Whiteout

The Harrow Creek cabin has weathered a hundred storms in its lifetime. It has seen hard winters and harder guests, and it keeps its secrets the way old wood does — quietly, in the grain. But the blizzard that descended on the Rockies tonight is something different. It came fast and came total, swallowing the access road, killing the cell signal, and reducing the world outside the cabin windows to a wall of white noise and darkness. By midnight, the nearest town might as well be on another planet. The fireplace crackles. The generator hums. The snow keeps falling. Something else is out there. It has no name, no shape that holds still long enough to be described, no motive that maps onto anything human. It is old — older than the cabin, older than the road, older perhaps than the trees bending in the wind outside. It has noticed the light in the dark. It is patient. It is already listening. The night ahead will not be kind to the people inside that cabin. But the dawn is out there, somewhere past the storm — and so is the road.