January 11, 2026, Chicago’s still locked in winter’s chokehold, the kind of cold that makes your bones ache and your dreams brittle. I’m Carl Kolchak, the guy who chases nightmares for the Independent News Service while dodging eviction notices. Last night, I got a tip that’s got my hackles up: people are dropping dead in the city’s skid row, their throats torn out, faces frozen in mid-scream, and—here’s the kicker—their vocal cords missing, like something plucked them clean. The cops are calling it a serial killer with a sick fetish. Me? I’ve seen enough weird to know this is no human handiwork.

Tony Vincenzo, my editor with a scowl permanently etched on his face, hands me a grainy photo from a homeless shelter volunteer. It shows a shadow in an alley, vaguely human, with too-long arms and a mouth that’s all teeth. The volunteer swears she heard singing—low, guttural, like a hymn from a throat that’s never known air—before a vagrant vanished. I start digging, hitting the frozen streets of West Madison, where the down-and-out huddle in cardboard shanties. A one-eyed drifter named Mack tells me about the “Shiver Man,” a thing that stalks the hopeless, singing them to their deaths. “It don’t just kill,” he mutters. “It takes your voice, makes it sing for him.”

I track down Dr. Elias Crowe, a disgraced anthropologist holed up in a dive bar, nursing cheap whiskey. He’s twitchy but spills about an old Celtic myth: the Sluagh, a horde of restless spirits led by a conductor—a “choir master” who steals voices to fuel its power. “It’s drawn to despair,” Crowe slurs, “and this city’s a buffet.” He mentions a forgotten chapel in the meatpacking district, built over a mass grave from the 1871 Great Fire. Rumor is, the Sluagh’s master was bound there by a priest’s blood, but the seal’s weakening.

I head to the chapel at midnight, my flashlight flickering in the subzero dark. The air hums with that same low, awful song—like a chorus of the damned. Inside, the pews are coated in frost, and I find carvings on the altar: jagged runes that make my eyes sting. Then I see him—the Shiver Man, a skeletal thing with a mouth like a bear trap, surrounded by floating, spectral throats, each one singing in a voice that’s not its own. It turns, and I swear it’s grinning. “Add your song, Kolchak,” it hisses, and my throat tightens, my voice choking off.

I scramble, knocking over a candelabrum, and spot a rusted iron cross embedded in the altar—Crowe’s “seal.” I rip it free, and the Shiver Man howls, the spectral throats exploding into shards of ice. The chapel shakes, and I barely make it out before the roof collapses. The singing stops, but my voice is a rasp, and my reflection shows a faint gray scar across my throat.

Back at the office, Tony trashes my story, muttering about libel and frostbite delusions. The cops blame the deaths on stray dogs. But I can’t shake the feeling that something’s still out there, listening. Last night, I woke up humming a tune I don’t know, and my window was rimed with frost. Chicago’s got too many lost souls, and the Shiver Man’s still hungry.