Krampus White Mountain Terror – Ethan Blackwood

A single line, leading away from the cabin. They followed them for what felt like an eternity, but could have only been twenty or thirty feet. The tracks were erratic, stumbling, the steps too far apart. She had been running. And then, they stopped. The line of footprints simply ended in the middle of a swirl of wind-driven snow. There was no sign of a fall, no body. It was as if she had been plucked from the face of the earth.

Beside the final footprint, the snow was torn up, violently disturbed. Two deep, parallel furrows were gouged into the surface, heading away from the cabin, towards the unseen treeline. They were the unmistakable marks of something heavy being dragged away. Lila’s headlamp beam fell on something small and dark, half-buried in the churned-up snow. It was Mara’s datapad, its screen a spiderweb of cracks. She picked it up, her gloved fingers closing around the cold, dead plastic. It was the last remnant of Mara’s desperate, fatal attempt to impose order on the chaos.

Her light swept a few feet further, and then it found the snowmobile. The dark shape of it was a vague, hulking presence in the whiteout. And on its side panel, etched into the bright yellow paint, were fresh marks. Four parallel gouges, deep and clean, that had torn through the metal as if it were cardboard. They were not the marks of a falling branch or a rock.

They were the marks of claws. Immense, powerful claws. Lila stared at the marks, her mind making the final, terrible connection. The claw marks on the cabin walls. The frozen ranger. The hoofprints. The bells. And now this. Mara had not gotten lost. She had not succumbed to the cold. She had been hunted. She had been taken. A sharp tug on the rope pulled her from her trance. It was Eli, signaling that they had reached the end of their tether. It was time to go back.

They retreated, hauling themselves back towards the faint, dark shape of the outpost, their backs to the unseen forest where Mara had been dragged. When they finally stumbled back through the doorway and slammed the door shut, the silence inside was a deafening, funereal thing. Ben was still on the floor, weeping quietly. Three of them remained.

Their number had been reduced by one. The monster in the woods had shown them that it was not a ghost or a legend. It was a physical, violent, and predatory force. And it had tasted first blood. The question now hung in the air of the violated cabin, colder and sharper than any shard of ice: what secret had Mara Baker carried that had made her the first to be judged?

OceanofPDF.com The return to the cabin was a descent into a new kind of silence.

The cold was a physical presence, a thing with weight and teeth. It pressed against the exposed skin on Dr. Lila Voss’s cheeks, tightening the flesh over her bones until her face felt like a porcelain mask. She cinched the final strap on the snowmobile’s rear cargo rack, the thick material of her gloves bunching as she pulled the webbing taut. The metallic click of the buckle was unnaturally loud in the vast, snow-muffled silence of the trailhead parking lot.

All around them, the White Mountains loomed, their granite peaks scraped clean by the wind, their lower slopes choked with a dense, dark fur of pine and fir. The sky above was the color of a fresh bruise, a low, bruised ceiling of cloud that promised more snow than the flurries currently dancing in the air. “Sensors are green across the board,” Ben Carter’s voice crackled through her helmet’s integrated comms system.

Lila glanced over at him. Ben was a decade younger, a wiry ball of kinetic energy and technological optimism from MIT, and he treated the wilderness as a series of data points to be collected and conquered. He sat astride his own machine, tapping commands into a ruggedized tablet bolted to the handlebars.

His gear was brand new, the logos still crisp, a stark contrast to the weathered, functional equipment used by the rest of the team. Her gaze swept over the rest of her small team. Mara Baker, her doctoral candidate, was performing a final check on the tranquilizer rifle case, her movements precise and economical.

Mara was all sharp angles and sharper ambition, her focus on the project so intense it bordered on obsession. The unusual southern migration of a small caribou herd—a phenomenon that defied all existing ecological models—was the subject of her dissertation, and she saw this expedition as the final, critical piece of her research. She rarely looked up from her work, her world compressed to the task at hand. And then there was Eli Tanner. Their local guide and tracker, Eli moved with a quiet competence that seemed to soak into the landscape itself.

He was not checking gear or tapping on screens. He stood a little ways off, near the edge of the trees, his head tilted back as he scanned the ridgeline. His face, weathered and seamed as the mountain rock, was turned towards the summit of Mount Lafayette, which was already beginning to disappear behind a thickening veil of grey.

He wore no helmet, just a worn wool cap pulled low, and seemed to feel the cold no more than the ancient pines that surrounded them. He had said little all morning, a stillness about him that felt heavier than his usual taciturn nature. Lila trusted his stillness more than Ben’s data.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 595dacf74c8ea5e3
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,102,592 bytes (1.052 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 121
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 208.47 minutes
• Total Words: 41,694
• Total Characters: 234,183
• Average Words per Page: 344.58
• Average Characters per Page: 1935.4

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