The Shuddering

Oona bark behind them. He turned to see whether the dog was following them, but the husky was nowhere in sight.
    “April?” Lauren yelled into the wind, but received no reply. They looked at each other, then picked up the pace as they continued down the road toward the base of the hill. They hadn’t taken more than a few additional steps when Ryan caught movement in the trees.
    “Look,” he said, pointing out a shifting shadow.
    “Thank god.” Lauren breathed a sigh of relief.
    “Hey, April, come on,” Ryan called out to her. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”
    But rather than a moody bride-to-be stepping out of the trees and into the road, what sounded like a guttural purr reverberated against frozen pines. Ryan and Lauren looked at each other.
    “What the hell was that?” Lauren asked, her eyes wide. She stepped away from the trail April had left and moved to the edge of the road.
    “Don’t.” Ryan caught her by the sleeve. It was an animal, and it could attack if it felt threatened. “We need to go back.”
    “What?”
    “What do you want to do?” he asked her. “Fight whatever that is with your bare hands?”
    “It’s probably just an elk or something.”
    But elk didn’t move like that, and they certainly didn’t purr.
    Something about that shadow set Ryan’s teeth on edge. His nostrils flared as he pulled Lauren back. “Do you smell that?”
    Lauren inhaled, grimaced, and lifted her gloved hand to her nose and mouth as soon as the scent hit her. The air was stifling, heavy with the stench of blood and death.
    “Come on,” he said, pulling Lauren along. He didn’t have a clue as to what he was going to grab for protection back at the house, but anything was better than nothing. Lauren dragged her feet behind him, her breath puffing out from beneath her scarf. He let go of her sleeve, giving her some leeway, but themoment he did she caught his hand in her own. Their eyes met, and though half her face was obscured by her scarf, he could tell she was spooked.
    “Don’t be scared,” he said.
    She narrowed his eyes at him defiantly. “I’m not sca—”
    The crack of a branch stalled her words.
    A tree shuddered in the near distance, snow falling from pine needles in fat clumps, as though something was climbing upward at a rapid pace. Ryan shook his head as they stood watching, unable to put together what kind of an animal would be big enough to shake a tree like that.
    “You’re right,” he said, his breath steaming out ahead of him. “It’s probably an elk. Rubbing its antlers or something…”
    “And the smell?” she asked, taking a backward step up the slope.
    Ryan didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the answers, and he was getting a bad feeling, like they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    “Come on,” he said, his grip tightening around her hand.
    “But April…” She looked over her shoulder as he dragged her along. And then she stopped dead in her tracks, refusing to budge as she stared back down the road.
    Ryan spotted what had caught her attention right away. It was impossible to miss—a long black scarf slowly rolling across the road, carried by the strengthening wind.
    “She’s there!” Lauren said, and then, just like that, Lauren let go of his hand and started to run, not back toward the cabin, but down the road.
    Ryan’s heart lurched inside his chest. Every nerve stood on end.
    “Lauren, wait!”
    He wasn’t sure what had come first: his words or his stumbling steps. He was running after her, kicking up snow behindhim; but that moment of hesitation, the moment it had taken him to process what was happening, had given Lauren a head start, and the girl was quick. She leaped through the snow like a gazelle, bolting toward the scarf that was encrusted in white, determined to find the girl they were looking for regardless of what may have been out there.
    For a split second, Ryan wasn’t sure what he was so afraid of. They were making plenty of noise; they’d scare any animal that was out there away. But that sour feeling in the pit of his stomach wouldn’t let up. It was a feeling that had saved his ass more than a few times, the most memorable being an avalanche in the French Alps that had buried four boarders but had spared his life. After that, he had never doubted that feeling again. Jane had called it a sixth sense. Premonition. A mental alarm that sounded when something wasn’t quite right.
    Lauren reached April’s