The Frozen Pond

It was the Dog Days of August when the creeks all dried up. What water was left went sour and the little pond up at Joe Parker's farm - the farm nearest mine and Nelly's childhood home - had gone green with stink and lack of stir, everything that late summer was an ugly mix of hot sweat and humidity.

And despite all of this heat, this is a story of a frozen pond and the mystery that created it.

---

My sister, Nelly, my good buddy Leroy, and I had heard our folks talking at length about the strange carpenter, Arty Holden who had taken up residence in the almost fallen down shed between our farm and Joe Parker's. He must have had Joe Parker's blessing because there wasn't a meaner man in fifty miles and he'd have said something by now if the old carpenter hadn't asked him first.

He kept to himself mostly, taking orders for repairs and some custom carpentry work, but he never took on any big projects. He was happy hanging around that old shed building doors. That's what got folks around town to gossiping.

This was also what led me, my kid sister, and Leroy to head up to the shed one night and see what we could learn…

---

…And what we saw only made the mystery worse.

Not the first night, mind you, but over the course of a week of careful observation, we began to notice a steady flow of curious-looking cars and people on foot and even one or two that came in on horseback and by wagon.

They were striking bargains, as best as we could here. We got as close as we could, but no closer, wanting to see and hear as much as we could but also slightly unsettled by this man that no one could help but wonder about.

On our walk home near the end of that first week, the three of us struck up a quiet conversation that changed the very course of our lives.

---

"What you suppose he's really selling?" Leroy asked, picking up pebbles from the little dusty road we were walking by moonlight.

"Coffins," Nelly said, suddenly looking back at us. She had looked as innocent as an angel, staring out at that field of fireflies until she turned and said that to us. That's why Leroy and I actually didn't mind my kid sister tagging along. She was surprisingly dark for a twelve-year-old and could punch hard enough to leave a bruise you'd feel for a week afterward.

"Coffins?" Leroy said with a little shriek, his voice cracked at the outer edges of puberty. "I thought they were trading for all them doors stacked against the shed. Did you see them, Jim?"

"That's what I think too," I said, answering him. "But did you see what they were trading for them?"

"Junk!" Leroy said.

"Not to them," Nelly said. "To them, they were things of great value."

"How do you figure?" I asked her. She had to be bullshitting us again.

"That one person, the one missing a shoe?" She said, and then her ice blue eyes fell on me, the moon made her look otherworldly. "That was an urn she had traded."

---

So, we continued to sneak out at night, head up the old dirt road between our farms, and watched the old Carpenter trade his craft for the odd things people brought him.

Jewelry boxes with dancing ballerinas.

Drawers took straight from their cabinets, overflowing with silver cutlery.

Stacks of books that looked old, with funny pictures on their covers.

And we saw coffee cans filled with things we couldn't see but could imagine. Gems and rubies. Or maybe fat wads of cash. Or possibly just extra coffee, as the harder times made luxuries of every kind harder to come by.

And every odd and quirky thing that was given led to a door of the old carpenter's choosing to be handed over. Sometimes visibly too heavy for the person to handle on their own, and when they were, the old carpenter would steady them, lean in close, and say something to them.

He'd disappear inside the shed and come back outside with a set of keys and then he'd do something strange. He'd go to each of the doors leaning against the shed and locked them. He'd look around suspiciously, and then he'd carefully lift the customer's door into the back of his truck and take the customer and their door to wherever it was they were going.

He didn't do this with any regularity, but, he did it enough that we began to develop a bad idea in a hurry.

---

"I say we sneak in there while he's gone and get us one of those doors," Leroy said.

"Steal?" I said, "I've never stolen so much as a cookie in my life."

"Not steal, you dummy!"

"Then what exactly?"

"We trade something for it," Nelly said. We both turned and looked at her.

"Everyone else does it that way," She said.

So, that's what we decided to do. We'd trade something for one of the doors. Except, the old carpenter wouldn't know about it until we were gone with his door. Some part of me knew, even then, that this wasn't just a bad idea, it was a horrible one.

---

So, we spent several days searching for things we valued and finally put our stack of odds and ends together.

My sister brought a teddy bear I hadn't seen for years, and when she caught me looking at it with curiosity, she gave me a look that threatened violence.

Leroy brought a box of comic books and a few handwritten stories he'd apparently been working on in secret. Who would have imagined him for a writer?

I brought a piggy bank I had been filling for the past few Summers. My escape fund. Lean times made me understand money faster than any fifteen-year-old should.

"All set then," I said to our little group.

"All set," Nelly said.

"Aye captain," Leroy said.

And so we set off for our adventure.

---

We sat in the woods watching the old carpenter make a few trades, work on a few doors he was putting finishing touches on, sanding, scraping, hammering. And not much else. The night felt like a bust, he wasn't going to leave tonight.

And then, a tired-looking older woman came staggering up the little dirt road to the shed. She was carrying a little sack of groceries, which she offered to the old carpenter, and he did something surprising.

He shook his head and smiled. He didn't want her groceries. Instead, he reached up and pulled a hairclip from her hair and grinned broadly. She saw what he had and then touched her hair and laughed, looking visibly younger when she did.

Leroy, Nelly, and I looked at each other. This was it. There was no way she'd be able to carry that door back to however far off she had come from.

And we were right. The old carpenter went inside the shed, fetched his keys on the big keyring that he kept separate from his truck keys, and went through all the doors, except one. An unfinished door leaning lazily against the end of the shed.

That was the door we were going to trade for.

---

"How do you reckon it's supposed to work?" Leroy asked as Nelly walked from side to side in front of the big ugly door.

"What do you mean, work?" I asked.

"Well, they have to do something, right?" Leroy said. "Why else would folks be giving their goods to get one of these?"

"I don't know, maybe they're just meant to be decorative?"

"They're not just decorative," Nelly said. "He locks them to keep strangers out. But out of where? Out of what?"

We just looked at Nelly. Sometimes she unsettled us with the hidden knowledge she tapped into.

Nelly made a face, an idea had hit her.

"We have to knock on it," Nelly said, stepping up to the door and turning to look at each of us.

I nodded at her quietly. My stomach suddenly felt very tight. I looked at Leroy and he was looking a little nervous himself.

Nelly knocked on the door three times. And then she turned the door handle.

---

Nelly yanked the door as if to open it and nearly pulled the whole thing over on top of herself.

Leroy laughed hard until Nelly found her footing, jumped to her feet, and tackled him. Normally I would have separated them, at great peril, but just then I thought I saw something that no August day in the South should ever see.

One tiny little snowflake danced on the hot humid air, falling like a feather before melting right in front of me. I blinked my eyes a few times and then pushed the door back against the tree and studied it for a moment.

---

Nelly had decided Leroy had had enough and had walked up beside me. I felt a little static dance between us and then, for whatever reason, I leaned forward, knocked three times, and then slowly turned the knob.

Before I had a chance to do anything else, the door planted itself perfectly straight into the ground, grew a frame right in front of us with a thundering roar, and then burst open on us with a gush of the coldest air I had ever felt. It lifted Nelly up and off her feet and flung her straight out into the slime-stained pond behind us.

Cold air came out and in such a heavy tumble that it turned the whole hillside and all the trees around the pond into a nightmare of ice and snow. We had gone from hot summer to the coldest winter in a matter of heartbeats. 

And something worse was already beginning to happen. The pond was freezing all around Nelly, who had gone under the water just as the ice slid over its surface and buried her alive.

---

Leroy and I ran looked at each other, looked at the door, and then looked at the frozen pond. I don't know which of us was running first, but we ran out onto the ice. It was frozen solid. 

I beat at the ice with my hands until they felt bruised and I could barely lift them. I heard someone far away crying and realized it was my own voice, a sound of despair leaking out of me like I had never heard before.

And then a strange and terrible thing happened. The old carpenter had run down the little hill and stopped. He looked at the clashing scenery, looked at the door, and then looked at us.

He walked to the door and shut it quietly. He grabbed it, yanked it up and out of the ground it had planted itself in and with it under his long slender arm, rushed out onto the frozen pond. He slammed the door down on the ice, looked at Leroy and me, and then he knelt over the door. He slid a key into its keyhole and whispered as he slowly turned the key counterclockwise.

We felt a deep thundering rumble rising from somewhere beneath the ice. 

And then he grabbed the door handle and opened it, revealing green pond water and Nelly splashing and coughing. He reached down into the water and snatched her up, and out of the pond, and slammed the door shut.

The old carpenter ripped the door from the ice with impossible strength and walked up and over the hill, back to his little shed. By the time we found our way up there, hoping to apologize, to thank him, to make things right somehow, he was completely gone. And so were all his doors.