Haunting Romantics

It was a sound that woke her, not the quiet chorus of the night that she had learned to sleep through but something that slipped between those familiar noises and scraped against her nerves. The coyotes called from the trees, the owls murmured to one another in the dark, the house sighed as old wood always did, but this sound did not belong to any of it. It was wrong in the way a shadow looks wrong when it moves against the light.

She lay still beneath her blankets, staring up into the dark ceiling, listening to her own breath as if it were the only thing anchoring her to the bed. The air felt thicker than it should have, as though fear itself had weight.

Then she heard it again.

A slow shuffle, something dragging across the boards of the porch, deliberate and patient, like whoever made it had nowhere else to be.

Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard it almost hurt. She did not reach for a candle. Light would make her visible, would make her small and easy to find. Instead, she slid from the bed and let the cold floor bite into her bare feet, grounding her even as it sent a shiver through her. With trembling hands, she pulled a shawl around her shoulders and edged toward the door.

Moonlight spilled through the hallway like thin milk, pale and unforgiving, revealing the stairwell and the dark waiting at its bottom. The house looked hollow in that light, emptied of anything that might protect her.

She stood there and listened.

Footsteps came again, soft but unmistakable, the careful weight of someone who did not want to be heard and yet did not intend to leave. There was no one else in the house. There was no innocent reason for anyone to be on her porch at this hour.

Fear tugged her back toward the bed, toward the blankets she had once used to hide from childhood nightmares, when pretending was enough to make monsters go away. Ignore it, and it will disappear.

But this was not a child’s fear. This was not the trick of moonlight or branches scratching at the walls.

This was a man.

A man who knew her father was gone. A man who had been watching her, inching closer as the house became quieter, emptier, more vulnerable. She did not need to see his face to know who it was or why he had come.

Her gaze swept her childhood bedroom as if it might reveal some hidden door, some impossible way out. Tears slid down her cheeks, silent and hot, and for one aching moment, she wished for her father with the desperate clarity of a prayer.

The doorknob rattled.

The sound cracked through the house like a gunshot. The lock held, but only just. She could not stay upstairs. Her feet found the stairs by memory, skipping the ones that creaked, her body moving on instinct even as her mind spiraled. The knob rattled again, and she froze on the bottom step, every muscle locked tight.

As if he could smell her fear through the wood, the man began to throw himself against the door.

The pretense of quiet was gone now. Whatever he had planned, it had shifted into something brutal and unstoppable. She did not know which was worse, the thought of him slipping inside unnoticed or the violence of him forcing his way in, but she knew neither ended with her safe.

The door shuddered, the frame groaning as his weight slammed against it again and again.

She watched, paralyzed, as her thoughts fractured into flashes of memory. Last winter, the lake, the way the ice had given way beneath her, and the freezing water had stolen the breath from her lungs. That awful moment of burning cold, of being pulled down with nothing to grab onto.

That was what this felt like.

Fear was cold and sharp, filling her chest until she could hardly breathe, until it seemed as if the panic itself might drag her under and leave her there.

A crack splintered through the wooden frame, loud and final enough to cut through the fog in her head.

He was going to get inside.

She could not stand here and wait for it to happen.

She had to move.