The Shuddering

hats and suntan oil.
    Her eyes widened as the Nissan started to slide sideways.
    “Oh god.” The exclamation came from their backseat passenger, and Ryan couldn’t help but grin. Jane rolled her eyes at his glee. He loved freaking her out with his driving, and she’d learned that keeping her mouth shut made him less prone to try stupid maneuvers. But this was Lauren’s first time as a passenger, and her little outburst was enough to have him stomping on the gas a little too hard, the Nissan spitting gravel out from beneath the back tires like a rock geyser.
    “Almost to the driveway,” he assured them, only to have Jane groan in reply at the reminder.
    “What’s with the driveway?” Lauren asked.
    “It’s not a driveway,” Jane said. “It’s a nightmare.”
    “It’s a driveway.”
    “It’s a nightmare, and it’s more of a road than a driveway. It’s like a quarter of a mile long, and it’s all uphill.”
    “Well,” Lauren said, casually crossing her legs as she leaned back in the center of the bench seat. “That sounds promising.”
    The Nissan spit dirty snow onto the road behind it as Ryan stepped on the gas, pushing it up a precarious incline—a slope that was scary to drive up when it was dry, let alone when it wasn’t. The Adlers had had many a mishap on that hill, the worst of which had happened during their final winter break as a family—her and Ryan, Mom and Dad. The road thick with snow, Michael Adler had insisted that he and his two kids get out and push the car that refused to make it up the slick incline while their mother jammed her foot onto the gas. Mary Adler had nearly burst into tears as her husband yelled for her to get behind the wheel. They never made it up that hill. The car caught traction and lurched forward just enough to have Ryan stumbling onto his knees while Jane fell onto her chest, hitting her chin on the frozen ground, nearly biting her bottom lip clean through.
    Jane covered her eyes as the Nissan rambled upward, holding steadfast to her silence, and after a few tense minutes, the car crested the drive and Chateau Adler came into view. Lauren blinked at the house.
    “The hostess didn’t mention the size of this place, I gather,” Ryan murmured.
    A massive stone-and-log home stood before them, tucked into the trees so thoroughly that it was invisible until, suddenly,it wasn’t, its grandiose two-story front entrance dominating its facade.
    “Holy shit,” Lauren said. “ This is the cabin?” She made eyes at Jane, then looked back to the house ahead of them. “This is a goddamn mansion.”
    It was a trophy home—the kind of houses the rich built for themselves as an occasional getaway. The landscape had been dotted with these estates for the last ten miles, no two less than miles apart, thousands of acres of heavily wooded hills separating one from the next. They were regal, inevitably decorated with the finest furniture, with expensive paintings that were far more status symbols than declarations of the owners’ discriminating taste. The same could be said of the Adlers’ chateau. Michael Adler had decorated the place in the style of a hunting lodge, but the man had hunted all of a handful of times in his life. The walls were decorated with mounted heads of deer and elk, of beasts that Ryan assumed his father considered a “catch,” but they had been bought and paid for. It was all for show—as was everything in Michael Adler’s life.
    “Wait until you see it all lit up,” Jane mused. She loved this place as much as Ryan did, though she liked it more when she could lie out on the deck and bask in the high mountain sun. There was something magical about sitting out on the porch, listening to the trees sway in the wind. But she could see why Ryan loved the snow. It gave the place a mystical feel; paradise in the middle of nowhere.
    Lauren stood in the doorway—a side entrance that led from the porch into a massive stone-walled kitchen. She watched Jane disappear down a hall directly ahead of her, apparently on some sort of mission—probably headed for the thermostat. It wascold inside, no more than fifty degrees. Ryan took a seat on the edge of a heavy table to the right of the door, bags at his feet, his phone already glowing as he checked his reception, not seeming the least bit interested in the grandeur laid out before him. But Lauren was stunned.
    “This place is incredible,” she confessed, almost afraid to step farther inside. The