The Shuddering

by Ania Ahlborn

The drips of blood that trailed him like scarlet breadcrumbs assured him that this wasn’t a dream.

The monsters of his youth were chasing him. They were hungry. They were real.

They only come when it snows, his dad had told him, repeating the stories his own father had whispered into his ear in the dead of winter. As a kid, Don assumed it was why he and his family packed up their stuff and left the cabin when the weather got bad. But as he grew older, he reasoned the stories away. Myth. Legend. Whatever he called them in the past made no difference.

relationships were complicated, volatile things. They were riddled with lies, with hidden secrets, ones you only found out about when it was too late.

A future was just that: the rest of your life. A relationship could crumble at any opportunity.

And despite the wail of the music, the last thing Pete heard was the snapping of his own neck.

She wondered whether this was how it felt to be lost, alone, spiraling toward some inevitable fate. The endless expanse of white, the silence, the solitude were overwhelming.

This was impossible, like one of those horror movies that made him throw his hands up and proclaim it was all crazy and improbable and it could never happen; how could something be scary if it could never be true? But there it was—a creature standing in the gray daylight as if to mock his skepticism, as if to say, See? Nightmares do exist.

Its black eyes locked onto Ryan as it fed, challenging him as sucking noises punctuated the short-lived silence, broken by Lauren’s final scream.