"What did you say?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"The snowman," Lily said, pointing a yellow crayon toward the back deck. "He's writing words. backwards words."
I turned slowly to face the sliding glass door.
I had been gone for maybe three minutes. In that time, the snowman hadn't moved closer—it couldn't, thanks to the glass—but it had done something else.
On the outside of the glass, smeared in thick, greasy black ink, were letters. They were written in reverse, so from where I stood inside the warm, safe cabin, they read perfectly left-to-right.
C O N F E S S
The letters were jagged, dripping. The font wasn't a font; it was raw anger. The "S"s trailed off into long, weeping lines that ran all the way to the floor.
My breath hitched in my throat. The room seemed to tilt.
Confess.
The word hit me like a physical blow. It dug straight through the panic and struck the raw nerve of guilt I’d been trying to numb for six months.
Confess what?
That I was working when Sarah died? That I had my headphones on, blasting industrial noise, while she was swallowing pills in the bathroom? That I didn't find her until she was already cold?
Confess that you saw the signs and drew them instead of stopping her.
"Daddy?" Lily's voice was small now. "What does that say?"
I stepped between her and the window, blocking the view with my body. "Nothing, Lily. It’s just... scribbles. Bad graffiti."
"It says 'Confess'," she read. She was six, but she was reading at a third-grade level. Sarah had been so proud of that.
"It's a game," I lied, the taste of bile rising in my throat. "It's a stupid game."
I looked over my shoulder at the snowman. It was still there, motionless. The knife was still in its icy grip. But the eyes... the eyes felt different now. They weren't just staring. They were judging.
The ink on the glass was fresh. It was still sliding. That meant the thing had moved its arm. It had pressed a finger—or whatever it had for fingers—against the glass and wrote that message while I was checking the front door.
It was toying with me.
"Who are you?" I hissed at the glass.
The snowman didn't answer. It just dripped.
Suddenly, the hum of the refrigerator cut out.
The low vibration of the electric heater in the corner died. The pot lights in the ceiling flickered once, twice, and then went black.
The cabin plunged into gray gloom.
"Daddy?" Lily whimpered. The fear was finally creeping into her voice.
"It's okay!" I shouted, too loud. "Just a fuse. It's the storm. Power lines go down all the time."
I fumbled for my phone to use the flashlight, but my hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped it. The screen lit up the room with a harsh, blue-white glow.
"Lily, stay on the couch," I commanded. "Do not move."
I swept the beam of light across the room. Shadows jumped and danced, stretching long fingers across the walls. The familiar furniture looked alien and threatening in the strobe-light effect of the shaking beam.
I aimed the light at the glass door.
I needed to see it. I needed to know it was still outside, trapped behind the glass and my pathetic screws.
The beam hit the window.
The word CONFESS was still there, black and dripping against the white storm.
But the snowman was gone.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.