The Antikythera Mechanism of Grandma Jean

A chase across a groaning frozen lake. A shattered heirloom. A secret buried deep in the snow just as their parents arrive.

The world was a high-pitched scream. It was the wind tearing past Mike’s ears, the frantic, ragged pull of his own breath, and the terrifying, resonant groan of the ice beneath his pounding feet. Each step was a gamble, a prayer sent down into the black, silent water. Ahead of him, a frantic, flapping silhouette against the vast, unforgiving white was Lin. His cousin. The agent of chaos. The reason Mike’s heart was trying to hammer its way out of his ribs.

“You’re not getting away!” Mike roared, the words torn from his throat and stolen by the gale. His lungs burned, each gasp a mouthful of tiny, frozen needles. The cold was a physical presence, a predator clinging to his back, seeping through the layers of his jacket and thermal shirt. But the fire in his gut was hotter. It was pure, distilled rage, fueled by the image that kept flashing behind his eyes: the soft, aged rosewood of Grandma Jean’s music box, splintered and gaping on the cabin’s pine floorboards. The tiny, delicate ballerina, her painted smile forever silenced, snapped from her brass spindle.

Lin, damn him, glanced over his shoulder. Even from fifty yards away, Mike could imagine the infuriating smirk. Lin was always faster, lighter on his feet, a blur of wiry energy that Mike, with his broader shoulders and heavier build, could never quite match. It had been the central, frustrating dynamic of their entire shared existence.

“Try keeping up, bigfoot!” Lin’s voice was thin, carried back on a treacherous gust of wind. “Might help if you didn’t run like you’re wearing snowshoes made of concrete!”

“I’m going to catch you,” Mike bellowed, ignoring the stitch in his side, focusing on the rhythm of his boots on the ice. Thump-thump-slide. Thump-thump-slide. “And when I do, I’m going to take that stupid, vintage scarf of yours and tie your ankles together!”

“Ooh, threatening my accessories? Now it’s personal!” Lin shot back, his laughter a sharp, brittle sound that seemed to mock the groaning ice itself.

Mike saw it before he heard the worst of it. A dark, spidery line that shot out from under Lin’s left foot. It wasn’t a surface crack, one of the thousand pale veins that crisscrossed the lake. This one was deep. Sinister. The groan that followed wasn’t a gentle complaint; it was a deep, guttural roar from the belly of the lake. A sound of immense pressure and imminent failure. Lin stumbled, his arms windmilling as he fought for balance. The playful energy of the chase evaporated in a single, heart-stopping second, replaced by the cold, metallic taste of pure terror.

Lin froze, stock-still. Mike skidded to a halt, his own momentum carrying him a few feet farther than he wanted, his boots scraping uselessly. The ice under him vibrated, a low thrum that traveled up his legs and settled deep in his bones. They were in the center of the lake, the point farthest from any shore, the point where the ice was always the most deceptive.

“Don’t move,” Mike said, his voice a harsh whisper, all the anger scoured out of it by adrenaline. The fury was still there, a hot coal in his chest, but it was now jacketed in a thick layer of fear. If Lin went in, the argument about the music box would become horrifyingly irrelevant. And if Lin went in, the current under the ice would have him before Mike could even get close.

Lin swallowed, a motion Mike could see even from this distance. His head turned, slowly, deliberately, as he stared at the network of new cracks spreading from his feet like a shattered pane of glass. “Wasn’t planning on it,” he said, his voice tight, all the witty bravado gone. “Any bright ideas, cousin? Or are you just going to stand there and look menacing?”

Mike forced himself to take a slow, deep breath, trying to calm the frantic thumping in his chest. His mind raced, pulling up fragments of half-remembered survival shows, of his dad’s stern warnings before every winter trip to the cabin. *Distribute your weight. Don't bunch up. If you hear it crack, get down low.*

“Get down,” Mike ordered, his voice gaining a sliver of authority. “Slowly. Onto your stomach.”

“Are you insane?” Lin hissed. “I’m not lying down on this thing.”

“It’s better than standing! It spreads your weight out!” Mike shot back, his frustration bubbling up again. “Do you want to become a permanent part of the local fish population? Because that’s option B! Just do it, Lin!”

For a second, Lin just stared at him, his face pale against the graying sky. The wind whipped his dark hair across his forehead. He was weighing his options: listen to Mike, his lifelong rival, or trust his own panicked instincts that screamed at him to run. The ice gave another low, mournful moan, a sound like a whale dying in the deep. That decided it. With excruciating slowness, Lin crouched, then lowered himself onto his hands and knees, and finally stretched out flat on his stomach, his arms spread wide like a fallen angel. The posture of surrender.

Mike felt a strange, unwelcome pang of something that wasn't anger. He watched his cousin, usually a tightly coiled spring of kinetic energy and sarcastic remarks, now utterly still and vulnerable on the groaning ice. He took a breath and followed his own advice, lowering himself carefully to his knees, then onto his stomach. The cold of the ice was immediate and shocking, leeching the warmth from his body through his thick jacket. He could feel the vibrations more intensely now, a constant, unsettling hum against his cheek.

“Okay,” Mike said, his voice muffled by the ice and his own collar. “Okay. We crawl. Back the way we came. Slowly. Push with your feet, pull with your hands. No sudden movements.”

“Like a very cold, very terrified lizard,” Lin’s voice came back, strained but unable to completely resist the urge for a comeback. “Got it.”

They began to move. It was agonizingly slow. A clumsy, desperate army crawl in full winter gear. The shore, which had seemed so close during the heat of the chase, now looked an impossible distance away. Every scrape of fabric, every push of a boot, seemed deafeningly loud in the tense silence between the groans of the ice. Mike focused on the texture of the frozen surface inches from his face—the tiny trapped air bubbles, the feathery patterns of frost, the ominous dark lines that hinted at the frigmatic abyss below.

His anger hadn't vanished. It had just been put on ice, so to speak. Every time he moved his numb fingers, he thought of Lin’s buttery ones fumbling the music box. He remembered the moment perfectly. Lin had been gesturing wildly while telling some stupid story, his hands flying around like startled birds. He’d been holding the music box, trying to wind it, trying to prove to Mike that he remembered the tune from when they were kids. A backswing of his arm, a collision with the edge of the heavy oak table, and then a sickening crunch as the rosewood box hit the stone hearth.

Lin had frozen, his eyes wide. And Mike, instead of saying, *'Are you okay?'* or *'It's just a thing,'* had felt a lifetime of petty rivalries, of being one-upped and out-talked, detonate inside him. The box wasn't just a box. It was Grandma Jean’s. It was the last thing she’d shown them before she got sick, her frail fingers tracing the inlaid mother-of-pearl flowers. It was history. And Lin, in his typical, careless, look-at-me fashion, had destroyed it. The fury had been so immediate, so total, that when Lin had bolted out the door in a panic, Mike had given chase without a second thought.

Now, inching his way across a frozen death trap, the fury felt… indulgent. Stupid. The immediate problem was survival. The secondary problem, the one waiting for them in the warm, wood-scented cabin, was almost as daunting.

“How far do you think we are?” Lin asked after several minutes of strained, silent crawling. His voice was tight with the effort of keeping his panic contained.

Mike risked a glance up. They had covered maybe a third of the distance back to the shore. The sky was darkening, the bruised purple deepening to a gloomy charcoal. Snow was beginning to fall, not a gentle dusting, but hard, stinging pellets driven by the wind. “Not far enough. Just keep moving.”

They crawled. The minutes stretched into an eternity. Mike’s knees ached. His gloves were soaked through from the friction with the ice, and his fingers were turning into useless, frozen sticks. He could hear Lin’s ragged breathing just ahead of him, a counterpoint to the howling wind. It was the first time in as long as he could remember that they had been working toward the same goal without competing. There was no witty remark to be made, no point to be scored. There was only the ice, the shore, and the shared, unspoken terror.

Finally, agonizingly, Mike’s outstretched hand touched something other than ice. It was the frozen, packed-down snow of the bank. He could have wept with relief. He pushed himself forward, dragging his body onto the solid, unmoving ground. He rolled onto his back, chest heaving, staring up at the swirling snow. A moment later, Lin collapsed beside him, equally exhausted.

They lay there for a full minute, saying nothing, just breathing. The ground was solid. It didn't groan. It didn't threaten to swallow them whole. The contrast was so profound it was dizzying. The immediate danger had passed.

Which meant the other danger was now front and center.

Lin was the first to speak, his voice still catching in his throat. “Well,” he panted, “that was a refreshing constitutional. Really gets the blood pumping.”

Mike pushed himself into a sitting position, brushing snow off his jacket. The cold was starting to feel less life-threatening and more just… miserable. “The only thing pumping is my desire to throttle you.”

“Get in line,” Lin shot back, sitting up and wringing out the ends of his ridiculously expensive scarf. “I think hypothermia has dibs.” He looked back at the lake, a sheet of hostile grey in the fading light. “Okay. I’ll admit. That was… not ideal.”

“‘Not ideal’?” Mike’s voice rose, the anger roaring back to life now that they were on solid ground. “‘Not ideal’ is when you get the wrong kind of mustard on a sandwich, you idiot! That was almost a dual-cousin popsicle situation! And for what? Because you can’t hold onto a priceless antique for five seconds without treating it like a football?”

Lin scrambled to his feet, his face flushed with a mixture of cold and defensiveness. “For the last time, you bumped the table! I have a very clear memory of your enormous, clumsy elbow creating a seismic event that led directly to the unfortunate incident.”

“My elbow was a foot away from the table!” Mike stood up, towering over his cousin. They were back to their old dynamic, squaring off like they had a thousand times before over video games, last slices of pizza, and who got the better bedroom at the cabin. “Your hands, on the other hand, were flailing around like you were trying to conduct an orchestra of invisible squirrels!”

“It’s called ‘expressive gesturing’! It’s a sign of a vibrant personality. You should try it sometime instead of just grunting and pointing!”

“I’ll show you ‘expressive gesturing’!” Mike took a step forward, his hands clenched into fists. He wouldn't hit him. He never had. But he wanted Lin to feel the sheer, vibrating force of his rage.

Lin didn’t flinch. “Go on, then. Take a swing. I’m sure Mom and Aunt Carol will be thrilled to arrive and find a domestic dispute in progress. It’ll be a great distraction from, you know, the pile of splinters on the hearth that used to be their mother’s most prized possession.”

The words hit Mike like a physical blow. Their parents. He’d been so consumed by his anger at Lin, then by the fear on the lake, that the ultimate consequence had been a dull roar in the background. Now it was a screaming siren. Their parents were driving up from the city. They were supposed to be here for the whole week. They were due… when? Mike pulled his phone from his pocket, his numb fingers fumbling with the screen. A text from his mom, sent an hour ago. *‘Just passed Miller’s Ridge. Traffic is light. See you two soon! Don’t burn the cabin down! ❤️’*

Mike’s blood ran cold for a reason that had nothing to do with the temperature. Miller’s Ridge was less than an hour away. “Lin,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “They’ll be here any minute.”

The color drained from Lin’s face. All the sarcasm, all the defensive posturing, vanished. They looked at each other, and for the first time that day, they were feeling the exact same thing: pure, unadulterated panic. The rivalry was a luxury they could no longer afford. They were a team now, united by a common enemy: imminent parental justice.

“Okay,” Lin said, his voice low and urgent. “Okay. Back to the cabin. Now. We need a plan.”

They scrambled back through the snow-dusted pines, the urgency of their new problem lending them a speed their exhausted bodies shouldn’t have possessed. They burst through the cabin door, bringing a swirl of snow and frigid air with them. The warmth of the room was a comfort for only a second. Their eyes were immediately drawn to the scene of the crime. The broken music box lay on the rough-hewn stone of the hearth, a tragic tableau under the warm glow of the cabin’s single floor lamp. The rosewood was shattered in a dozen places. A handful of tiny brass screws and gears were scattered like lost teeth. The ballerina lay on her side, her painted-on smile a cruel mockery.

The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy with failure. The witty barbs were gone, replaced by the stark reality of their situation. This wasn't a broken plate. This wasn't a scratch on the car. This was a piece of their family's soul, and it was in pieces on the floor.

Mike walked over and knelt, his knees protesting. He picked up the largest piece of the box, the lid with the faded, mother-of-pearl inlay. He remembered his grandmother’s hands, wrinkled and spotted with age, tracing the same floral pattern as she told him the story for the hundredth time. Her own father, a clockmaker in the old country, had made it for her. It was the only thing she’d brought with her when she’d emigrated. It played a lullaby he couldn’t quite remember the name of, but the melody was burned into his brain. A soft, tinkling sound that meant safety, warmth, and love.

“We could try glue,” Mike said, his voice rough. He knew it was a stupid idea even as he said it.

Lin knelt beside him, picking up the tiny, snapped spindle that the ballerina was supposed to spin on. “With what? Wood glue? Super glue? Mike, it looks like it went through a woodchipper. There are pieces the size of a fingernail here. We’d need the skills of a Swiss watchmaker and a time machine. We have about forty-five minutes and half a tube of dried-up Elmer’s in the junk drawer.”

“Okay, okay, I know,” Mike snapped, dropping the lid with a clatter. He started pacing, his boots thudding on the floorboards, the sound echoing the frantic beat of his heart. “What if we just… tell them? Say it was an accident. We were wrestling, it got knocked over.”

Lin looked at him as if he’d just suggested they sprout wings and fly to Mexico. “Are you new here? Have you met your mother? Or mine? They will form a joint tribunal of maternal disappointment so powerful it might actually rupture the space-time continuum. ‘Accident’ is not in their vocabulary when it comes to this thing. They’ll look at us, they’ll know we were fighting, and we’ll be grounded until we’re thirty. We will be doing chores at this cabin, in the dead of winter, for the rest of our natural lives.”

Lin was right. He was infuriatingly, undeniably right. Their moms, sisters who were as close as twins, shared a reverence for this music box that bordered on religious. Its destruction would be treated not as a mistake, but as a desecration. A personal insult to the memory of their beloved mother.

“So what then?” Mike demanded, spinning to face his cousin. “We just leave it here? A little welcome-home-surprise for them? ‘Hi, Mom! Hi, Aunt Carol! Welcome to the cabin! Hope you don’t mind that we pulverized your most cherished family heirloom!’”

“No, you Neanderthal, of course not,” Lin said, standing up and brushing the dust from his knees. He began to pace as well, his movements quick and twitchy, a direct contrast to Mike’s heavy, deliberate stomps. They circled the room like caged animals. “We need to think. We need to be clever. What do we do with a problem we can’t solve?”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to be clever!” Mike shot back. “I’m the one who’s supposed to lift heavy things and follow directions!”

“A stereotype you’ve always embraced with gusto,” Lin muttered. He stopped by the window, peering out into the swirling snow and the deepening gloom. His eyes scanned the landscape, the snow-laden pines, the rising drifts against the cabin walls. Then he went very still. A slow, dangerous idea began to dawn on his face. “We don’t solve it,” he said softly. “We hide it.”

Mike stopped pacing. “Hide it? Where? Under a rug? They’re going to notice a missing music box, Lin. It’s been on that mantelpiece for forty years.”

“No. Not hide it in here.” Lin turned from the window, his eyes gleaming with a desperate, frantic energy. “We make it disappear. We say it was never here. We say we don’t remember seeing it when we got here yesterday. Maybe one of them packed it away last year and forgot. Maybe it’s in storage. They’ll question their own memories before they question us, if we play it right.”

Mike stared at him. The plan was audacious. It was deceitful. It was… kind of brilliant. The sheer gall of it was breathtaking. It was a classic Lin solution: sidestep the problem with a lie so bold no one would dare challenge it. “They’ll tear the cabin apart looking for it.”

“Let them! It’s better than them finding it in a million pieces on the hearth,” Lin insisted, his voice gaining momentum. “All we need to do is get rid of the evidence. All of it. Every last splinter. And we have to do it right now.” He pointed out the window. “Out there.”

Mike looked where he was pointing. The wind was piling the snow into a massive drift against the north wall of the cabin, the side with no windows. It was already five feet high, a soft, white, anonymous mound.

“Bury it,” Mike breathed, the words tasting like ash. It felt wrong. It felt like burying a body.

“It’s the only way,” Lin said, his face grim. “It’s a terrible plan. But it’s better than any other plan we’ve got. Agreed?”

Mike looked from the broken box to his cousin’s determined face, then back again. This was a new threshold for them. Their rivalry had always been about winning, about being the best. This was about mutual survival. It was a pact. He hated that it was Lin’s idea, but he couldn't deny the desperate logic of it.

“Agreed,” Mike said, his voice low. “But if we get caught, I’m telling them it was your idea.”

“Naturally,” Lin said with a thin smile. “And I’ll tell them you forced me. Now stop talking and start gathering. We need a container.”

The truce was sealed. The frantic energy of their argument transformed into a focused, desperate efficiency. Lin darted into the small kitchen, rummaging through cabinets. A clatter of pots and pans. “The old biscuit tin!” he shouted. “The one with the creepy painting of the royal family on it! Perfect! It’s airtight!”

Mike, meanwhile, was on his hands and knees at the hearth, carefully, painstakingly, gathering the evidence. He used a piece of cardboard from a cracker box as a makeshift dustpan, sweeping the tiniest splinters and brass filings into a pile. His big hands, usually better suited for chopping wood or throwing a football, felt clumsy and huge. He had to work with a surgeon’s precision. Each piece he picked up felt weighted with guilt. He found the tiny ballerina and cradled her in his palm for a moment. Her leg was broken, her tutu chipped. He gently placed her in the growing pile.

Lin returned with the biscuit tin, a monstrosity of faded reds and blues. He placed it on the floor and began helping, his nimble fingers plucking up the smallest bits that Mike had missed. They worked in silence, side-by-side, their shoulders occasionally brushing. It was the closest they’d been physically in years without one of them trying to shove the other. The only sounds were the scrape of wood on stone, the howl of the wind outside, and their own synchronized, anxious breathing.

Once every visible piece was in the tin, Mike took a flashlight and scanned the area, his beam cutting through the dim light of the cabin. He found a tiny screw hiding in the grout between two stones. Lin spotted a sliver of wood under the leg of a nearby armchair. They were a team, their senses heightened by the shared risk. They were both thinking the same thing: one missed piece could unravel the entire lie.

“Okay,” Mike said, his breath fogging in the air as he stood by the door, pulling his still-damp gloves back on. “I think that’s everything.”

Lin clicked the lid onto the biscuit tin. The sound was horribly final. He held it in both hands, looking at it as if it were a bomb. “Let’s give it a proper burial.”

They stepped back out into the maelstrom. The sun was completely gone now, and the world was a swirling vortex of black and white. The wind was even more vicious than before, and it drove the snow sideways, stinging any exposed skin. The cabin’s outdoor floodlight cast a weak, yellow circle of light that seemed to be swallowed by the storm just a few feet from the walls.

“Over here!” Mike yelled over the wind, pointing toward the massive drift on the north side. He grabbed the lone snow shovel leaning against the porch railing. Lin followed, clutching the tin to his chest like a sacred relic.

The digging was brutal. Mike drove the shovel into the packed snow, which was heavier and more compacted than it looked. Each shovelful felt like lifting wet concrete. The wind tore at him, trying to rip the shovel from his grasp and pushing him off balance. After a few minutes, he was panting, his muscles screaming in protest.

“Let me take a turn!” Lin shouted, setting the tin down carefully.

Mike relinquished the shovel without argument. Lin, though wiry, was deceptively strong. He attacked the snowdrift with a frenetic energy, flinging snow behind him in a wide arc. They fell into a rhythm. One would dig until their arms burned and their lungs ached, then the other would take over. They didn’t speak. There was no energy for witty remarks, no breath to spare for accusations. There was only the shared, punishing labor. The wind, the snow, the cold, the digging. And the terrible, tin-bound secret waiting at their feet.

They dug for what felt like an hour, though it was probably only fifteen minutes. The hole was deep, nearly up to Mike’s waist. It was a dark wound in the pristine white of the drift. The bottom of the hole was shielded from the wind, an oddly silent pocket in the heart of the storm.

“That’s good enough,” Mike panted, leaning on the shovel. “No one will ever dig down that far before the spring thaw. And by then…” He didn’t finish the sentence. By then, they hoped the lie would have solidified into accepted fact.

Lin picked up the biscuit tin. He hesitated for a moment, looking from the tin to Mike. In the ghostly light from the flood lamp, his face was all sharp angles and shadows. The wind had plastered his hair to his forehead. He looked young and scared.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, his voice quiet.

He knelt and placed the tin into the bottom of the hole. It sat there, a dark rectangle in the snow, looking small and pathetic. The tomb of their grandmother’s memory. Mike felt a fresh, sharp pang of guilt. This was a point of no return. He grabbed the shovel and began pushing the snow back into the hole, burying the tin, burying their crime, burying the last vestiges of their childhood innocence.

Lin helped with his hands, scooping and pushing the snow, his movements frantic. They worked together to mound the snow on top, to pat it down, to try and disguise their work. They kicked fresh, loose snow over the area, trying to blend it in with the rest of the drift. It wasn't perfect, but in the dark and the driving storm, it would have to do.

They stood back, their chests heaving, their work complete. The drift looked… mostly like a drift. The evidence was gone. A profound and terrible silence descended between them, broken only by the shrieking of the wind.

And then, another sound. Faint at first. A low, mechanical whine, slicing through the gale. A sound that didn't belong to the storm. It grew steadily louder, more distinct. A high-pitched, two-stroke engine working hard against the snow.

They both froze, their heads snapping up in the direction of the winding access road. A single, bright light pierced the veil of swirling snow, sweeping through the trees. It was the headlight of a snowmobile.

They were out of time.

The roar of the engine was the only sound in the world, and in the sudden glare of the headlight, Mike saw his own panic perfectly reflected in Lin’s wide eyes—a secret now sealed between them, frozen as solid as the lake.