Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Patty Griffin – Cold As It Gets

Ghosts? Hallucination? Or people who can appear and disappear without a trace, with their own agenda? Mysterious figures appear outside an isolated cabin surrounded by unending cold but their bizarre behaviour leaves unanswerable questions in their wake.

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Cold like this got deep into the bones. Needles of ice took shape in the marrow and made my joints brittle. Flesh turned into slabs of marble. This kind of cold hurt. With every movement, my body screamed for release, to just lay down and stop, but I couldn’t. Something forced me to keep going. Step by agonising step.

Until I saw the man on the hill. The first person I’d seen in so long I couldn’t even remember when. That stopped me dead in my tracks.

“Hey,” I found my voice. “Hey! Hey!”

Apart from the cabin and the edge of the dead, black woods, for days I’d seen nothing but white. Drifts of snow obscured any trace of the original landscape, endless, soft, rolling hills. Fog disguised the mountains, cotton white, and blanketed the sky. Nothing could be seen of the sun all day except for a muted silver dollar. I’d thought I was the only person around for a thousand miles. And now this man on the hill, standing there as plain as day.

“Where did you come from?” I shouted.

Dropping my bundle of firewood and my axe, I stumbled toward the man. My feet were bricks of iron attached to awkwardly shaped snowshoes which I struggled to lift and drag across the surface of the snow. Even with the snowshoes, each step punched a hole through the powder up to my knees. As I made my way toward the man, he didn’t respond. I could feel him watching me, probably why I’d noticed him in the first place, but my eyes were too old and too weak to make out any trace of an expression. He wore a white coat as if to blend with the environment but made no other effort to hide. Under the coat, the rest of his clothing was a muted blue. Muted anywhere else in the word but here among nothing but whiteness it was an explosion of colour. His hands and face, dark as they were, would have given him away anyway against the white backdrop of fog.

“Hello? Why won’t you answer? Where did you come from?”

Beneath the snow, my feet rarely touched the ground. Instead, they gripped onto a layer of packed down ice, thawed and refrozen over and over until it was hard and rough and slippery. With a sudden jerk I lost my footing and my legs were yanked from under me. My hands were too cold to even feel the impact as I fell. Fresh powder swallowed my head and shoulders.

I fought my way upright, wet powder clinging to my face and beard. The hill where the man had been standing was empty. Thinking the fall had disorientated me, I scanned the whiteness but found nothing out of place. The man in the white coat and blue uniform had disappeared as mysteriously as he’d appeared.

I considered going up the hill to see if I could spot the man or where he’d gone. The hill wasn’t a tall one, barely twice the height of my cabin, but it sat some distance away through snow I’d have to slog through both there and back. My limbs were leaden and stiff. Wasting the energy to get up the hill and back might not just be tiring, in this kind of cold it could be deadly.

Turning, I navigated my way back through my own footprints and hauled the load of firewood onto my shoulder again. Every movement was ten times harder than it should have been and needed to be weighed as such. With my free hand, I scooped my axe out of the snow as well. On the way back to the cabin, I scanned the surrounding hills constantly but saw no sign of the man. Curtains of fog drew in around the valley.

My cabin consisted of one single room with a single door and a single window. Thick planks of dark and rough hewn wood made up the floor, the walls, the ceiling, softened in place by poorly tanned furs. No matter how I policed the structure or how many rags I stuffed into how many gaps, the cold found a way inside. What little furniture I owned, table and preparation bench, a single chair, my bed, cluttered the space around the woodstove.

Chunks of wood went into the hungry stove, ashes glowing and smoldering. My hands were as stiff and unfeeling as crab claws. Clumsy and desperate, I stirred the embers and fed the flames until the fresh wood caught. Leaving the stove open, I pulled my chair up to the very front and hovered over the flames. Melting snow dribbled off my clothing. I struggled to remove my gloves. My fingers felt swollen and would barely cooperate. My fingertips were as hard and cold as ice.

How long had it been since I’d seen another human being? I couldn’t even remember. One day stretched into another into another. A sea of white feeding into grey. The same sights, the same routine, sometimes it was difficult to distinguish waking from sleep. Perhaps I’d imagined the man out of depths of loneliness that hadn’t fully registered to my conscious mind. Often I found myself talking to myself, to my tools, to my meals, to the weather, but I’d never imagined anything that wasn’t there. Not that I was aware of, of course. Certainly none of the inanimate objects I’d talked to had ever talked back. But I couldn’t imagine where the man might have come from, assuming he was real. And I couldn’t imagine where he’d gone.

Flames bright and burning danced in the belly of the woodstove. The light seared my eyes but my hands found no trace of their heat. I held my bare palms as close to the fire as I dared but the warmth didn’t reach me.

“Come on, I did my job,” I said. “I fed you your dinner, now give me some warmth! Give me some heat!”

The cold had burrowed too deeply, I couldn’t dislodge it. I was tempted to plunge my bare hands deep into the flames. To scoop up the embers and let them run through my fingers. To take those blazing ashes and scour my skin down to the bone. To feel something, anything, other than cold. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that if I injured my hands I wouldn’t be able to go out and gather more firewood, and presumably things could always get worse. The sleeves of my coat smoldered, wisps of smoke turning in the air. If I could see the sleeves burning, surely my palms were burning as well. I backed off, rubbing my hands together until the fingers became more limber, although I still couldn’t feel any warmth.

Nights were long and empty. With my cot pushed against the iron belly of the woodstove, I huddled beneath a mound of clothing and furs. Shivers rumbled up from deep in my core. Cold burned through my fingers, in every joint, and across my flesh.

Firelight leapt behind the bars of the stove and I watched patterns caper across the walls. The room’s sole window glowed with moonlight. Suddenly, a shadow flitted across the glass. Rimed with frost, the glass blurred the silhouette but I was sure it was the man from the hill. It was too dark to make out any details but the moon caught glimpses of his white coat.

As I watched, the man stared in through the window. Observing me, I thought. He must have believed I was sleeping. Although I couldn’t see his eyes, I could feel them crawling on me.

A second figure joined the man at the window. Shorter and with long hair, a woman in darker clothing. I could see them moving, they seemed to be talking, but I couldn’t hear any sounds. They must have been whispering. Apart from the crackling flames, the cabin was silent. I breathed shallowly, thinking, before deciding to throw back the covers.

“Hey! What are you doing? Where did you come from?”

Between the mound of furs and my layers of heavy clothing, my movements were clumsy. I did my best, however, to burst out of the cot and storm across the room. If the pair had thought I was asleep though, and were therefore surprised by the way I emerged and shouted at them, they didn’t show it. I didn’t even see them flinch. Breath fogged around my head. I stomped right up to the frosty glass and glared.

“What do you want?”

There was no way the two of them couldn’t hear or see me. Even with the window between us, we were less than an arm’s reach apart. The two of them kept talking, or miming perhaps, I couldn’t tell, half-turned toward one another but keeping an eye on me. Even with the moonlight and woodstove, shadows hid every detail of their faces.

Crossing the room again, I retrieved the gas lantern and turned it on. Hissing, its impersonal light filled the cabin. I hurried to the door. My feet, cold and leaden as they were, were already stuffed into my boots. I tossed open the door and snow spilled across the entry. Somehow, in spite of the woodstove and the fact that the cabin had been shut up for hours, I couldn’t truly sense a difference between the bitter cold outside and the bitter cold inside.

Boots punched through the fresh powder as I circled the cabin. I didn’t have far to go, the cabin being as small as it was. I led with the lantern as I rounded the corner, bringing the window into view, but there was no one standing outside of it. No man, no woman, no one.

“That’s impossible.”

The lantern’s glow didn’t reach far beyond the cabin but moonlight beamed across the vast, white nothing that surrounded me in all directions. Nothing moved out there. Nothing except for fat flakes of snow drifting from the sky. The only direction they could have possibly gone without being seen was around the cabin. I circled wide, holding the lantern aloft, but after circumnavigating the structure I saw nothing. In the deep snow, there was no way they could have sprinted away without being seen.

The lantern quivered in my hand. Deep cold worked its way through my bones. I lowered the light and studied the snow beneath the window where the man and the woman had been standing. The only footprints I could see were my own, there was nothing directly below the window. The two of them had looked as real as I was, as real as anything, but they couldn’t possibly have come and gone without leaving any record of their presence.

“I can’t have imagined them,” I said.

Spreading out, I kept searching until I could stand the cold no longer. Nothing. The two people at the window had come and gone like ghosts.

xXx

One day drained into the next and drained into the next. There was nothing to hold onto, I felt like I was tumbling through an endless field of white. And cold, unending cold. The man and the woman at the window were constantly in my thoughts. Who were they? What were they? Hallucinations? Ghosts? People who could appear and disappear without a trace, with their own agenda? When they’d been in front of me, I was sure the man and the woman were real but as their absence stretched doubt set in. 

Water boiled on the woodstove. I held my hand in the steam but felt nothing. The cold permeated too deep. I was tempted to plunge my hands into the bubbling liquid. To upend it over my head even if it raised boils and blisters. As soon as it cooled, it would only make things worse but that second of heat as it kissed the skin and seared the flesh would be worth it. I craved warmth like a drowning man craved air. No matter how close I got to boiling water or open flames or hot metal, I found no change of temperature.

Something teased the corner of my eye. The window, shadows, movement maybe. I whipped around but there was nothing there. Just dull sunlight behind the glass.

There was something familiar about the woman. I didn’t get a good look at her. My sense of her seemed off as I replayed the memory in my mind. From some angles she felt like an older woman, from some she was young. It felt like I knew her but I couldn’t say from where. I’d been alone in this cabin for so long, alone, as long as I could remember. The man and the woman, I hadn’t even been able to make out their faces. It was all just a sense of them.

“If you imagined them, hallucinated, your brain must have pulled the idea of them from somewhere,” I told myself. “Thinking you know one of them doesn’t mean anything.”

In spite of those reassurances, I barricaded the door and set the axe down close at hand. Some fresh wood went into the stove and kept it blazing although I still couldn’t feel the difference it made. Turning my full attention to the window, I studied the empty expanse and made sure it stayed empty. A storm moved out of the south, black at its core, hazing the air. I felt like I was under siege.

Night collapsed in a slow, sedate tumble across the valley. Darkness brought on the storm, or the storm brought on darkness. Snowflakes thickened the air and the cold wind tested the window and gaps in the planks. Cold, cold, endless cold.

Whispers came from the walls. Under other circumstances I’d have thought it was just the wind. I saw movement in the corners of my eyes, especially at the window. I didn’t eat, I couldn’t remember the last meal I’d had. I didn’t sleep. All I could do was sit and wait in the freezing cold. Both the lantern and the axe stayed close to hand.

There was no light outside from the moon that night, just what glow filtered through the window from the lantern and the stove, but I felt something move among the fat flakes of snow. Blackness on black. I felt their eyes on me. And then tapping, they were tapping on the glass. They wanted me to know they were there.

I snatched the lantern and hurried to the window, turning up the brightness. Hissing, light threw itself against the glass and bounced back. Enough filtered through, however, to catch the dark figure outside. The woman this time, alone, standing in the storm in dark clothing that looked unsuited for the cold, nothing but a thin sweater on top. She tapped on the window again, not reacting to how close I was, and let her bare finger linger on the glass.

“Who are you?” I shouted.

The woman didn’t respond. She looked so real, so real and so familiar. Maybe she was real and I was the ghost? Raising the lantern, I tried to make out details but the light just glared on the glass. I still couldn’t see a face.

“Who are you? What do you want?

I passed back across the room and grabbed my axe. Raising it above my head, I returned to the window. The woman still didn’t react. Not even when I brought the axe down on the glass with all my strength. The head thumped and rebounded without leaving a mark. Impossible, there was nothing special about the window so far as I knew. I slung the axe around again but it jumped back from the glass without damaging it in the slightest.

“How is this possible?”

I went to strike a third time but something stopped me. The woman’s fingertip traced through the frost on the glass, carving letters, words.

“What is this?”

I waited and watched the words take shape. If I was hoping for enlightenment, however, I was disappointed. The letter and words were backwards, correct to her, readable for me after a moment’s study, but still meaningless.

“See you soon?”

xXx

Ranks of identical chambers filled the subterranean room. Podlike cylinders with ovals of reinforced glass through which their inhabitants were visible. Men and women of all races, almost all of them elderly, frail and unwell, dressed in identical gowns. Frost collected on the outsides of the chambers as well as on the numerous tubes and tanks hooked to them.

Dr Dawson walked the rows between chambers. Tall, slim, with dark skin, he wore a white coat over the powder blue uniform of CryogenCo. Automatically, his eyes traced across the digital readouts hooked to every chamber. He stopped outside the one he’d been seeking, number ‘784’, and studied the inhabitant. A heavily lined and bearded face, dignified.

An older woman in dark clothes made her way down the corridor behind him. She gathered her sweater against the bite in the air.

“Mrs Brunstein, did you have any trouble finding your way?”

“No, no, it’s fine, thank you,” Ada Brunstein said.

“Your husband, here he is.”

Dawson gestured to the closest chamber. Ada looked inside at her husband, Martin. For a few moments, neither of them spoke.

“You’ve never visited before?” Dawson asked.

“No, I was always worried it might make me remember him differently.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll be coming back here soon though, under other circumstances. We signed up for the preservation package together. I wanted to see what it looked like.”

“If you don’t mind me asking-,”

“Cancer, the doctors have given me less than six months.”

“Ah, you look well, considering.”

“Thank you, I suppose.”

“Sorry, I spend all my days monitoring our patients. They don’t talk back, my bedside manner might be a bit rusty.”

“You’re sure he can’t see anything or feel anything?”

“No, the patients’ blood is drained and replaced with a sort of protective solution before they’re cooled and then frozen at a temperature of around one hundred and twenty degrees below zero, celsius. There’s no brainwave activity. They’re neither alive or dead, we actually call them Schrödingers. It’s a reference to a thought experiment, there was a physicist named Erwin Schrödinger and he-,”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it. The cat in the box.”

“That’s right, well, I’ll give you a moment alone. Take as long as you need.”

Dr Dawson stepped away and walked back toward the end of the corridor. Ada stayed where she was, studying her frozen husband through the oval window. After a few moments, she reached out and tapped the glass with a fingernail. The glass was icy to the touch. She tapped a few more times then left her finger there and gauged the temperature.

“Oh, Marty,” she said. “It does look awfully cold in there.”

Like most of the cryogenic chamber residents, Marty’s expression was one of peace. His arms crossed his chest. She couldn’t help but notice though the way his half-lidded eyes gave a glimpse of the pupils underneath. As if he was on the verge of waking, halfway between dreaming and rising.

On impulse, Ada reached out and traced her finger through the frost on the outside of the glass. ‘SEE YOU SOON’.

“See you soon, Marty,” she said, before turning and walking away.

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Sean: The idea itself didn’t come from the exhibition, but the day right before I wrote the first draft of this story I went to an exhibition on Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated Arctic exhibition which I think helped hammer the feeling of cold into my brain.

This story vibes with The Old Man, which is probably one of my favourites from 2022. I mean, they’re all favourites. Similar themes with the isolation, the uncertainty of memory, the mystery of it all, check it out if you enjoyed this one.

If you’ve read more than a couple of my stories you’ll notice I very rarely use first-person narration, I vastly prefer third. But I feel like most of the stories which use first-person I never name the character. In this case they don’t get a name until the perspective changes. I’m not even sure if that’s totally true, I’d have to go back through everything to figure it out, but yeah I’m pretty sure I don’t name first-person narrators that often. Weirdly, I’ve found myself writing more first-person for this project, Mixtape, than I ever did for All There in the (Monster) Manual. I don’t know why that is but you can judge for yourself how it works as I put out more of them.

Next one is a fun one, I was going to put out something else originally but I moved this one up when I realised it would be coming out on Valentine’s Day! I think it’s very appropriate.

Next Track: The Killers – Bones