Silver tinsel shimmered under the glow of multicolored bulbs, the kind that hummed faintly when they got too hot. Glass ornaments painted in soft pastels and metallic sheen dangled from artificial pine branches too symmetrical to be real. A paper angel crowned the top, its edges yellowed with age, its smile cracked.
The whole thing was beautiful in that eerie, frozen-in-time way, like the kind of tree you’d see in an old advertisement, untouched by real life or the hands that decorated it.
My buzz kicked in. I took another drink and then started typing. The words on my screen blurred, and not from the vodka. For a moment, the world outside went utterly quiet before the storm howled again.
“God, I’m losing my mind,” I muttered, staring at my drink. “Or maybe I shouldn’t have poured a double.”
I focused and continued with the scene.
The knock came again. It was harder, deliberate. He was here. For her.
And then I heard it again in real life. Three heavy knocks too controlled to be the storm.
The lights flickered—out, back on, then out again long enough for my heart to stutter. The generator coughed, chugged, and the heater sputtered back to life. I sat perfectly still, the cursor blinking on my screen like a heartbeat.
The fire crackled in the hearth, a fragile heart in a body of cold wood and storm. It threw shifting light across the cabin, gold teasing at the edges of the shadowy corners, heat reaching just far enough to touch my legs. The scent of burning pine threaded through the air.
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 teenagerwatching 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 maskedmen 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.
