Espejo De Hielo

It was mid-January when an American glacier research team found a ship drifting between the glaciers north of Greenland. The rag-tag team of four was supposed to be studied the effects of climate change on the ice formations, but the opportunity to explore an old galleon and uncover hidden riches and secrets was not passed up once suggested. After all, Nord was less than ten clicks away, and their radio had plenty of range. After securing their little boat to the old wooden vessel, a crew member was able to find the something carved into side of the bow. Espejo De Hielo. It could have been the name, but it was so sloppy and hastily scratched into the wood, it looked as if it had been a patch job. As if the ship was an employee using a name tag until an ID card was printed. Needless to say, the research team had no language expert team, but the weather sailor they had hired was of a Hispanic lineage. Although he had never officially learned the language, he had picked up enough to translate the name as "ice mirror". It wasn't hard to navigate downwards from the crunchy ice of the deck down the two decks below. It was strangely tidy. There were no stray coils of rope or knotted messes of rigging. The dust and ice crystals coated the floor evenly, each door shut. This was most likely a passenger's deck, and it was proven so as several doors were pried open. Couples, individuals, families, and even lone children laid in their cabins, perfectly preserved. The rooms were much like the hallways, all neat and tidy, not a thing out of place even after all that time of drifting aimlessly through treacherous icebergs. The mirrors of each cabin were cracked and dusty, barely reflecting the blue shimmering of the flashlights, but that was to be expected. The reflections danced, making odd shapes and shadows, and playing tricks on the mind. A hand here, a smile there, sometimes an entire face. No one wanted to confess what they thought they saw, and they most certainly didn't want to admit they felt watched. The hairs on the back of their necks stood on end, doing their part in warning of danger. Even more disturbingly, the victims in the descending cabins seemed to be becoming less historically accurate, as the team began to see zippers, polyester, bleached hair, and sunglasses. A shattered, water-damaged iPhone sat on the rustic vanity table of one cabin. A Funship Freddy from Carnival Cruise Lines on the pillow in another. A portable fan sat on the nightstand of yet another. And then the cabins were empty for nearly an entire deck, their mirrors cleanly intact and their beds made. The last body found in the cabin at the farest end of the hallway on the bottom deck was that of a teenage girl, a young woman in her own time period. Her blonde hair was stiff and straight, neatly fanned out across her bed. Her eyes were open, unlike the other passengers who seemed to have frozen to death in their sleep. The blue orbs were fixed on the ceiling, sunken back into her skull. Her skin was as white as her nightgown and it took the eye a moment to distinguish the two. Not that it would need to, because one's gaze would jump to the balled yellowed parchment in her left hand. The sailor crossed himself, backing away from the cold colorless corpse. He excused himself from the room as the parchment was plucked from her fingers and flattened. The ship's name was written in elegant calligraphy in the center of the square parchment, and signed by a Angelina Ernesta. Nothing was heard except the crunching of ice beneath the shifting weight of bodies. The crunching grew louder, to the cracking of glass. The crew turned to the mirror, to find a perfect portrait of the girl instead. Her eyes seemed to fix on each individual simultaneously. The picture shifted, her smile grew and continued to grow to painful extents. The temperature dropped steadily, biting at the already freezing flesh of the four stowaways. There were no screams. The research boat and it's captain were found two weeks later near Húsavík, Iceland. The official report stated he was found frostbitten and in a delirious state of dehydration. The ship he named is believed not to exist, due to a lack of any documentation. The ship in question was never found. The four member research team that had accompanied the sailor are, to this day, still missing.

The original pasta can be found here.