# The Ice Man/Horror/1,700 words



## semtecks (Feb 2, 2015)

From: constable.john@opp.ca

Subject: Re: incompetent aresholes!!!


Dear Mr Cuttler,

In regards to your recent email I would like to emphatically deny that we did, as you suggest, "a half arsed job" during the search for your client. You are right in one respect. We are indeed "a small, provincial force". Most of the issues we deal with involve hunting, land disputes and ecological matters. However, we are the best you could ask for when it comes to searching for missing people in one of this planet's most inhospitable environments. To put it simply: the circumstances involved in Mr Sykes' disappearance are quite unlike what our force, or any force, are used to dealing with. Please don't take that as an admission that we have written this case off as an 'unexplained paranormal event' as you have claimed to the media. If this comes across as blunt, I apologise -- I'm not used to communicating by email. If you still want to sue, that's your prerogative. I've asked my secretary to scan the papers we found in Mr Sykes' cabin. You'll find them attached to this email, as per your request.


*Yours sincerely,*
John ConstableProvincial ManagerOntario Provincial Police







*ONTARIO PROVINCIAL POLICE**FREEDOM OF INFORMATION/PRIVACY ACTS **COVER SHEET*





















*SUBJECT: JONATHAN SYKES**FILE: 66-MP-656

*


​I'm completely snowed in, three hundred kilometers from the nearest town. There can't possibly be anyone out there. So who's knocking on my door?

Let me start at the beginning. I came to Ontario in search of the perfect secluded location. Following the furore that surrounded my last book, I just needed to be somewhere -- anywhere -- where there were no people, no newspapers no internet and no judgement. Bishop's Grave seemed to be that place. 'As far from civilisation as you can get without a time machine or a spaceship,' I was told. 

My agent rented the cabin at my request, warning me that I might be snowed in until spring. I told him that was fine with me and assured him, for the millionth time, that I wasn't going to drink myself to death or blow my head off. I may have taken a bit of a beating over what happened to those kids but I'm no suicide.

I flew in to Vermilion Bay on a light aircraft where there was a truck waiting for me. Then I drove for what seemed like an eternity. Then came the snow, great big tufts of the stuff like handfulls of of cotton wool. The world turned to TV static and I hugged the steering wheel like a myopic grandmother, trusting that the GPS would do it's job. 

Bishop's Grave turned out to a be a log cabin. It looked ancient, like it had been knocked up by the first white man crazy enough to come this far north, hewn from whole tree trunks he'd used to clear the land. There were four rooms inside: a study with a large fireplace, a stuffed moose head on the wall and a typewriter sat on a beaten old desk; a bedroom with a four poster bed; a kitchen with a gas stove and a wooden table that looked like it'd been carved from a single gigantic tree; and the last room, which was where all the canned goods, chopped wood, and extra fuel rested on shelves over a petrol generator and the emergency radio.

I started up the generator and got a fire going in the hearth. Then, after a hearty meal of canned beans, I started writing immediately. For the first time in months the words came. My fingers flew across the keyboard and I no longer cared what people were calling me in Guardian editorials or the Twittersphere.

It was about midnight when I first heard the knocking.

I stopped typing, my fingers hovering above the keyboard. I waited for a second knock. 

Silence. 

I realised I'd been holding my breath and let it out in a single whoosh. Then I laughed. There was no way someone was outside, knocking on the door. As far as I knew there were no other cabins in these parts. There was just...nothing, stretching on for hundreds of kilometers of freezing wilderness.

Still, I looked out the window to be on the safe side. Snow swirled out of a black sky. Nothing was moving out there.

I got a bottle of scotch from the pantry and poured myself a glass as I re-read what I'd written. Gradually, I convinced myself there'd never been a knock. It was the cabin settling. Or maybe a bird had flown into the door, blind and confused by the storm.

I woke up the next morning with a sore head and mostly empty bottle of scotch. I put my thick jacket and winter boots on and went to go breathe some of that fresh country air people are always banging on about. I opened the door and my blood froze.

There were footprints. Not tracks, perhaps left by a foraging animal -- such as a bear -- but human footprints. I could see the tread of what looked like Converse sneakers. The tracks came out of the woods, up to the front door and then around the side of the cabin. 

I scanned the treeline, as if expecting some madman to come screaming out of the shadows with an axe and the bloodthirsty grin of a half decayed corpse. The snow had ceased and now the white world lay silent. There was no movement.

I followed the tracks around the cabin to where they stopped in front of the window to my bedroom. The tracks were deeper here, as if their owner had stood for some time, peering through as I slept in a drunken stupor. Then the tracks turned and walked back off into the woods.

I grabbed a stick that was half buried in the snow and walked to the treeline, the snow up to my shins.

'Hello?' I called.

There was no reply. The silence under the canopy of the trees was thick, oppressive. I thought about following them further but it was awful dark in there -- not to mention there were wolves here and, probably, bears.

I thought again about what happened to those kids. I Pictured them in their final moments as their faces went blue and their eyes bulged from their faces. Did they realise the mistake they'd made? Did they claw at the nooses around their necks as they kicked weakly at thin air? 

I shook the thought away. They were just footprints. There were any number of reasons they might be there. And I was not a murderer, no matter what those hack internet journalists said.

That day I made chili, chopped some wood and wrote fifty pages before sunset. The footprints were all but forgotten as I opened another bottle of scotch and reclined in a comfortable arm chair in front of the fire.

'Cheers, buddy,' I said, extending my tumbler of scotch to the stuffed moose head.

I took a sip and ended up spilling most of it down my shirt as there were three sharp knocks on the door.

My heart thundered in my chest. The tumbler fell from my hands and shattered on the floorboards. I listened for more but all I could hear was the whiskey dripping through a gap in the floor.

'Who's there?' my voice sounded old, weak. 

'I've got a gun,' I lied. 

Minutes that felt like hours passed. The puddle of whiskey continued to seep through the hole in the floor.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It took a supreme effort to get to the window. My feet felt like lead and every step seemed to take hours. As far as I could tell there was nobody out there, but seeing as the snow had started up again I couldn't be sure of that. I could see my own reflection and the white flakes twirling in the light from the lounge's bare bulb but nothing else.

I realised my whole body was tensed, ready to bolt at the slightest sound. I forced myself to relax, feeling my shoulders slump. 

That's when I realised that I wasn't looking at my reflection.

The silhouette in the window stood rigidly, unmoved.

I felt something bubbling in my throat that might have been tears or laughter, and then the thing, which I now guessed to be a man roughly my size, raised its fists and smashed them against the window three times.

I fell back, screaming and raising my arms to my face to protect them from broken glass. Luckily, the window didn't it break. It rattled in its frame but it stayed whole. Then I did something that surprised me: I started to cry.

***​That was the worst night I've experienced at Bishop's Grave so far. I spent it cowering in the storage room with a frying pan in one arm and a bottle of whiskey in the other. I listened to the Ice Man, as I've come to call him, walk around the house. He never makes a sound. He never speaks. He just crunches through the snow, relentlessly, only pausing to knock. He always does this three times -- sometimes its the door, sometimes its one of the windows and quite often its on the side of the house.

I knew it was dawn when the knocking stopped and I heard Ice Man's footsteps crunching off into the distance. I gave it another hour, just to be safe, then slowly opened the door onto the lounge. The cabin was in tact. None of the windows were broken and the door was closed.

It was like nothing had even happened.

I threw on my thermal clothes and opened the door, making sure that there was nothing waiting for me out there before leaving. The sun was peering over the horizon to the east, showing the perfect circle the iceman had left around the cabin and the tracks he'd left coming out of, and going back into, the woods.

My heart sank when I saw what he'd done to my car.

The entire front bumper had been smashed by something big. There was a U shaped dent, as if it had ran into a telephone pole at over a hundred miles an hour. 

I still tried the keys in the ignition out of dumb hope. The silence just confirmed what I already knew: I was going to die out here.


[That's as far as I've got so far. Any thoughts?]​


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## rcallaci (Feb 3, 2015)

The only thought that I have is - that this is one well written and exciting tale. This has the tone and feel of a Stephen King piece with a hint of Poe- the knock knock knocking at my door- Love this- One hell of a barn reader...

my warmest
bob


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## C. S. Danner (Feb 3, 2015)

This is great! First, I really like the format you have for the narrative, the prelude with email chain is interesting enough for me to wonder, "What happened?" and to keep reading on. 
The description of the place and the flow of the character's actions were nicely interwoven. I like that the 'reveal' of the Ice Man didn't say too much about him. Personally, I find that in horror stories the scariest things are the unknown (House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski does this really well with the entire setting, and it becomes really unnerving the longer it continues). By the end of the story I feel stranded (just like the protagonist) which is pretty awesome. If I was him I probably wouldn't have even gone outside, haha.


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## tornskate (Feb 12, 2015)

It was absolutely terrifying. I loved it. I might even have trouble sleeping tonight.

Seriously though, write more. I'm dying to know what happens!


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## kbsmith (Jun 17, 2015)

Awesome. Big fan of this piece so far. 
I want to know more about the ice man! You had me dying to see him for the first time, and the horror of the wasted whiskey is nearly as terrifying as the pounding on the glass. Maybe resigning the character to his fate isn't the best of ways to transition into your next section, hope is a great motivator for readers. 
I would like to see less of conundrum in the telephone pole smashed car, as it gives me sneaking suspicion that maybe I can't trust this boozing narrator. Maybe something more obscene to the car would make the damage more interesting. Feces is always fun.

Damn good writing.
Only thing that really kinda bugged me, 'he doesn't make a sound' felt wrong. Especially after saying 'I sat listening to him'

Uber curious to know more about the Ice Man's motivations and backstory.


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## T. John. C. (Jun 17, 2015)

As mentioned by rcallaci, very Stephen King-esque with the whole "I'm a writer" aspect which is pretty neat. I think it gives him real purpose to be out in the middle of no where like that. Also, there's something about him drinking a lot of scotch that gets me wondering if there is some reason to why he drinks so much. He downs half a body one night and after the Ice Man shows up, he continues drinking while holding the frying pan. I think that this can incorporate some sort of past occurrence or reason he has such a taste for scotch. Just a random thought, of course; this doesn't have to be included to be a good story. But, I do like it so far. I can't wait to read what happens next


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## DATo (Aug 2, 2015)

Very nice exercise in thriller/terror. I was captivated from the start and I particularly liked the introductory format you used (the email) as a prologue to the story. I confess that I have read a similar story within the last year in which the "knocker" proves to be the partner of the man inside but the man inside has lost his senses and in his terror, thinking it to be a supernatural visitor, refuses to let him enter. The "knocker", as a result, dies in the blizzard.

I am at a loss to conceive how one would proceed from the point at which the narrative ends. Sasquatch, perhaps? Wait ... that would require a Sasquatch who wears trainers. Bad idea.


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## Joe_Bassett (Aug 4, 2015)

I'm afraid that I'm just repeating the other posts. It is certainly a very good idea you have.  It feels much like Stephen King and formatting style reminds me of Michael Crichton.  It's rather chilling (pun intended).


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## Tbird0000 (Aug 21, 2015)

Alright, what to say about this one.

FANTASTIC! Loved it for realz!

So when I read, I want read and imagine this playing out in my mind as a movie. If watching this as a movie and these events were the first 10 minutes, I would be hooked instantly! I imagine camera angles that add depth to his desolation. I imagine his long untamed beard covered in snow flakes as he yells at the woods. His hot breath creating steam while he breathes harder and harder from the anxiety that he might hear someone yelling back. The person doing the knocking in my mind is simply just a black silhouette he can faintly make out through the window with no real form resembling anything other than his inner most fear. 

Truly a chilling tale.

The ending:
"I still tried the keys in the ignition out of dumb hope. The silence just confirmed what I already knew: I was going to die out here." -Remove that word.

Gives the character a great sense of despair. Obviously he doesn't want to die, so where to go from here? Now comes the anticipation for a physical altercation or confrontation between the two.

Gripping, I give it 2 thumbs up. Keep it coming.


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