Able in the Evening

The loneliest building in town, on the precipice of an ever-expanding sea of frost and moonlight, stood a once lived in shack looking out at the untampered canvas.

 Madalynn got back at a quarter to midnight, her recently deceased father’s house held a blanket of snow on its small roof. Whenever they came to the gelid village Madalynn’s father would rent out a one-bedroom house that was the same size as their garden shed in Texas. The place came with a stove, a twin size bed, a window above the bed, a box of slugs, and an old frontier coffee ketal. It was made with chestnut planks and stood fast against the demolishing winds that the tundra had to offer. Her father had started living there full time after he divorced Madalynn’s mother, and it never changed in the 15 years since he first rented it out. The same twin-size bed under the same small window with the same box of slugs hidden underneath it. Six months after the divorce Madalynn’s father bought the house, and after he killed himself, it was left to her. 

Madalynn went inside and lit the stove with some half-burnt wood from the morning. It was already mid-October, and Madalynn needed to finish settling her father’s affairs within the week or risk being stranded due to poor weather conditions until April. However, word around town was that the days were growing colder faster than usual, and that might mean that flights coming in and out of the region would be grounded sooner than expected. Madalynn wasn’t about to see if the rural people of this town were going to be right about the weather, so she skipped the pleasantries and went straight to business. 

Just that night she spoke with Cindy, her father’s ex-girlfriend, who hated answering questions about his death saying, “I don’t know, he was a crazy person. He broke up with me right after his shift two weeks before he jumped. He wouldn’t tell me why, and when I went to go see him he was never there. Roggie said that he saw him sit out in the snow for twenty minutes before. Didn’t move, didn’t shake, hell Roggie barely even saw his shoulders go up and down as he breathed. That’s all I know.” 

Eventually, Cindy would go teary-eyed, and when Madalynn asked her if she did it she spat at her and said, “You think I killed your dad?! He was 150lbs heavier than me and worked in the coal mines. How would I even attempt that without him slapping me in the mouth? God! You both are just the worst headcases this town has ever seen!” Cindy started crying at that point and gave Madalynn a look of intense vitriolic hate.

Now the spit had frozen on her way back home and thawed as she set her boots near the stove. Madalynn rubbed her hands and arms to warm herself up while the stove’s heat filled the vacuum of cold. She closed her eyes and remembered a time when she was young, and her father took her out to this place. They use to go to the rich part of town and shovel the driveways of the rented houses managers and supervisors lived in. She remembered her father telling her that they were 50/50 partners and any money they made they would share. Of course this, at the time, was a huge scam, for her father only had one shovel, and it was only small enough for her. But, there was nothing she could do, her protest fell on deaf ears wherever they went. Yet, when she turned 18, and her father missed her graduation she found a box addressed to her at her home in Texas. The box was from her father and it had $10,000, and a note that said:

 “Backpay for shoveling the driveways. I rounded up to make sure it was enough. -Dad” 

A smile crept across Madalynn’s chapped lips as tears ran down her rosy cheeks. She brings herself back to the present and grabs her blanket to cover her shoulders as she takes out the file on her father. The file was thick, nearly 150 pages, and it was filled with random pieces of paper with shorthanded notes scribbled around it, photos of people he met before he died, a bar napkin with a crossdressers number next to a kiss mark, as well as the occasional “Return to Sender” letter he wrote for his daughter. It didn’t make any sense, everyone that Madalynn spoke with said that her father was a kind and gentle man with some odd habits. But, Even the habits didn’t make sense, like dumping his stove ashes into the Quarry by the shack, or crushing crab shells and smearing them on the toe of his boot, and weirdest of all was that he spoke with a man named John Ullur every week yet no one has ever heard of him.

Madalynn could only find the name in the first phone book that the town published in 1936. The name led to a news story about a man who had killed his daughter by leaving her outside in the freezing cold. Doctors said she died in the first seven minutes. Wolves were a problem at the time, and when they stumbled across the cabin they found the poor girl’s corpse and ate it. When the punishment was up John went to see how his daughter was doing and found only a pile of blood with a piece of her dress next to it. John’s wife followed him outside only to break down in a hysterical crying fit that whaled throughout the arctic landscape for months. No one knew what John did to his wife, all they knew is that one day John burned the Cabin down with his wife still inside. The police found three things, the charred remains of Mrs.Ullur, A child’s bed that was fully intact, and the notes of what happened in those cold months. Sheriff Ford looked over the notebooks and burned them, said that the man who lived in that den was the devil and that it would be best that he was forgotten. 

With the whole lot of confusion bearing down on Madalynn she tucked herself in the small bed and closed her eyes. She dreamed of a cabin, a cabin surrounded by impenetrable fog, a cabin that looked an awful lot like the shed she was sleeping in. Without warning she sees herself opening the door to walk in yet the scene is unrecognizable. Instead of a small stove in the left corner and a bed secured to the right, was an interior that resembled the great halls of the Tzars. A rectangular crimson Yasmin rug laid on the floor; the walls of the hall were 20 feet apart and covered with oil paintings of old aristocrats; above all this was a great chandelier that lit the perspective of the room, and hanging from that chandelier was a man. The man was dressed in dirty jeans, old worn-out work boots, and a canvas jacket with a flannel buttoned up underneath. While the face of the man was the face of Madalynn’s father. Stricken with fear, Madalynn’s body betrayed her, and when she tries to move her legs they stay stiff, and she can not but look at the face of her father through crystal tears. Then a molasses like accent creeps in the back of her head and tells her, “The nights are so very lonesome less a lady like little ol you walks with a loner like little ol me.” As soon as the voice finishes its sentence a cold suddenly rips Madalynn from her sleep.

Cold… more than that… frigid… more than that… abominable. This bittering freeze cut at Madalynn’s skin. It tore its icy fangs into every inch of her, and as it reached closer and closer to her core she knew that the stove would be the only thing that could save her. She got up from her bed as the night stood hanging above her, and put on all of her clothes. Hesitating to open the door for fear of finding herself in the same place as her dreams, she leaves her shack and grabs four pieces of wood. Bringing them inside, she opens the stove and finds that the wood that she started to burn never actually caught aflame. Perhaps it got snuffed out somehow, she thought to herself, but when she went to use her lighter it seemed to be out of fuel. Frustrated, she leaped to her feet to see if she can find a spare in the small shack. She moves as if the cold had bound her with rope, and it wasn’t until halfway through looking for the lighter that she saw a man through her window, about 60 feet away, standing there with a cane and bowler hat. Madalynn couldn’t see any other discernible features, and she was afraid that the man needed her help. So, she stopped what she was doing and went outside to see if the man was okay. 

Walking on the perimeter of the shed she lost her line of sight with the man, and suddenly he had moved another 30 feet away, yet he still stood deathly still. It was at this time that Madalynn began to notice that the terrible cold that filled her shed was less terrible the closer she got to the man. As she walked she shouted to the man asking what he was doing and how he got out there, but the man never responded. When Madalynn looked down as she trudged through the snow in exhaustion she would look back up and see the man had moved again. Time seemed to pass quickly and the bottoms of Madalynn’s feet were becoming sore, but there was something about the man that beckoned to her, his heat sang to her body. There was a rhythm to it: walk 25 steps, yell out to the man, look down in exhaustion, look back up to see that the man had moved another 30 feet. Minute by minute did she walk in that snow, the hawkish hell of the cold biting at her back. Still, it is the messianic heat that beckons her to move forward. 

She walked for three hours trying to catch that calefaction. She walked and she thought to herself that she only wished for one more midnight stroll with her father. She walked and she passed a chain-linked fence with warnings all around it. She walked, and then she saw the man’s face. She walked and she saw that he was not a man at all, he was a thing, a monster, a beast. She walked and insider her belly she could feel the dagger of cold finally reaching for her. She walked until the floor beneath her gave way to the opening of the Quarry on the edge of town. She walked even though her feet touched nothing and wind screeched in her ear. She walked until the cold finally took her. 

O, that beast, how cold its hellfire is. A twisted smile crossed its mangled mash of skin and teeth. If it were a more hellish creature, it would have hooves, but the body of the man it was before stayed. It touched its feet down on the frozen surface tentatively, it felt the warmth of biological iron, unknowing if the red clashed well with the white.