“Oh, it’s a wolf,” Leah said.

It took Noah a few seconds to register her nonplussed tone, and he wondered somewhat sheepishly if he were the only one to have panicked.

Brian clapped his hands. “Ay, buddy! Get off the trail!”

Noah grabbed Brian’s arm before he could clap again. “Are you mad?”

Leah looked at Noah’s pale face and laughed lightly. “It’s okay, it knows we’re here. The best thing to do is make ourselves big and loud. We see a lot of wolves back by our home and we’ve never been attacked. Just don’t push your luck and do something stupid like panic.”

Noah looked wildly between them and was slightly gratified to see that May looked just as wide-eyed as he felt.

“Okay. Well, I’ve never seen a wolf before in my life, so this is a very new and exciting experience for me. Is it normal for it to be getting closer like this?”

Leah didn’t take her eyes off the beast. It was better illuminated now, creeping forward with its eyes locked on them. It was smaller than Noah had always imagined a wolf to be, but that didn’t make it seem any less threatening.

“We can back up,” she said. “Not too quickly.”

“The clearing is just behind us,” Noah said. He took steady steps backward alongside his friends, resisting the urge to bolt away. “We can hide…”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence with anything close to ‘in the mausoleum’,” Brian warned.

“Hey, you’re the one who said it,” Noah said. “It would be a good place to hide.”

“Suit yourself,” Brian snapped. “I’ve had plenty of encounters with wolves and I’ve survived all of them without having to hide in a random shady-ass mausoleum.”

“What’s so shady about it? Just because it’s ominously separated from the local cemetery and is unlocked for unknown reasons doesn’t make it of any more dubious character than your average mausoleum. It sounds like you’re making excuses to yourself to avoid being more open-minded, if you ask me,” Leah said.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

They reached the edge of the clearing and drew closer to the building. The wolf prowled after them, not closing the distance, but not letting them draw away.

The group came to a stop in front of the door, and the wolf paused a few meters away in turn, unblinking. After several seconds two more identical creatures slipped out of the woods and padded to the first wolf’s side.

“Alright, no need to dawdle, everybody in,” Noah said, putting the flashlight between his teeth and grasping the handle once more. He pulled it open, heart stuttering as the door only opened just a couple inches before sticking stubbornly on some invisible obstruction. He wrenched on the handle with all of his strength, and the door grudgingly rewarded him with three more inches before the handle suddenly snapped off in his hand and its two bolts clattered to the ground. He instantly shifted his grip to the edge of the door, but was unable to open it further. May had already dashed inside with no hesitation as soon as she saw that there was enough room for her to slip through the narrow gap.

“Is that wide enough for you two? Hope so,” Noah said, and squeezed himself inside after May. The flashlight’s handle bumped the edge of the door frame as he passed inside, knocking the flashlight out of his mouth and making his teeth hurt.

It was at least fifteen degrees cooler in the mausoleum than it was outside, and it was not a warm night. His teeth chattered as he stooped to retrieve the flashlight, which had rolled a few times and come to a stop against a wall. Its beam illuminated May’s lower legs as she stood against the opposite wall.

A moment later Leah popped in. “My idiot brother is so scared to be in the vicinity of a couple of corpses that he’s about to become one himself,” she hissed. She sounded angry, but her expression was tearful.

“Brian!” Noah yelled through the gap in the door. “If you don’t get in here you’re gonna get eaten!”

Brian was leaning against the wall next to the door, peering inside the opening, sweat visible on his temples. “That’s okay,” he said shakily. “I think I’ll just-”

Noah couldn’t see the wolves from inside the mausoleum, but Brian suddenly flinched violently and without a second thought Noah grabbed his friend’s shoulders and yanked him inside. Half a second later a wolf bounced off the wall and turned to growl at them. The beast lunged forward, its gnashing jaws slotting narrowly into the opening before its shoulders caught on the door and it was unable to push further inside. Its maw snapped furiously, panting hot air, its eyes and teeth glinting.

Noah gripped his flashlight tightly, holding it over his shoulder like a baseball bat, then brought it down fiercely on the beast’s snout.

It let out a pained whimper and withdrew just long enough for Noah to pull the door shut. He gripped the handle as tightly as he could even after the door had shut all the way, holding it closed as if the wolf would somehow figure out a way to open it without a handle from the outside.

But ten seconds passed, and there were no audible sounds from outside besides the ongoing howls of the other wolves circling the mausoleum. Noah gradually relaxed and stepped away from the door.

He looked at his friends’ pale faces and exhaled. “Okay. What now?”