The Gift of the Snow by Anne Brooke

Description:

When Andi moves into her new house, she knows from the outset that it's different. One autumn night, she discovers how different it is when she wakes to find that her past, and the woman she left behind so long ago, aren't quite so far away after all. Will she succumb to her own fear of the unknown or will an old love be strong enough to protect her? A short story.

Excerpt:

Andrea—Andi to her friends—knew there was something odd about the house. She’d been lucky to get it as it had been the last property in her town she’d looked at, and the only one she could actually afford. It had been a repossession, which wasn’t something she approved of, morally, as she knew from personal experience that anyone could fall on hard times. But she’d viewed it because the estate agent had been determined and when one of the neighbours had revealed the former owner was an alcoholic who occasionally beat his wife who had now left him, all her moral positioning disappeared.

Buying it was in some fashion helping the wife to escape, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Once she settled in, Andi had begun to find the house impinging on her senses. Much like a great beast she had inadvertently come to rest nearby and who was taking its time in sizing up her potential, though for what, she remained unsure. After all, when she considered each individual component of her home, she saw nothing to make her wonder. A small but adequately equipped kitchen, which led on to a separate dining room, both of them decorated in shades of pale yellow. The living room was larger, stretching almost the whole width of the shaded garden but failing to make the most of any light it came by. Andi had thought of adding a glass door but had not yet done so. The living room was, somehow, satisfied with the way it was. Upstairs was more higgledy-piggledy but Andi considered that part of the house’s charm. Just two bedrooms, a box-room and a bathroom, which was rather old-fashioned but again she liked it that way. Between the bedrooms there was a set of up-and-down steps which, by now, three months after moving in, she’d nearly got used to. Sometimes, if she needed to visit the bathroom during the night, Andi could swear the steps weren’t quite where she expected them to be, but she was never fully awake then.

Really, the only unusual aspect of the house was its name: Kaneq. The name was Inuit for “frost,” a fact Andi knew only because she’d looked it up in the library one wet Wednesday lunchtime. She couldn’t understand how the name had come about as she could find no reason for it. The neighbours didn’t seem to know why a former owner might have chosen it as there were no prior links to the Inuit people. The house had simply always been known by this name ever since it was built in the 1960s and no effort had ever been made to change it.

So, for three months Andi’s life went on in the usual way. She went to work, she saw friends, she read, she gardened. All the standard pursuits of a single woman in her early fifties. Everything was as she expected it to be, that is, until the beginning of October.