Crunch, Pause

"My body remembered how to run before my mind caught up. Every dancer knows this—the way instinct becomes choreography when survival demands it."

I woke to the sound of my own scream dying in my throat.

The car was a freezer. Ice had formed on the inside of the windscreen, my breath crystallising in patterns I could see even in the darkness. I couldn't feel my feet. Couldn't feel my hands. The cold had crept into me while I'd been unconscious—not sleeping, never really sleeping—and now I was shaking so hard my teeth were clicking together, an involuntary percussion that filled the silence.

I fumbled for my phone on the passenger seat. The screen flared to life, harsh and blinding in the darkness. 2:17 AM.

I needed to move. The shaking was getting worse, not better, and if I stayed in this car much longer the cold would do what grief and exhaustion hadn't managed—shut me down completely. I needed to walk, to get blood flowing, to remind my body that it was still alive even if everything else was falling apart.

The door handle was so cold it burned. I pushed the door open and the night air hit me like a blade—sharper than the car had been, cutting straight through my jacket, my jumper, every layer I'd thought would be enough. My breath plumed white in front of my face. The frost crunched under my feet as I stepped out, loud in the absolute silence.

The stars were staggering. Thousands of them—millions—spread across the sky in a spray of light that seemed almost violent in its intensity.

I walked toward the building. Ten steps. Twenty. The cold was already making my muscles seize, my joints ache, but the movement was helping. Blood returning to my extremities. Feeling returning to my hands and feet—painful at first, then merely uncomfortable.

The building loomed ahead of me, darker than the darkness around it. The stone walls swallowing what little light reached them. The doorway a black rectangle, absolute and impenetrable.

I was three metres from the entrance when I heard it.

A footstep.

Behind me.

I spun around. The clearing was empty—just my car, frost-white under the starlight, and the scrub beyond, and the endless dark of the outback stretching to the horizon.

Nothing.

I stood there, heart suddenly loud in my ears, scanning the darkness for movement. The scrub was motionless. The car was where I'd left it. The silence had returned, thick and total, as though the sound had never happened.

An animal. A kangaroo, maybe, or a fox. The outback was full of things that moved at night. I was being paranoid. I was exhausted, terrified, half-frozen—of course I was hearing things.

I turned back toward the building.

And saw him.

He was standing in the doorway.

Just standing there—a shape, a silhouette, darker than the darkness behind him. Tall. Still. So still that for one fractured moment I thought it was a trick of the light, a shadow that my fear had assembled into human form.

Then he moved.

One step forward. Out of the doorway. Into the clearing.

I didn't think. Didn't plan. My body was already running before my mind caught up—feet pounding the frozen earth, arms pumping, lungs burning with cold air that felt like swallowing glass. Not toward the car. Away. Into the scrub, into the darkness, into anywhere that wasn't here, wasn't him, wasn't the thing that had been waiting in the doorway of the building I'd been about to enter.

Branches whipped my face. Thorns tore at my jacket, my jeans, the exposed skin of my hands. I couldn't see where I was going—could only push forward, crashing through vegetation that grabbed at me from every direction, tripping on roots and rocks and the uneven ground that seemed determined to bring me down.

Behind me, footsteps.

Not running. Walking. That same measured pace—crunch, pause, crunch, pause—unhurried, unworried, following me with the casual confidence of something that knew I couldn't escape. Something that had done this before and knew how it ended.

I veered left. Found a gap in the scrub and pushed through it, branches scraping my cheeks, something sharp catching my ear and tearing. I could feel blood, warm against my frozen skin. Didn't matter. Keep moving. Keep running.

The ground dropped away without warning. A depression, a gully, something I couldn't see in the darkness. I went down hard—hands out, catching myself, the impact jarring through my wrists and up my arms. My knee hit a rock and pain exploded through my leg, bright and sharp, but I was already scrambling up, already moving, because the footsteps behind me hadn't stopped.

Crunch. Pause. Crunch. Pause.

Closer now. Or was that my imagination? I couldn't tell. Couldn't think. Could only move, only run, only survive.

A structure appeared ahead of me—the shed, the corrugated iron shed I'd searched yesterday, its walls a slightly paler darkness against the dark. I changed direction, heading toward it, my breath coming in ragged gasps that sounded obscenely loud in the silence.

The shed door was hanging open. I slipped through it and pressed myself against the back wall, in the corner where the darkness was thickest, my hand clamped over my mouth to muffle the sound of my breathing.

Silence.

The footsteps had stopped.

I strained to hear—anything, everything. The blood rushing in my ears. The hammer of my heart against my ribs. The small, desperate sounds of my own body trying not to make sounds.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Then—close, too close, right outside the shed—the soft crunch of a boot on frost.

I stopped breathing.

A shadow moved past the gap in the corrugated iron wall. A shape—tall, dark, that long coat brushing against the rusted metal as he passed. I could hear the fabric whispering against the wall. Could hear his breathing—slow, measured, utterly controlled. The breathing of something that wasn't afraid. That had never been afraid. That didn't know what fear meant because it had always been on the other side of it.

He stopped.

Right outside the door.

I could see his silhouette in the gap—the shape of his shoulder, the back of his head. He was facing away from me, toward the scrub I'd come through. Looking for me. Trying to determine which way I'd gone.

Don't turn around. Don't turn around. Don't—

He turned.

Not quickly. Not dramatically. Just a slow pivot, his body rotating until he was facing the shed. Facing the door. Facing the darkness where I was pressed against the wall with my hand over my mouth and tears running down my cheeks and every cell in my body screaming that this was it, this was how it ended, in a rusted shed in the middle of nowhere with no one to know and no one to care.

He took a step toward the door.

Then another.

And then—impossibly, inexplicably—he stopped.

Stood there for a moment, looking at the door, looking at the darkness beyond it where I was hiding. His face was in shadow, featureless, just the shape of a head on the shape of shoulders. But I could feel him seeing me. Could feel his attention like a physical weight, pressing against me through the walls and the darkness.

Then he turned away.

Walked past the shed. Into the scrub. The footsteps resuming their measured rhythm—crunch, pause, crunch, pause—fading slowly into the darkness.

I didn't move.

Didn't breathe.

Counted to a hundred. Counted again. The silence stretched, thick and absolute, unbroken by anything except the blood pounding in my ears and the small, involuntary sounds of my own shaking.

He was gone. He had to be gone. No one could stand that still, that silent, for this long. No one could wait out a woman too terrified to move. He had better things to do, other places to be, other—

I had to get to the car.

The thought surfaced through the terror with the clarity of pure survival instinct. The car had locks. The car had an engine. The car was the only thing between me and whatever was out there, and I needed to get to it before he circled back, before he realised where I'd gone, before—

I moved.

Not carefully. Not quietly. Just moved—bursting out of the shed and running, sprinting across the clearing toward the car I could see in the starlight, the frost on its roof glinting like something precious, like salvation, like the only hope left in a world that had narrowed to this single, desperate goal.

Behind me, footsteps. Running now. Running.

I screamed. The sound tore out of me without permission—a raw, animal noise that bounced off the stone walls of the building and came back wrong, distorted. My legs pumped harder. My lungs burned. The car was twenty metres away. Fifteen. Ten.

I hit the driver's door with my shoulder, my fingers scrabbling for the handle. Yanked it open. Threw myself inside. Slammed the door. Hit the lock.

The sound of the locks engaging was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard.

I hunched in the driver's seat, gasping, shaking so hard the whole car seemed to vibrate. My breath was fogging the windows, each exhale leaving a spreading patch of white on the glass, obscuring my view of the darkness outside.

Silence.

The running footsteps had stopped. Somewhere between the shed and the car, between my scream and the slam of the door, they had simply ceased. As though he'd never been running. As though I'd imagined the sound of pursuit, the terror of being chased.

I wiped the condensation from the driver's window with my sleeve. Peered out.

The clearing was empty.

The building sat silent in the starlight. The shed was a dark shape in the distance. The scrub beyond was motionless, undisturbed.

Nothing.

I checked the passenger window. Twisted in my seat to look through the back windscreen, my breath coming in hitches that kept fogging the glass no matter how many times I wiped it.

Empty. All of it.

He was gone. Vanished. As though he'd never been there at all, as though the whole encounter had been a nightmare, a hallucination, the product of a mind that had finally cracked under the weight of everything it was carrying.

Crunch.

The sound came from directly beside the car.

I whipped my head toward the driver's window. Saw nothing—just my own reflection, ghostly and terrified, superimposed on the darkness beyond. The fog from my breath was spreading again, obscuring, hiding.

Crunch. Crunch.

Footsteps. Circling the car. Moving around the bonnet, past the passenger door, along the rear bumper. I twisted in my seat, trying to track them, trying to see through windows that my own panic kept clouding.

I wiped the rear windscreen. Nothing.

Wiped the passenger window. Nothing.

Wiped the driver's window again, my sleeve squeaking against the glass—

A face.

Right there. Inches from the glass. A man's face, ordinary and featureless in the darkness, his eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that stopped my heart.

I screamed again. Threw myself sideways, away from the window, away from those eyes. My elbow hit the gear stick, my knee cracked against the steering wheel, pain exploding through my leg but I didn't care, couldn't care, could only scramble away from the thing outside the window that was watching me with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.

When I looked again, he was gone.

The window showed nothing but darkness. The clearing was empty. My breath was fogging the glass again, each panicked exhale another layer of white obscuring my view.

I stayed pressed against the passenger door, my body twisted sideways, my eyes darting between windows. The silence was absolute. The night was still.

Then I heard it.

A soft click. Metal on metal.

I looked at the windscreen.

The windscreen wiper—the driver's side wiper—was lifting. Slowly. Deliberately. As though an invisible hand were raising it from the glass.

Then it dropped back down.

Something was underneath it. A small, pale shape, trapped between the wiper blade and the windscreen. Paper, maybe. Or cloth. Or—

I couldn't see what it was. The fog on the inside of the glass, my own terrified breath, was obscuring everything. I wiped frantically at the windscreen, clearing a patch, peering through.

A piece of paper. Folded once. Tucked neatly beneath the wiper blade.

I stared at it. At the small white rectangle sitting on my windscreen, placed there by hands I hadn't seen, by a man who had been standing right outside my car while I cowered inside.

I should get it. Should know what it said. Should—

I couldn't move.

Couldn't make myself unlock the door, step outside, reach for that piece of paper. The thought of leaving the car—of putting myself back in the darkness where he was waiting—paralysed me completely.

Minutes passed. Five. Ten. The paper sat on the windscreen, fluttering slightly in a breeze I couldn't feel.

The silence held. Deep. Complete. The silence of something that had delivered its message and departed.

But I couldn't be sure. Couldn't know. Couldn't see through the fogged windows, couldn't hear over the sound of my own breathing, couldn't tell if he was standing three feet away or three miles.

I stayed in the car.

Stayed pressed against the passenger door with my knees drawn up and my arms wrapped around them and my eyes fixed on the windows, waiting for a shape to appear, a face to materialise, a hand to reach through glass that suddenly seemed far too thin.

The night stretched. The cold crept back in, my earlier warmth from running long since dissipated. My teeth began to chatter again. My fingers went numb. The fog on the windows thickened, obscuring everything, wrapping me in a cocoon of condensation and terror.

I watched the paper on the windscreen. Watched it flutter. Watched it sit there, white and patient, waiting to tell me something I wasn't brave enough to learn.