Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 21796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 109(@200wpm)___ 87(@250wpm)___ 73(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 21796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 109(@200wpm)___ 87(@250wpm)___ 73(@300wpm)
I could almost pretend I wasn’t alone.
When the lights finally steadied, I told myself to shake it off.
She told herself there was no one there—that it was all her imagination.
My fingers flew across the keyboard… until I stopped. That sound. Footsteps? My throat went dry. “Okay,” I muttered. “Fuck this. That’s enough for tonight.”
I pushed away from the table, thick socks whispering over cold wood. The windows rattled beneath the storm’s weight as I pulled the curtain aside. Whiteout. The world erased itself with every gust. The lights flickered, warping the glass and everything reflected in it.
I moved to the kitchenette, tipped the rest of my drink down the sink, and tried to laugh. It came out thin, as if swallowed whole by the cabin.
The space heater’s hum deepened, a low mechanical warning. I grabbed a handful of snacks just to have something to do and went back to the table. Typed. Deleted. Typed again. The screen’s glow washed the room in icy blue, bleeding over the beams in the ceiling above.
My phone lay beside the laptop, its signal bar dancing between one and zero like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to fuck me over completely.
She felt him watching as she wrote about him—her story threading itself into her reality.
The storm screamed harder. I pressed my palm to the hollow of my throat, dragging a nail along the dip. A nervous tick I’d carried since I was a teenager watching a horror movie about a man chasing a woman through the woods.
I closed my eyes, counting the beats of my pulse.
I imagined a gloved hand tracing the same path. Rough leather. Cold against heat. My breathing shifted, deepened. A shiver rolled through me—one that had nothing to do with fear.
So this was what spiraling felt like.
The heater clicked off. It made a stuttering death rattle, and silence rushed in to fill its place.
I turned toward the window. I couldn’t have said why, only that something in me needed to look. That’s when I saw it… movement outside.
At first, it was just negative space—snow shifting, shadows layering. Then the shapes thickened and became deliberate, until the dark took form. My pulse slammed against my ribs.
Through the large living room window, three figures stood on the porch, black carved out of the whiteout. Indistinct until I realized why I couldn’t see their faces.
They were wearing masks.
My heartbeat staggered.
“What the fuck,” I breathed, jerking upright, the chair crashing behind me. “You’re imagining it. You have to be.” There was no way the three masked men I’d been writing about could be standing outside my cabin.
I should’ve backed away. Instead, I moved toward to the window. Each step was shallow, precise. The wind plastered snow against the glass until it felt like it was violent enough to shatter and let it in.
The closer I got, the sharper their images became. Broad shoulders. Massive height. Stillness that felt sentient. A strangled sound broke from my throat as I stumbled back, hip slamming against the table. The lamp toppled, bulb bursting in a violent, white flash—then nothing.
Shadows swallowed the room. Only the Christmas lights remained, strings of red and green that made everything surreal.
The storm’s reflection sharpened their silhouettes outside. I kept to the shadows, eyes straining. The wind screamed, but they didn’t move.
“Not real,” I whispered, though my voice betrayed me. “You’re not real.” Yet they stayed, those three masked predators cut from night. Unmoving and watching, although I couldn’t see their faces.
In the faint reflection of the window, I caught my face. Wide eyes, parted lips, breath rushing out of me as fear tangled with something hungrier.
The scene I’d imagined so many times unfolded outside of the window, the ones I hadn’t yet written. A name, the first one I would have introduced, rose unbidden, burning the back of my tongue.
Roman.
And then the power cut out, and the world went black.
2
The silence had claws.
It crawled under my skin, biting, tasting, devouring. The kind of silence that felt too alive to be safe.
The Christmas lights were the only thing that dared breathe color back into the dark. The generator outside coughed and rattled, keeping them alive. Red and green bled across the walls, soft at first, then pulsing as if the lights had learned how to mimic a heartbeat.
My laptop screen dimmed to a ghostly glow. The cursor blinked at a slow, steady rhythm of something patient. Something waiting. I told myself to move, to do anything. Instead, I stood there listening.
The storm screeched, throwing itself at the cabin as if it wanted in. The wind howled down the chimney, a hollow, hungry sound that made the flames dance wild in the hearth. They swayed and bent under the invisible force, stretching long and thin, but they never went out.
Then came the crunch. Footsteps. Not wind this time. Definite. Deliberate. Every part of me went rigid. I counted to three, then paused, and started counting again. Whoever was outside… They were pacing the porch, making sure I heard all of them.