A Christmas Horror Story - The Long Cold - (Episode 3) - "What Came Before"

Sarah finds Lily in the hidden passages, talking to something in the dark. She drags her daughter back to safety—but safety is an illusion. Her mother's car sits buried in snow at the edge of the property, abandoned for days. Inside, Sarah discovers her grandmother's journal, documenting decades of horror: the thing in the walls has always taken children. It took her aunt Margaret in 1962. And now, in her mother's final entries, a desperate plan to destroy it—ending mid-sentence. On the last page, five words in an inhuman hand: SHE IS RESTING NOW. Then the lights go out, and the thing in the walls begins to move.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Calorogu Shark Media, Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories
and our special Christmas series The Long Cold. This is
episode three. What came before.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I went into the wall after her? I didn't think
about it, didn't hesitate. My daughter was in there, somewhere
in that darkness, and nothing else mattered, not my fear,
not my safety, not the part of my brain screaming
that this was exactly what it wanted for me to follow,

(00:47):
to come into its space, to leave the light behind.
I grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen and I went in.
The passage was narrow, so narrow, I had to turn
side ways to fit my shoulders, brushing rough timber on
both sides. The air was different in here, colder, older, thick,

(01:09):
with the smell of dust and something else, something organic,
something wrong. Lily. My voice came back, flat and dead,
swallowed by the close walls. Lily answered me nothing, just
the creak of old wood settling, just my own ragged breathing.

(01:32):
The passage turned turned again. It didn't follow any logic
I could understand. It wound through the cabin's bones like
a maze, branching and reconnecting, opening into small chambers and
then narrowing again to gaps I could barely squeeze through.
Whoever had built this hadn't been thinking about human comfort.

(01:54):
They'd been thinking about hiding, about watching, about moving. Unseen,
my flashlight caught something on the wall. Scratches, dozens of them, hundreds,
the same parallel marks I'd seen on the closet door,
but more numerous. Here. Sets of five grouped into larger clusters,

(02:15):
covering every surface I could see. Not counting days, I
realized counting something else, counting us. I kept moving. The
passage sloped downward, and I realized I must be approaching
the basement level. The walls here were rougher, less finished,
more like a tunnel than a constructed space. The smell

(02:38):
grew stronger, and then I heard her, Lily's voice somewhere ahead,
not crying, not screaming, just talking in that easy conversational
tone children use with trusted adults. And my favorite color
is purple, but sometimes it's blue, Mommy says, I can't

(03:00):
have a favorite that changes. But I think that's silly.
Don't you think that's silly? A pause, as if someone
was responding, yeah, I think so too. I rounded a
corner and my flashlight found her. She was sitting cross
legged on the dirt floor of a small chamber, her
back to me, facing a wall of ancient timber, just

(03:22):
sitting there talking to the wood. Lily, my voice cracked, Lily, honey,
come here right now. She turned smiled at me, completely unafraid. Hi, mummy,
I was just talking to the man. He's really nice.
There's no one there, sweetheart, Come here, please. He's shy.

(03:47):
She stood up, brushed dirt off her pajamas. He doesn't
like the light, but he says you can stay if
you turn it off. I'm not turning off the light.
Come here now toward me, and I grabbed her hand
so tightly she winced. I pulled her back through the passages,
through the maze of hidden spaces, back toward the closet

(04:09):
in her room. She didn't resist, didn't complain, just followed
along as if this were all perfectly normal. We emerged
into her room and I slammed the closet door shut.
My hands were shaking so badly I could barely function,
but I managed to drag her dresser in front of it,
then her bed, then everything else I could move. Tom

(04:31):
found me there wild eyed and panting, building a barricade,
while Lily watched with mild curiosity. What the hell is
going on? She went into the walls. There are passages,
Tom all through the cabin. She went in, and I
had to go after her. And there's something in there,
something she's been talking to. He stared at the blocked closet,

(04:55):
at me, at Lily. There's a man, Lily said helpfully.
He lives in there. He's been here forever and ever.
Tom knelt down to her level. Sweetheart, there's no man.
It's just an old house with old spaces. Your imagination
is he knows Grandma Ruth, Lily interrupted. He says she

(05:18):
came to see him. He says she's resting now. The
words hung in the air. Tom looked at me for
the first time since we'd arrived. I saw doubt in
his eyes. Not belief, not yet, but the first crack
in his certainty. What does that mean? He asked, quietly,

(05:38):
What does resting mean? Lily shrugged. I don't know. He
just said she's resting and she can't come to Christmas
any more. I left Tom with Lily and went to
the window. The snow had finally stopped, but the sky
was darkening toward evening Christmas Eve. We'd been here barely

(05:59):
twenty four hours, and everything had already fallen apart. Through
the window, I could see the long slope of the
driveway disappearing into the trees, and beyond that, half buried
in a drift at the edge of the property. Something
I hadn't noticed before, a shape dark against the white

(06:20):
metal and glass, catching the last of the daylight.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
A car.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Tom My voice sounded strange to my own ears. Tom,
there's a car out there. He came to the window, looked,
his face went pale. That's that's your mom's car.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
I know.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
It wasn't there this morning.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
I know.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
How did we miss it?

Speaker 1 (06:47):
How did?

Speaker 2 (06:49):
I don't know? But I did know. I knew exactly
how we'd missed it. The snow had buried it, the
snow had hidden it. And now that the snow had
seen stopped, now that the drifts had settled, it was
visible again. My mother's car a quarter mile from the cabin,

(07:09):
buried in snow. But no, Mother, stay here, I said,
Stay with Lily. Don't let her out of your sight,
don't let her near any closets or walls, or just
don't let her out of your sight. I didn't wait
for him to argue. I grabbed my coat, my boots,
the flashlight. I fought my way through the front door,

(07:30):
through the drifts on the porch, down into the yard,
where the snow came up past my knees. It took
me twenty minutes to reach the car, twenty minutes of
struggling through white nothing, of cold so sharp it hurt
to breathe, of wind that had picked up again, and
threw ice crystals into my face like tiny knives. My

(07:52):
mother's Subaru sat at an angle, nose first in a
ditch at the edge of the road. The driver's door
was open. Snow had filled the interior, covering the seats,
the dashboard, the steering wheel. No sign of her, no footprints,
but the snow would have erased those days ago. I
searched the car with numb fingers. Found her purse on

(08:14):
the passenger seat, her phone dead in the center console,
her reading glasses in the cup holder, and on the
back seat a journal. I recognized it immediately, my grandmother's journal,
the one she'd kept for decades, the one my mother
had inherited when Grandma died leather bound, worn soft with age,

(08:37):
filled with my grandmother's careful handwriting. I opened it with
shaking hands. The entries went back years, decades, my grandmother
documenting everything she knew about the thing in the cabin,
its habits, its patterns, its hunger. It sleeps when the

(08:58):
cabin is empty, she'd written in nineteen eighty seven. The
cold keeps it dormant. But when we return, when we
bring warmth and life back into these walls, it wakes.
And when it wakes, it hunts. It's patient, more patient
than anything human. It can wait for years, decades, but

(09:20):
it always wants the same thing. Children. It wants children.
I don't know why. I don't know what it does
with them. Margaret went into the walls in nineteen sixty two,
and I searched for three days. I never found her body.
I never found anything, but sometimes late at night I

(09:41):
hear her voice in there, still talking, still playing, as
if she never left. I flipped forward past entries about
failed attempts to seal the passages, past desperate prayers and
half formed plans, past decades of guilt and fear and resignate,
until I reached the final entries. Recent my mother's handwriting,

(10:06):
now not my grandmother's. December twenty first. I've come back
to end this. Mother spent her whole life trying to
appease it, trying to coexist. I won't make the same mistake.
I'm going to find it. I'm going to find what's
left of Margaret, and I'm going to burn this whole

(10:27):
place down. December twenty second. The passages are more extensive
than I remembered. It's been busy all these years, building, expanding.

(10:50):
There are chambers down there i've never seen before, places
where it keeps things. I found bones today, small bones.
They were human. December twenty third. It knows i'm here.
It's been watching me. I can feel it in the walls, moving,
always just out of sight. The lights help. It doesn't

(11:14):
like the lights. I've turned on every light in the cabin.
I sleep with a flashlight in my hand. December twenty fourth.
Sarah is coming today. I should have warned her. I
should have told her not to come. But if I
can kill it before she arrives, if I can finally
end this. The entry stopped mid sentence. The rest of

(11:36):
the page was blank. I turned to the next page,
and the next all blank until the very last page
of the journal, where something had been written in a
hand that wasn't my mother's, wasn't my grandmother's. Letters scratched
into the paper, crude and jagged, like someone writing for
the first time, or like something that had only ever

(11:59):
watched humans right and was trying to imitate what it
had seen. Five words. She is resting now. The journal
fell from my hands into the snow.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
I ran.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
I ran back to the cabin, fighting through the drifts, lungs,
burning legs, screaming. I burst through the front door and
found Tom where i'd left him, sitting with Lily in
the front room, both of them staring at me with
wide eyes. We have to leave, I was gasping, barely coherent.

(12:34):
Right now, tonight, I don't care about the snow. I
don't care about the car. We have to, Sarah. Tom's
voice was strange, flat. The power went out. I looked around.
He was right. The lamps were dark, the Christmas lights
on the porch, the lights my mother had strung, the

(12:56):
lights that the thing didn't like, were dark. When just now,
right before you came in. He stood up slowly, and Sarah,
I heard something while you were gone in the walls.
What did you hear? He didn't answer. He didn't have to,

(13:16):
because I could hear it now too, movement behind the walls,
above the ceiling, below the floor, not just in one place, everywhere,
a slow, deliberate shifting, the sound of something large, redistributing
its weight, something that had been patient for a very
long time and was finally ready to stop waiting. Lily

(13:38):
looked up at me. Her eyes were different, now older,
as if something behind them had changed while I was gone.
He says, the lights don't hurt anymore, she whispered. He says,
it's time for us to meet him, And somewhere deep
in the cabin, in the spaces between, in the dark
places that ran through this house like blood through a body,

(14:01):
something began to move toward us. I heard it in
the walls, not above us, not below us, inside, all
around us, everywhere, at once, coming closer. The last light
of Christmas Eve faded outside the windows, and in the
darkness that followed, the thing that had taken my aunt,

(14:23):
that had taken my mother, that had waited decades for
my return, finally stepped out of the shadows to claim
what it had always wanted. My daughter, my family, ME.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
Ghost Scary Story Worries is a production of Calaoga Shark Media.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Some elements of AI may have been used in this production,
but it was written, edited, mixed, and produced by Real
Live People. Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott