The Shuddering

by Ania Ahlborn

  She plucked a can of tomato soup off the shelf and checked the expiration date: still good, but most certainly not enough.

  “I already looked,” Ryan said, startling her. She pressed a hand to her chest and gave him a look. He responded with a sheepish grin. “But we knew we’d have to swing into town, regardless.”

  “You should have thought of that earlier,” she told him. “Your shortcut is actually going to waste time, not save it, and I don’t think I can make it up the driveway myself.”

  “I don’t want you to make it up the driveway yourself.” Ryan unclipped the bag of cookies and stuck his nose inside. “I need the Nissan for another few months. After that, you can destroy it all you want.” Fishing one of the cookies out, he took an overly cautious bite. She watched him as he chewed, his face twisting in confused disgust. “Sawdust flavor?” He coughed, checking the bag to see what in the world he was eating, and, despite his protest, stuck the rest of the cookie in his mouth before rolling up the bag and tossing it back onto the shelf. “I’ll just leave those right there. Sweet Jesus.”

  “There’s water in the fridge.”

  “Is it gluten-free?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “That’s good,” he said, turning to walk into the kitchen. “Because I wouldn’t want to break my diet.”

  Jane and Lauren shopped while Ryan wandered the produce department, plucking grapes off the vine one at a time, covertly popping them into his mouth as he continued to mess with his phone. Jane had nearly talked him into piling Oona back into the car for the twenty-five-mile trip it took to get into town, but Ryan refused. He wasn’t about to drag the dog back into the car and put up with the hassle of keeping her on a leash while the girls bought groceries. It wasn’t like it mattered what Oona did to the house anyway. If they returned to a steaming pile of crap on the couch, he’d congratulate the husky on a job well done.

  “I think we’re ready,” Jane announced, rolling a grocery cart alongside a pyramid of oranges. Ryan eyed her selections, raising an eyebrow at the amount of stuff.

  “You think that’s enough?” he asked.

  “It’s four days.”

  Leaning forward, he plucked a box of oatmeal out of the mix, giving her a look.

  “For breakfast,” she said.

  “This isn’t even flavored.”

  “You put fruit in it.”

  Lauren stepped up behind Jane, tossing a box of Lucky Charms into the cart.

  “See, that,” Ryan said, motioning to the cereal. “That’s good taste… This?” He shook the box he was holding.

  “I hate oatmeal,” Lauren confessed. “There’s just something about it.”

  “Baby vomit,” Ryan told them. “The look, the texture.”

  “Am I to assume you’ve eaten baby vomit in the past?” Jane asked, snatching the box away from him.

  “You’re in big trouble, pal,” Ryan said. Jane rolled her eyes at the Happy Gilmore quote before he finished it, having heard it a million times. “I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast.”

  Lauren didn’t miss a beat. “You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?”

  Ryan blinked at her, impressed, surprised at the shared joke, both of them trying not to laugh. Ryan finally spit out an offended “no” and they cracked up, catching the attention of the lady working the only available checkout lane.

  “By the way…” He lifted his phone. “If anyone needs to make a call, now is the time. No reception at home.”

  “The Wi-Fi isn’t working?”

  “Disconnected. I checked.”

  “What about the house phone?”

  “Disconnected too.”

  “Makes sense.” She shrugged.

  “Maybe,” Ryan countered. “But I’d rather blame it on pockets so tight they squeak when he walks.”

  “Your dad’s a miser?” Lauren asked, doubtful.

  “Oh, he’s not a miser when it comes to buying stuff for himself,” Ryan assured her. “But if it comes to leaving the Wi-Fi connected, he’s going to cancel it and save himself fifty bucks a month.”

  “You think it’s abnormal to disconnect the phone if the place is up for sale?” Jane countered. “Especially if he’s not going to come back?”

  “If he’s not going to come back, then he should have taken all his crap with him.”

  “So we could sleep on the floor?”

  “Why are you defending him?” Ryan asked, suddenly annoyed. It was just like her, sticking up for that prick for no reason at all.

  “I’m not defending him,” Jane countered. “You’re just being overly critical and a little ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous,” Ryan muttered with a scoff.

  Jane shot Lauren a wry look. “Let’s go. Dinner is going to take a while, and I want to make a cake.”

  With a trunk full of groceries, Ryan guided the car back up the mountain, squinting at the glare of the snow through his sunglasses while Jane tapped her fingers against her thigh and Lauren bobbed her head to Huey Lewis and the News.

  Turning off the main highway, the Xterra bounced along the snowy road that would eventually lead them to the cabin’s steep driveway. Jane held her chin in her hand, watching the scenery glide by—the skinny pines that swayed in the breeze, the roll of phantom mist as the sun baked the top of the snow into a fine, brittle crust. She always watched for animals, hoping to see a family of deer with their noses buried in the snow or a squirrel bounding up the trunk of a tree.

  As her eyes scanned the beautiful scenery, her heart lurched into her throat. There, upon a blanket of virgin snow, was a large swath of red. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. She mutely tapped her finger on the window instead, the urgency of her motion catching Ryan’s attention.

  “What is that?” She finally managed to spit out the question, her finger still pressed to the window. “Do you see it?”

  Ryan slid his shades down his nose.

  “Stop,” she told him, reaching over to the stereo and turning Huey down to a whisper. When the Nissan continued to amble along at the same pace, she turned to look at Ryan with wide eyes. “Stop!” she repeated, this time with more intensity.

  “What? What?” he asked, slamming his foot on the brake. The SUV skidded to a stop, the three of them lurching forward, only to be shoved back into their seats.

  “What is it?” she asked, pointing to the blotch of red. It looked like something had been killed and dragged into the trees.

  “I don’t know.” Ryan shrugged. “Roadkill or something.”

  “Roadkill is usually on a road,” Jane corrected.

  “Are there wolves out here?” Lauren asked from the backseat, wrinkling her nose.

  “Werewolves,” Ryan said flatly. “That or serial killers.”

  “It’s a forest,” Jane cut in, incredulous.

  “Woodland serial killers, then,” Ryan corrected, amused with himself. “They’re the worst kind. They’ve all got cabin fever. And axes. And a dozen kids to feed.”

  “God, totally creepy,” Lauren said. “Wolves like in that one movie, the one with Liam Neeson.”

  “Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Ryan added. “But, you know, with snow instead of Texas.”

  “Don’t start,” Jane warned. She had never been a fan of gore and Ryan knew it. He also knew she was terrified of the forest at night. As a child, he had convinced her little girls were bears’ favorite food.

  “That movie where the plane crashed,” Lauren continued, sounding oddly worried, “and they had to walk through all that snow. Did you see that?”

  “Oh yeah, we saw it,” Ryan told her. “Planes crash here all the time.”

  Despite Jane’s own trepidation, she bit back a pang of amusement. It was a nice change of pace, Ryan teasing Lauren rather than her.

  “There aren’t really any wolves out here, are there, Janey?”

  “Sure there are,” Ryan cut in, not allowing his sister to answer. “Giant mutant wolves that stalk the fo
rest at night, looking for fresh meat.”

  “Stop.” Lauren chuckled, but her tone was laced with apprehension.

  “And what’s safe, anyway; a car, a cabin? What if they have a key?”

  Jane covered her mouth, trying not to laugh.

  “I’m just saying”—he shrugged—“we think we’re safe until we’re dead.”

  Lauren leaned forward and punched him in the arm, and he beamed at her childishly.

  “You’re a true gentleman,” she told him. “Prick.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Jane told her. “He’s an idiot.”

  Ryan opened his mouth to protest, feigning a look of offense.

  “Drive,” Jane told him.

  “Driving,” he replied, turning his attention back to the road, leaving the tract of bloody snow behind them. “The hapless trio, driving back to the cabin…”

  Jane leaned forward, shooting Lauren a look.

  “You never mentioned you have an evil twin,” Lauren told her.

  “But I did tell you he’s an idiot.” She smirked, then twisted the volume knob on the stereo, a saxophone solo drowning out her brother’s laughter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It wasn’t like Don to stay out so long. It was well past lunchtime, and he had left the house hours before. It never took him this long to collect the wood. The little sled he used to pull it behind him could only hold so much. Jenny stood at the window, her fingers dancing against her mouth. Maybe he had gotten winded, injured… She turned away from the glass, shaking her head. Of course he was fine. They’d lived out here for three decades. Don knew know to handle himself. He was just running late.

  It was only after she pulled her cinnamon raisin bread out of the oven that she realized just how long it had been. Crossing her arms over a waist that had expanded over the years, she stared at the ham sandwich she’d prepared for him nearly two hours before and frowned. Don hadn’t eaten since breakfast. No doubt he was starving. Reaching behind her, she grabbed hold of her apron strings and pulled, tossing the plaid pinafore onto the counter before marching out of the kitchen.

  She stopped in the door of their bedroom and stared at the photograph on the dresser—the two of them smiling in front of that very cabin thirty years before, she in a pretty summer dress, he with his fluffy beard and ridiculous Bermuda shorts. Grabbing her coat and scarf, she pulled a hat tightly over her ears, wrapped his ham sandwich in a square of wax paper, tucked it into her coat pocket, and stuffed her hands into a pair of gloves. If he was going to insist on staying out and catching his death, he may as well eat first.

  She grabbed Don’s gun from beside the front door. They’d noticed the wolves early this year, the beasts stalking through the trees in search of prey; yet another reason why Don should have known better. He had his ax, but he wasn’t young anymore. If a pack fell on him…Jenny put it out of her mind as she stepped outside, the snow crunching beneath her boots.

  She looked to the west, squinting against the sun. The snowcapped summit of the nearest peak was clear, but clouds loomed in the not-so-far-off distance. He had complained about his knee the night before, so they knew a storm was closing in. She had been the one to remind him about the wood. The nights had been unseasonably cold, and they had burned through their supply in half the expected time. Had she not mentioned it, there was the possibility that they would have been snowed in without a fire, but at least she would have known where he was; home in his recliner, chuckling beneath his breath at disillusioned antique collectors. She turned away from the mountain, putting the clouds to her back, and began to follow his tracks—footprints flanked by two straight lines left by the rails of his firewood sled.

  It was his usual route. Don hardly ever trekked more than a mile before sinking the blade of his ax into the trunk of a tree. He had learned his lesson the hard way. Thirty years before, when the newlyweds had settled into their mountain home, he had stepped into the first snowfall of the season and chopped down a pine not three yards from their front door. Jenny had screamed at him for weeks after and brought up his indiscretion for years, unable to help herself whenever that ugly stump came into view. Ten acres of land and a thousand miles of timber to either side of them, and he had to chop down trees in their front yard. She had made her demand: if he insisted on chopping down trees rather than buying wood in town, he’d have to walk himself out far enough so she’d never see another stump again. She smiled at the memory. That man, just like her father had been, lacking foresight but quick to learn.

  A half mile into her search, she stumbled across the first splintered trunk. But the cuts were old, and his tracks trailed past it farther east. She continued forward, one hand squeezing the cold barrel of the gun while the other stole half of Don’s sandwich. It was his own fault. He knew she never ate without him.

  Idly chewing and humming beneath her breath, she slowed her footsteps when she caught a blip of fire-engine red. It was his sled, half-obscured by the trees. And while that meant he had to be close, there wasn’t a sound to be heard in that forest; nothing but the quiet whisper of wind and the shiver of pine needles.

  “Donnie?” she called out, but the snow deadened her yell. Holding her breath, she listened for a response, but none came. She stopped next to his sled, her eyebrows knitted together. It didn’t make sense. He’d never leave his sled behind, half-piled with wood. Jenny veered around, trying to look in every direction at once. “Don?!” Panic slithered into her tone. What if he’d thrown out his back, collapsed in the snow? She’d warned him not overexert himself, but he was a stubborn old fool, convinced he was in his thirties instead of sixty-five.

  She left the sled behind, jogging along the footprints Don had left in the snow. Her breath hitched in her throat when his path shifted from straight to erratic, and dread coiled itself around her belly, threatening to cut off her air. She could see it in the way his footprints were deeper toward the toe, the way snow had been kicked out behind each footfall: he had been running, weaving through the trees. And he hadn’t been alone. There were prints all around his, but she couldn’t make out exactly what type of animal they could have belonged to. They were too big to be wolves’, too lean and long to be bears’. They looked almost human, despite their wide, lurking gait. An animal with that wide a step must have been huge.

  She fell into a run as well, following her husband’s footprints no matter how scared she was of the tracks that surrounded them. His name fell from her lips in a gasp. And then she stopped, her eyes wide as she was assaulted by a fetid stink. There was something lying in the snow. An animal. Don’s ax handle jutted out from its skull like a crooked flagpole.

  Jenny crept toward the carcass, her grip tightening around the barrel of the gun as she pressed it against her chest, her heart thudding in her ears. It wasn’t an animal as much as it was a monster, a thin and hairless monster so bony its arms looked like twigs in proportion to its wide, skeletal chest. She couldn’t make out its face, Don’s ax having cut it in two. But she was glad she couldn’t tell exactly what it looked like. Wide at the temples, its head looked almost alien, like a creature that had fallen out of the sky or had crawled out of hell itself. Its stomach was deflated, little more than a hollow cavity covered by thin gray skin. Her breath puffed out from her lungs in short, staggered bursts as she slowly approached, terrified but unable to help herself. It was like nothing she’d ever seen, its long, angular body spread out on the snow. It was its teeth that snapped her out of her daze, reminding her that Don was missing, that there were far too many tracks to belong to this one creature alone. Its teeth were thick and jagged, like the fangs of a massive dog.

  She twisted away, breaking into as fast a run as her sixty-year-old legs would allow.

  That thing was dead, which meant Don was out there somewhere, alive. Alive. He had to be alive.

  But those long, thin, alien tracks followed Don’s footsteps away from the kill. He had fought one of them off, but there had been far more than one. She re
adied the gun as she ran, determined to blast every last one of those freaks off the face of God’s green earth.

  Skidding to a stop, she sucked in a breath and yelled as loud as she could. “Don, where are you?!”

  This time there was a response.

  This time a communal moan rose in the distance.

  A jolt of terror shot through her torso, radiating out to her arms and legs, because it didn’t sound like any animal she’d ever heard. It sounded almost human, like a battlefield of dying soldiers wailing as they waited for death. Her breath hitched in her throat as she staggered backward. That haunting cry surrounded her on all sides, at first distant, but slowly growing louder until it transformed completely. The last thing she heard was a rattling growl. The last thing she saw was a shadow sprint across the snow.

  Ryan stood on the deck overlooking the pines, his coffee cup on the railing, steam wafting out of it like a witch’s brew. The silence of the outdoors was staggering—not a sound save for the whisper of wind through the conifers, those green giants swaying gently in the mounting wind, ebbing and flowing like a waterless tide. The occasional gust made it colder than it already was, carrying the distant groan of what must have been a gang of elk upon the wind. The chill bit at his cheeks and fingertips, at the back of his neck where the air slithered beneath his coat. Jane and Lauren were inside. He could hear them laughing over Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days.”

  Ryan didn’t need music out here. He liked the silence, the soft creak of tree trunks bending in the wind. He snowboarded without headphones, loving the sound of his board carving into the snow as he zigzagged down a steep grade. But if Jane needed Duran Duran to be one with nature, he wasn’t about to deny her. With the possibility of this being their final visit, it was all the more important to make this trip count.