Inside, the cabin is a wooden throat. The lamp makes the corners honest. The knocks do not wait for you to be ready.

The stovepipe vowel arrives when the wind hits the roof-mouth, a hollow oooo that makes the hairs on your arms try to leave. Air over a bottle does that. Air over a flue does it louder. Warm air rising up the pipe—the stack effect—meets wind across the opening and makes a note. You remember pareidolia, though you do not say the word out loud because it sounds like a spell: your brain hearing a voice in a moan because voices are what brains practice all day.

A scratch in the wall is smaller and busier. Not a miner’s hammer. A chew. Something with teeth likes the porch corner where people spill salt and soup.

The damper handle is a little lever with a personality. The porch hatch, where wood meets snow, has a smear of bark-dust like sawdust’s cousin.

Priya’s radio blips one burst, then none. Still digging. Stay in or stay on packed path. You are in. You are also a researcher with a noisy house.

The cabin smells like last night’s onions and this morning’s pine. That is not a haunting; that is supper. You still get a shiver when the pipe says oooo, because shivers do not wait for permission from science. You give the shiver a job: find the damper. Find the chew. Do not invent a miner in the insulation. Insulation wants mice, and mice want crumbs, and crumbs want you to sweep later.