Alena opened her eyes and looked at the clock. She blinked once, testing her eyelids to see if they were heavy enough to sink shut again, but they remained open. She listened and heard the wind howling through the woods; she could hear the oaks and hickories rocking back and forth, sweeping the night sky with their great leafy brooms. A powerful gust caught the trailer broadside and flexed the metal wall with a soft boom; she squeezed her eyes shut and pulled the sheets tighter around her neck.

The wind began to tease the trailer, buffeting it with sticks and twigs and the brittle shells of old acorns, making ticks and clicks and soft dull thumps everywhere. She heard something land on the roof and slowly roll across—or was it walking? The harder she listened, the more each sound seemed to take on life: The ticks on the walls became tapping fingers; the pummeling wind contained muffled voices; the shadows that flashed across her window became figures stealing by.

She felt a drop of cold sweat run down her back, but still she kept the sheets pulled tight. She stared wide-eyed into the darkness and tried not to listen while she strained to hear even more.

She heard a sound under the trailer, where she had never heard a sound before. It was a thumping, dragging, scraping sound, and it seemed very much alive. A dozen hopeful explanations hurried through her mind: a possum or raccoon escaping the wind; a rabbit or ground squirrel that couldn’t reach its burrow in time; even a tiny field mouse, its size amplified by the thin, hollow floor. Now the darker explanations began to creep into her mind: the hideous, the deformed, the slithering, the nameless ancient fears that only come out at night. She could feel something under her, staring up at her, feeling along the floor with its cold dead fingers for a crevice or a crack.

The thumping stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the room fell silent, except for the sound of air exiting her lungs in short, trembling gasps.

She heard a high-pitched whine from the direction of the kennels. It was the whimper of one of the younger dogs, probably cowering from the wind—or was it something in the wind? She could imagine the dog pacing back and forth in its kennel, its head slung low and its hackles standing on end from fear. She heard another whine—a lower one this time, from one of the older and more experienced dogs that should have known better. Now the rest of the dogs began to slowly join in a rising lament of whimpering moans and howls.

She sat up on the edge of her bed and listened.

From somewhere deep in the woods she heard a bellowing yelp and then an abrupt silence. In the kennels, every dog fell silent.