Chapter 6: The Cold Companion

Chapter 6: The Cold Companion

The highway was a black river, and the sedan was a lost boat caught in its current. Headlights cut a fleeting, yellow tunnel through an endless night, illuminating nothing but the next few feet of asphalt and the ghostly flicker of reflective markers. Samantha drove with a manic, white-knuckled focus, her foot pressed hard on the accelerator. She was running, but from what, she no longer knew. Was it the police? The restraining order from a man who once promised to love her forever? Or was it the memory that now burned behind her eyes, the horrifying, indelible afterimage from the rearview mirror?

The glitch.

It replayed itself with every mile marker they passed. The wavering, heat-haze distortion of her daughter's face. The skin pulling taut over an impossible geometry. The two burning pinpricks of light where Sophia’s soft, dark eyes should have been. Her mind fought it, bucked against it like a wild horse, trying to categorize it as a trick of the light, a symptom of panic, a hallucination born of sheer terror. But the vision was too clear, too visceral. It felt more real than the steering wheel in her hands.

And beneath it all, the officer’s words, a cold, steady drumbeat of doom. Passed away two years ago.

She risked a glance in the rearview mirror now. The face in the backseat was placid, normal. It was Sophia. Just a pale, quiet little girl, strapped into her booster seat, watching the dark world fly by. The sight should have been reassuring, but it wasn't. It was the calm surface of a deep, dark lake, and Samantha knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the marrow, that a monster lived in its depths. The monster she had seen for one terrifying second.

The fuel gauge, a glowing orange needle sinking toward empty, forced a decision. It was a practical intrusion on her supernatural terror, a mundane problem she couldn't outrun. A green and white sign materialized in the headlights: GAS - FOOD - NEXT EXIT.

She took the ramp, her tires humming on the grooved pavement, and followed a cracked two-lane road to a gas station that seemed to be the only point of light for a hundred miles in any direction. It was a desolate island in an ocean of darkness, its fluorescent lights casting a sickly, buzzing glare on the cracked concrete and the lonely pumps. A single, dusty pickup truck was parked by the air hose.

The need to care for the child—this child, this thing—was a deeply ingrained instinct, a compulsion she couldn't shake. It was her last link to the role of "mother," the only identity she had left. And mothers feed their children.

“I’m going to get you something to eat, sweetie,” she said, her voice thin and reedy in the silent car.

The child in the back didn’t respond. She just kept staring out the window.

Samantha filled the tank on autopilot, the fumes sharp and chemical in the cold air. The simple act felt grounding, normal. But when she returned to the car, a strange chill met her. It wasn't the autumn night; this was different. It was the familiar, unnatural cold that seemed to emanate directly from the small figure in the backseat. It was stronger now, a palpable presence that made the hairs on her arms stand up.

Ignoring it, she went inside the convenience store. The bell above the door chimed with a lonely jangle. The inside was a sterile world of pre-packaged food. She grabbed a bag of potato chips, a cellophane-wrapped hot dog that had been sweating under a heat lamp for hours, and a carton of chocolate milk. It was junk, but it was food. It was something a normal child might eat.

When she opened the car door again, the cold hit her like a physical wave. It was a deep, penetrating chill, the kind that feels like it’s coming from inside your own bones. She could see her breath misting in the air inside the car.

“Look what Mommy got,” she said, forcing a bright, cheerful tone that sounded like a lie even to her own ears. She unwrapped the lukewarm hot dog. “Yummy, right?”

She held it out. The child turned her head from the window and looked at the offering. Her face was blank, her eyes empty. She made no move to take it. She didn’t even seem to see it as food. It was just an object, presented to her for inspection.

“Please, Sophia,” Samantha begged, the name tasting like ash and prayer on her tongue. “You have to eat something. Just one bite.”

The child’s dark eyes lifted from the hot dog and met hers. There was no rage this time, no flash of hatred. There was only a profound and utter lack of interest. A deep, abyssal indifference.

As Samantha stared, pleading with her eyes, a strange thing began to happen. The cold inside the car intensified, and the windows began to change. A thin film of condensation bloomed on the inside of the glass, starting in the back and creeping forward. It clouded the view of the lonely gas station lights, obscuring the world outside, trapping them in a hazy, intimate bubble.

The child didn’t shiver. The cold was coming from her.

Then, the condensation began to crystallize. Delicate, feathery patterns of frost spiderwebbed across the rear windows, sparkling in the dim light of the dashboard. It was impossible. It wasn’t freezing outside. But inside the car, a supernatural winter was descending.

Samantha’s hand, still holding the hot dog, began to tremble violently. The world outside was gone, erased by a curtain of ice. It was just her and the cold companion in the backseat, sealed together in their frosted metal box.

In the strange, diffused light filtering through the frosted glass, she looked—really looked—at the child’s face. The image from the rearview mirror, the memory of the glitch, sharpened her senses. She was searching for it now, for the wrongness.

And she found it.

It wasn’t a monstrous transformation. It was something far more subtle, and infinitely more disturbing. The proportions were off, but only by a fraction. The space between the eyes

Characters

Connor Brown

Connor Brown

Samantha Brown

Samantha Brown

The Entity / 'Sophia'

The Entity / 'Sophia'