beneath bleeding through in a marble pattern.
She reached for the kettle and stopped. There, on the windowsill, fresh snow. Only a dusting, really, but it was on the inside.
She frowned. The window wasn’t open and she did not feel any discernible draft. Still, she checked every window was locked tight. Every door secured. Nevertheless, that small pile of snow on the sill sat there, no bigger than a child’s handful.
Her phone buzzed, making her jump. Impossible. There was no signal out here; she’d checked a dozen times, wanting to call her agent, her mother — anyone. Yet there on the screen was a text from an unknown number:
don’t watch it don’t measure it don’t let it know you see it coming
The timestamp said the message was sent three years ago, on the day Nana died.
That night, Carissa dragged an old dresser from the spare room and pushed it against the front door. She hung blankets over the windows, nailed boards across the ones she couldn’t reach.
BANG.
This is ridiculous.
BANG.
There’s no figure.
BANG.
You’re just scared of ending up like Nana.
BANG.
Alone and frozen and…
BANG!
The last nail went in crooked and caught the meat of her thumb. She yelped and stuck the injured digit in her mouth. The copper taste of blood made her stomach turn.
When she pulled her thumb out to inspect the damage, blood didn’t cover it, but frost. The same intricate patterns that now decorated the windowpanes.
The figure arrived earlier the next day. And the next. Each time Carissa worked to better secure a window, it seemed to move faster, as if her attempts were only making it more determined. After a week, she could make out some details: the dark shape of what might have been a coat and the hint of a hood pulled low.
She stopped sleeping more than an hour at a time. Kept the lights on 24/7, though the electricity flickered more each day. She completely abandoned the novel, instead replacing it with endless entries of observations in her notebook taken with an old rangefinder:
Day 1 — Approx. 2640 feet from cabin (half mile)
Day 2–2440 feet
Day 3–2240 feet
Day 4…
The numbers marched down the page like footprints in the snow. At this rate, the figure would reach the cabin in five more days. Unless it kept accelerating. Unless it decided to make a break for it.
(Unless, unless, unless…)
She found herself talking to Nana’s ghost, or maybe just to herself:
“What does it want?” she whispered as she watched it through a crack in the boards. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
The cabin groaned again, but this time she could have sworn it talked back: I did, honey. Why didn’t you listen?
She found the journals on day ten, hidden in a compartment under the bed. Five leather-bound volumes, spanning thirty years. The early entries were mundane things like recipes, weather reports, notes about the garden. But around 1992, they changed:
January 15: Saw it again today. James says I’m imagining things. Says the isolation is finally getting to me. But he doesn’t see how it moves. He doesn’t understand the snow.
January 20: James is gone. He needed supplies from town. That was two days ago. The phones are down. It’s snowing again. Always snowing now.
January 25: It’s closer. Every time I look away, it gets closer. Have to keep watching. Have to keep measuring. Have to understand the pattern before…
The rest of the journal was blank except for a single sentence scrawled in shaky capitals on the last page:
IT JUST WANTS TO COME HOME
Carissa dropped the journal and ran to the window. The figure stood in the clearing now, not fifty feet away. As she watched, it raised a hand — slowly, so slowly — and waved.
The gesture was hauntingly familiar.
The thing about patterns is that they don’t just measure distance; they measure time and circle back on itself like snow in a whirlwind. They measure blood and bone and the things we inherit without understanding. They measure the distance between what we know and what we choose to forget.
Nana had understood that at the end. That’s why she’d sat in her rocking chair and watched and waited. Some things you can’t escape by running. Some things you have to face head-on, even if they wear your own face, even if they come wearing your future like a dark coat and hood, even if they bring the snow with them.
She looked at her reflection in the window glass. She couldn’t tell which side of the glass she was on; she couldn’t tell if she was watching the figure, or if she was the figure, eternally walking home through the endless snow.
Someone knocked on the door. Three soft taps, like Nana used to do.
She stood up.
She began to walk.
The snow fell, and fell, and fell.
In the spring, they found the cabin empty except for a laptop showing a novel, seemingly complete up to the final chapter. In the kitchen, two teacups sat on the counter, both rimmed with frost despite the warm May weather. And in the snow that somehow refused to melt around the cabin’s foundation, two sets of footprints led off into the woods, one following the other, forever walking, forever almost home.
