Under the Great White Northern Lights

The whole trip had been a nightmare. They drove the old Honda up the coast in silence, her headache too insufferable for music, and the sun was already setting in the sky when they parked at the lift. Without even having a moment to stretch out her legs, Alex was rushing them to the cable car, and anxiety paralyzed her as it carried them over a valley so deep and dark she thought it might actually be bottomless.

Alex guided them up the path to the shack with a ridiculous headlamp that blinded her every time he turned around to ask her to repeat what she’d said, only for her to inform him that she hadn’t said anything at all. It will be worth it, he kept telling her, I promise. She’d been telling herself the same thing for years.

The lake was frozen over, and she’d had to talk Alex out of walking across it even if it meant another grueling half hour in the cold. When they came across the dead, half-frozen stag, she had trouble tearing her eyes away.

It had been shot, that much was easy to tell from the hole in its chest and the crimson stain in its fur. After that, though, it was hard to surmise what exactly had happened. Its body was half-submerged in the icy lake, only its head and torso poking out, as if the lake had frozen over in an instant, without warning. The exposed bits had been ripped away savagely, and though Alex gently reminded her that, remember, they were in the wilderness and wolves had to eat too, she didn’t feel any better.

This wasn’t how wolves ate. They wouldn’t have wasted meat.

She stared into the stag’s dead, dark eyes, and wanted desperately to go home. Alex put one hand on the small of her back, the other on her arm, and gently guided her away, reassuring her they would be fine. For a brief moment, she once again felt at home in his arms.

But that only lasted a moment, and now huddled together in a cold, dark cabin, she found herself wishing for a million things, if only for a clean bed and cup of hot tea.

“Here,” Alex said, handing her a bottle of whiskey he’d packed. “It’ll warm you up.” His face had the familiar reddishness to it she’d once thought was cute and now thought made him look like a large child. Either way, she took a swig and winced as it traveled like fire through her throat and stomach. They crawled into bed together, laid under a duvet stained with something she preferred not to investigate, and curled together for warmth.

“Lis,” he murmured just as she was about to drift off. He never finished the thought, instead lifting his hand under the covers, gently patting her thigh, and pulling the covers up to his chin. A minute later, he was snoring, the way he always did when he drank. Between his breaths, she heard howling in the distance. It took some time to fall asleep. She watched shadows dance in the cabin as moonlight shone through gaps in thick clouds.

The next morning, according to the clock, she woke up to a warm glow and Alex removing a kettle from the fireplace, pouring hot water into two mugs of instant coffee. He sweetened hers with a packet of sugar and added a scoop of powdered creamer.

“It’s not as good as the stuff you make it home,” he said, handing her the cup. She sat up, considered admitting it’s hard to screw up Nespresso, but kept her mouth shut and took a sip. It tasted bitter and artificial. At least it was warm.

“Hopefully the clouds clear away soon.” He was leaning against the wall, staring out the window, steam rising from his cup. He looked different from the night before, more stoic. She felt around the side of the bed for her backpack, produced from it an old instant camera they’d chanced upon it at a thrift shop a few years earlier. Then, she’d forgotten it somewhere in the back of a closet and only found it again when packing for the trip.

She snapped a photo of him, the flash startlingly bright, causing spots to appear in her eyes. Alex leaned over her shoulder as the photo printed, the darkness of it fading away, gradually bringing the image of him to the surface.

“That’s crazy,” he said, pointing to the window. “The flash makes it looks like there’s nothing outside. Just an endless void of black.” Then, fearing he’d gotten too serious, added, “I look great, though. Really rugged.”

After a lukewarm shower — she’d declined to shower with Alex, now regretted it if only for the warm water — she returned to the main room and sat by the fire while she finished toweling off. She felt Alex’s eyes on her, became strangely bashful, then wondered why that was. After all, it’s not like they hadn’t seen each other naked hundreds of times.

He was looking over a map she was sure he didn’t know how to read when she finished getting dressed, feeling a bit like a mummy, wrapped tightly in several thick layers.

“It’s a bit of a hike,” he said. “It’ll take us two hours, but the view is supposed to be amazing.” She didn’t have much of a choice, did she? Sitting in the cabin wasn’t exactly a dream vacation. Granted, neither was a two-hour hike in the freezing cold. She’d have much rather had a cup of hot chocolate, sat in a glass igloo.

“Ready,” she said. She nearly took it back when they opened the front door and saw the stag’s head lying in a pool of its own frozen blood, just outside the door. The ice had robbed it of its color, the tongue a grotesque bruise-like purple, its dark eyes frosted over, ice in kaleidoscopic patterns over the soulless pupils. She couldn’t help herself; she let out a scream.

Alex grabbed it by the antlers and, with noticeable effort, lobbed it into a dense circle of nearby evergreens. He kicked some snow over the blood, did his best to try and hide it. She was shaking, couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or the spike in blood pressure.

“Damn wolves,” Alex cursed. There were footprints, she was sure, in the snow not far off, but they were gone now despite the still air.

“Are you sure we’re allowed to be in this cabin?” she asked. “What if someone’s trying to scare us?”

“Of course we are.” There was a bite in his voice, the kind that hid shame. “No one’s trying to scare us. There isn’t anyone around for miles. It’s just me and you. And nature. As long as we don’t leave the door open, nothing’s going to get in. Okay?”

She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway.

Twenty minutes later, she was so certain the cold was slowly freezing her brain that she barely remembered the decapitated stag. The walk was almost entirely uphill, the path hidden under a dense padding of white, each step under their feet like crunching bones. Otherwise, there was only the wind, the occasional soft ruffling of branches swaying in the faint breeze or collapsing under a weighted blanket of snow.

Still, while the image faded from her mind, the feeling lingered in her body as an unwelcome guest. Each time the wind rustled the pines or she stared too long in one direction, uneasiness swirled through her blood. There were things watching them from the trees, she’d think, only for a moment, before logic once again took over. The path was dark, their only guide the thin stream of light from Alex’s headband and the infrequent shine of starlight leering through the clouds.

They must have been walking for just over an hour when they came upon a small clearing with several collapsed trees strewn about and Alex suggested a break. He unearthed a thermos from his bag along with a pack of beef jerky and a box of matches. She declined the jerky but heartily drank from the thermos, filled with warm water that melted away the chill that had settled beneath her skin. They were fortunate, too, that the trees had fallen long ago, the wood dry enough to easily light a small fire that filled the air with the scent of burning pine sap.

“Let’s take a picture,” Alex said, inching closer to her. “It’ll be a nice memory.” Her fingers no longer numb, she dug through her backpack and found the old Polaroid, and, holding it at arm’s length, snapped a photo of them. Being on the receiving end of the flash was much worse; her vision danced a discotheque menagerie of colors, warping the fire into a psychotropic belly-dancer. It made her nauseous.

The photo didn’t develop right. The contrast was gone, their skin painted a sickly cyan tinted by a green fire's glow, and behind them, a row of identical evergreens, colored ash white like long-forgotten statues.

“Sorry.” She passed the photo to Alex. “I should have held it in my pocket while it developed. The color’s all wonky.”

“It’s fine,” he said, inspecting it closely. “I kind of like it. What I don’t get is why it’s smudged here.”

“Smudged? Where?” He pointed out a spot, minuscule, barely noticeable, in the middle-right of the photograph where, sure enough, there was a smudge. Or something like it. Some small portion of the frame was distorted, and if she stared long enough she could almost give it shape.

“It’s like a Rorschach test, isn’t it?” Alex said. “What do you see?”

“I don’t know. Maybe… a dog?”

“A dog?"

“I really don’t know. It’s either a dog or a bush.” Or a person, but she didn’t want to verbalize the thought.

“Those are very different things.” He flashed her a cheeky, knowing look and she couldn't help but giggle. "You know what I see? I see two happy people, still in love after all these years." He stuffed the photo in his pocket. "And two people who should get moving before they freeze to death without seeing what they came here for."

Her legs groaned as she rose up off the dead tree, and she wondered how she’d be able to walk back. Also scolded herself for becoming so lackadaisical when she’d used to run a mile each morning. Her breathing was sharp and shallow as they trekked along, each inhale a frigid dagger of icy air, each breath out a hot burst of steam that stung her eyes. The strangest part, she’d noticed, was that she should have been able to see the borealis above them when she looked up. It's not as if it would suddenly appear at the top of the hill, after all, but when she looked up there was nothing. Not a single star or cloud, no sign of the moon or anything else. Nothing but a deep and endless void.

“We’re almost there,” Alex said, a determination on his face she hadn’t seen before, as if he’d stolen someone else’s expression, an alien in human skin. He took a sudden turn into dense undergrowth, revealing a path invisible to anyone who wouldn’t have known to look for it. Before she could ask about it, he grabbed her hand and marched them along the trail, his eyes fierce and mad, led along by some invisible force, an ethereal rope around his waist drawing them closer inch by inch.

She thought about how horror writers describe people’s eyes when they’ve become possessed, how there’s always something off, and never had understood the fixation. Suddenly, she found that she did. Her heartbeat was echoing through her head. Doom, it said. Doom doom, Doom doom.

An opening, a gap in the trees. Alex carried them through it, and there it was. Just as he’d promised. She felt her mouth drop open as a gasp of air escaped her lungs; it was beautiful. The sky danced colors of violet and emerald, shimmering like fresh morning sunlight on top of a gentle ocean.

How high had they climbed? The incline hadn’t felt that steep, but when she looked out over the landscape they were far above anything else, and the borealis overhead was so close she swore she could reach out and touch it.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“So are you,” he said and, brushing hair out of her face, leaned forward to kiss her. She should have kissed him back, the way she’d done many times before, but she didn’t. She turned her face away from his, his lips landing warmly on her cheek.

“I- I’m sorry.” She’d gutted him. That’s what his expression said. He might as well have been holding his intestines in his hands, trying desperately to shove them back inside or, at the very least, keep them from spilling out over the ground.

Then, he said, “It’s okay,” and for some reason, it hurt. He should have protested. Should have *fought* for them. It wouldn't have made a difference in the end, but that he gave up so readily upset her more than she expected. She didn't notice she was crying until the wind bit her cheeks in lines where hot saline had traveled.

“It’s okay,” he repeated. Despite herself, she hugged him, and he hugged her back. He didn’t cry, not even one single tear. “When did it happen? When did things change?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure there’s a before and after. I never, you know, I never cheated on you or anything. It's nothing dramatic like that. It was more gradual."

“Sometimes people just fall out of love."

“Yeah.” She choked out the word; it didn’t take shape, came out more as a phlegmy cough than anything else.

“I thought I could fix it. That maybe if we finally took this trip, something would rekindle the flame. I probably should have picked somewhere warmer.”

“I’d like to stay friends,” she told him. He’d like that, he agreed.

The walk back was silent, dead as the night. After the ethereal glow of the borealis above them, the dark sky was suffocating, a vacuum that made the entirety of the universe strangely claustrophobic.

The silence was shattered when Alex fell and twisted his ankle. His nose bleeding and face red from where it collided with the icy earth, she helped him to his feet. He put most of his weight on her the rest of the way down the mountain, making their two-hour trip take nearly twice as long. By the time the cabin came into view, Alex complained that his leg was numb — either from the cold or the pain — and she could only respond with bursts of hot, steamy breath.

That’s when the howling started. It echoed through the trees, rang out in a garbled call-and-response. The trees didn’t shake as they did in movies; no flocks of birds erupted from them. For a moment, she could almost convince herself it had been the wind, only there wasn’t any wind, and the calls were getting closer.

Alex heard it too. He took long strides, nearly dragged them both down to their knees each time he put pressure on his injured leg, gritted his teeth and fought through the pain, face still stained red. Out of the corner of her eye, movement. The rustle of branches, a twig snapping. Sets of eyes, reflecting the moonlight at them out of the shadows.

The first one leaped at them from a cluster of evergreens, bounding madly over the snow, a thick cloud rising up behind it. It wasn’t a wolf, not entirely. It bounded forward on all fours like an animal, but its proportions were wrong, unnatural. If it stood upright, it could look human. Its face, too. Its face was human. Mostly. Behind the bristled, matted fur, the bulging dark eyes, the jowls and sharp double-rows of teeth, there was something unmistakably human about it.

She stumbled in the snow, flinging herself from Alex; he let out a wail as pain shot through his leg and he tumbled forward. It was lucky, the creature hadn’t expected them to stop and overshot its pounce.

But there were others.

Two more breached the forest line, raging towards them with the same animalistic intent. A rush of adrenaline propelled her to her feet, and with one arm she lifted Alex onto his and dragged him forward across the arctic field. She heard them close behind. Her legs screamed at her *stop, stop, stop!* but she didn't, ran like a hamster on a wheel carried onward more by momentum than anything else, dragging Alex along beside her.

The cabin door opened with ease. Another stroke of luck. She shoved Alex inside, watched him stumble forward onto the cold wood floor and drag himself out of the way, and then she felt hot breath and teeth cut into her arm like razor blades. A second one latched itself onto her waist, throwing her off balance, clawing through the layers of her clothes. Without thinking about it, she threw the door shut, cutting off Alex’s scream from the other side as she toppled backward into the snow.

The last thing she remembered was three not-quite-human faces staring down at her with eyes dark as the unforgiving night sky, then the hot sizzle of blood pouring out over her skin.

There was a flash, bright and blinding as that first firework on the fourth of July, and she was flying, the cold air stinging her cheeks but, she noted, not unpleasantly. Not flying, she realized, *running*. Faster than she'd ever run before. Her vision around her blurred together into a kaleidoscopic menagerie, and she smelled something fresh in the air, something warm.

It was only after she’d ripped the still-beating heart from Alex’s chest that she realized what she’d done. She stared at the hideous thing in the reflection — the thing that stained its lips with his blood and scraped stuck bits of fat from its teeth — and wanted to scream, wanted to make this awful nightmare end. It bubbled up inside her, a force stronger than any she’d ever felt, and she let it out in a singular, frenzied cry.

She howled, and the others joined her.