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Last night, I dreamed I was back at Loon Lake Lodge again, though not the lake I remember from so many summers spent in Upstate New York. Instead of placid shallows stained deep by the shadows of overhanging pines, the lake in my dreams, always frozen, clings to a rocky shoreline. Its ice, opaque and solid as stone, offers no glimpse of what might lie beneath. Inscrutable as a room behind a locked door, it reflects nothing.
Lungs burning, fingers bare and bleeding, I claw my way up the steep icy slope from the shore, desperate to reach the cabin. While I struggle, the forest comes alive, snapping and crackling around me. A layer of ice coats the trees, transforming each sapling, hemlock, and pine into grotesque hunchbacks that glitter beneath a capricious sun. Gusts of wind rip at the blanket of new-fallen snow, flinging up whorls of razor-sharp crystals that spin amongst the trees like lethal, dancing ghosts.
In the dream, there’s always an urgency to stay in sunlight. The air shimmers, and as it closes in, landmarks once familiar to me as the curves of my face transform. The long slope, blue clapboard cabin, towering pines—all turn brittle, becoming as fragile as images painted on a paper curtain. Every night, I grasp a corner of that vision between my trembling fingers and tear it away in a long, wide ragged strip. But when I see what lies behind it—
Here is where I always awaken with the echoes of my last screams still in my ears and my heart juddering beneath my breast. Disentangling myself from sweat-soaked sheets, I snatch my notebook from the dresser and write until my fingers cramp and my eyes burn, desperate to pinpoint the source of that fear. Over time, I’ve realized this recurring vision is more than just a nightmare.
It depicts a moment from long ago.
A moment seen through someone else’s eyes, now projected through my own.
A final, agonizing moment.
But no matter how many pages I fill with frantic scribbles or how deeply I search for meaning in those fleeting images, I can never move further forward in the dream. It remains fragmented and vague: no concrete descriptions, no clues, not even a single name. The source of my darkest fear remains as mysterious as whatever was stalking me in those winter trees.
Odder still, I have never been to Loon Lake Lodge in winter. Growing up, we never arrived at the cabin earlier than mid-June or stayed later than the second week in October. Summers in Franklin; winters in Bennington: this was Father’s unbreakable rule for all the years we spent at his grandfather’s cabin in the Adirondack wilderness.
A firm no—his answer whenever Nisha and I begged to visit the lodge during winter break. Loon Lake, strictly a summer place, was too remote, too ill-equipped for winter.
“Why, there’s not a scrap of insulation in the place! With just the fireplace for heat, we’d freeze solid by January. Just imagine us, frozen in place, posed like pieces on a chessboard. Come springtime, hungry bears would find us and suck the marrow from our bones.”
Here, he’d pause for dramatic effect. To underscore his point, he’d wrap his arms around himself like a straightjacket and shudder theatrically—or slap his hands to his cheeks as though warding off frostbite. Father always had a flair for the dramatic, a knack for turning the simplest question into the deepest mystery.
Back then, I could poke fun at his eccentricities.
Summers at Loon Lake always ended too soon. Once leaves blanketed the ground and the nights cooled with intention, a strange restlessness would take hold of Father. His preoccupation with fire became a source of running commentary. Why did we need so many citronella torches around the cabin, so many lanterns dangling beneath the eaves? What purpose did multiple bonfires on our property serve? Wasn’t one enough?
No one ever knew. Father refused to explain.
Despite these rituals to keep darkness at bay, he could never relax. By September, he’d stop sleeping altogether. Long after midnight, I’d hear him pacing through the cabin. Office to den, to kitchen, to living room: a route as measured as his pacing, as though he was patrolling some secret perimeter.
But always within the house. After dark, he refused to go outside.
When his rounds were done, he’d settle into the battered recliner by the stone fireplace to stoke its embers through the night. Sometimes I’d creep downstairs before sunrise and find him there: bathrobe knotted tight; shotgun draped across his lap.
What were you waiting for?
I asked myself that question last month as I ran my fingertips over the lid of his coffin. A coffin closed out of necessity after a single incident rendered him unrecognizable.
What frightened you so much?
The polished black cherry lid refused to answer.
After Father’s funeral, the dreams began. Loon Lake. Winter. Fleeing a faceless, unnamed fear. In them, I never feel complete. Their return also marks an anniversary.
Ten years ago, I lost a vital piece of myself among those frozen trees.
The name of my missing piece: Nisha.
Braver and bolder, Nisha scoffed at Father’s rules. When she snuck off to the lodge for a backcountry ski trip one January, I expected her to return to face her grounding with frostbitten fingers and a story of how she cheated death.
But Nisha never came back.
Had she discovered what haunted Father? Or something even worse?
I need answers but won’t find them at Loon Lake Lodge. No one ever will. Like Nisha and my parents, it’s gone now, too. Consumed by flames; consigned forever to memory. All that remains are photographs and home movies: pale imitations of life, too fragile and fleeting to hold.
Any hope of solving this mystery lies with Nisha—what remains of her memories.
Memory extraction was new back then, a controversial procedure, fraught with risk. After her death, Father refused to allow it, despite knowing it might provide closure or peace for us both. In the end, he had neither.
To this day, her memories—untouched since her autopsy—remain sealed in a facility in Saratoga Springs. If answers exist anywhere, they have to be there, in Nisha’s memories.
I have to find them. All I have are fragments: fleeting dreams, unanswered questions—and a single bloodstained note, scrawled in Father’s trembling hand.
It comes in the night.
It comes with the cold.
It hunts you!
