Shari Lapena

What is love anyway, she thinks, but a grand illusion? We fall in love with an ideal, not a reality.

Finally, deep into the night, she’s falling asleep at last, when she hears a muffled scream. But sleep has her now, and the scream becomes part of a dream—a nightmare. Someone is trying to suffocate her. In that strange way of dreams, she is screaming loudly even while someone holds a pillow firmly to her face.

Riley wakens suddenly, sitting up abruptly in bed, eyes wide open. She thinks she’s heard a scream—loud and piercing. Her heart is pounding, and she can feel the familiar adrenaline surging through her body. She glances quickly around the dim hotel room and remembers where she is. She turns to the other bed beside her, throwing aside the bedcovers, and is immediately accosted by the cold. Gwen is awake, too, and alert.

“What’s going on?” Gwen says. “I thought I heard something.”

“I don’t know. I heard it too.”

David nods. Bradley hands him the lamp and fishes the appropriate key out of the bunch. He feeds it into the lock and slowly opens the door. David holds the lamp high.

He sees Candice lying on the floor, her scarf pulled tightly around her neck

It’s when they move to the last unoccupied room on that side, across the hall from the room currently occupied by Gwen and Riley, that they find something disturbing. James inserts the key and opens the door, David beside him with the light. James’s face registers surprise, and David turns his attention away from the owner to the room itself. The first thing he notices is that the bed has been slept in

Bradley shakes his head. “All clear,” he says.

“Look,” David says, his voice sharp.

Beverly follows where David is looking. There’s a window on the far wall, near the ceiling.

“Shit,” says Bradley.

Beverly watches, tense, as Bradley approaches and examines the window. She can see that the glass is broken; there are fragments on the floor below

He spies a large book open on the coffee table. He switches the flashlight on, and sees a picture of a nineteenth-century ship locked in the ice. He wonders who was reading it. He sweeps the flashlight around the room and turns it off again. Losing interest, he pauses at the doorway. If he goes right, he knows he will find another sitting room and wind up back in the lobby. He doesn’t want that. Instead, he turns to his left, and moves back along the rear of the hotel. This time he recognizes the door to the woodshed. He hesitates, then pushes open the door

Inside the woodshed, a sudden rattling sound coming from the direction of the door to outside startles Matthew. He whirls toward the sound and trips over something, dropping the flashlight before he can turn it on. Completely blind, he senses something in the darkness, something moving. Matthew fumbles from cold and nerves, clutches the gun and raises it. He fires wildly in the dark

David comes closer until he is almost upon them. Bradley lies facedown in the snow. He’d run out without a hat, and there is an ugly, vicious gash at the base of his skull. Blood is spattered all over the snow.

James looks up at him, his face almost unrecognizable in his grief. “Help him!” he screams. “You have to help him!”

Henry stares moodily into the fire. Three people are dead—and maybe Riley too—but his wife is still here.

He failed, interrupted at the last moment. He had hesitated for too long. Coward! But they might have come back just as he’d finished bashing her brains out, and then they’d have been on him like a pack of hyenas.