Prologue
Morning fog draped across the Lower Mountain Loop, thick enough to settle on his jacket and chill the back of his neck, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that the mountain was watching him. His radio whispered static at his hip. Today it set his teeth on edge.
Eric Paulson had been clearing Stoneveil trails for three years, and thaw season unsettled him. The locals said winter buries, but the thaw remembers.
The sun cleared the eastern hillside, throwing long shadows across the trail. He paused to watch his breath cloud in the cold air. Overnight the temperature had risen just enough for the thaw to begin its quiet work—frost dripping from the trees, tiny beads of water darkening the softening earth.
Eric pulled on his gloves—worn leather, stiff at the knuckles from three seasons of this—and brushed branches from the trail. Wind damage from the night before, but nothing serious.
Seasoned work for a man who preferred nature over people. But today felt different. As he knelt down to cut through a patch of snapped pine needles, puddles formed between his knees. The thaw had cracked the earth, letting wispy rivulets worm through. Their darkened channels of meltwater carved clean lines down the trail.
Runoff season had begun in earnest.
His radio crackled. “Northern section clear, heading to marker four,” his only coworker reported from somewhere on the upper trails.
He pressed the talk button. “Copy. Still working lower loop. Should finish before noon.” His own voice sounded strange to him.
In an area like this, there would usually be songbirds flitting around, squirrels poking out of their nests, melting snow dripping from the tree limbs—but not here. Not anymore. It was eerily quiet, broken only by water dripping from melting ice. Eric stood up, kicking mud off his knees, and took a deep breath. Pine and earth, and underneath something else. Metallic. Like pennies left in the rain.
Fifty yards ahead, the trail bent around a stand of aspen. White bark shimmered otherworldly in the fog, trunks standing sentinel. Three sections left, then he could return to the maintenance shed. Beyond the ridge, a bank of dark clouds sat low and heavy—the kind that didn’t burn off. He tried to loosen the building tension in his shoulders. “Nothing but the cold slowing him down,” he muttered.
The sound of his footsteps was too loud. Each boot clearly imprinted into the softening earth—footsteps preserved perfectly in mud, then slowly siphoning water. The mountain began to stir from sleep, casting off its frozen scales one by one. Revealing whatever hid underneath.
A crow cawed once above him—harsh enough to make him flinch—then silence resumed.
Eric came around a bend and stepped onto a patch of thinning ice crossing the trail. It cracked beneath his boot, radiating outward in fractures. Sparkling. Like a spiderweb, or a cracked mirror fracturing the sky. The water trickled through fissures, clouding the clear ice.
The old-timers in town talked about thaw season like it was a living thing. “When the Ridge looks,” they’d say. “It has eyes. Come thaw season, it sees what winter tried to hide.” He’d never given the old stories much weight. Standing here now, he wasn’t so sure.
He crouched down, tracing a finger across one of the fracture lines. The ice had built up in pages, each freeze-thaw cycle forming another sheet. A dark smear traveled through the bottom layer. Dirt. Pine needles. Something trapped in the initial freeze.
Eric climbed to his feet. There was an opening up ahead where the drainage culvert passed under the trail. He’d have to check that—culverts filled in with melting snow during the thaw and started washouts that could undermine the entire trail if he wasn’t careful. Standard procedure.
So why was he now hesitant to approach it?
His chest had gone tight. The trees held their silence. He stood there longer than he should have, not moving.
Steam rose around his ankles now, no longer being evaporated by upward drafts but condensing, collecting in the dips and valleys of the trail. Morning fog burned off in the higher sun but shadows from the ridges retained pockets of cold air that refused to leave. Dirty patches of snow clung to the shaded dips where the winter had been especially heavy.
His radio startled him when it buzzed again. Just static this time, no voice—the mountains played havoc with reception. He adjusted the volume and continued forward.
He paused twenty feet from the culvert. The silence hung thick in the air, tangible enough to press on his eardrums. Even the meltwater dripping from above had stilled; it seemed as if the entire forest held its breath in anticipation.
Eric took a second step, then a third, pushing forward despite himself. The drainage ditch feeding into the culvert still had ice on top, a translucent film broken up into patches. Water bubbled underneath—the noise he should have been hearing.
Something was off. The culvert should have been running freely by now. Instead, the opening remained partially blocked, the ice strangely intact despite the thaw.
He approached cautiously. And that’s when he spotted them. Tracks. Through the melting snow, one after another. They shouldn’t have been there.
At first glance, the tracks could have belonged to a large hoofed animal. The pattern wasn’t right, though. As he continued, human tracks appeared, rising from the winter like images coming back from the depths of a foggy sea. The footsteps weren’t fresh mud prints. They had been preserved under winter’s cover for weeks.
He knelt and scraped away the accumulated slush with a gloved finger. Two sets of tracks, walking parallel, then veering. One normal, evenly spaced. The other… different.
Eric leaned forward, scowling. The second set of tracks disappeared deeper into the ground, sinking noticeably. Drag marks here and there—toe planted hard into the earth, heel leaving a lighter print.
He straightened up. This section shut down every winter after the first big snowfall—no one should have been here after late October. The runoff seemed to uncover the prints one after another, like pages turning in a book. His stomach tightened.
Wind rushed through the exposed limbs of the aspen trees, creating a hollow sound similar to dry bones striking together. He swallowed. His mouth had gone dry.
Just tracks in the snow. Nothing to worry about.
His heart pounded harder.
Tracks led on towards the drainage culvert, a decommissioned concrete pipe meant to funnel meltwater underneath the trail. Something about their intent unsettled him. This wasn’t the rounded steps of hikers taking in the view. It was someone with somewhere to go.
He reached for his radio and paused. What would he say? That he’d found old footprints? That the mountain felt wrong?
Eric let go of the radio and stepped forward, tracking the prints. They were easier to see now that he knew what he was looking for—impressions in the thinning snow that crunched beneath his boots, already filling with water as the sun grew stronger. The dragging set zigged slightly, crossing over the clean prints here and there as though whoever was making them had struggled to walk straight.
Tiny clouds of breath drifted from his mouth. Cold still hung in the air despite the brightening sun, shadows clutching at winter. He stalked sideways between trees, stepping to the side of the prints instead of through them. It wasn’t evidence—but something in his gut told him not to mess them up.
The forest had emptied of sound. He couldn’t hear the distant humming of his coworker’s chainsaw cutting through trees in the northern area. No birds. Not even ice dripping into the still puddles around his boots. It was just him and the muted sound of his own breathing.
The tracks showed a different pattern fifty feet beyond the culvert. The walking prints ended suddenly, as if whoever it was had walked off the face of the earth. The drags carried on solo, deeper impressions gouged into the earth. And there it was. Something thin and dark cut between them, a streak pressed into the earth.
His stomach clenched. Twenty years of trail maintenance had given him an eye for these things. He knew these signs. He refused to acknowledge what this trail had revealed to him.
A strong mineral scent intensified as the wind rushed toward him down the narrow path. Almost metallic. Almost like—he couldn’t think that thought. Couldn’t even speak it.
Ten feet ahead, a larger set of bootprints veered from the trail, showing where someone tripped or fell. Snow here had melted away completely, leaving a depression in the trail that matched the print and was filled halfway with water. He approached slowly, tense and unsure with each new step. Something about the water pooling in those prints seemed off. It wasn’t clear, like melted snowwater should be.
He dipped a finger into the pooled water and brought it up. Cold, despite the morning’s warmth. His fingertip came away pink.
Blood. Thinned by snowmelt, preserved by months of frozen ground, but blood all the same.
His heart thumped in his chest.
But whatever tracks he’d found kept going toward the culvert. And he was going with them. He straightened and wiped his bloody finger on his work pants.
Instinct screamed at him to flee, to call for backup, to let this be someone else’s problem. This was his section. His responsibility.
The trail forked at the drainage outlet, and the boot prints diverged into a V shape, converging on the mouth of the culvert. The scraped trail between them grew wider as it approached—whatever was dragged had ceased cooperating before the end. Eric swallowed as he inched forward. Each step toward the culvert pulled at the mud with a soft, wet sound.
When he reached the opening, he stopped. A four-foot concrete pipe ran perpendicular to the trail—winter meltwater should have carved a clear path through by now.
Ice choked the entrance, stubbornly persistent despite the thaw. The smell hit him first.
Something was in there.
The footprints stopped abruptly at the mouth of the culvert. Just as he’d paused now, crouching at the entrance and peering into the darkness.
A cold that had nothing to do with the weather washed over him. The locals’ superstition echoed in his mind: the thaw remembers what winter buried.
He dropped to one knee, bringing his eye level with the opening. The ice at the entrance was the thinnest, translucent in places. He could see blackness beyond, but it wasn’t rocks or branches. Not logs or leaves.
Eric got lower, pressing his shoulder against the concrete lip, and slid a gloved hand across the icy surface just inside the entrance, careful not to brush too hard. Whatever was sealed behind this frozen shield wouldn’t take much to expose it.
The ice just inside the mouth was paper-thin. He heard it crackle faintly as he swept away the last of the frost coating the surface. His brain refused to acknowledge what his eyes were seeing at first. Negative space. Shapes devoid of context.
The sun crept around the mountain, throwing a wash of weak light horizontally through the pipe. Definition filled the void as recognizable shapes solidified into something… human. A face stared back at him through the cloudy ice, features unmarred by decay. Ice sealed the eyelids back, and the man stared blindly toward him, caught forever in time.
He stumbled back, boot sliding through mud, one hand over his mouth. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe.
A man. Young man—probably in his mid-twenties. The thin ice sheet revealed skin that had turned blue from cold beneath its surface. Dark tendrils of hair were frozen in position around his temples. But those eyes made him hesitate, refusing to let him look away. The eyes remained wide open, displaying either shock or terror in their frozen positions. White-masked fingers, frozen, clutching at his cheeks.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, the words thin in the cold air. “Jesus Christ.”
It wasn’t until he took another step back he realized it wasn’t just a face staring back at him through the ice. Shadows under the shallow water revealed muscle and sinew. A shoulder pressed up into the clouded light. Limbs twisted unnaturally and his neck was bent grotesquely, shoved sideways into the culvert like the ice had burst inside him and pushed him there. This wasn’t how people ended up by accident.
Eric turned away and gulped down mouthfuls of pine-scented air. He’d been hiking mountain trails for twenty years and had seen his share of dead bodies before—careless hikers caught in bad weather, climbers who’d fallen too far, even a hunter killed by a wounded elk once. But never like this.
He should radio this in. Step away, preserve the scene, call the sheriff. There was a procedure for a reason, but his limbs felt frozen, his boots cemented to the ground. All he could do was stare blankly at the lifeless figure of the dead man who stared accusingly back at him.
How long had the person been there? The tracks looked like they’d been dragged, not walked. Dragged here while the earth was still soft enough to churn up mud. Late fall, before the heavy snows came. Months of being frozen in this shoddy grave while innocuous passersby walked overhead. Months of waiting for Spring to unveil a murderer’s secret.
Slowly, he reached for his radio. Hands shaking, he almost dropped it. He took a step back from the culvert. His eyes remained fixed—the face might vanish, or change expression, if he looked away.
Finally tearing his eyes away, Eric forced himself to survey his surroundings. Was he alone? Was the killer gone? Watching him now?
He took a slow step back toward the culvert’s edge. Made himself look.
“Who did this to you?”
There was no answer. Just the lifeless stare of a dead man. But somehow he knew it hadn’t been some drifter who got caught on the wrong side of Stoneveil and ended up here. Someone local took the trouble to stash him here like this—knew the trail would be closed this time of year. Knew which side of the mountain kept quieter in winter. Whoever killed him knew Stoneveil like he did.
He felt colder than he should have.
He blinked, eyes refocusing. Shadows lanced across the thin ice, distorting grotesquely in his memory. Trickles of water spidered outward. Blinking again, he thought the man had moved. But the face was still, his eyes boring into him like he’d somehow seen this coming too.
That was when the gravity of it truly landed. This wasn’t an accident like so many of the others had been this winter. This was a body. Murder. Something Stoneveil hadn’t seen in years, something that was going to tear the sleepy mountain town apart.
The radio felt like lead in his hand. There was no taking this call back.
He coughed, mouth flooding with the copper taste of adrenaline. That man deserved to be pulled from that grave with dignity. Whatever happened after this call couldn’t be worse than leaving him there.
His thumb found the talk button, visibly shaking even through his glove. The radio crackled softly, and he took a calming breath.
Then on open channel. “Lower Loop maintenance.” His voice cracked on the second word. Eric swore under his breath and pressed again. “I need to request—I need the sheriff. There’s something I found—”
He stopped, gaze flicking back to the culvert once more.
“A body,” he continued. “Dead man in the ice. On the South Ridge Trail.”
Static crackled in his ear. The seconds were long and laden with nothing but radio noise until a woman’s voice came through. “Say again, Lower Loop? You found what?”
Professional. Steady.
“A body.” His throat was thick again, demanding that he swallow. He cleared it with a harsh rasp of cough. “Male. Young male. Found frozen down in the drainage culvert by marker seven. I can see his face through the ice.”
He couldn’t tell her about the eyes. How they seemed to follow him when he looked at them, yet still stared blankly ahead when he looked away.
“Okay. Do not leave your current location. Do not approach the scene any closer. Sheriff Barnes is being notified, Lower Loop. Are you by yourself?”
The question landed strangely. He hadn’t considered it—hadn’t thought to look. Hadn’t thought anyone else might be waiting for him. He swallowed heavily. Did a quick headcount.
“I’m alone.” He paused. “I think I’m alone.”
The woods closed in on him. Too silent. Too… attentive. Clumps of pine and aspen, once harmless shapes littering the forest floor, now became places to hide. Shadows between trunks became hollows for lurking figures. He took another few steps back from the culvert, scraping his shoulder against its concrete lip, putting the culvert between himself and the tree line.
“We’re sending help,” the dispatcher said calmly. Her voice steadied him more than he cared to admit. “Can you tell me exactly where you are? Coordinates.”
He pulled out his GPS unit and mouthed coordinates back over the radio. Remembered the pale face under the cloudy ice.
The man wasn’t moving. But that bizarre fear gnawed again, whispering at his brain that if he took his eyes off for long enough, the body would simply vanish—or worse, move.
“Deputy Ruiz should be eight minutes out to you,” the dispatcher said. “Stay put if you can do so safely. If you feel unsafe or if anything changes, relocate to a safer location.”
“Copy,” he said, clinging to that tiny slice of normalcy on the radio.
Eric set the radio down and felt something cold against his cheek. Then his forehead. Snow. Individual flakes tumbled through the treeline, melting into his jacket.
He stared in fascination as the crystals slowly drifted down around him, landing on the shallow ice crust covering the dead man’s face. They settled over his features until they covered him like a blanket—like the mountain wanted him back—like it wanted to re-bury what the thaw had uncovered.
The radio crackled to life again. “Lower Loop, this is Deputy Ruiz. En route to your location. Don’t touch anything. Over.”
“I’m not,” he replied on instinct. He felt like lead-weighted gum stuck to the ground. Part of him wanted to turn around and run.
The snow was falling heavier now, blurring footprints, covering evidence. Someone killed this guy and tried to hide him—freeze him, let the mountain finish the job. But now people would come. Search parties, cops, CSI. Fucking TV trucks.
Eric turned back to the culvert.
“Who are you?” Not into the radio. “What happened to you?”
Static crackled through the radio again—the dispatcher requesting a report—and he blinked at the interruption.
Snow fell on the dead man’s cheeks. Nothing ever truly went away on that mountain. It just waited.
“Lower Loop, do you read me? Is everything alright out there?” Dispatch crackled once more over his radio, impatiently requesting an answer.
“Yes. Copy. All quiet.” He deadpanned into the microphone. “No change. Still waiting.”
Whatever truth was locked behind that frozen stare would stay there. Not to him, anyway. In eight minutes the deputy would arrive. The investigation would start. All of it already in motion.
For now, everything was quiet.
Just him, the dead man, and the snow.
