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I’ve always loved hockey; not just watching it but the feel of the ice beneath me, the slap of the stick, the thrill of a breakaway. It’s been my life since I was six, but now, I’m not sure I’ll ever skate again. Not after what happened.
It started when I picked up that puck.
I work part-time at the local rink, cleaning up after games and practices. It’s not glamorous but it keeps me close to the sport while I’m at community college and after my shift I’m allowed out onto the ice to practise my moves for free, as long as I brought my own pads and equipment.
Last week I was locking up late when I spotted it in the corner, near the bleachers. The puck was … I don’t know how to say it other than it felt off . Not like the rubber discs I’d handled a thousand times before. This one was darker, like it had soaked up shadows. Etched into its surface were faint markings; lines that didn’t quite form letters, but which made my eyes hurt if I looked too long.
I should have left it there, but curiosity got the better of me. I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. It was cold - colder than the rink itself - and heavier than it should have been. It made a faint swishing noise when I ran my fingers over it, reflecting the halogen strip-lights in a way that made them look like they were refracting through water.
That night, I dreamed of ice.
I wasn’t on a rink, but a vast, endless expanse of frozen black water. I stood alone, my breath fogging the air. In the distance, a figure skated toward me. I couldn’t see their face, just a silhouette against the pale moonlight. Yet as they drew closer, I realised they weren’t skating at all – they were gliding above the surface of the ice without moving their legs. I had a vague impression of eyes, limbs, and a penetrating sense of fear. Then I jolted myself awake.
When I sat up in bed, my room was freezing. My breath clouded in front of me even though I knew it wasn’t cold enough outside for that. Frost had formed on the inside of the windows. The puck sat on my nightstand, exactly where I’d left it, but now those markings were clearer now. They almost seemed to glow.
I decided to take it back to the rink and dump it back where I had found it. Maybe I could stash it in lost and found and forget about it. Then it would be someone else’s problem. However, as I was crossing through the rink to get to the employee lounge, the puck fell out of my bag. Without thinking, I smacked it with my stick.
Big mistake.
The puck didn’t slide like normal. It screamed . The moment my stick collided with it, a high-pitched wail echoed through the empty rink. I froze, hands over my ears, my stick clattering to the ice. The sound stopped but, when I looked down, the puck was gone.
The rink lights flickered once, twice, casting long, eerie shadows across the ice. I felt a strange pressure in my chest and tingling across my skin, as if the already low temperature of the rink had dropped a few more degrees in an instant. Unnatural silence consumed the place; not just a lack of noise, but a complete absence of the very concept of sound. I couldn’t even hear my own frantic pulse in my ears.
I turned in a slow circle, the cold biting through my clothes, my breath coming out in ragged clouds. I wanted to call out but my words strangled away in my throat.
At first, I thought I was seeing things. It was just a trick of the light, a shadow cast by the bleachers, maybe, or my annoying co-worker Dave pulling one of his unfunny pranks. I should be so lucky.
In the centre of the rink, hovering just above the ice, was the figure from my dreams. It stood impossibly still, as though it had always been there, just waiting for me to finally notice. It was unnaturally tall, the proportions of its limbs all wrong. Gangly arms were folded neatly behind its back, long fingers dangling over its bony hips, which sat atop legs with too many joints.
Yet it was the face that made my blood run cold.
Its skin was pale and stretched taut over its skull, every angle and curve highlighted in grotesque detail. The flesh around its eyes had rotted away, leaving empty sockets where eyes should have been. Deep in those concave pits was nothing but darkness so pitch, it seemed to suck in the all light around it. Its mouth was twisted into a frozen scream, lips pulled back so far that the skin had torn at the edges. I could see the jagged remnants of teeth. No scream escaped that mouth, but I felt the scream radiating from it like an oppressive force. A scream without a voice.
I tried to move, tried to run, but my body was paralysed. I couldn’t even draw a breath. The figure glided toward me, movements unnervingly smooth, just like in my dream. There was no sound of footsteps, no scraping of skates, just the un-scream hovering in the air around us, compressing with every inch that closed between me and that awful creature.
When close enough, the figure leaned toward me. I could feel the chill of death from its mouth. Its breath was a biting cold that had no place in this world. It reached out, elongated fingers curling toward my throat. I sensed what it wanted without ever being cognisant of how: my voice, my warmth, my life.
I tried to scream, but the air was frozen and unyielding. I wanted to run but my body was held fast.
The very tip of its index finger brushed the skin of my neck –
The lights went out. For a long, terrible moment, I was lost in the dark. Not being able to see the creature broke whatever spell it had on me and I broke and ran. Or tried to.
I don’t clearly remember what happened after that. Everything becomes a blur when I try to recall it, like a half-remembered nightmare. Mostly I remember snatches and fragments that I can sort of put together to form a coherent whole, but it’s not a complete picture. I remember my chest hurting as I sucked in desperate lungfuls of air, each feeling like it might be my last. I remember the cold air stinging my skin as if it were alive and made of tiny bees. I remember the ice beneath me, slick and treacherous.
But in every fragment of memory, the world around me twists. I remember some things and only think I remember others. I must have imagined them, or hallucinated, or something , because to accept that any of it was real is … too much.
I remember the lights overhead flickering, dimming and brightening in unpredictable patterns that felt and smelled like dreams might taste. I remember the darkness creeping in, not just to the rink, but into my eyes and mind. I remember the freezing air seeping into my bones through the pores in my skin, freezing me from the inside out.
The rink was a maze, the familiar layout I knew so well now unfamiliar. The bleachers looked warped and stretched out, their edges curving in unnatural ways. The cold around me was deeper, more insidious, like it had latched onto my warmth the moment it touched me and was using that to turn everything around me into a nightmarish landscape.
My only thought was to keep moving. To get away.
But the further I went, the more disorienting it became. The walls of the rink seemed to close in on me, the darkness at the edges of my vision bleeding into everything. I was dizzy but kept pushing forward, almost as if they were on their own.
I remember finding myself near the centre of the rink again where I found the puck in the first place.
I don’t know how I ended up back there. I didn’t stop, didn’t turn back on myself in my desperate fleeing, but somehow I was there, standing in the middle of that endless, empty ice. I remember pressure settling in the air around me; the unmistakable chill of that creature’s presence, closing in. It felt like I was a rabbit who had bumbled into a snare.
The puck. It had to be the puck.
I don’t remember how much time passed after that. It felt like seconds, but it could’ve been hours. The air was so thick with frost that it felt like I was suffocating, my lungs full of ice with every desperate gasp. My body trembled uncontrollably and my limbs felt heavy, like I was moving through wet cement. My mind was clouded by a singular thought: I have to get away.
Yet no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t move any faster. The rink had become a void, stretching out endlessly before me, no exit in sight. The walls seemed to disappear into nothingness; the ceiling blurred, as if the entire space had collapsed into a quantum singularity of suffocating blackness. I began to wonder if I was even moving at all, or if I had been trapped here, suspended in time, doomed forever to be fleeing while the figure drew nearer.
Then, between one blink and the next, the figure arrived in front of me.
The empty sockets where eyes should have been were darker in that last memory, swirling with some kind of inky void. I could feel the pull, like I was being drawn into the abyss that lived within those hollows. Its mouth stretched open unnaturally wide, broken teeth like shattered glass glittering in the strobing lights. The stench of decay emanated from that mouth, filling my nostrils as it leaned them closer to me.
It didn’t speak. It didn’t need to. Its presence alone spoke loud enough to drown out every rational thought in my mind. Its lips split as its mouth parted in a slow, sickening motion. Its skeletal fingers twitched toward me once more. I felt its presence surrounding me. Then there’s only darkness. I don’t know if that means I passed out or there’s literally a hole in my mind where those memories should be.
I woke up in my bed. For a while, I tried to convince myself it was all just some elaborate nightmare brought on by eating too much poutine. Yeah, right. Amazing, the things we try to tell ourselves so we don’t have to accept truths that are supernatural in nature.
I went back to work the next day. I acted like it was all a dream. I wanted things to be normal. I needed things to be normal. It had all been a nightmare; the puck, the cold, the figure – all just my mind playing tricks on me.
Obviously, I was wrong.
I arrived early for my shift. I was opening that day. The moment I stepped through the doors, I could feel it: the same kind of atmosphere that follows a terrible storm, when people are finding out whether their houses are safe or not during the return from evacuation. The rink was completely empty. My boots made soft echoes as I walked across the floor, the sound unsettling in the otherwise still space. I put it down to me just being super early for work.
But the ice …
God, the ice.
It had cracks in it. They were deep, jagged, running from end to end, slicing through the surface like something had torn the rink apart from beneath. I’d never seen anything like it. The edges were blackened. The ice looked less like something you’d skate on and more like an open wound.
I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t even begin to understand what had happened. I went closer to the rink, hesitant but drawn to those cracks. The urge to touch them was suddenly overwhelming. I knelt down, running my fingers over the surface. Too warm for ice. It was a sickly warmth, like the body of something dying. My fingertips tingled with a sharp jolt, as if the ice itself had reached out and bitten me.
I stilled. With that jolt had come … voices. Desperate, breathless noises, like people trying to scream but too cold to form words. Darkness flickered at the edges of my vision until I yanked my hand away from the ice. The voices ceased the moment I stopped touching it.
I backed away from the cracks, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the rink itself was watching me, waiting for me to come back. The figure, the puck, the cold – none of it was just in my head. Something evil had left its mark on this place.
Management tried to brush off the cracks as some freak accident caused by a flaw in the ice that needed repairing. However, when the maintenance crew came in to inspect the damage, they couldn’t explain what they found either. The ice was warped, yes, but there was something else. Apparently, the cracks didn’t go straight down, as they should have, but wound around under the surface, like something had been burrowing through for a while before coming up to the surface. No one wanted to stay in the building long enough to figure it out.
The rink closed while repairs were done, but to me, there was no fixing what had happened. It seemed the same was true for other people too. No one wanted to be anywhere near the place. Rumours started. People said the ice rink was cursed. Some rumours were just plain dumb – tales of murder done in the dead of night and covered up by authorities. But some chimed in my head in a way that made my skin feel cold and shivery. They said something terrible had been in that ice that was never meant to leave it. It wasn’t just a fluke, the rumours said, it was a warning. Something ancient had been disturbed and had used the rink as a means of accessing our world from its own. All it needed was someone to unlock the door with a key. And keys could be items.
Like a hockey puck.
I tried to shake it off, tried to believe it was all just paranoia. But I knew better. I knew the ice wasn’t just cracked. It had been split open. Something had come through. I had unknowingly unlocked a door and let it into our world.
I still have the puck. I don’t know why. It was in my bag when I woke up after my false nightmare. It’s still there, heavy as ever, whispering in a language I can’t understand. I thought about getting rid of it, but I kept it because … well, what can unlock a door can also lock it again. Maybe, if that creature can be convinced to go home, I can seal the way behind it.
Maybe.
It doesn’t seem to want to go home though.
You see, whenever I close my eyes now, I see that black expanse of ice again. I hear the pleas of those souls the creature sacrificed to open the portal, now trapped in the rink. I think the figure wants me to come back to work. It wants me to place my bare hands on the rink, skin against ice.
The compulsion to give in and go to it gets stronger every day.
And I’m not sure how much longer I can resist the pull of the cold.