The Shuddering

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 snowboardedwithout 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.
    Plucking his coffee mug off the deck’s railing, he lifted it to his lips and let the steam drift across his face. The fur lining of his trooper hat shivered in the breeze, the pelage snagging on the bristles of his day-old beard. Fresh laughter spilled from inside the house. He smiled against the edge of his mug, watching his sister through the window as she twirled in the kitchen, a spatula covered in frosting held above her head. She looked just like their mother: fair skin, dark easy curls cut short—the kind of girl who didn’t try too hard. The kind of girl Summer had been.
    Jane lowered the spatula, singing into it before slapping it against the top of a chocolate cake while Lauren stood next to the kitchen island, trying not to choke on her coffee. Ryan had offered to pay for retail space for Janey to open a bakery, knowing that she hated taking cash from their dad; offered to buy all the equipment and even a neon sign in girly pink font— Janey Cakes —but she refused every time. Her students at Powell Elementary were more important to her. She insisted that she was happier supplying sprinkle-covered cupcakes to her kids than to stuffy housewives who couldn’t be bothered to bake for themselves. She loved watching second graders smear sweet frosting across their faces, giggling in sugar-induced ecstasy.
    Lauren spotted Ryan watching them and gave him a ghost of a smile. A second later the music swelled when the kitchen door swung open and his sister’s friend stepped onto the deck with a chuckle, closing the door behind her. She tossed her blonde hair over a shoulder before shrugging against the cold.
    “Jesus,” she said, jerking up on the zipper of her hooded sweatshirt. “It’s freezing out here.”
    Ryan cracked a sideways smile and extended his free hand, swooping it outward as if presenting the snow-covered trees to Miss Lauren Harvey for the taking.
    “Yeah, yeah.” She ducked beneath the thin veil of her cotton hood.
    “You realize it’s, like, twenty degrees out here?” he asked. “Think that hood is going to help?”
    “I’m just waiting for chocolate cake,” she admitted, blowing into her hands before fishing a pack of cigarettes out of her front pocket. “I wouldn’t be catching pneumonia if Jane would let me smoke inside.”
    Had it been Ryan’s call, he would have let her smoke in every single room, if not just to stink up his father’s place, then to oblige his twin sister’s quite attractive best friend.
    Lauren tapped the hard pack against an open palm, her teeth clacking as she shivered. She noticed him looking and offered up a sheepish grin. “Bad habit, I know.”
    “You should quit. Three days.”
    “What’s three days?” she asked, lighting up a smoke and offering the pack to Ryan. He waved it away.
    “It’s how long it takes your body to get used to something. You know how diet soda tastes funny if you’ve never drunk it before?”
    “Tastes like a