From the Hill to the Pond

My family owns a cabin about seventeen miles from Highway-85 and about halfway up what is called Glimmer Hill, New Mexico. It’s a quaint mountain town with a population of 328 – although given the separation between sporadically-placed homes throughout the area, you might think it is much less. It was rare even to see more than twenty residents in town at the same time.

We didn’t speak to many of them anyway. At least not since the fire.

My grandfather had built the cabin in the late forties as a family vacation home. It was nestled at the base of a mountain hill, adjacent to Kasher Pond. And he was friendly with the townspeople up until the year that he passed away.

He used to bring my younger sister Marcy and I up to the cabin a few times a year when we were young. Our grandmother had died in her sleep before I was born, and our parents had disappeared while traveling through New England when I was four and Marcy was two. I am thirty-four now and there hasn’t been a single shred of evidence in thirty years, when their car was found abandoned in Vermont, three days after their disappearance.

After that it was just the three of us.

The three of us and our family cabin, which grandpa would take us to during the summer and winter months.

Winter was our favorite, though.

There’s a hill behind the cabin that is perfect for sledding, and a pond – Kasher Pond – in front. In the winter Kasher Pond would freeze over just thick enough to go ice skating and we would spend entire days going back and forth – from the hill to the pond.

Marcy and I would make a campfire fifteen yards from the ice where we could warm up during skating breaks and every now and then, if you looked up to the cabin next to ours, the old woman who lived there would be staring directly down at us and our nature-made ice rink. It was difficult to tell if she was looking at us or off into the distance, but it was a little unsettling, nonetheless.

And it always seemed strange to Marcy and me that our grandfather appeared to know almost every person in Glimmer Hill except for this woman.

He didn’t even know her name.

But he told us that she lived there long before our cabin was built, and that after her husband died, she never left the house. Some of the people would say that the old woman would only come into town once a year, on December 1, to place her annual grocery order, which was delivered just inside of her front door by whoever happened to be working that day.

Everything on her list was ordered in large quantities and consisted of various canned items, powdered milk, pasta, and numerous other non-perishable foods that would keep her fed throughout the year.

My grandfather died in December of 1987, two weeks after my 28th birthday, during what is now referred to as the “Southwest Whiteout.” This was a four-week snowstorm that had rendered us cabin-ridden eight days into our vacation. What was supposed to be another quarterly, two-week getaway for the three of us turned into a twenty-two-day blizzard.

Luckily, he had always kept the pantry stocked with plenty of non-perishables for similar circumstances, so that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that one night grandpa had attempted to retrieve firewood while Marcy and I were asleep. Except the only thing that he returned with that night was a bad case of frostbite.

The next day the wind had died down enough that Marcy suggested the two of us go collect wood for the house and our ice-rink campfire because if it stayed this way a little while longer, we might be able to enjoy the frozen pond for a bit before we had to remain inside for the night.

Our grandfather was watching Alfred Hitchcock’s "Frenzy" on the VCR in the living room when I came down the stairs to meet my sister, who was waiting outside.

“Going to get firewood, Grandpa,” I said, skipping toward the front door.

“Ta-ta. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he mumbled.

He acted like nothing, and I thought nothing of his strange demeanor and went on out the door.

And that was the last string of words I would hear him speak.

The wind was beginning to pick up when we returned so, as quickly as possible, we stacked the wood for the cabin inside by the fireplace and made our way down to the fire-pit by Kasher Pond. It took only a minute or two before the flames were at a near-perfect height and we could enjoy what little time we had out on the ice and by the fire.

The trees slowly began to sway more and more as the wind began a low howl. I could see the woman by a dim candlelight in her second-story window, looking down at the pond in our direction. As the howl got louder and the wind blew faster it became hard to stand, much less skate. Marcy dumped a bucket of snow on the fire and then we heard it. The howl had turned into an awful shriek, and it sounded like it was coming from the cabin.

We sprinted toward the front door and as I looked up at the woman’s window, she was grinning down, directly at me. A horrid and toothless grin.

When we stormed through the front door the sound became so loud that we both covered our ears.

It was coming from upstairs. I ran up to my grandfather’s room and he was sitting on the floor in a pool of blood; his right foot black with frostbite turned gangrene, and the infection so bad that he had been delirious, attempting to remove his foot at the ankle with a rusty handsaw.

I immediately grabbed it from him while shouting at my sister to go out front and shoot off as many road flares into the sky as she could. Meanwhile I attempted to cauterize and wrap my grandfather’s foot – which was nearly halfway detached – but he had already lost so much blood that it was only a matter of time.

I approached the window and looked down to see if Marcy was still firing off flares but instead, I saw Kasher Pond covered in flames and my sister nowhere in sight. I assured my grandfather that I would return as quickly as I could, and then made my way down the stairs and out the door.

Marcy was gone and the fire was slowly fizzling out. I went back upstairs, and my grandfather was dead. I searched the house and there was still no sign of my sister.

Then I decided that I should check the old woman’s house to see if she’d ran over to ask for help. When I stepped foot onto the porch, I noticed that the front door was cracked, so I went inside.

It was pitch black.

I found a lantern at the base of the staircase, so I turned it on before scouring every room in search of my little sister but found nothing.

Not even the woman.

The place smelled like it hadn’t seen a guest in months. The floorboards were coming up and the walls were rotting. Then I noticed a door that led to a garage in the back. When I went inside there was nothing but a broken-down 1962 Willys Jeep with four flat tires parked in it.

That’s when I noticed it. It made every hair on my body stand straight up. The license plate. It had a Vermont license plate …

I haven’t been back to the cabin in six years and the day my grandfather died was the last time I saw my sister. Nothing new has come about her or the woman, and the residents of Glimmer Hill just pretend that nothing happened.

But I didn’t speak to many of them anyway.

Yesterday I received a request from the county that I drive up there to sign the demolition paperwork and retrieve any valuables or personal items from the house before they tear it down. I still don’t know what exactly happened that night. Or whether it had something to do with the impossible pond fire. Or the woman.

I still haven’t seen the inside of the woman’s cabin during the day.

Maybe now it’s time.