The Shuddering

by Ania Ahlborn

They were all classics—Austen and Brontë and Sir Walter Scott. Her fingers drifted across Stoker’s Dracula, one of the few she’d read. All those books made her feel small, uneducated, but they also made her inwardly grimace at how ostentatious they were. Not a trace of King and Koontz, of books people actually read and enjoyed.

“If I told you what happened, you would never leave this room again.”