Heart beating like a Dyatlov Pass student, Terah groggily looked around. Where was she? He couldn’t keep that damned story out of his head. Snow was falling and although he was limping, he found her trail with the ambient light from under the clouds. Ambient light? They must be near a town after all! Hobbling out, he knew he couldn’t shout. She was only a few feet away, thrashing in the snow.
“Sh, sh, sh,” he hushed, trying to quiet her. “They’ll find us.” Her eyes were open, wild. She looked like she’d seen a demon. “Sh, sh, sh. It’s all right.” He hugged her. She whipped around.
“Get away from me!”
“Mich—Lindsey. It’s me. Terah. Calm down. You’re going to freeze to death!”
Sucking in deep breaths of cool air, she came to herself. “There was someone else in the shelter with us!” Terah turned back. The fire had gone out. The blanket was still around his shoulders. He wrapped her up in it.
“I’ll take a look.” His lighter wasn’t much of a lantern, but it gave enough illumination to show an abandoned overhang. He scooped up his heavy pack and Mich’s smaller one. Kicked the remains of their fire out into the continuing snow.
“There’s nobody there,” he said softly, coming back to her. “There’s enough light to see by,” he said. “Maybe we’re close to a town.”
With Lindsey wrapped in the emergency blanket, they trudged to where the sky seemed lighter. The source turned out to be a solitary street light. “It ain’t no town,” she sighed.
“But they don’t put street lights out in the middle of nowhere. There’s got to be something nearby.”
Through the snow they saw a solitary house. Everything was dark, but it was probably the middle of the night. They crept closer. The house had a barn several yard behind it. “Let’s check it out,” Terah whispered.
If there was a house there had to be at least a dirt road nearby. In the fog they’d ended up closer to other people than they’d supposed. The barn loomed large and threateningly over them. Its planks were weathered and gray. Strange for a barn, it had windows. An unshoveled drive indicated it was, in fact, repurposed as a garage. A beaten up aluminum door faced the house. Conscious that they were leaving footprints, they slunk away to the back. The light reflecting from the bottom of the clouds seemed trapped by the snow beneath and illuminated things just enough that they could make out a human-sized door. It wasn’t locked. Inside the place was filled with junk. No car.
Mich had fished out her flashlight and, careful to avoid the windows, played it across the stuff. “It looks abandoned,” she whispered. In the dim light it seemed to emanate the neglect of objects that have not been used in a long while. Things that had remained unmoved.
“Still, we can’t be too careful.” Terah nervously glanced in dark corners.
“We can spend the rest of the night here,” Mich insisted. “I feel safer with walls around me.”
The junk had the pattern of a mind with some internal logic, but outward indecision. The floor, better to serve as a garage, was poured concrete. The walls had been rebuilt around this pad, but it wasn’t insulated at all. Befitting a previous life as a barn, it was large. The windows had stained paper shades drawn over them that hadn’t been opened in many summers. Making their way around implements for yard care and ejected household goods, they came to a partition that stretched halfway across the width of the rear. “Probably originally a storage room, before the whole thing was made one. Proceeding cautiously, they were glad to find that it had a door. A rusty, empty hasp hung on it, with no padlock. Mich creaked it open to reveal predictably full shelves and enough space for two people to stretch out on the floor.
“We could sleep in here,” Mich suggested. “Nobody’d see us.”
“But if someone from the house comes out here, there’d be no way to get out,” Terah countered. “There’s no window in here and only one door. Where’d we hide if someone came in?”
“Why’d they do that?”
“Our footprints in the snow. It’d be pretty obvious that someone has come in.”
They stood in silence, listening to the wind. It was pretty clear another storm was on its way.
“We don’t know anybody lives in the house.”
“But we have to assume so.”
“You wanna try to find a place to sleep outside? How many people come to a storage room in their garage in winter?” Mich played her light around the shelves. “An’ lookie here—there’s campin’ equipment.”
That caught Terah’s attention. “We could borrow some of that.”
“But I gotta crash for a while,” Mich insisted. “The wind an’ snow’ll hide our tracks.”
Terah found a couple emergency blankets on the shelf. “Just for tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow when it gets dark, we head out. We’ll need to chance the road for awhile so our prints can’t be followed.”
Mich was already wrapped in a blanket and drifting off.
Leaning against the shelves, Terah noticed that they weren’t affixed to the walls. Not wanting to topple them, he slid to the floor next to Mich. He couldn’t sleep. He lay on the concrete listening to the wind.
She didn’t talk about herself, Terah mused. It was clear she had secrets. He didn’t know how old she was—he’d never been good at guessing that about people. She was local, though. And something gave her night terrors. It could’ve been spending the night exposed in the overhang, but, he admitted, it was more likely sharing the same blanket with him. She’d been abused. It was as if an intractable puzzle began to come together and a picture emerged out of chaotic pieces. She’d been on her own for some time, staying in a haunted asylum that kept others away. When discussing where they might go, she knew of a convent a few towns over. How many young women knew to find a convent?
Just as the quality of grayness under the door was shifting to indicate day had arrived, Terah started to drift off. Then he heard it. The opening of the outer door. Someone had come into the garage, and they had no way out.
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