Whispers from the Icebound Cabin

The tundra stretched to the horizon like a white clangor, a sheet of glass that refused to melt. In the middle stood a cabin, half-swallowed by drift and silence. Its wooden tongue creaked whenever the wind chose to speak, and every spark caught in the fog of powdered snow seemed to burn with a memory of warmth long gone.

Icy air clung to my skin as I pushed the door open. The hinges groaned, not with rust but with reluctance, as if the house remembered the strangers who had left long before I arrived. The room smelled of cold iron and old bread, a recipe for hunger that never finished feeding.

The First Signs

In the stove, a coal-black kettle hung like a patient eye, though the water never boiled. On the table lay a ledger, pages brittle with frost, each entry a name I could not forget: travelers, surveyors, those who sought shelter from a storm and found something colder still. Footprints mapped themselves across the floor, stopping at the doorstep then vanishing into the air as though the snow were a doorway.

“The ice keeps what it loves,” a voice whispered, not from the walls but from the white horizon outside. “And what it loves most is fear.”

Whispers in the Walls

As night thickened, the cabin exhaled in a chorus of soft, solvent voices. The wood held a map of every confession ever spoken inside these rooms, and every confession returned as a cold wind that stroked the skin with needles of frost. I heard names repeating in a dozen languages, not spoken aloud but vaulted inside the timber like trapped birds.

• A lamp that refuses to burn, but glows with the pale light of a fogged moon.
• Rats that vanish, only to reappear on the ceiling, marching in time with a heartbeat.
• Breath on the glass that forms sentences you cannot read, but feel in your bones.
• The ledger’s margins that fill with fresh handwriting—my own name, as if I had always been part of the list.

“Close the door,” another voice murmured, “before the outside becomes in here, and you forget which breath is yours.”

When dawn finally cracked the horizon, the cabin wore my fear like a coat. I understood, at last, that to leave was to strip away the warmth of the world; to stay was to become a line in the ledger, a whisper among the icebound echoes. I did not close the door. I stepped into the whiteness, listening as the house breathed in unison, welcoming a new confession and a new traveler into the icebound chorus.