Last night, I dreamed I was back at Loon Lake Lodge again, though it is not the lake I remember from so many summers spent in Upstate New York. Instead of placid shallows, stained deep viridian by the shadows of overhanging pines, the lake in my dreams, always frozen, clings to a rocky shoreline. Its ice, opaque and solid as stone, offers no glimpse of what might lie beneath its surface. Inscrutable as a room behind a locked door, it reflects nothing.
Lungs burning, fingers bare and bleeding, I claw my way up the steep icy slope from the shore, desperate to reach the cabin. While I struggle, the forest comes alive, snapping and crackling around me. A layer of ice coats the trees, transforming each sapling, hemlock, and pine into gruesome hunchbacks that glitter beneath a capricious sun. Gusts of wind rip at the blanket of new-fallen snow, flinging up whorls of razor-sharp crystals that spin amongst the trees like lethal, dancing ghosts.
In the dream, which is always the same, night after night, there is an urgency to stay in sunlight and never step into the shadows. The air shimmers before my eyes, and as it closes in, landmarks, once familiar to me as the curves of my own face transform. The long slope to the blue clapboard cabin, the towering pines—all turn brittle, fragile as images painted on a paper curtain. Every night, I grasp a corner of that vision between my trembling fingers and tear it away in a long, wide ragged strip, but when I see what lies behind it—
Here is where I always awaken with the echoes of my last screams still in my ears and my heart juddering beneath my breast. Disentangling myself from the sweat-soaked sheets, I snatch my notebook from the dresser and write until my fingers cramp and my eyes burn, desperate to pinpoint the source of that fear. Over time, I have convinced myself that this recurring vision is more than just a bad dream, for it depicts a moment from long ago.
A moment seen through someone else's eyes, but now projected through my own.
A final, agonizing moment, although my hastily scribbled journal entries offer no relief. Unable to move any further forward in the dream, I am left with no concrete description, no clues, not even a single name. Fragmented and vague, the source of my darkest fear remains as hidden as whatever was stalking my dream self in the shadows of those winter trees.
I have never been to Loon Lake Lodge in winter. While I was growing up, we never arrived at the cabin any earlier than mid-June and stayed no later than the second week of October. Summers in Franklin, winters in Bennington: this was my father's rule, and the sole one to which he would not concede in all the years we stayed at his grandfather's cabin in the northernmost region of the Adirondack Park.
When pressed for a reason, he'd say, 'It's so remote, it's not a fit place to spend the winter. With just the fireplace for heat, the first cold snap would turn our blood to ice. Frozen in place, there we'd remain like pieces in an abandoned chess game. In the spring, hungry bears would find us and suck the marrow from our frostbitten bones. No, Amara. Loon Lake is a summer place. It's safer in summer. If your great-grandfather were here, he'd tell you the same.'
To underscore the seriousness of his intention, he'd wrap his arms like a straightjacket about his chest to still his visible shudder. If this failed to produce the desired response, he'd clap his hands against the sides of his face and clench his jaw to quell his chattering teeth.
Father always had a flair for the dramatic, along with a knack for turning what should have been the simplest, most reasonable question into an absolute mystery.
Back then, it was easier to make light of his eccentricities.
Summers always ended too soon at Loon Lake Lodge. Once the leaves began blanketing the ground in a carpet of faded reds and golds, and the nights started cooling with intention, a strange restlessness would come over my father. A preoccupation with fire that manifested in citronella torches ringing the cabin, lanterns glimmering beneath porch eaves, and bonfires blazing on the lawn. Despite these rituals, he still could not relax, could not sleep.
Compulsive movement—machinations bordering on the neurotic—soon followed and worsened with each passing year. Often awakening after midnight, I would hear him moving from one room to another. His nighttime pacing, not the random shuffle of the garden variety insomniac, but a purposeful march from office to den to kitchen to living room. My father, dutiful as a sentry on his watch and every bit as sober.
After completing his rounds, he'd return to the living room to stoke the maw of the enormous stone fireplace. While feeding the sole heating source in our century-old cabin throughout the night, he'd allow the outside fires to burn down to charred stubs and embers. Even now, I can still picture him in what I would call (though never to his face) his night watchman's uniform: Black Watch plaid Pendleton wool bathrobe and scuffed suede slippers.
High above in the attic loft I shared with my sister, Nisha, I would press my forehead against the window screen. Eyes closed, I would immerse myself in the pine-scented night, hoping my senses would find some clue for the source of my father's sleep disturbance. Though I heard loon cries echoing across the lake, owls hooting to each other on the hunt, and the occasional grunt of a black bear, there seemed nothing untoward about them. All were sounds one would expect to hear at the lake. Natural sounds, effortless as breathing. Nothing in them could account for Father's profound sense of unease.
When morning came, always the first to rise, I would find Father dozing in the battered recliner by the fireplace. More often than not, there'd be a twelve-gauge shotgun draped across his thighs.
What were you waiting for? What frightened you so much? I wondered, last month, as I ran my fingertips over the lid of his coffin. A coffin, closed out of necessity, for a memorial attended by fewer persons than there are fingers on one hand. Black cherry wood, polished and poreless, refused to yield an answer.
After Father's funeral, the dreams began. In them, I never feel like my complete self. A piece of me, of my soul, cruelly ripped away, matches the shredded reality that haunts those nightmares.
The name of this shred, this vanished piece, is not Father. Gone forever, he is incapable of returning. No, the name of my Other Half, the spawn of all my disturbing dreams, is Nisha.
Braver and more rebellious, Nisha defied Father's cardinal rule, sneaking off to the cabin for a backcountry ski weekend in the dead of winter.
We never saw her again.
Did she discover the source of my father's fear in her last moments—or something worse?
Answers, I need answers, but I can never return to the lodge again. Like Nisha, like my mother and father, it is no more. Consumed by flames, forever consigned to memory, all that remains of it are photographs and home movies. A pale pastiche, this veneer of lives lived in a series of tableaux and fleeting images. Opaque as lake ice, these ghosts of moments past hoard their secrets, revealing nothing. Nor does there exist any written record of events to provide the faintest clue. Neither Father nor Nisha ever kept a journal or diary.
Any hope I have of unlocking the mystery of Loon Lake Lodge now lies within Nisha's memories. Memories extracted at her autopsy. The procedure, then in its infancy, so intricate and fraught with controversy, Father refused to avail himself of any opportunity it might have provided for closure or peace. In the end, he had neither.
Sealed behind steel, swathed in cold, those memories still sit in storage in a special facility in Saratoga, New York.
In memory is where I may find answers, so in memory, I must begin. The only other clue I have, scrawled on a bloodstained note, contains the last words my father ever wrote.
It comes in the night.
It comes with the cold.
It hunts you!
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