All she knew was that in her seventeenth winter – the one where she had left home for reasons terrible and many, a winter where she sheltered sometimes in bus-stops, in public toilets – one day she had woken to find the tracks surrounding her in the snow. A sense of déjà vu. She had started walking, and then she had run until her breath was panicked, flavoured with blood. Now she tasted that panic again, stronger than before.

She hoisted the rucksack up her back. Husband walked beside her, silent, his long legs making more headway. They pushed boughs away from their faces. Possibly it was a mistake, to be going further into the forest.

“Think happy thoughts,” Husband instructed her, because they had found sometimes that this staved it off, and he held her hand to facilitate it. They thought of the first Christmas, with the turkey swaddled in its bacon, and about the week at the beach, where they’d stayed in a blue-painted hut and the sand had washed up to the door in drifts. She thought about kissing the flushed plane of his cheekbone in the morning when he was too hot under the covers. They hummed a soft tune together and she thought briefly, ‘my heart is breaking’, but banished it. No more of that, she told herself. No more.

“What will you do when it comes for me that final time?” she asked Husband in the beautiful days, and he had not shied away from it, but instead had looked at her and said, “I don’t know.” A pause. “Shall we make a plan?”

So they had, but the only possible plan was the same as always, and that was to run.

“We could reason with it,” he had suggested, and she had laughed. How do you reason with the thing single-mindedly in love with obliterating you? She had pictured how it would be: an arc of red, a hole in the forest floor.

“I’ll protect you,” he said, and she shook her head but thanked him.

“When it comes,” she said, “when it gets me, run from it. Because you may have a chance.”

“It would come for me anyway,” he told her. “We may as well go together.”

“No,” she told him, her despair true as a note. She clasped her hands tight over her heart to muffle it.

When the snow seemed thinner, she realised it was the woods becoming thicker, that the boughs of the trees were holding it from them. Husband pooled torchlight onto the ground. She knew he had miscalculated, but when she tripped he was there immediately, hands on her padded body, and they cried for a sharp few seconds, cheeks pressed close so their tears were indistinguishable.

They sat for a short while, even though by now she could hear its breathing. She could feel Husband’s incredulity too. She knew that he had secretly always believed that he would be able to save her, and this made her angry – oh Husband, don’t you know that’s the worst kind of patronising – don’t you know what we’re dealing with?

The big short: meet the winner of Stylist’s gothic short story competition