‘The Cabin’
Aditya Kumar is a driven and multi-talented high school sophomore with a deep passion for photography, music, astronomy, and creative writing. He earned 4th Place (Honorable Mention) in the PTA Reflections District Photography Middle School Division and has previously been published in The Word’s Faire Magazine. Aditya’s artistic versatility extends to music, where he trains weekly in six instruments—Guitar, Piano, Saxophone, Flute, Harmonium, and Tabla. He actively participates in numerous extracurriculars, attending daily meetings while maintaining academic excellence. In addition to photography and music, Aditya has gained recognition in public speaking.
The Cabin
There’s a monster in the woods. It moves on all fours, silent – the crack of a twig, the rustle of leaves, the whistle of a hollow wind – it encroaches its mark. Through the dark, shines the moon, reflecting its white eyes, yellowed teeth. Leaves cover the undergrowth, no footprints. It points its dark mouth to the sky and howls like a scream, like a cry for help, like a trap laid beneath the brush. Then an impossible swipe of a claw, an invisible gnash of teeth. Its eyes shine, two crystalline orbs, its teeth bespeckled red, a smile if monsters could smile. The sound of footsteps, two small eyes looking from the outside in, a child at the edge of the woods. The monster turns her way. She’s too scared to run.
Looking up at the mountains always made her feel like she was a kid again - that feeling of revisiting a place from an old memory and seeing everything for how it really is, smaller, less colorful, as if the world all around had shrunk down gradually over time. It’s the opposite of an ever-expanding universe, collapsing inwards until there’s no space, no light, alone listening to her breath against the sound of the heater in her car. She saw herself as a sort of cartographer, charting the paths through the mountains, drawing an invisible line between herself as a child and herself now, giving that road a name, traversing it forwards and backwards. Always on those last few miles, her phone loses signal, the radio turns to static, so she’s stuck with her thoughts and the wind through the pines and the gravel crunching underneath her tires.
Her parent’s cabin, that little vacation home, the warmth of a fire in the small wood stove in the corner, the lull of nighttime tv, coffee in the mornings, her breath in the air. How she’d sit in the backseat of her dad’s car on the drive up, this subtle anxiety bubbling as if they were driving straight up into the sky, her ears popping, her dad laughing, making her laugh, the feeling gone as soon as they got up the driveway.
But in the night, alone, she knew the cabin was empty, abandoned. It had been over a year since she’d come back here. In the silence of the car, she went back over her todo list, cobbled together from google searches about home ownership and upkeep, not that she was even really aware of what state the cabin was in. She had a couple days to clean it up before the open houses, and then that would be it.
She pulled her car up to the top of the driveway, headlights shining into the thick of oaks and pines that surrounded the small acreage. In the dark, the moonlight shone through the cabin’s bouquet of windows, giving it an ethereal glow, like a halo, like a ghost. The late autumn night felt like the dead of winter, leaves falling to the ground in the place of snow, blanketing it in that slow decay. She could see the dark circles of mold that rose from the ground and lashed out at the logs just above the cement foundation. The cabin looked dead, decomposing, an abandoned building, the kind that if you look at too long, you can’t help but imagine seeing faces in the windows, staring back at you, eyes silently pleading for something.
She put her key in the lock and opened the door. Cold air pushed past her escaping into the world outside. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine her parents sitting there, the warm lights glowing, the crackling of the fire, boiling water on the kettle. Opening her eyes, the darkness, the cold, foreign shadows stretching on the walls in the soft light of the moon. She went down to the basement and flipped the master fuse.
She grabbed some of the remaining scraps of blackened wood and used some pages from her notebook to light a fire in the wood stove. The way her dad taught her over a decade ago now. She watched the flames kick to life sitting in her jacket waiting for the warmth to creep back in.
She went room to room, turning on the lights, bringing small bits of life back to each space. The first floor kitchen was connected to an open living area with the wood stove glowing brighter in the corner and a tv on the wall adjacent to the staircase leading upstairs reflecting a distorted glow of the fire. Each of the two small guest rooms, one of which where she would be sleeping, shot off in opposite directions from the kitchen, both pristinely kept, the beds still made, sheets folded much neater than she could have managed.
The first floor looked closer to how she remembered. It didn’t need much cleaning. She headed back into the kitchen and up the staircase leading to the second floor - a balcony overlooking the open living area and the master bedroom, her parent’s bedroom.
The air felt different in the room - the warmth of the wood stove hadn’t yet reached it. There was a humid smell, like the start of something rotting. She hit the light switch, but the bulbs remained unlit. She went to close the door, resolved to come back in the morning to check it out, but something stopped her as it was swinging closed. Something in that smell of decay didn’t sit right, like the decomposition of some animal that could have snuck in and died.
She clicked on her phone’s flashlight and began scanning the room. Each step forward creaked on the floorboards like a stifled cry from the cabin as if it was mourning. Her light swept past the room, over the bed in the corner, the wardrobe that towered next to the window looking over the driveway, the small reading couch and table in the far side of the room, the oval rug spanning the length of the floor, the closet door. Nothing stood out. She opened the closet; the shape of the roof morphed the small space into something abnormal. A series of clothing rails were drilled into the wall wherever they would fit, still full of her parents’ winter clothes. She bent forward to get a glimpse of the end of the closet, where the roof and floorboards met at an angle, closing off the space at an abrupt edge. She reached through the forgotten clothes; they no longer smelled like her parents, they just smelled old. Her flashlight passed along more dust, things to clean later, but just by the far edge of the closet, she noticed a small door, what must have been a crawl space she had never known was there. There was no keyhole, no door handle. An impossible door that could only lead nowhere.
She stared at the door, the light of her flashlight unable to penetrate the spaces between the small frame. Looking closer she could see it had been painted over, sealed shut. As she reached out, her hand inches from the door, she heard a creak in the floorboards coming from the opposite side of the room. She jumped, her head slamming up against the slope of the ceiling in the small closet. Rubbing the back of her head, she felt stupid, like a kid in her parents’ house, the heat of the fire expanding the wood, the rush of warm water through long dormant pipes, a million reasons for creaks and weird noises.
She exited the closet and stood, dusting off her pants, and that same noise, this time louder, swelled from beneath the floorboards in a prolonged groan. She jumped again, dropping her phone to the ground. It slid against the floorboards a few feet, twisting so that its light shined towards her parents’ bed. Feeling even more foolish, she bent down to pick it up. The black shadow beneath the bed didn’t react to the light, as if it was passing into some hidden cavern, as if there was something underneath waiting.
She made her way over to the bed, and that rotten smell she had grown accustomed to grew stronger. Getting closer, she bent her head below the frame. In front of her at the exact center beneath her parents’ bed, was a large circular black stain, the outsides of it grey against the wooden floor, darkening towards the center into an intensely black dot. She rose back up, and pushed the bed out of the way, revealing the entirety of the stain, roughly five feet in diameter. It was like looking at a cloud, assigning meaning to random shapes and patterns, the black puddles and tendrils shifting in her mind until she could make out the features of a face staring back at her. She put her hand to her nose and mentally jotted down mold removal onto her list of cleanup tasks. She closed the door and went back to the fire to add another log. She was ready for bed.
She usually doesn’t remember her dreams unless they’re nightmares. She’s lying in that same bed in the cabin, only now she’s a kid again. Through the thin walls, she hears the hum of the fan of the wood stove, the dull sound of the tv playing in her parents’ bedroom above her, and beneath that, the breathing of her parents, that quiet snoring of her dad. As she’s listening to those comforting sounds, she hears a shrill scream clawing through the walls of the cabin coming from outside. Her perspective shifts, like she’s watching a movie. She sees the child version of herself rip the covers off her bed, climb out, and throw her shoes and jacket on. She reaches for the door and opens it as that same scream repeats, this time much louder, much closer. She recognizes the sound, a memory of hearing these cries in the night like someone pleading for help, her running outside, wandering out in the woods and seeing two white eyes staring back from the brush, teeth reflecting the light of the moon, the blood, her frozen, every part of her screaming for her to run, her dad sprinting outside, shouting, the monster sinking back into the woods. Her dad wasn’t coming this time.
She watches as the child version of herself sees those two glowing white eyes in the night, the same teeth, a monster jumping from the brush, rushing after her. She scrambles back inside, rushes into her bedroom, slams the door, and hides under the covers. The monster claws at the door, that repeated scream sounding like human death permeates the cabin, she tries to cover her ears. The creaking of the floorboards above as her parents rush down, the screams of real human death, and then quiet. The creaking of the floorboards, footsteps, a voice, rasping, like a whisper, a death rattle, like the wind blowing through a cave, her name at the door, three syllables, the way only her parents ever said it, repeating like a lullaby. “Samantha”.
The wind sent leaves rustling up against the windows as the sun rose above the mountain line lighting up the first floor of the cabin. Sam searched the cabinets and eventually found a tin of Folger’s that she threw into the coffee machine on the counter. It was the same one her parents replaced back at their house with some Christmas gift from an aunt or uncle. It needed a thorough cleaning, the unavoidable taste of coffees past sneaking into each cup, something stale like memories too foggy to remember, where only emotions poke through. A sad cup of coffee.
She sat out on the porch on the hanging swing chair she helped her dad build, upcycled from old pallets that they scoured the old industrial area of town to find. She remembered feeling stupid, literally digging through garbage, but when they got it up to the cabin, hammered in all those nails, drilled the heavy chains into the crossbeams of the porch covering, it all felt sturdy. She imagined a life surrounded by objects like this, imbued with stories, fortified structures, aware of each screw keeping it together.
With the steam rising from her mug, she went back over her list of things to do: purchase cleaning supplies, scour the cabin, text the real estate agent. All of it individually mundane, but together, overwhelming. Sam got in the habit of keeping lists, something her mom always did, like there was some magic spell where if you wrote everything down in one place, confined it to a single page, you limited its ability to shapeshift in your mind until even just a single task was too much. But sometimes a list wasn’t enough.
The road never seemed as steep on the way down the mountain. It was a sunny fall day, one where if you were just looking outside from the comfort of a warm home, you would think it was ten degrees warmer than it actually was. It was a weekday in the off season, no snow on the mountains yet, so she didn’t see more than a handful of cars on her drive over. Her car was the only one in the hardware store parking lot.
She purchased a mop, some cleaning supplies, and an industrial mold remover. She hoped it would work against the jet black stain beneath her parents bed. In her mind that darkness was spreading, she’d go back, and the second floor would be covered, the walls of her parents’ room blanketed, covering the windows like blackout curtains, a chasm of darkness at the top of the stairs, two white eyes peering out, teeth smiling.
She left the store and retraced her steps - back up the road, last few miles in silence, steep S curves leading up to the sky, key in the door, cold air following her inside, bundle of cleaning products placed on the counter. She threw more wood into the stove, the fire died at some point the night before.
Her phone buzzed - it was a number she recognized as the real estate agent. “Hi Sam, how’s the cabin looking?” She stared at the supplies on the counter. “Hi Kim, not too bad. I have maybe a day of cleaning and then it’ll be all set for showings.” “Fantastic! I have three open houses booked for the weekend. There’s already so much buzz online! Can’t wait!’. Sam liked the last message, giving it a thumbs up, ending the conversation. Her phone buzzed a few minutes later once it was clear Sam wasn’t going to respond. “Is it alright if I head over tomorrow afternoon? I like to get a last look at each house before a big weekend of showings plus I was hoping to grab a few more photos.” Sam didn’t think she trusted her to do a good job cleaning. “Sure, I’ll be here all day tomorrow, so stop by whenever.” “Great! Be there around 1pm. Thanks so much!” Another thumbs up.
Sam started with the easy stuff, sweeping the floors, dusting the ceiling fans, stuffing out-of-place items into drawers, out of sight. She went room to room figuring out what would need to be thrown away after the house was sold, calculating how big of a dumpster she’d need, wondering how a truck is even going to get a dumpster up the hills. Tires rotating on gravel with no purchase, the whole thing beginning to slide downhill. A distant crash.
It was surprisingly easy to go through the house, the mechanical nature of cleaning, of righting messes, not taking time to think about how they got there, who was responsible, how each mess was like a footprint in the sand, and she was like the tide effortlessly, apathetically washing it away - the moon pushing and pulling her hands forward and backward on the broom. There was a finality to it though, there were memories in the cabin woven together into this tapestry and she was pulling a loose thread, creating a blank slate, something that would look good in photos for the listing on the website, with tags like rustic, homey, cozy - lies about a home that is no longer lived in. Like a cadaver in a casket, makeup and clay covering the scars, barbed contacts holding the eyelids closed, at a quick glance, at peace, staring longer, the ringing in her ears, a quiet and horrible end to everything, inescapable blank waves of static, the colors blooming behind eyes squeezed tight, blankets pulled over her head, something at the door waiting to be let in. She packed up all the picture frames and placed them in a box in the basement without looking at them.
The first floor was done. No dust in the corners, no long strands of hair lingering between the floor panels, a shine of the overhead lights reflected on the kitchen counters. Sam grabbed the mop, bucket, and mold cleaner and went upstairs. She cursed herself while reaching for the light switch in her parent’s room - she forgot lightbulbs at the hardware store. She still flipped the switch anyways and surprisingly the bulb came to life above her. She opened the curtains, and the afternoon light entered the room, the sun coming in horizontally from the west along the eclipse of the mountainside, blinding from the wrong angle.
She took a deep breath and moved her parents’ bed aside, bracing for the horrible smell. The bed slid on a pivot towards the side of the room revealing the stain. Sam stood confused, the night before she had seen something horrible, but on the floor beneath the bed now was a black stain barely a foot in diameter, black and bubbly with mold growing in tiny spores in a contained circle. It looked like someone had maybe spilled something and just never cleaned it up. Admittedly it still grossed her out, but it was nothing like what she saw before. She chalked it up to the dark, the not-so-dead lightbulb, the heavy curtains, all playing some conspired trick against her. She wet the mop in the cleaner and got to work.
It went quick, most of it clearing away in a single pass. There was just one speck of black in the very center of the stain, a tiny millimeter, that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard she scrubbed. She got down on her hands and knees and used her nail to try and scrape it away. She pulled hard until it felt like the polyurethane of the flooring was coming up itself, but the dot remained. It was as if it had seeped into the wooden floor, becoming a part of it. She’d have to tear the entire plank out to get rid of it, but this was good enough. She dried the cleaned area and replaced the bed, turned off the light, gave the room one last glance to confirm nothing was out of order, and went back downstairs.
Sam thought the whole cleaning thing would have taken much longer. Now the sun had just started going down and she had nothing else to do. Ever since last year, Sam did her absolute best to never idle, to always have something on her plate. Part of the reason for the lists she kept was to make the big tasks seem small, but it also meant she always had something new to focus on. Something to keep her mind from wandering, like a sun she could stare at to keep herself blind.
She turned the tv on, cooked dinner, streamed some random show - all things she did in the foreground while her mind spun in circles. Ever since she got to the cabin, she could feel the world shifting on its axis, turning and turning until everything was upside down. She was an intruder, she didn’t want to be here, it felt like the cabin didn’t want her to be here. She could see herself, sitting on the couch, eating pasta, the glow of the tv reflecting in her eyes, autonomous actions carried out by someone else, a different person at the steering wheel careening through long winding roads up and up into the sky or over the edge, tires skipping over a median, crashing and falling. She blinked back into the room, into herself, as a scream shattered the night sky, a scream from a nightmare.
There was something outside the cabin. Sam looked through the glass of the front door beyond her reflection lit by the stuttering glow of the tv into the woods. A few dozen feet beyond the door, she saw its eyes, its teeth curled into a snarl. She could see its heavy breath in the cold, a steady panting. It was too far away, but the rhythmic swirls of mist around its nose carried the idea of the sound through the glass, getting louder and louder in her mind until it drowned out the tv, until there was just the ringing in her ears and the breathing. She wasn’t moving, she knew that it could see her and that the second she moved it would too, like a reflection in a mirror. Her dad kept a gun in the basement. She knew it’d still be there. The monster took a step forward. The darkness moved with it. She ran for the basement stairs.
The pounding of her own footsteps, her heartbeat in her ears, the cacophony melted into a chaotic rumble that was indistinguishable from the slam of the monster against the door, her footfalls on the steps falling in time with the sound of the wood bending against the doorframe. The lockbox, the code, her dad’s old revolver, bullets haphazardly tossed around the inside of the box. He showed her how to fire it a few years ago. The sound of wood splintering above her.
“Now that you’re going off to college, you’re gonna need to learn how to fire a gun…at the boys who are gonna chase you around…so I don’t have to do it myself.” Her dad spins the revolver cylinder, holding it in his hands trying to impersonate a cowboy from the westerns they used to watch when she was younger. Sam laughs uneasily, being around guns always gives her a bit of anxiety, and her dad knows that, hence the bad jokes.
“Here’s the deal, kiddo. We’re gonna head outside, I’m gonna nail one of these targets against a tree.” He holds up a paper target as if he had rehearsed this, Sam thinks of flight attendants giving a safety spiel. “You’re going to take ten, no twenty steps back, and you’re gonna hit this target. Then we’re gonna get ice cream and watch a movie, sound like a deal?”
It’s the summer before college, soon Sam would be moving out, moving in, classes, new friends, the whole college deal. She was never a person who liked to try new things. College was what she was supposed to do, so it’s what she was going to do. She spent most of that summer in her room, reading books, watching shows, staring at the ceiling. This was her family’s last trip to the cabin before she’d start school. Late August feels like autumn in the mountains.
“Sure Dad, sounds good.”
He nails the target against the trunk of a wide elm. Sam walks with him up to the tree, noticing a few scars here and there where bullets had burrowed into the bark. Her dad wasn’t a gun person, but he got bored and fired it off every once in a while when they were up here, much to her mom’s dislike - the loud bangs causing her to lose her spot in whatever she was reading.
“Alright, kiddo, twenty steps back.” He walks with Sam as she counts off her steps, at twenty she turns back around, the target feels much smaller.
“First things first about shooting a gun, you have to keep a tight grip. This right here,” he adopts an old western style accent at this point, ”is a Colt .45 Revolver, the gun that won the west.” Accent gone now. “Problematic history aside, it’s a reliable pistol, but it has a whole lot of kick, so when you’re pulling the trigger, think of it more like squeezing your hands. I’m going to put one bullet in the cylinder, so don’t worry about accidentally firing twice. What I want you to do first is just point the gun downrange, I mean, across the backyard, to the hill behind the tree. Don’t bother aiming too much, just pull the trigger so you can get a feel for it. Oh, and your mom would kill me if I didn’t give you these.” He hands her a pair of earplugs from the container that her mom uses when her dad snores too loud. And then he gives her the gun.
Sam is surprised by the weight of it. Her dad subtly tenses up a bit as he hands the gun over, his smile momentarily becoming more painted on than authentic. Her hands are sweating just a bit. She copies his grip, points the gun towards the hill, and pulls the trigger. Her eyes close against the bang and the gun jumps, pulling her arms up towards the sky. The bullet careens invisibly into the dirt somewhere beyond the target.
“Great! Now, I’m going to load one more bullet and this time you’re actually going to aim at the target.” Sam hands the gun back over, a faint sense of shock over the explosion she held in her hands. She takes back the loaded gun and aims at the target. She hates the cold metal, the feel of the plastic handguard, how much power there was in her hands to take away, like that feeling of staring off the edge of a cliff, that thought of what would happen if you jumped, the fear of acting on it. She exhales as she squeezes, something she saw in a movie, and closes her eyes just before the explosion.
“Oh my god, Samantha, that’s a bullseye!” Sam hands over the gun, with the intent of never touching one again in her life. She smiles at her dad, his enthusiasm contagious, that brief seriousness gives way back to his goofy self.
Her dad thought that maybe shooting a gun might be a bit of a catharsis for Sam. He knew it calmed him down a little when he was feeling stressed out, that feeling of power that comes with pulling a trigger, that sense of being able to do anything. Sam didn’t feel the same way, but her dad was trying, and that meant something.
She wished she could be better, that she could fend for herself, that she didn’t still need to go crying to her parents when things went wrong, that she could just be a normal adult. That a few years later into college, she didn’t call them asking to come home, that they didn’t pick up the phone, that they just forgot her, that they were still out there somewhere, happy.
Sam walks back to the cabin, one final crack as her father fires a shot into the tree bark. The wood splinters beneath the target.
Another bang. The pounding in her ears continued to grow as she forced a few bullets into the cylinder. Her breathing was rapid, eyes wide, frantically recalling her dad’s lesson. With the click of the cylinder back into place, the cabin groaned, she could hear wood giving way, the slam of door hinges tearing from their housing. And then silence. She was finally able to parse the sound of her heartbeat from the pounding at the door. She stood quiet in the basement, staring at the top of the stairs for any sign of movement.
She waited a few more minutes before going upstairs, holding the gun aloft, ready. At the top of the stairs, she pointed the gun at the front door, wide open, the cold air rushing inside. She paused again, listened for movement, nothing. She slowly advanced to the door, expecting a splintered mess, but it was still held on its hinges; she was able to swing it closed with no issue, as if whatever was trying to get inside had the key, had opened the door to its own home.
With the door closed, she went room to room, checking the windows, making sure everything was locked. She peeked outside through the glass, watching for any signs of movement. There was nothing, no eyes watching from the shadows, no teeth gnashing in the dark. She thought for a second she had imagined the whole thing. She searched for any evidence of the chaos, of the monster, but there was nothing. No marks on the door, no scratches on the floorboards. She pulled a chair aside and sat down staring unblinking through the glass of the door at the edge of the forest, through that darkened doorway into the cold world outside. She watched for hours until she eventually fell asleep. Nothing stirred in the woods, only her translucent reflection in the glass of the front door, this version of herself watching from outside, a gun in her lap.
Sam woke up early the next morning, her back aching from her awkward position in the chair. At some point the gun had tumbled onto the ground. She stared at it, trying to recount what happened the night before. She asked herself how sure she was of what she saw. There were bears out here. Her parents had caught them on camera multiple times, and she knew bears had a knack for getting into things, but she knew what she saw, or what she thought she saw, was not a bear. It crawled on four legs, complete darkness except for eyes and teeth, how it seemed to disappear the closer you tried to look at it, something not quite right you catch in your peripheral vision, like a coat hanger in the corner, that strange somehow human shape, something you feel stupid about once you actually look. She didn’t feel stupid though, she felt scared.
She checked her phone; it was almost dead. The time showed 12:14pm and there was text from the real estate agent. “On my way over now! Be there in 30 minutes!”. The message was sent at 11:45am. She almost screamed at the sound of knocking at the door.
Sam looked down at the gun she held in her hand and stuffed it in the junk drawer of the kitchen in a panic. She caught the reflection of her face in the mirror, heavy bags under her eyes. She practiced a smile, it didn’t look right, tried it again, this time better. She walked over to the door still holding that smile, waved at the realtor through the glass and opened it.
“Hi Sam, so great to finally meet you! What a lovely home!” Sam tried to match the enthusiasm a bit, “Great to meet you too, Kim! Come on in!”. Kim thanked her and entered the cabin. Her head was on a swivel as she took in the state of everything, calculating the best angles for photos, deciding on what should be strategically left out. She had already taken the outside shots, choosing an angle looking up at the cabin to hide the black mold creeping up the base of the exterior against the slope of the hill. Little tricks and harmless lies; ‘you’re selling the idea of the house, not just what’s physically there’ - part of a quick pep talk she gave herself on the way to new houses. “Care if I walk around and take some photos?” “Not at all, just let me know if I’m in your way.” Kim could tell something was off with Sam, maybe drank too much the night before, but she wasn’t one to judge, she knew what happened to the owners of the house, to Sam’s parents. It was a small town; she was one of three real estate agents operating there. She was the one who sold them the house in the first place, almost two decades ago now. Such nice people, she thought. So sad, she thought.
Pictures of the guest bedrooms, surprisingly clean. Kim had lugged over a chair from the dining room table asking Sam, “Mind if I borrow this?”. She was sitting on the couch staring at her phone, absent, Kim could see the screen wasn’t even on. “Sure”. Kim decided to get the photos quickly and be on her way. Scaling the chair, finding the right angles, catching the light exiting the windows in just the right way, carefully modeling the shape of the curtains - this was her favorite part of the job. She really did love houses, seeing how people lived, what they collected, what they saw as valuable, what they chose to capture in picture frames. There were no picture frames here.
The downstairs was done. She already knew the basement was unfinished and decided it’d be best to skip it for the photographs - some blurb in the description about ample storage space would work. She climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, dining room chair in tow. Sam looked up from the blank screen of her phone as she heard a yelp from Kim upstairs.
Kim stared at the blackened stain on the floorboards. It emerged from underneath the bed like a monster from a child’s nightmare and scraped across the floor all the way over to the closet. It traversed in elongated stripes like footprints in the snow, like dragging feet. Her initial shock subsided, she’d sold some homes in terrible shape before. She’d always feel bad about it after, but tried to tell herself it was the buyer’s responsibility to be thorough, not hers. The stain matched the mold at the foundation of the house, which she knew was pretty common in aging log cabins. Maybe it had somehow traveled up the walls and found a new home in the room. It didn’t make any sense, but it was just her job to sell the house. She moved the chair off to a corner, repositioned the area rug to cover the majority of the stain, and grabbed a couple shots that would require a keen eye to discern that anything was awry. She turned off the light, glancing back at the closet, this feeling of being watched. She didn’t believe that houses could be haunted. She had never sold a dead person’s home before though.
She placed the chair back at the dining table. Sam hadn’t moved at all, phone still out, avoiding her. Kim understood, her father had passed away last fall. She couldn’t imagine losing him when she was Sam’s age, let alone her mother as well. She saw a newspaper article about it; it was a small town, all the details were there, too much if you asked her.
“Hi Sam, all set with the photos. Not sure if you saw, but you have a bit of a mold problem upstairs. I don’t think it’s anything a good clean won’t fix. I can someone over in a couple hours.”
Sam finally caught Kim’s eye, “No problem, I can fix it.” For some reason, Sam felt responsible for the stain, like it was her fault that it was there, and the idea of another stranger in the house felt like an intrusion. She wanted to be alone. “I have some cleaner in the basement.”
Kim wasn’t convinced that the stain would be gone when she came back for the open house, but she knew Sam wanted to be alone and that would have to be enough. Plus, she could always use that huge area rug to cover most of it. “Sure, sure. I’ll get out of your hair then.”
Something pulled on Kim as she was leaving. “And listen, I just want to say, I’m so sorry for your loss. I hope you have some wonderful memories in this home.” She paused, Sam looking at her blankly. Sam had heard it all, a million times since the accident. Empty words, even from the people she really cared about. When a pain is so severe, people lose the ability to relate to it, they can just stand nearby watching you writhe, placing a hand on your back. Those stale words, soured over time, she hated hearing them, she hated being reminded. She stared back at her phone, black screen, after a pause, “Thanks.” Kim got the hint, “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow for the first showing. We’ll have an offer in before you know it!” Sam nodded, the charade over, “See you tomorrow.”
Kim was back in her car, starting the drive down the mountain either in silence or listening to radio static. Sam finally got up from the couch. She went up to her parent’s room expecting to see the same stain as yesterday, ready to use the rest of the mold cleaner. She dropped the mop when she saw the floor. The black stretching from underneath the bed to the closet, two tracks, like marks left from screeching tires. The wreckage from a crash.
Sam texts her mom, “I can’t do this. I just need to come home.” Her mom’s worried, Sam’s always been a strong girl, capable. Something like this out of the blue meant things were really wrong. They hadn’t talked in a while. Sam was busy preparing for finals, she was swamped at work. She thought they existed in this mutual reality where silence meant everything’s great, all going according to plan. She calls her husband, tells him they were going to need to make a trip upstate. She calls Sam, the phone ringing and ringing, then a voicemail message. A few tries, then a text message, “Okay Samantha, your dad and I are on our way there now. Please call me when you get this.”
Sam is asleep, she pulled an all-nighter studying and was finally feeling the effects. It was like when she sent that text to her mom this invisible weight had been lifted from her shoulders, admitting she was still a kid, letting the grownups handle the stress of adulting. Sleep hit her almost instantly. Sam is in her senior year of college, finals are a few days away. Her grades had slipped all year, and one bad final meant another semester, even more loans she couldn’t pay off. She doesn’t have a job lined up, she interviewed for a few different positions, each one going worse than the last – small talk, some bullshit about school projects, my greatest weakness is that I’m about to fail out of my last semester, my greatest strength is that I can still call my parents when I fuck up.
Sam wakes up after a few hours and reaches for her phone. A few missed calls, a text from her mom. She calls her mom back, straight to voicemail. She tries again. After a few minutes she tries her dad, same thing.
Both of their phones were destroyed in the crash. A truck merged without checking a blind spot, the driver essentially asleep at the wheel after a long shift. Her parents’ sedan was pushed against the median guardrail first crunching between the weight of the truck and the steel guard before catching and flipping over the median. The car dropped thirty feet and rolled end over end down the steep hill between the eastbound and westbound interstate. Her father wasn’t buckled and was ejected. The police report Sam reads a few days later says the medical examiner’s opinion was that he died instantly, trauma to the head. The other part of the report, her eyes sort of glazing over, the description of the fire that started as the engine sparked against fuel leaking through the punctured tank into the passenger bay of the crumpled car upside down in that forbidden area between the highways. Her mother had succumbed to her burns. She was buckled up, they don’t tell Sam if her mom was conscious, she doesn’t ask.
Sam gets out of her finals, all of her professors are happy to give her a passing grade. She’s handed along from person to person, another so sorry for your loss, another I can’t imagine what you’re going through, another let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, like a conveyor belt of misery. Sam doesn’t usually remember her dreams, but in that couple hour long nap where her parents were killed on the interstate, she was with her mom and dad. They were up at the cabin. Sam had already graduated, and they were talking about jobs and what was next with her life, and they just kept saying that they were proud of her. It was the first non-stress dream she had in a long time, up in the cabin, fire crackling in the corner, feeling happy.
The funeral goes by, then a few weeks, then a few months. Time passes unnoticed. She tries to recall the color of the flowers on the caskets, how many people had been there. None of it stuck, as if her ability to make new memories died with her parents. And then she’s driving north to the cabin, she can't keep up with the payments and she knows she can’t live there herself, not with the memories, so she decided to sell it. She reached out to the realtor with that put-on voice, as if the news of her parents hadn’t yet made its way to this quiet town. Maybe she can pretend for a little bit. Every second of the drive up feels like she’s on her way to the cabin to meet her parents for a quiet weekend together in the mountains. The cold, dark house sitting on top of the hill annihilates her, a broken heart in a broken heart in a broken heart. A hollow cavity in her chest, parts she ripped out to not have to feel anything anymore. An empty cabin is just an empty cabin. She remembers the orange chrysanthemums on her mom’s casket and the purple hyacinths on her father’s when she opens the door.
Sam was crying, dragging the mop over the black stretched out across the floor mingling with the shadows through the windows. She didn’t know how long she had been standing there. The day was gone, she wasn’t sure if the stain had grown or not. It stared back at her. The tire tracks led to the closet. She dared not open it. The mop moved back and forth, the chemical smell of the cleaner.
The stain was gone for the most part, a tiny dot persisted in the center. Sam felt exhausted, scared to go to bed. Another waking nightmare, reality that isn’t reality, in a house that isn’t a home, a cabin that’s been swallowed by tragedy, digested, the logs, the floorboards, the foundation, like discarded bones. One more day, she’d probably have an offer after the first showing. Probably another landlord, but whoever could take this from her could have it. How real this terror felt, whatever space her parents left behind was quickly filled with horror, that black mold creeping in. Their outlines, ghosts in darkness, silent, staring, on the opposite side of some veil she couldn’t cross. She’d hire a cleaning service once it was sold, everything inside in dumpsters. Her mom and dad were buried, but they were somehow still in the house.
Sam got through the rest of the night, checking off her list, each action leading to subsequent actions autonomously - cooking dinner, washing and drying the dishes, putting them back in the cupboards, checking on the fire, staring too long at the shadows in the corners until they’re moving, growing and collapsing, like heavy breathing, the threshing of silent weeping, the pulsating of a cocoon, what’s inside ready to escape.
After Kim had left, Sam retrieved the gun from the junk drawer. The weight of it in her hand made her feel like she was losing her mind - it had to have just been a horrible nightmare, the dark playing tricks on her, her memories punishing her, but there was enough of her that was still terrified by those eyes she saw or imagined staring back in the dark. There was a part of her that was still staring at those eyes. She kept the gun in her waistband, it didn’t make her feel much safer, but it reminded her of her dad.
The house was spotless minus some careful maneuvering of the upstairs bedroom rug over the tiny remaining stain. It was ready for showings. Sam laid in bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. She recalled a time when she was a kid, she had this horrible nightmare of watching her parents die. It must have spawned from some violent movie too close to bedtime. It felt real, she remembered crawling out of bed, poking open her parents’ bedroom door, seeing the bedsheets rise and fall with their quiet breathing. She was scared to go back to sleep for what felt like months, scared to go back to that dream reality where her parents were gone, where she was alone. And now she was staring at that same ceiling in the same bed, alone in both worlds. There was nowhere to escape to, no place where things went back to normal. Eyes drifting closed, memories like stop motion films, some invisible hand arranging the characters one moment at a time, the movements jittery, expressions manipulated in clay, the time between each frame expanding, the moments lost, reconstructed from guesses, or gone entirely.
Sam is sitting in the back of her parents’ car. She can see her mom and dad’s reflection in the rearview mirror, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. They’re staring straight ahead out into the darkness illuminated by headlights. They look concerned, they’re not talking, silence except for the road moving underneath them. Mom, Sam says, Dad. They don’t respond, they keep their eyes forward, her dad’s hands on the wheel, constant speed. Sam gets louder, Mom. Dad. Look at me. She reaches out towards them, her hand stopping against some invisible wall like a taxicab barrier. Louder. Stop the car. She’s screaming, she hears her own voice outside of herself. Like she’s in another room, sound echoing through the walls. She’s banging on the backs of the seats, punching, kicking, begging them to stop, to turn around. I’ll be okay. Go back home. Please go back home. The car shaking like an earthquake, Sam stops, stares ahead, following her parents’ eyes. Beyond the glow of the headlights, two white specs growing, a half-moon smeared across an invisible face, wide eyes, getting closer. Stop. The monster steps into the light, the beam of the headlights bending around it. Her parents see it, she sees the fear in their eyes. Her dad pulls the steering wheel, the car flips, the world upends.
Bang. Sam is upright in bed, sweat dripping down her forehead. The noise in her dream echoes inside the cabin. She can tell the front door has swung open, she hears creaking floorboards, something crossing the kitchen, climbing the staircase, entering her parent’s bedroom. She quietly climbs out of bed, grabbing the gun from the nightstand. The noise above her stops. She waits, minutes, maybe hours, still, no sound. She exits the bedroom, gun held aloft in front of her. The light of the moon, full, shines through the windows illuminating the entire cabin in a pale blue light. The front door is wide open, the curtains are pulled back from every window. Her eyes trace the staircase and see the upstairs bedroom door ajar. Darkness from inside, the light of the moon falling short of the threshold. What she’s feeling isn’t fear, it’s morphed into some form of despair, the dread of finding what’s waiting for her, of confronting a ghost, a monster.
Up the stairs, the light switch doesn’t turn on. Her eyes, adjusted to the darkness, scan over the room - curtains pulled over windows, the bed where she left it, the wardrobe, the reading couch. On the floor, the area rug is pulled away. She sees the mold, laid out in two sets of footprints, she can make out the distorted shapes of heel, toe, and sole. They traverse the floor from under the bed to the closet. The door is open.
She slowly makes her way across the room, gun leading her, poking into the closet. She feels cold air flowing, as if it’s breathing. She readies herself for whatever confrontation hides behind the clothes. She tears them apart and points the gun. She sees the empty space where the closet slopes into the roof. The small impossible door is open. Cold air seeps through, accompanied by darkness.
She watches her body crawl through the closet, as if she’s in the backseat watching through the windshield, someone else driving. She reaches out into the darkness of the small doorway. She pokes her head in, looks up and down for a ceiling, a floor, neither come into view. At the precipice of this fathomless cliff is the rung of a ladder, wooden planks hastily nailed together along the battens, descending downward. She watches her body extend a foot over the edge, the cold enveloping her, another foot, a hand. The dull light of the moon through the open closet door disappears as her head ducks through. Darkness, lower, counting each step, one, two, a dozen, twenty, thirty, as if she’s descending not through the cabin, but into the mountain itself. The faint light of the small doorway is almost a pinprick. A quiet clicking noise, the light of the doorway disappears. Like flipping a switch, apathy swallowed by fear, the feeling of being watched, a million eyes in the darkness of this unending space all pointing inwards. Her foot reaches for the next plank finding only air, her hands slip. She is falling.
Like falling asleep. In complete darkness, she isn’t sure if her eyes are open or closed, if the air is rushing by her or her through it. After her parents died, she spent as much of her days as possible in bed, the grief, the sorrow, didn’t follow her in her sleep. That sleeping world overtook the waking one. The indifference, the solace, how much sleep was like death. Sleep used to be a small prayer, a two-way ticket into that realm beyond life, like visiting a hospital bed. Looking down at a loved one, time crawling over their skin, weighing heavy in their breaths, seeing yourself in their face, looking into the future. A sheet over a figure in the basement of a morgue, a hand pulling it back, your parent’s face, your own face. That dreaming self silently acknowledging the fate that awaits it. An alarm clock pulling you away, not time yet. Falling and falling, falling asleep.
A body at the bottom of the world stirs. Sam feels the cold ground against the side of her face and opens her eyes. Everything is lit with a faint pale light with no apparent source. She is lying down at the end of what looks like a hallway with no doors. She sits up. The ceiling is like a starless sky with no end or beginning; the walls of the hallway stretch upward disappearing out of view. As she stands, she checks her pocket for her dad’s gun. It’s not there. She scans the ground around her. The gun is gone. The cement floor reminds her of an unfinished basement, the forgotten foundation of an old building. Her eyes follow down the hallway, the surreal nature of this liminal space. A trancelike lassitude, she’s awake, but she still feels as if she’s asleep. She can make out an end to the hallway roughly 100 yards away, and at the limit of the space is what appears to be a distorted figure staring back at her. Sam walks forward slowly, eyes locked on the figure in the distance.
As she approaches, she sees the figure in the mirror gaining clarity, someone is staring back at her, the whites of their eyes coming into focus. Closer, faint movements become more apparent, arms swaying at its side, feet shuffling as if impatient. Closer, she recognizes her own hair, the clothes she went to bed in, her face staring back at her. The expression is wrong. Red lines streak down her face like scarred tracks of tears, her lip trembles as if she’s holding them back. Ten steps away, she nears the end of the hall. The movements in the mirror seem to lag her own, as if on playback. The figure is almost see-through, the ghost of an image, like an old VHS tape recorded over itself. She sees that the hallway doesn’t end here, to the left exactly at a right angle is another hallway. She reaches the mirror. It’s tilted at a 45-degree angle, in a way that it doesn’t actually face her, the reflection isn’t her own. The mirror faces down the next hallway, slightly shorter than the first. She sees the same figure waiting in the distance. She stares directly into the mirror, sees her own eyes looking past her, as if trapped in a memory, tears run down her face along the red lines, like acid.
She heads down the second hallway, faster now, the figure in the distance becoming clearer with each step. She notices the same expression as before only now her reflection is darker, as if the source less pale blue light that engulfed the hallway had begun to deteriorate around that version of herself - her features beginning to be swallowed by darkness. She reaches the end of this hallway, sees the same mirror as before titled to face down a third hallway, even shorter than the last.
She breaks into a run, another figure in the distance, swallowed more and more in darkness, another mirror, another left turn. She spirals inward, the cold air stinging her lungs, the sound of her feet on the cement echoing off the walls into the void above.
She loses count of how many turns she’s taken. In front of her now, the hallway is only ten feet long. She stops to catch her breath, the foggy exhales visible in the air. The figure in the mirror is now completely enveloped in darkness. Its features are still there - she can make out arms, legs, components of a face. Lips still trembling, black tears running along deep shadowed canyons on its cheeks. Her hand moves to her own face. She feels the wetness of her own tears.
Walking forward, she turns another corner. Five feet in front of her, a final mirror, facing directly at her. The figure has changed. She sees the white eyes, the yellow fangs, the monster in the dark. It stares back at her silently, blood pounding in her ears. The monster steps forward, pressing a paw, a claw, a hand, against the reflective glass. It reaches through, the pale light of the hallway dimming around the mirror. Darkness entering the maze. Sam turns and runs.
She is sprinting, exiting the vortex. She knows it is right behind her. She hears the snarls, the howls, the screams, her parent’s voices, her own voice, all inhabited by the monster. Her breath is ragged, her feet cut into by the jagged cement floor, the cold air biting like a million tiny teeth. The light around begins to fade, it’s getting closer. She sprints forward, how many right turns, another hallway. She feels a hand on her back, she’s falling, sliding across the floor. She knows it is right behind her, she cannot look. Another corner a few feet ahead. She crawls around it desperately and huddles against the wall. She can go no further. She closes her eyes and waits.
The snarls, howls, screams, voices stop. She opens her eyes. The empty space of the hallway is replaced with a wall. She’s in a smaller room, one she recognizes. That starless night sky is replaced by a wooden ceiling, her father’s workbench barely visible in the dark, the stairs leading to the kitchen. Sam stands and begins to move towards the steps. As she does, a figure shifts if in the darkness. The white eyes and yellow teeth move towards her, she is frozen. The four-legged creature shifts, it stands up, splits in two, sets of white eyes and yellow teeth, her parents, Samantha, she hears it whispered, loud as a scream. The figure shifts again, merging, closer still, white eyes, yellow teeth. She sees herself smiling in the darkness. She feels the cold steel in her own hand. She points it towards the monster, towards herself, and pulls the trigger. The shattering of glass, pouring down from a broken mirror like rain, the world goes black.
Sam is in the back of her parents’ car. She’s a kid again. She watches the shapes of the trees as they pass by out the window. Her parents are in the front, they’re singing some pop song from the eighties, smiling as they’re trying to teach her the words. The song on the radio turns to static as they enter the mountain range, but they keep singing. She hears herself trying to join in, making up the words as she goes, her parents are laughing, she’s laughing. She feels the car climbing, heading up the mountain, and the road floats away, as if they’re driving into the sky.
In the morning, Sam is packing up her things. She’s filling a box with picture frames, a few trinkets, souvenir coffee mugs. She makes a final pass through the house, collecting anything that holds a memory. She’s laid them out on the floor, taking inventory, allowing herself a moment with each item, reliving small fragments of time now past. She is taking out her phone, texting the real estate agent about the key in the lockbox by the door. She is taking a final look at the cabin. She is seeing her dad on the couch watching tv, her mom reading a magazine in the rocking chair. They’re both waving goodbye, smiling. She is closing the door. She is driving back down the mountain.
Zach Downs is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he earned his BS in Chemical Engineering. Although new to the world of creative fiction, he has prior writing experience with his work in the band On Regret, an alternative five-piece band based out of Boston, MA. Zach is a guitarist and vocalist in the band and one of the primary songwriters/lyricists.
