Speaker 1: Calorogu Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories
and our special Christmas series The Long Cold. This is
episode four, Midwinter Night. The darkness in that cabin was absolute,
not just the absence of light, something thicker, heavier, a
darkness that pressed against your skin and filled your lungs
when you breathed, the kind of darkness that felt alive.
Tom grabbed my arm. We need to get out right now,
the front door, Lily. I pulled away from him. I'm
not leaving without Lily. She had been right there, right
next to us when the lights went out, and then
she wasn't. In the space between one heart beat and
the next, she had simply vanished. I knew where she'd gone.
We both did. Sarah, we can't. I'm going in after her.
I found the flashlight in my coat pocket. The beam
cut through the darkness, thin and inadequate. Stay here if
you want, but I'm bringing my daughter back. He didn't stay.
I knew he wouldn't. We found the pantry by feel,
by memory. The gap behind the shelves stood open, now
wider than before, as if the house itself had exhaled.
The passage beyond waited like a throat. I went in first,
Tom followed. The walls were different now, I could feel
it immediately. Something had changed in the spaces between the passages.
That had seemed like a maze before now felt directed, purposeful.
Every turn we took led us deeper. Every branch we
might have followed had collapsed or narrowed to nothing. It
was guiding us somewhere, funneling us toward a destination. We
walked for what felt like hours but was probably minutes.
The flashlight flickered twice three times, and I thought of
my mother's journal entry I sleep with a flashlight in
my hand. How long had she wandered these passages before
she stopped? The smell grew stronger as we descended, that
organic wrongness I'd noticed before, but concentrated, now older, and
underneath it something else, something sweeter, like flowers left too
long in a vase, like perfume on a body in
a coffin. Sarah. Tom's voice was barely a whisper. Do
you hear that? I stopped? Listened voices faint and distant,
echoing through the passages, children's voices singing Silent Night, Holy Night.
The carol drifted toward us, thin and strange, the melody
distorted by the winding passages until it sounded less like
singing and more like wind through broken glass. All is calm,
all is bright. That's Lily. I started moving faster, pushing
through gaps that scraped my shoulders, ducking under beams that
seemed lower than before. That's her voice, Lily. The singing stopped,
and then her voice, clear and close, Mommy, we're in here.
Come see a final turn, a final passage. And then
the space opened up around us, and I understood where
we'd been led. A chamber larger than any space, had
a right to be inside the walls of an old cabin.
The ceiling vanished into shadow above us. The walls were
lined with things, objects, possessions, decades of accumulated belongings, toys
and clothes, and photographs and jewelry, all arranged with careful precision,
a collection, a museum, a nest. Lily stood in the
center of the chamber, holding someone's hand. A girl, a
little girl five or six years old, with dark hair
and eyes I recognized from a photograph taken in nineteen
sixty two. She wore a night gown that had once
been white. But had yellowed with age. Her skin was pale,
too pale, but her eyes were bright and aware, alive
after a fashion. Margaret, my mother's sister, taken sixty years ago,
still a child, still here, still waiting. Mommy, This is Margaret,
Lily said, She's been here a really long time. She's
my What did you say? She looked at the other girl.
Great aunt Margaret whispered, her voice was dusty, unused. I'm
your great aunt. Behind them, deeper in the chamber, I
saw another figure. She sat slumped against the far wall,
half hidden in shadow, gray hair, familiar coat, hands folded
in her lap, as if she'd simply sat down to
rest and forgotten to get up again. Mam. The word
tore out of me. Ma'm I ran to her, fell
to my knees beside her, grabbed her shoulders. Her eyes opened,
looked at me, knew me, Sarah. Her voice was faint, wrong,
like she was speaking from very far away. You shouldn't
have come. I told you never to come here at Christmas.
I told you we're leaving right now, all of us.
I tried to pull her up, She didn't move, couldn't move.
Tom help me, He was beside me, lifting, straining, but
my mother stayed where she was, as if she'd grown
roots into the floor of this terrible place. It's too
late for me. She grabbed my wrist with surprising strength.
Listen to me, it's too late. Once you rest, you
can't leave. Margaret rested, I rested, but Lily hasn't. Not yet,
Take her and go. I'm not leaving you here. You
don't have a choice. Her eyes drifted past me, toward
the darkness at the edge of the chamber. It's coming.
It knows you're here. Take Lily and run. I felt
it before I saw it, A pressure, a presence, something
massive and ancient, filling the space around us, displacing the air,
making the shadows themselves seem to thicken and congeal. And
then it spoke, not with a voice, nothing so simple.
The words came from everywhere at once, from the walls,
from the floor, from inside my own head. You came back.
I turned, made myself turn. It stood at the edge
of the light, tall, so tall it had to hunch
beneath the ceiling, folding in on itself, like something that
had learned to live in small spaces. Its body was wrong,
limbs too long joints bending in directions they shouldn't. Its face,
if you could call it a face, was smooth and pale,
featureless except for two dark hollows where eyes should have been.
It was looking at me. I knew it was looking
at me, even without eyes. I've waited so long. Let
us go. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
Let my daughter go. I don't want to hurt you.
I've never wanted to hurt anyone. I just want you
to stay. It moved closer, not walking, gliding, flowing like
shadow given form. The cold that came off it was immense, absolute,
the cold of deep caves, the cold of places that
had never known sun. It's so quiet when you're gone,
so empty. I count the days, but the days are
so long, and then you come back. You always come back,
and for a little while, I'm not alone. You took
my aunt. I was backing away, keeping myself between the
thing and Lily. You took my mother. I kept them
kept them safe, kept them young. They're not alone anymore,
neither am I. It reached toward Lily, those long, wrong
fingers extending through the darkness. She likes me. She's not
afraid children never are at first. They understand loneliness better
than adults. Lily didn't move, didn't flinch. She looked up
at the thing with something like sympathy in her eyes.
He's so sad, mommy, He's been sad for so long, Lily,
Come here right now. Stay, the word filled the chamber,
Stay and rest all of you together. I'll keep you warm,
I'll keep you safe for ever and ever, no more cold,
no more leaving. For one terrible moment, I understood it
felt what it felt, the crushing weight of centuries alone
in the dark, the desperate hunger for connection, for presents,
for anything to break the endless silence. It wasn't evil,
not exactly. It was something older than evil, something that
had existed so long in isolation that it had forgotten
how to be anything but hungry. But understanding didn't mean acceptance. No,
the word came out hard final. We're leaving all of
us who can still leave, and you're going to let us.
Why would I do that? I reached into my coat
pocket found what I'd grabbed from the kitchen before the
lights went out, before everything fell apart. A box of matches,
a can of lighter fluid for the fireplace, because if
you don't, I'll burn this whole place down, with all
of us inside. You've survived this long because you had
somewhere to hide. What happens when there's nowhere left. The
thing went still. You would die, maybe, but so would you.
And you've spent too long building this place, collecting these things,
keeping these people. You don't want to lose it all.
You don't want to be alone. In the ashes silence,
the shadows seemed to pulse, to breathe. I popped the
cap off the lighter fluid. The smell of petroleum cut
through the old darkness. Lily, come here now, this time
she came. She walked away from Margaret, away from the
center of the chamber, and took my hand. Her fingers
were ice cold. Tom get my mother, She said she
can't try. He lifted, strained. My mother's body shifted, and
then stopped, held fast by something invisible. Sarah, My mother's
voice was resigned, peaceful, almost. I told you it's too
late for me. I've been resting for three days now.
I'm part of this place. Mum, take Lily, take your
husband go. She smiled at me, and it was the
saddest smile I've ever seen. I came here to end
this and I failed. But you can still get out,
you can still save her. I can't leave you. You
have to. She looked at the thing in the shadows.
I'll keep it company, Margaret and I both will make
sure it doesn't get lonely. That's all it ever wanted,
really company. In the cold, the thing shifted, those dark hollows,
turned toward my mother. You would stay willingly. I'll stay,
but you let them go. You let them go, and
you never touch my granddaughter again, Never follow them, never
call to them. Swear it a long pause, the shadows breathed,
I swear. Don't know if a thing like that can
be held to a promise. I don't know if its
word meant anything at all, but my mother believed it.
I could see it in her eyes. Go Sarah, now,
before it changes its mind. I wanted to argue, wanted
to fight, wanted to do anything but what she was asking.
But Lily's hand was in mine, and Tom was pulling
at my arm, and somewhere in the darkness, Margaret had
started singing again, that thin, strange voice carrying the melody
of a Christmas carol. Through the shadows. I kissed my
mother's forehead, tasted dust and cold and something like goodbye.
Then I ran. The passages were different, now, shorter, straighter,
as if the house was exhaling us, pushing us back
toward the surface. We burst through the gap in the
pantry and into the kitchen, and the first thing I
did was strike a match. The flame was tiny, pathetic,
but in that darkness, it was everything. The stove I
was already moving. Tom turn on the stove, all the burners,
open the gas. He didn't question it. The hiss of
gas filled the kitchen, the smell of it sharp and
chemical and wonderfully beautifully unnatural. I grabbed Lily, grabbed Tom,
pulled them toward the front door. When I throw this match,
we run. We don't stop, We don't look back. Sarah
promise me. He looked at me, at Lily, at the
darkness of the cabin behind us. I promise. I threw
the match. The world turned to fire. We made it
out barely. Snow cushioned our fall from the porch, and
we ran, half stumbling, half crawling through the drifts until
we reached Tom's car, still buried, but not as deep
as before the plow had been through. While we were inside,
the road was passable behind us. My grandmother's cabin burned.
The flames lit up, the snow turned the whole mountainside
orange and gold. I could hear the structure groaning, collapsing
in on itself, the hidden passages, the secret chambers, the
decades of accumulated darkness, all of it consumed by heat
and light. We sat in the car, engine running, heater blasting,
and watched it burn. Lily was in the back seat,
wrapped in a blanket from the trunk. She seemed okay, tired, confused,
but okay. Whatever the thing had done to her, whatever
hold it had begun to establish, the fire had broken it,
or so I told myself. As the roof collapsed and
sparks rose into the winter sky, Lily pressed her hand
to the window waved, who are you waving too, sweetheart?
She didn't answer for a moment, just kept waving that slow,
solemn wave children give when they're saying goodbye to something important.
The man, she finally said, he's at the edge of
the trees. He says he's not mad. He says fires
go out eventully. My eyes snapped to the treeline, nothing,
just snow and shadow and the dark shapes of winter pines.
But for just a moment, just a flicker at the
corner of my vision, I thought I saw something tall
and thin, standing motionless at the boundary between the clearing
and the forest, watching us drive away. He says he'll
see me again someday. I put the car in gear,
pulled onto the road, drove down the mountain without looking back.
Christmas morning dawned clear and cold. The storm had passed,
the roads were open. We drove in silence through a
world made clean and white and new. I don't know
if we escaped. I don't know if anyone ever really
escaped something like that. But we survived. And sometimes, in
the darkest hours of the longest nights, when the cold
presses against the windows and the house settles around me
in ways I can't explain, I remember what my mother
said about how it counts the days, about how it
waits patient as stone for us to come back. We
won't go back. I've made sure of that. I sold
the land, let the county take what was left of
the cabin, tried to erase every trace of that place
from our lives, but I still see it sometimes in
my dreams, in the shadows at the edge of my vision,
in the way my daughter pauses, sometimes head tilted as
if listening to a voice I can't hear. It was
there before the cabin, before the family, before anything, and
it will be there long after we're gone, waiting in
the cold, counting the days. Ghost Scary Stories is a
production of Caloroga Shark Media. Some elements of AI may
have been used in this production that it was written, edited, mixed,
and produced by Real Live People Executive producers Mark Francis
and John McDermott.