Screams in the Whiteout

Screams in the Whiteout

The storm arrived without warning, a white furnace that pressed against the windows and swallowed everything but the sound of the wind. Kira pulled her scarf tighter and counted breath to steady her hands as the ridges outside vanished, replaced by a blank, merciless world. She and the map she'd cherished for years had planned a quiet survey of the northern passes, but the mountains kept their own rules—and tonight those rules demanded a toll in snow and silence.

The cabin trembled with the roar of the blizzard, as if some great creature pressed its teeth to the walls and demanded entry. The door jittered, then closed with a final, merciless thunk. A single candle burned, its flame a delicate point of rebellion against the white. When the radio hissed to life, it offered only white static and a breath that sounded suspiciously like a sigh, as though the storm itself were exhaling a warning. Alone with her borrowed maps and a stubborn desire to mark the land accurately, Kira felt the place sketched into her bones—every corner shadowed, every honest truth dressed in frost.

“The snow does not hide the truth; it edits it,” a voice whispered through the static, though no one else was there to whisper back.

She moved through the room, tracing the shelf where a missed bottle had fallen years ago and left a smear of frost on the wood. Footsteps appeared, not in the fresh snow outside, but along the dust on the sill, as if someone had stood there and watched the wind until it forgot them. A notebook lay open on the table, its pages filled with coordinates and a single, chilling line repeated in neat handwriting: Tonight we listen to the white noise of the world and pretend it is security.

To pass the hours, she kept a running inventory of peculiarities the storm seemed to sanction.

• The compass on the wall spun in slow circles, finally choosing a direction and refusing to budge when pressed.
• A kettle sang a lullaby that stopped the moment she leaned close enough to hear the melody’s hollow undertone.
• A faint, indistinct chorus rose from the attic, as if a hundred voices rehearsed a chorus without ever stepping into the light.
• Footprints appeared at the threshold—tiny, deliberate, and not leading away, but turning back to the heart of the cabin as if inviting someone to follow.

When the power finally failed, the room melted into a pale blue glare that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Kira pressed her forehead to the glass, counting the seconds between shuddering gusts, and tried not to listen to the attic chorus. The screams, she realized with a cold shock, were not outside but inside the cabin’s memory, a recitation of losses that the storm had learned by heart and was now reciting back to anyone who listened long enough.

As the night stretched and the whiteout closed its hand around her, the truth settled like frost on a window: some storms do not erase the past; they force it to speak aloud, until every tremor in the air is a memory clawing for release. By dawn, the world would clear, but the screams would remain, echoing in the corners of the cabin and in the hollow of Kira’s chest, a reminder that to be trapped in snow is to be trapped in memory as well.