Cabin Fever

The television crackled through the static: The biggest storm of the past 200 years was on it’s way. The family had been preparing for the past two weeks, stockpiling mountains of canned foods and powdered milk, along with fifty pounds of flour and rice. They had braved the hoards of people at the local mall to buy new boots for each of them as well as a mountain of blankets. The storm was due in two days.

* * *
The storm hit the way a wave does: sudden and hard. The wife watched her husband pull into the drive. The ground, nearly bare with patches of grass showing through the light sprinkling of white powder only twenty minutes before, now was covered in a good two inches of wet, dense snow. A snow plow passed down the road, spewing an eternal roll of gray and black snow before it.  The husband trudged up the long drive and came through the door, stamping the snow from his boots and brushing the snow from his thick work coat. He sighed with exhaustion. “Long day?” his wife implored. “Mh-hm” He nodded back to her. “I’ve been called off for the week, no way that anyone could get their cable fixed in this mess. It’s time paid, too.” “That’s great sweetie,” his wife replied. “I’ll start on dinner, nobody will deliver because of the storm.”

* * *
The power had failed two days into the storm. By that time snow had piled high against the house, and the cars in the drive were swamped by drifts, appearing in the snow like half-sunken ships in an arctic wasteland. The family had stored plenty of firewood in the basement, and decided to cordon off the peak-ceilinged living room and use the fireplace for warmth. The phones no longer worked either, the land lines having fallen and the cell phones long dead. The children now read, or otherwise were locked into an eternal loop of playing Monopoly or Checkers, their parents silently consuming literature they never had the chance to read. Quickly though, these things became old and repetitive, and the family had began to grind each other’s nerves. No one left the living room except to use the restroom, or when the wife piled on her coat and gloves to retrieve food from the kitchen. They had considered moving the stores to the kitchen, but had decided that it would cause the room to lose too much heat from the constant movement through the blanketed doorway. So instead they quarantined themselves from the cold, with not a chance of contact with the outside world.

* * *

The husband awoke in the dead of the night. His children were snuggled together in their nest of blankets, and his wife peacefully slept on the couch next to his own. His eyes searched the room: something had woken him. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he glimpsed a dark moving shadow. He snapped his head to the corner of the room. He thought that a dark shadow-like figure stood there, but a blink of his eyes and it disappeared. The husband rolled over and returned to sleep.

The next day passed as those before it, the monotony of the cycle silencing everyone for fear of causing one another to exhale their irritation in concentration at each other. That night the husband decided to stay up later than his family; he was nearly done with an anthology of E.A. Poe stories and was trying to finish. Slowly he began to sense that something was watching him. He turned his head toward the doorway, and thought he glimpsed a shadow duck behind the now-swaying blanket. He put his book down and crept toward the blanketed door, heading into the kitchen. He drew back the blanket and stepped onto the icy tiles of the kitchen floor. Before him was a tall shadow, pitch black and yet somehow translucent in the dull glow of the fire coming through the doorway. He froze, staring at the form in front of him. The air was still, then seemed to begin vibrating at a deep frequency. Two orbs seemed to glow a deep red near the top of the shadow, growing in intensity. Then suddenly the shadow disappeared and the humming vibration stopped, and the husband was left standing in the frigid kitchen all alone.

* * *
Twelve days passed without incident. The monotony returned to the family, and they grew more anxious by the day. Snow poured from the sky periodically, and the wind continued to swell it against the house, further trapping them. Very little natural light came through the windows, the sun being concealed by walls of frozen water. The husband was again staying up late, well past his family. Suddenly the a gust of wind blew through the chimney, extinguishing the low fire. The room was soaked with darkness. The husband rose to relight the fire, and as he did so, felt the deep vibration fill the room. The fire flared back to life, and the man turned around. The shadow levitated in the center of the room. The vibration in the air deepened, gathering into a bass-like note. A whispering began to creep into the deep noise, subtle at first but quickly becoming a harsh rasp in the husband’s ears. His eyes glossed over, and a grin crept over his mouth. He pushed through the blanket on the doorway and went down the hall into the garage. Inside he gathered chains and brackets, then set to work.

* * *

The husband sat in his big chair, reading once again. The others were gone now, he had done as instructed. The fire was again running low. He hadn’t eaten much the past few weeks, he didn’t need to anymore. It took care of him now. It was his master. He did as It said. The fire went dark, having finally burned through its fuel. The room began to vibrate. The husband looked up. It had come back again. The husband was overjoyed. He had not seen It for two solid weeks, not since he did It’s work. Now It’s eyes glowed red once again, and a whisper joined the bass vibrating through the room. The husband listened, then nodded curtly, closing his book and putting it on the floor next to his chair, taking his razor from it’s place on the end table. He smiled, then gladly did It’s work again.


* * *
The vehicles in the drive had lain dormant for weeks. Though the snow melted from around the house, nothing showed any signs of stirring within. A missing persons report had gone out when the husband never returned to work and the family’s phone’s were not answered. The police had been so influxed with other emergencies, car accidents, cases of hypothermia and people lost in the now, even a few fire from people trying to keep warm, that they had little time to search for the missing family. Now, however, the town had returned to normal, and more resources could be expended. The police first went to the house, thinking that perhaps the family had fallen ill or perhaps frozen. What they found was much different than expected.


The police swept through the house. When nobody had answered their repeated shouts, they had been given the go-ahead to enter the home. inside the entrance they had found two neat rows of boots, a woman’s pair and a man’s, as well as two child-sized pairs and children’s snow suits. In the kitchen the search team discovered a full stock of food, as well as dozens of half-melted candles and a dozen boxes of matches. It seemed the family had not left, but seemed to have vanished into the white blur of the storm.

As the police searched through the seemingly abandoned home, they came to the living room. They peeled the blanket hanging from the doorframe slowly, guns at the ready. The interior was nearly pitch black mountains of snow still drifted against the windows. They found the family there, the wife and two children suspended from long chains anchored to the rafters of the peaked room, makeshift shackles of pipe clamps around their ankles, their arms dangling under them as the last winter breeze swept through the open doorway, swaying their bodies. beneath each of them was a large plastic bin, filled with the deep red of frozen blood. Red icicles hung from their throats and wrists. The husband was seated in his large recliner, his frozen eyes still wide and a maniacal smile plastered upon his face. His palms were turned upward, red rivers frozen atop them. a straight razor laid on the floor between his feet. A coroner’s report revealed that the wife and children had died approximately three weeks after the storm had hit, with the husband’s death estimated to be about two weeks later.  The police filed their findings as the result of a severe psychological break caused by a case of extreme cabin fever.