Cold Heart

This Valentine’s-themed short YA horror story first featured in my newsletter in February 2025.

Trigger warnings: violence, stalking, body horror

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Someone was tapping at his window again. Soft, thrumming little taps, like the sound a wolf’s claws might make against a laminate floor. Or at least what Lewis imagined a wolf’s claws would sound like; there were no wolves running around the village of Cowed Edge in Shropshire for him to know that for certain. Still, it set his teeth on edge.

This was the third night Lewis had slept in this draughty, creepy room, and the third time he’d heard it. At first, he’d ignored it, his mum’s warning not to let anyone know they were staying at Hygarth Hall ringing in his ears. He’d even managed to convince himself it was just some extension of the house’s more general creaks and groans, but the sound was so insistent that he hadn’t been able to tune it out for long.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

There it was again. Lewis sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Not his bed, as he could never call the ancient carved four-poster his, and neither was the room in any way like his own. The dark floral wallpaper and antique furniture made the attic bedroom feel like a forgotten museum exhibit. It wasn’t dusty — his housekeeper mother would never allow any space she worked or lived in to be dusty — but it had a certain smell that hit him every time he walked through the door; leatherbound books and mothballs and something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but it smelled old.

Then there was the portrait.

The girl in the painting looked like she was in her late teens, her hair falling in long, dark curls around her shoulders. Her catlike eyes were the most unusual shade of blue, almost violet, and her lips curved up ever so slightly at the edges like she had a secret she couldn’t wait to share. Lewis couldn’t shake the feeling that the portrait was watching him. She was watching him, whoever she was. His first night in the room it had freaked him out so much, he’d taken the picture down and made it face the wall. But the next day he’d gone to his room and found it back as it was, staring at the bed where he slept. Since there were only the two of them at Hygarth Hall, seeing as the owners were currently floating around the Med on a four-week cruise, Lewis presumed this was his mother’s silent way of scolding him for touching things he shouldn’t.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

With an irritated growl, Lewis stormed over to the window, threw open the curtains and saw…

No-one.

Of course there was nobody outside. He was on the third floor of a lurching old manor house surrounded by dozens of acres of land. Lewis couldn’t really picture any of his friends from school dragging a ladder all the way out here just to mess with him. Besides, nobody knew he was here. His mum would lose her job if anyone found out.

She’d been the housekeeper at Hygarth since she and Lewis had moved to this dank little village last September — just in time for Lewis to start Year 11 at his new school. He’d moved schools six times since his parents had split up — through no real fault of his own — so he was an old hand at being the new student. Not that that made him hate it any less. It meant making only casual friends he wouldn’t miss too much when they moved on. Flying under the radar of teachers who’d try to get him more involved in school activities. It was always the same routine… until he’d met Maisy Pierce.

She was pretty, with big pouty lips that she used some kind of lip balm or gloss or something on, so they were always shiny. And she liked him, or he’d thought so. Maisy always laughed at his jokes, even the cringey ones. She didn’t seem to mind hanging out even when their other friends weren’t around. It had definitely seemed as though she liked him when she kissed Lewis at Harry Turnbull’s birthday party the previous month. But when he’d seen her in school the next week, Maisy had acted like it never happened. She still talked to him, but only when other people were around. He’d tried asking her what was going on, but she just laughed it off and told him nothing was wrong and he was just imagining things.

Maybe I’m just a bad kisser, he thought sourly. Not that he’d ever had complaints about that before, but perhaps a girl like Maisy expected better moves than he had. They had a real connection, he was sure of it. He just had to convince her of it.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

Maybe it was because he was already thinking about Maisy, but the sudden noise at the window had his head jerking up to look outside again, somehow expecting to find her there.

She wasn’t out there. His window, glazed with swirling patterns of frost, looked out over the unblemished white blanket of snow outside. Despite it being almost Valentine’s Day, the snow didn’t appear to be in any hurry to leave. The only things he could make out beyond the crisp white covering were the old chapel folly, the willow tree looming behind it like some enormous snow-covered spider, and the faint track of the public footpath which ran through the manor’s grounds.

Could someone have come in along the footpath and decided to throw stones at my window for a laugh? Lewis wondered, his deep sigh fogging up the glass. There was no way anybody would be out there at — a grandfather clock somewhere in the sprawling mansion chimed the hour — two A.M.

But what was making the noise? It had stopped now, of course — it always did whenever Lewis actually checked the window — but he wasn’t imagining it.

He felt around the leaded glass, feeling for any loose panes which might have been rattling in the wind. Because it was windy out there, enough so that the falling snow whipped about in sharp squalls.

Lewis rubbed his pricking neck. Probably just a flurry of hailstones or something.

Whatever had made the strange sound, he really needed to get some sleep.

Lewis’s mother was very quiet when he entered the kitchen for breakfast the next morning, but he was so fuzzy-headed after a night of disturbing dreams that it took him a while to notice. He couldn’t remember what the dreams had been about, exactly, but he kept getting flashes of that strange girl from the portrait in his room.

Finally, though, the silence broke through. Quiet was never a good thing with Lewis’s mum. It meant she was pissed off, and it was usually because of something he’d done. Lewis wracked his brain trying to think what it was but came up blank.

He kept a careful distance from her bristling form as he made himself some toast, then sat at the kitchen table.

“Where did you go last night?” she said at last, not looking up from stirring her porridge on the stove.

Lewis coughed to clear the lump of toast that had suddenly gotten stuck in his throat. “What do you mean? I didn’t go anywhere last night. I went to bed the same time as you.”

She finally turned long enough to give him a disbelieving side-eye. “You left the back door open. When I got up, it was swinging wide with snow piled up in the entryway.”

“Mum, I didn’t go outside last night,” Lewis protested. “Maybe the door just hadn’t latched properly and the wind blew it open. Do you want me to clear up the mess?”

His mother still didn’t look entirely convinced, though she did stop stirring her porridge with such obvious annoyance. “No, I’ve already done it, love. Besides, you don’t want to be late to school.”

God forbid, Lewis thought to himself as he cleared away his dishes and went to grab his schoolbag from the entryway. There was a soggy patch where the snow must have piled up on it, too, though a quick glance inside showed it hadn’t seeped through to his textbooks.

“See you later,” he called as he hurried out of the manor, pausing only briefly when he noticed that someone had drawn a heart in the frost covering the window in the back door. But the strangeness of it drifted quickly from his mind as he ran to catch the bus.

School had been torture. From the moment he’d arrived to see the HAVE YOU BOUGHT YOUR VALENTINE’S PARTY TICKET YET? banner in the entrance foyer, it had been one excruciating thing after another. He’d slipped on his way into registration – apparently a puddle of melted snow was all it took to make Lewis flail about like a tool – and of course Maisy had seen. Then at lunch time he’d been digging through his bag and found a note.

BE MY VALENTINE

For one short, heart-leaping moment, Lewis had thought Maisy had put it there. Long enough for him to turn to her with his heart in his throat say, “You mean it?”

Maisy had glanced at the note before looking up at him like he’d escaped from the zoo.

“That’s not from me,” she’d said, her tone leaving him in no doubt that she was telling the truth. “Look, I never should have kissed you at Harry’s party. Like I told you, Lewis, I just want to be friends, okay?”

It was obviously someone playing a joke on him. They’d probably slipped the note in there on the bus that morning, though he’d had his bag on him all day. Except — hadn’t it been unzipped before he left the manor for school? He’d left it by the back door…

The same door his mum had found wide open that morning. The heart drawn into the frost on the window flashed into his mind. That had to mean there was someone outside last night, right?

His day hadn’t improved after that. One nearly-failed maths test and a gruelling gym lesson later, and Lewis was just glad to be home. Well, at Hygarth Hall, anyway. The boiler in the little cottage he shared with his mother still hadn’t been fixed, so they were stuck hiding out at the old manor house like a pair of squatters, hoping his mum’s boss wouldn’t find out and give her the sack.

Lewis lay in bed that night scrolling through Maisy’s social media and listening to the wind howling outside — though there was no tapping yet, thank God. She posted a lot on her socials, often pulling cute faces with her arms around her friends, or doing whatever dance routine was trending. None of her pictures or videos included him. At least, not since Christmas. There had been a photo of them and two of her netball friends cheers-ing at Harry Turnbull’s party, but she’d taken it down the day after.

What did I do wrong? He wondered, staring at the dark, knotty wood of the bed frame, his mind wandering to the Valentine’s party at school.

So he’d messed up with Maisy somehow. Twice, if you counted the thing with the Valentine’s note. But if he went to the party and talked to her, showed her that he wasn’t a complete knob, then she’d have to give him another chance. After all, they’d kissed at the last party they both went to. Why not this one?

He sighed, exhaustion catching up with him as the last few nights of interrupted sleep made themselves known. So much so that the knots in the wood seemed to swirl into strange patterns. They looked almost like drawings.

Or letters?

Lewis hauled himself up to standing, wobbling a bit on the old, creaky mattress. Upright, he was no more than a foot away from the dark wooden beam of the four-poster, and from here he could see that his eyes hadn’t been lying to him; there were letters carved into the wood. They seemed old, the marks almost the same deep brown as the varnish, but clear to see from this close.

WH+JN… WH+RP… WH+FI… WH+AD… WH+RS…

There were dozens of sets of letters. Initials? Every set featured the same two letters at the start: WH. If they were initials, who did they belong to? And why were they linked to so many others?

W… W-something Hygarth? He’d heard his mum saying that although the current owners had a different last name, the original family who’d built the manor back in the 1800s had been named Hygarth. And this bed certainly creaked like it was that old, so maybe it had belonged to one of the original Hygarths.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

Lewis jumped so violently at the sudden noise that he almost fell off the bed. Scrambling down from on top of the lumpy mattress, he raced to the window and flung open the curtains.

This time, there was someone out there.

Despite the heavily falling snow, he saw a figure walking through the garden just under his window — it looked like a girl in a long white dress. Despite the lack of light, the bright white snow appeared to glow, making the scene in front of him seem eerie, like an image etched in glass.

She must be freezing, he thought, shivering. He rapped against the window, but she didn’t look up. Just kept walking, not seeming to be in any particular hurry, but heading away from the house. Not wanting to let her disappear from sight, Lewis fumbled for the light switch, hoping it would cast enough light to make her stop and turn back to look at him. But when he peered back through the window, there was no sign of the girl despite his bedroom light stretching across the thick white drifts of snow.

He leaned back from the glass, debating whether he should get dressed and go after her, but stopped short when he noticed a mark on the window. There, in the very centre of the glass pane, was the impression of a perfect pair of pouting lips. A kiss-mark. Had he accidentally pressed his mouth to the window as he peered out?

But when Lewis raised his arms to rub at the mark with his sleeve, he found that it was on the outside of the glass.

That night his dreams were fractured and chilling. It felt as though he were lying in the snow, unable to move as the flakes piled up on top of him, burying his frozen body alive. And all the while, a voice whispered to him — disjointed murmurs of love and belonging which should have felt comforting, but only sent the chill even deeper into his bones.

When Lewis woke before dawn, cold sweat making the sheets cling to his skin, he saw a set of letters carved into the headboard not far from his head. Strange that he hadn’t noticed them before. More than strange, because there was no way they could be new.

WH+LT

But the part that kept him awake and staring into the pre-dawn half-light was the fact that LT were his initials.

“I saw a girl outside last night,” Lewis told his mum over breakfast. She stopped scrubbing the scrambled egg pan and gave him a sceptical look.

“What girl?”

“I don’t know. She was wearing some kind of white dress and walking near the manor.”

His mum shrugged, going back to her scrubbing. “Probably just a dog walker. You know there’s a public footpath that runs through the grounds.” Suddenly she halted again. “You didn’t let her see you, did you? You know we’ll get into trouble if anyone finds out we’ve been staying here, Lewis!”

“She didn’t see me.” Technically, that was the truth. She’d never looked up at his window, even if she had — possibly, though also impossibly — left a kiss on the outside of the glass.

The tension in his mother’s shoulders eased a little, but Lewis thought it might be better to change the subject.

“Do you know much about the original Hygarth family?” he asked.

His mum nodded over the washing up bowl. “A bit. They made their money in tin mining before the eldest Hygarth son married the daughter of an earl and started a trend among his siblings of marrying well. They ended up with some titles, I think, and owned a lot of property in the area back in the early 1800s. That’s when they built this place. As the generations came and went, things started to go wrong… a lot of bad luck, early deaths, their fortune dwindling away. By the time it came to the last Hygarths who lived here, the father made some bad investments and put everything they still owned at risk. He decided to marry off his only daughter to someone with money, or they’d lose everything. But the daughter… She was a romantic, I suppose. A bit like someone else around here.” She glanced pointedly at Lewis before turning back to the dishes. “Always in a hurry to fall in love.”

“God, Mum, I am not,” Lewis groaned, and his mum snorted out a laugh.

“So, the girl’s parents tried to find her a good match from among their connections,” she continued. “But something about her scared off all the men her parents introduced her to. Probably just the usual misogynistic crap women have to deal with, but these were Victorians. Anyway, the daughter ended up believing she’d never find a husband who loved her, and she died of a broken heart.” Lewis’s mother shot him a wry look. “It was probably just the flu or something, but a broken heart makes it more dramatic, doesn’t it? Anyway, I think they went bankrupt after that and a distant cousin bought the estate.”

Lewis nodded, an uneasy thought prickling at the back of his mind. All those letters etched into the bedframe in the attic… all those initials. Were they scratched into the wood by this young Hygarth woman who wanted so badly to find a loving husband?

“I think the daughter was buried somewhere on the grounds, but I’ve no idea—”

“What was her name?” he asked, cutting her off and drawing an arch look for being rude. “Sorry, I’m just curious.”

His mum took a deep breath, seeming to search her memory.

“I think it was… yes, Wilhelmina. Wilhelmina Hygarth. Though I seem to remember reading that they called her Willow for short. There’s a painting of her in your room, I think.”

Wilhelmina Hygarth.

WH.

Those had to be her initials upstairs. A chill ran through him, like an icy finger had just skimmed across his innards. Because he couldn’t shake the idea that the girl in the snow and the one who had etched her initials so many times next to so many other initials were one and the same.

Lewis knew, of course, that the girl he’d seen outside in the white dress hadn’t been Wilhelmina. Obviously. Still, he couldn’t help but imagine it had been her walking broken-hearted through the snow.

“Where’s your big coat?” his mum asked just as he was darting for the door the next evening.

“I dunno. Must’ve left it on the bus or something,” Lewis grumbled back, zipping up his hoodie which would only get wet ten seconds before the rest of him did. He hadn’t left his big coat on the bus, he knew that. He would definitely have noticed walking back to the manor from the bus stop in nothing but his school blaser. “I’m already late, Mum.”

He was keen to get to the Valentine’s party. Lewis knew he only needed to talk to Maisy in a non-school kind of setting and show her that they were meant for each other. Maybe they’d kiss again, and everything would be like it was supposed to be after Harry’s party. He could forgive Maisy for being a bit shy. She just needed time and a little nudge in the right direction to see that he was supposed to be her boyfriend.

He’d been so focused on the party that he’d barely thought about Wilhelmina Hygarth — Willow — wandering outside the manor in her white dress. Leaving kiss marks on his window and scratching initials into her bedframe. Our bedframe, he thought to himself, then felt a bit weird about it. Yes, it was technically the same four-poster bed they’d both slept in, but it wasn’t like they’d slept in it together.

But now he was thinking about it, and his eyes drifted to one of the paintings in the manor’s entrance hall. It was another portrait of Willow, this time wearing a violet dress the same colour as her eyes. As he watched, he would almost swear he saw her smile at him.

Great. Now I’m seeing things, he thought. That’s how stressed out I am about this whole Maisy situation.

Lewis waved to his mother and left the manor, going over all the things he wanted to say to Maisy in his head. He wouldn’t mess this up, not like he’d done with the girls in his previous schools. Even if it was mostly their fault. But Maisy was different. They were soulmates, he was sure of it.

The driveway stretched out in front of him like a severed limb, crooked and neglected. Lewis barely glanced at it as he veered away from it, taking a shortcut over the grass which led past the abstract silhouette of the folly and the swaying tendrils of the weeping willow next to it. His footsteps made a muffled crunch as he walked through the freshly fallen snow, changing only slightly as he left the driveway and stepped onto the white-blanketed lawns. Lewis didn’t notice. He didn’t notice anything but the figure stepping out from the shadows of the folly.

It’s her.

It was a ridiculous thought, and one he quickly dismissed. He knew there were no ghosts wandering around the estate… especially not ones wearing his missing coat. It was unmistakably his green parka, the hood pulled up so that it cast the girl’s face in shadow. For a moment, his heart lifted.

“Maisy? Is that you?”

There was no answer, but he realised with a sinking feeling that it couldn’t be Maisy. This girl was too tall, too thin.

“Hey!” he yelled, his voice sounding alien as it broke through the soft silence of the falling snow. “Whoever you are, you’d better stop pissing about and bring back my coat!”

He got only a faint chime of feminine laughter in return. Now he was really getting annoyed.

She turned her back on him and skipped away toward the folly.

“Where are you going? I’m talking to you!”

Lewis cast a glance over his shoulder towards the manor, wondering if his mum was watching all this. She’d be so pissed off if she saw him out here talking to a stranger, letting on that they were staying in the manor when they had no right to be here. The light pouring from the kitchen window stung his eyes after the night-glow of the starlit snow, but he saw no sign of his mother. He turned back to face the folly. The weeping willow. The stranger.

At last, she spoke. “Come inside,” she told him, parting the tree’s hanging branches to step inside the hollow space beyond.

Muttering some choice curses, Lewis jogged over to the tree, then stopped at the threshold. It was so dark beneath the overhanging branches he could barely make out the girl’s shape among the shadows. He was fumbling for his phone so he could use its light when the girl spoke again.

“I’ve seen you in my room, Lewis Taylor. You’ve been watching me too, haven’t you? We’re so alike. You’re the one I’ve been waiting for — my true love. My Valentine. I knew you’d come if I only waited…”

Her voice drifted away, though Lewis had the feeling she hadn’t moved but was just waiting for him to react.

“All right, I get it. Very clever, trying to make me think you’re the ghost of Wilhelmina Hygarth or whatever. But I’m on my way to a party and I need my coat, so whoever you are, just hand it over, yeah?”

“I’m no ghost, Lewis. I’m a girl of flesh and bones, and I love you with my whole being. You love me too, I just know it.”

“You what?”

Now his annoyance edged into something sharper. Something primal. His muscles tensed, ready to run or defend himself if he had to. Because this girl was taking this joke way too far, if it was a joke.

“Look, you don’t even know me, so there’s no way you can love me. Besides, I’ve already got a girlfriend, pretty much. Her name’s Maisy. So I’m just going to take back my damn coat and get on with my night, okay?”

She didn’t respond. Didn’t move, either. Cautiously, he stepped between the parted branches, letting them fall back into place behind him as he turned on the torch on his phone.

Everything fell away — the nighttime sound of the wind, its bitter bite.

He raised the light so it swept up from her strange, tattered shoes, over the stained skirt of her dress to where it disappeared under his parka. Higher…

“No, don’t!”

She moved with inhuman speed, knocking the phone from his hand. Before he could even cry out, she’d shoved him hard enough that he tripped and went sprawling. His head connected with something hard, making stars flicker behind his eyelids.

There wasn’t as much snow beneath the overhang of the willow tree’s branches, but still a few inches had blown in just as it had through the manor’s open door. The chill bled through Lewis’s jeans, crawling up his legs like frozen spiders. He forced his eyes open, the pain in his head redoubling as the harsh light from his phone hit his retinas. Still on his hands and knees, Lewis rubbed at the spot where he’d hit his head, his fingers finding a sticky wetness. Blood.

“Shit,” he murmured. Even that small sound made his head spin. “I need to get out of here. My head’s killing me. I think I might need stitches.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” the girl answered, and even through the ringing in his ears he noted that her tone had changed. There was no light laughter dancing beneath the words now; her voice was ice-cold, hard as whatever he’d just hit his head on. He blinked as he searched for whatever it had been, and stopped short.

His phone had landed next to him with its light shining up like a distress signal. In its glow, Lewis saw that he wasn’t just on the ground; he was lying in a shallow ditch in the earth, snow-crusted piles of soil stacked up around them. And at one end, next to the trunk of the willow tree, was a gravestone.

Here lies Wilhelmina Hygarth

28 November 1878 – 14 February 1896

She loved so fiercely that it broke her heart.

May she find her love returned in death’s everlasting embrace.

Lewis opened his mouth to scream but found something cold and damp pressed against it: Willow’s hand. Close up, she smelled of rancid, mouldering flesh. He fought not to gag.

“Why couldn’t you just love me? Why?”

Willow’s voice seethed with anger as she spat her words next to his ear, her breath cooler even than the snow-filled air. Lewis didn’t want to look at her. Knew that whatever he saw, he’d wish he hadn’t seen. Because he already sensed that the creature who held him clasped against her, keeping him from pulling away, wasn’t human. Or wasn’t human anymore. But his eyes moved toward her like a terrible magnet.

In the slanted torchlight he saw the truth of her: the black veins threading beneath the girl’s waxy skin, the way her eyes had sunk deep into her head. There were thread marks running all the way around her mouth, as though her lips had once been sewn shut. Blackened, cracked nails tipped her bony fingers, and he yanked away from her, his head swimming with the movement.

Her awful features twisted with rage. “You’ve ruined everything! All I wanted was to love you! Just give me your heart!”

“What? No!” Lewis yelled back, even though the effort knocked him sick.

I just need to get out of here, away from her.

He turned to scramble out of the unearthed grave but was stopped by something pulling on the back of his hoodie.

“Let me go!” Lewis tried to tug free of her grip, but it was no use. With a force she shouldn’t have been capable of, Willow hauled him backward into her arms. She locked him within her embrace, taking him to the ground with a low shushing in his ear.

“No,” he gasped. “Let me go!”

Instead her grip tightened, crushing his ribs until something popped. Lewis screamed until she once again covered his mouth with her too-cold hand. And then her fingers started to work their way between his lips, wriggling into his mouth. He screamed again but it was only a garbled mess of sound as she plunged her hand deeper. Into his throat. Deeper.

Until the clawed tips of her fingers wrapped around his heart and wrenched it, still beating, from his body.

Lewis fell still, his eyes and mouth wide open in an awful rictus of shock. Willow released her hold on him and pulled away, leaving Lewis lying alone on the cold earth. She let the swiftly-cooling heart fall on top of him, its beat now silent.

“I would have loved you forever,” she said sadly, stepping behind one of the piles of earth surrounding the grave. “But now you can stay down there with all the others who broke my heart. Such a disappointment.”

And she began to kick at the soil, sending it cascading down over Lewis’s body until he was tucked in snuggly beneath his earthen blanket.

“One day I’ll find my Valentine.”

***