The Face In the Ice (Halloween Special!)
A boy discovers a face underneath the pond ice in his backyard.
When I was a boy I lived in the northwestern United States, so near the Canadian border I could spit and need a passport. The nearest asphalt road was a half-mile from my house, which itself was nestled in a clearing made from firs and pines that all stood around in the cold winter nights like steadfast black icicles. We lived far from lights, far from the city, and at night the stars twinkled like ice crystals.
My house was the antidote to the bitter winters. Our hearth was always warm. We always had visitors and family staying for the holidays or a long weekend. My friends would ride their bikes to come play with me in the woods. Back then, I was light enough to slide across the thick-crusted ice that lay on top of the snow in the mornings, and imaginative enough to spend the entire day playing in the woods. The natures of the games never mattered; the days were always too short to get everything done. When evening crept over the treetops and my friends and I came indoors, mom always had mugs of hot chocolate and snacks to warm our bellies and our bones. It was an idyllic, almost magical time of my life.
There existed deep in the woods behind my house a lone dark blue pond. Each year my dad would check the thickness of the ice before we were allowed to skate on it. In the year in question the ice was very thick, almost eight inches, and yet we were still reminded of the usual safety precautions when playing on the ice. Be wary of holes and thin spots. Lay flat if the ice ever cracks. We all took the warnings to heart at the door and promptly forgot by the tree line.
I had two friends with me the first time I saw the face in the ice: Phil and Luis, twins with freewheeling parents who lived a little closer to the city. That morning the ice that covered the pond was dusted in a thin layer of snow like powdered sugar. It was tricky to skate through, but as we drove circles in the ice, the sounds of the sugar-snow crunching under our blades filled us with delight. Inevitably one of us would stumble and fall to the laughs of the others. It was a very clear morning. There were no clouds in the sky.
When it was time for Phil’s unlucky slip, he slid a very good distance across the ice, farther than any of us had that morning. Luis and I jeered at him as boys do, but the jeers quieted when Phil did not get up. He was propped up on his elbows staring directly into the pond. We skated toward him, hoping he was unhurt. If someone got injured on the pond, mom wouldn’t let us skate on it for at least a week, perhaps even the rest of the season.
As we drew near, Phil brushed the snow from the pond’s surface. He looked up as we slid to a stop.
“There’s something down there,” he said, pointing.
Luis and I laid down on the ice and we each took turns brushing snow off the pond in hopes of getting a clearer sight of whatever Phil had seen. The ice was a pale teal and the water underneath was dark blue, making it difficult to see deep down, but in the pale sunlight I thought I could see a shadow bobbing about. I asked if it could be a fish. No one answered.
The shadow settled just underneath the spot we cleared. The cracks and slivers in the ice distorted it, but there was no doubt that it was a face. The eyes were closed, the lips tight. Hands were on either side of the head, giving the impression of a sleeping creature peering in through a window. Long black strands floated across the face like a tangle of seaweed.
“It’s a man,” said Phil.
“That’s a woman,” Luis said. “Look at how long her hair is.”
We argued over the biology of the face beneath us for a few more minutes, and once we looked back the face was gone. We scoured the nearby ice but could found no more signs of the thing. Some days later Phil and Luis returned to my house. None of us had forgotten the fascinating face, and once we all pretended that we were just going to the pond to skate, we went to work searching for where it would show up next.
Luis found the face on the other side of the pond, but it had changed a little. Its sleeping features were sunken and gaunt. Flecks of skin about the cheeks and temples were missing. The prominent cheekbones stood out like ball joints from a machine. The hands were pressed more firmly into the ice. Suddenly the forest seemed too silent, as if a bear were watching us from the trees. We tried to skate for a while longer, but the cold ate at our bones and sapped our energy. We left the pond early that day.
We went back to the pond some days later. This time none of us brought up the face in the ice. We tried to skate around and ignore the nagging feeling that something was watching us. We didn’t jeer each other when we fell. We just stood very still and waited, hoping not to hear a cry of alarm. It was a joyless, tense morning, and unfortunately, I was the first one to find the face. I was skating through a well-grooved area near the shore where, with enough skill, one could take a sharp curve with significant speed. My skates failed to grip, and my feet came out from under me. I slid a few feet without injury, but as I came to a stop, I found myself staring into the ice and then into the face.
The sleeping form had decayed even more since last I saw, exposing the tendons and bones underneath. I could see the teeth on the back of the jaw peering through the rotted cheeks. Its nose was totally gone, leaving only exposed nostril holes like two black teardrops. Its hands were digging into the underbelly of the ice, as if trying to claw itself free. The eyes were the most horrible thing of all—lidless, pale yellow, staring straight at me under a tight brow. It was a savage, inhuman face filled with animalistic rage, and I scrambled back and yelled for my friends. They didn’t wait to see what had caused my fright. We ran from the pond; Phil and Luis didn’t come back for the rest of the week.
When the excitement had died down, we jeered each other about the silly face in the ice. We took turns making impressions and mocking it. Despite our outward machismo, we all shared no interest in returning to the pond. We agreed that as long as we stayed away from the pond, we could still enjoy the winter. A day or two passed in the woods and the face in the ice left our minds. We focused on other games and shared in snowball fights.
One morning we decided to play hide-and-seek. I drew the short stick and was forced to count to sixty with my nose against a tree. Phil and Luis quickly fled into the forest, their footsteps crushing the newly-laid ice into the snow and disappearing into the creak of trees and the white noise of the outdoors. It was a particularly frigid morning. I rubbed my numbed fingers in my gloves, trying to stay warm.
My count was nearing thirty when I heard footsteps breaking through the ice. I thought that it would be pretty foolish for Phil or Luis to try to sneak back to me in the loud snow, though it was not an uncommon technique in our hide-and-seek games.
The crunching of the footfalls stopped behind me. I suspected Luis was there, trying to trip me up. I counted louder. Then the crunching moved toward me. Someone was breathing very heavily, someone who didn’t sound like Luis. The air was already cold, but if possible, it grew even colder. The footsteps had stopped directly behind me, perhaps no more than half a stride, and I could hear then that the heavy breaths were strained, as if whoever was making them had come running from a long distance. I stopped counting and stood very still.
A hand slowly moved around the side of my head and planted itself against the tree. It was chilled blue from frostbite, and the wiry muscles looked closer to icicles than flesh. Tattered cloth hung off the forearm, and the fingers were long and bony with split, blackened fingernails. Another hand moved past the other side of my head and pressed into the tree. The bark splintered, then began to freeze before my eyes.
I felt a mouth draw near my ear. The breath was cold, inhuman, and the sound that wheezed in my ear was nothing more than an achy rattle. In panic I ducked under the arms and ran blindly into the forest. I saw in my mind the savage face in the ice. With each flurried step I swore the creature was loping along just behind, an icy hand inches from my jacket hood, intending to drag me deep into the frozen pond—this I knew by instinct.
I stumbled into Phil and Luis by mere chance and barely slowed to tell them to run. My fear went into them, and together we all bolted through the woods. I looked back only once and saw nothing except the trees and the snow, and plenty of both in sight. A sickly wind moaned through the boughs. I kept running until my legs threatened to give out.
Phil and Luis didn’t return for the rest of the winter. I never told them what I saw; I don’t think I needed to. From then on the woods were frightening and dangerous even in the brightest of light, and it was difficult to explain to my parents why I wanted to stay indoors, or why my friends weren’t coming around as often. I went out only under the wing of my dad, and still then only during the brightest part of the day.
During the darkest part of the winter our house was sieged by a blizzard blown down from the Arctic. Inside we were warm and stocked with firewood, good food, and bright lights. I sat by the window watching the snow fly past horizontally. The sight was dusky and gray-blue, with visibility barely to the trees in my backyard. In my hands I held a cup of hot chocolate. I felt spiteful and proud. Let the wind blow all it wants! In here, not a single snowflake will survive a fall to the floor.
As I raised the cup to my lips, my eyes caught something in the snowstorm. I thought it might be a wolf, padding through on its way to a safe burrow. I sat up for a clearer look and rubbed the fog from the window. It was larger than a wolf, standing upright, perfectly still in the screaming wind. It wore tattered clothes that whipped in the wind; its hair was tangled and dark, and centered in the head was a pair of twin, twinkling yellow eyes.
My breathing hitched. I ran for my parents, but when I brought them back to the window, the creature was gone. My parents assured me that nothing could be out in the storm. That only made me more anxious. If I didn’t know where it was, I couldn’t know where it would appear next. In my closet, buried in the clothes? In the bathroom while I washed soap from my hair? In the folds of my bedsheets and covers?
For the rest of the night I dreaded the preparations for bed. The water that pooled in the sink and bathtub couldn’t warm the ice in my blood. I thought again and again of the pond. The face in the ice, teeth gritted and eyes blazing, leered at me from every shadow and behind every closed door. I stayed near my parents, near the lights. When I had to move I kept my back to the walls and bathed with the curtain open so I could watch the door.
I couldn’t bear to let go of mom or dad’s hand that night as I was tucked into bed. They indulged me with two bedtime stories, and then asked me what was bothering me. I told them then, and only then, about the face in the ice, about the creature I’d seen standing in the blizzard. They assured me of the safety of our house, of the safety of my bed, as parents are wont to do, but once they left me to sleep, I heard them checking windows and doors. Surely, I thought, wood and glass were nothing for a creature that could claw its way through seven inches of northwestern ice and stand up to blizzard winds. There, I thought at every creak in the house; it’s finally come for me! My sleep was restless and uneasy.
I woke at some point after my parents had gone to bed. To the right of my bed was a window which looked into the backyard, and which I kept covered with a heavy curtain in the winter so as to keep heat in the room. The room was uncomfortably cold even under my blankets, and fingers of frost crawled across my ceiling. The heavy curtain billowed from an unseen wind—no, I saw it clearer: it billowed in the wind coming from outside. My window was wedged open.
I laid motionless in my bed. The curtain billowed again, and through the shade I saw a shape pressed into my window. It slowly grew larger, and from the sill a fog poured like saliva from a gaping mouth. The ice crawling on my walls splintered like wood cracking in a fire. The window pressed into my room, pushing aside the curtain, and I at last saw fully the creature from the pond.
Its face was rotted completely, more death blue than living pink, with black gums barely clinging to the ugly white teeth. It made a horrible noise as it sucked air through its missing nose, a sound I can only describe as a man trying not to drown. Its black, matted hair fell down around its head like vines in a jungle, and its yellow eyes lacked any pupil. As it pushed through the open window it wheezed and seethed through clenched teeth, and its body was covered in scraps of clothing, frostbite, and ice.
I remember whimpering. The blizzard raged outside and the creature crept into my room and approached my bed. My throat was frosted over and my voice found no foothold on which to step and leap free. My blankets crackled against the encroaching cold. Ice grew on the cloth right in front of my eyes. I cried out, a hoarse and weak mew that hardly cleared my lips. Whether that was enough, or whether it was what came next, I’ll never know.
The door opened just then. It was my mom, likely suspicious as to the sudden cold in her house, or perhaps in passing she had heard my cry. She shouted, at first, at all the ice and snow pooling in my room, and then she screamed at the sight of the creature. She ran to my bed and yanked me free. I felt a searing pain in my hands; they had frozen to my blankets, and as I was freed, my skin ripped raw. I buried my face in her shoulder and remembered someone yelling, but that was all.
The police refused to come until the blizzard cleared in the early morning. By that time, the creature had long been gone and my room was indistinguishable from the outdoors. Everything was iced and blanketed in snow, perfectly cold and white. Following the scare, my dad filled in the window and my room was moved somewhere else in the house. I never returned to the pond in the woods, not even in the summer. I think at some point after our family moved away, it was filled with concrete.
These days when the weather is perfect for blizzards and ice skating, I stay clear of woods and ponds. At night I shut up my windows and draw the curtains tight and build a large fire in my hearth. Some nights I lay awake listening to the howling of the wind until morning. Other nights I awake in a fright that my wife can’t understand. Those are the nights that no shower or fire or warm food can drive the chill from my bones. Those are the nights when I see the face in the ice.
What a chilling read -- if you'll pardon the pun!