Saturday Afternoon

The storm arrived faster than anyone expected.
By the time the last ski lift shut down at Silver Peak Resort, the world outside had turned into a wall of white. Winds screamed against the timber walls, rattling windows and burying doors beneath drifts taller than the snowcats. No one was leaving—not tonight, not tomorrow, and probably not for days.
Inside the lodge, nearly seventy stranded guests gathered around fireplaces and battery lanterns. The power flickered on and off, the generators struggling. Food supplies, meant for a weekend rush, were thinning. And patience, like firewood, was running out.
Cell service came in fuzzy bursts. Wi-Fi only worked if you stood on one leg near the lobby window. Even then, messages went out half-formed:
“Storm bad… stuck… don’t panic.”
Day 3 — The First Disappearance
On the third day, when the wind finally dipped just enough to hear more than its own roar, Mark Leland, a solo snowboarder, was reported missing.
He’d last been seen pacing the hallway outside his room, muttering about needing air, needing space. His roommate said Mark had been growing agitated—food rationing hit him hard, and the rising tension among guests seemed to crack something inside him.
A search of the lodge turned up nothing. No coat gone. No boots missing. No tracks outside impossible given the constant snowfall.
It was like he’d vanished inside the building.
The staff insisted he must have snuck out, but everyone knew that was a lie. Anyone stepping outside would have been swallowed whole by the blizzard within seconds.
So where did Mark go?
Day 4 — Strange Noises in the Walls
Food was running out. Breakfast became crackers and lukewarm water. Dinner was soup made from whatever remained in the kitchen. People snapped at one another over blankets, phone chargers, and rumors.
That night, several guests heard something disturbing:
Scraping. Inside the walls.
A maintenance worker, Maria Soto, followed the sound to a locked storage utility door that she didn’t recognize. When she asked the resort manager for the key, he paled.
“There’s no entry behind that door,” he said. “It’s—well—it shouldn’t even be there.”
But the scraping continued.
Day 5 — The Hidden Passages
When the storm eased a little, Maria and two guests pried open the mysterious door with a crowbar. Behind it, they found:
A narrow passage. Old. Dusty. Ice forming along the beams.
And footprints. Fresh ones.
They followed the tracks deeper until they reached a fork. To the left, a collapse. To the right… something else.
A large empty space, once an old maintenance crawlway. And in the center of it:
A parka. A glove. A trail of blood-soaked snow. But no body.
Maria swallowed hard. “He was here. But someone moved him.”
The Truth Beneath Silver Peak
That night, the manager finally broke down and confessed to a secret the resort had buried long before any of them were born:
Silver Peak had been built on top of a defunct mining network—shafts and tunnels abandoned decades ago. Some were unstable. Some were lethal. But some… were still accessible through hidden panels and old maintenance doors that hadn’t been updated on modern plans.
During the storm, the shifting snow had pressured the structure, revealing weak points, opening hidden routes between the lodge and the caves beneath.
Someone knew about them. Someone used them.
And someone had dragged Mark Leland’s body into the dark.
Day 6 — One Footstep Too Many
The storm finally broke.
Rescue crews began the long trek up the mountain, but inside the lodge, fear overshadowed hope. Guests refused to sleep. People huddled in corners, clutching anything that could be used as a weapon.
Just before dawn, a scream echoed from the basement—where the generators were dying.
They found the assistant chef standing alone, shaking violently, pointing at an open floor grate.
“He—he was right there,” she stammered. “A man. Crawling. His face was—white. Frostbitten. Like he’d been dead for days.”
Rescuers arrived hours later, but by then, whatever had crawled through the grate had vanished again.
The body of Mark Leland was never found. But the tunnels remained. Cold. Endless. Waiting.
And every winter since, guests claim that during storms, when the wind quiets, they hear scraping beneath the floorboards.
As if something or someone is trying to get back inside.