Knowing

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

Danny paused at the front door of his own home, a neighboring log cabin visible through the trees. His gaze fixed on the unmistakable flicker of the candle's glow.

Did someone break in? he thought. But who? And why would anyone want to?

Years earlier, the cabin had been occupied by a couple and their young son. Danny couldn't remember the time before Patrick had moved in. Having a neighbor at all was exciting enough in this population-sparse neck of the forest, but having a boy the same age as Danny move in next door ensured that the two would be best friends from the beginning.

Every day after school, and all summer long, Danny and Patrick stayed out in the forest until dusk, running and climbing and scouting for new hideouts and inventing new games for each day of the week.

"You can play outside as long as you don't go too far and always stay together," their mothers had said, reciting the instruction like a mantra, repeating it each time a townsperson reported a pet had gone missing or a toolshed was broken into, or someone saw the flash of something on a security camera that wasn't supposed to be there. But this was a rural mountain town where incidents were few and talk was plenty.

On the last day of third grade, Danny and Patrick raced side by side up the winding road from the bus stop. They split only to dump their backpacks on their respective front porches and met again in the forest behind the two cabins. Over the years, it had become their forest.

The game of the summer would be pirates and aliens, they had decided that morning on the bus. Danny had spent the entire day conjuring ideas for his pirate alter ego, and he knew the perfect place to serve as his ship.

Deep in the forest, in a clearing a ways down the ravine behind their houses, the thick trunks of four pines made a sizable square. Some time ago, someone had thought to complete the square with a wooden platform nailed into the trunks some five feet above the ground, like the base of a treehouse. Danny had discovered it in the spring, and the platform had served as the center of their play ever since.

Now, Danny and Patrick tore down the ravine, beelining to the clearing.

Patrick arrived on target first, hoisting himself up on the platform. He folded forward and put his hands on his knees, gasping for breath.

"Hey, what are you doing?" Danny said between short breaths of his own. "I'm using the treehouse for my pirate ship, remember? You have to start on the flying saucer rock over there."

"I think I wanna have the treehouse for my flying saucer."

Danny's mouth dropped open. "But, no! But it's mine! We talked about it, that the treehouse is mine, remember?"

Patrick held his ground, if a little sheepishly. "Yeah, but you always get to use the treehouse. It's not fair. It's my turn."

"But I'm the one who found it! If it wasn't for me we wouldn't even have it!"

"You can use the rock."

Danny ran through all the glorious battles at sea he had designed in his mind. He tried to imagine making aliens walk the plank off of the granite boulder on the other side of the clearing.

"No. Either I get to use the treehouse or I'm not playing."

Patrick didn't budge.

"I'm serious, Patrick. I'm not gonna play."

Patrick plopped down on the platform and folded his arms across his chest.

Eyes narrowed, Danny slowly turned and began walking up the ravine. He thought Patrick would follow, leaving the treehouse vulnerable for capture, but when Danny turned after fifteen paces, Patrick hadn't moved an inch.

Danny maintained the course. He was certain that eventually Patrick would follow him, but the farther and farther he walked, the angrier he became. Betrayal made his steps heavy as he stomped uphill. By the time he reached his house, he was so furious he couldn't fathom playing with Patrick for the rest of the summer. And for the first time since the winter, Danny passed the afternoon on the sofa in front of the television, barely noticing when one cartoon bled into the next.

Patrick never came home that night.

Almost immediately, Patrick's parents launched a heroic search that spanned months and miles. Volunteers from the community donned boots and headlamps and hiked far and wide across the rugged terrain, scouring caves and rappelling down granite cliff faces to see if a young boy might be lying broken at the bottom. The sheriff's department had the trickling streams and small ponds of the forest combed for pieces of clothing, a shoe, or a body. Patrick's family was well-known in town, so raising money for a search by air proved to be an easy task. Curled up in a ball on the floor of his bedroom, Danny covered his ears each time he heard the roar of the helicopter overhead. A half-starving mountain lion was unfortunate enough to get caught in the search radius. An examination of the contents of its stomach proved fruitless. Every night, Danny knelt at the foot of his bed and prayed to his god that Patrick might return. Every night, Danny's mother had to lift him off his knees and into his bed, where she held him and rocked him and smoothed his hair as he cried into her shoulder until he fell asleep.

Six months passed, and the search of the forest came to an end. Danny's mother had to check to be sure she didn't buy any of the milk pints with Patrick's smiling face under the spout.

It was the mystery that drove them all mad. The not knowing whether to mourn or to just look around one last corner. It was all the possibilities that kept running through their heads, some blindly hopeful and some too sinister to name.

A year later, Patrick's parents moved away. The cabin was left vacant and empty.

For some time, Danny continued to pray every night, but eventually, that part of him, too, faded from existence.

Danny got older. He made new friends and learned to drive and took a job chopping wood at the lumberyard. He often thought of Patrick. He didn't dare to hope for it, but he often imagined hearing a knock on the door out of the blue, and opening it to discover Patrick's return after all these years, older but immediately recognizable. He tried to imagine what Patrick might look like as a young man, and he toggled between two pictures. In the first, Patrick was well-dressed and clean cut, having been raised by some local do-gooders that took him in after suffering a head injury that left him a total amnesiac—until now. In the second, Danny saw a bearded, dirt-covered, half-wild mountain man crouching in tattered shorts on his front porch, the Patrick who somehow eluded the search parties and managed to survive on his own all these years, with matted hair and battle scars to prove it, different in nearly every way from the little boy that had grown playing in the forest. But Danny would know those green eyes anywhere.

These were the two images that bounced back and forth in Danny's mind as he stared at the bright flame in the window of his best friend's house. The sky hadn't been dark long, and with each passing minute, more stars winked into view above the trees.

Danny left his bag on the front porch and began making his way toward the neighboring cabin. He couldn't stop his heart from racing, though he knew it was likely anything but his lost friend. It could have been myth-chasers, thieves, or someone desperate who needed a place to sleep. Was it possible the cabin had been sold without him knowing? No, Danny was sure Patrick's parents hadn't put it on the market. And he knew the cabin housed nothing worth stealing. Some rotting building materials and dust bunnies hardly had any utility or resale value.

Danny looked for piles of fallen pine needles to cushion his steps, and he stepped gingerly onto the back porch, careful to avoid the board in the deck that creaked under weight. Danny made his way to the window with the lock that had been broken from the day Patrick moved in, an easy point of entry if only you knew how to trigger the lock just right from the outside. At the dusty windowsill, Danny peered inside. The room was empty, save for the single glowing candle on the fireplace mantle.

Sweat beaded on Danny's brow at the thought of going in alone, but his own parents wouldn't return until the following afternoon, and the thought of calling in any peer reinforcements wasn't tenable. None of his friends could tread delicately enough, Danny thought, especially if the person he met on the other side of this window was really, actually, somehow—

No. He couldn't let that thought form. Either way, he couldn't wait for someone else to show up. There was no guarantee that whatever was inside would wait for him. Again, the feral mountain man and the clean-shaven teen flashed in his mind's eye.

Danny couldn't let this chance slip away. He just couldn't.

He pulled out his pocketknife to slide under the window at just the right angle, only to find that it was already cracked half an inch. Hope slammed into him with amazing force. He tried wildly to push it away, tried to remember that anyone could have figured out the trick with the window, tried to keep in mind that someone could have opened it from the inside, but all he could see was little Patrick earnestly demonstrating his new discovery the day he left his backpack, key inside, on the school bus. Danny saw Patrick open the window and make Danny swear not to tell because he wanted it to be his secret passage.

Now, Danny blinked back tears as he slid the window open and swung a leg inside.

He stood in the living room in which he had spent so many winter nights warming in front of the fire, in which he had spent several afternoons in recent years, sitting on the floor of his old friend's bedroom, back against the wall, watching the angle that the sun made with the ceiling grow narrower as shadow enveloped the walls.

Danny assessed the two images of Patrick in his mind now. Were they accurate? What if Patrick looked nothing like he imagined? What if he had suffered some deformation after so much time in the woods?

Then, with no sound at all, out of the hallway stepped Patrick. Patrick, who looked nothing like the two pictures Danny had spent so long pondering. Patrick, who, down to the clothes he wore, had not changed one bit from the time Danny had last seen him—arms crossed, legs swinging off the platform in the forest.

I'm hallucinating. I'm hallucinating. The little boy seemed almost seemed to shimmer, to glow a soft pink from within. This is a hallucination. It has to be.

Patrick walked toward Danny, hand outstretched. Danny began to shake and, unable to understand what he was seeing, squeezed his eyes shut. It's a hallucination. It isn't real.

Danny felt fingers intertwine with his own. It's NOT a hallucination! His eyes flew open, and in the same instant, he knew there was something wrong with the hand holding his own. It was rough and cold and, could it be, scaly?

The shimmering pink little boy that had entered the room was gone. Danny was holding hands with a horrible, towering thing, with four glowing eyes, an impossibly wide, dripping grin, and a grotesque protruding abdomen.

Danny ripped his hand away and launched himself back, stumbling into the opposite wall. The beast blocked the hallway, and the front door had been boarded shut years before. Danny's gut urged him to run for the half-open window, but the beast was closer, and in his soul Danny knew the beast was faster. Danny braced himself on the wall, chest heaving. He locked eyes with the beast, and a soft pink light shined out of its eyes like a lighthouse beckoning a lost ship to safety.

In the light, Danny saw Patrick again, in the forest and smiling. Something pulled Danny closer and closer to Patrick, and the sunlit forest began to take up more and more of Danny's vision.

No! Danny wrenched his eyes from the gaze of the beast.

The beast laughed from the other side of the room. "That is why I don't normally bother with grown prey. Too much trouble." Its voice, deep and grating, made Danny double over with nausea. "Come on, look at me. Don't you want to play with your little friend?"

Danny fixed his eyes on the floorboards, and the nausea intensified as the pink light grew brighter. Pushing off the wall, Danny darted for the window, only for his path to be blocked by an impossibly long, thin arm barbed with dripping razors.

"Danny, don't try to run. Patrick has been waiting to play pirates and aliens all these years. Don't disappoint him now."

Tears clouded Danny's vision, and helplessness began to close in on him. He spun to face the beast. His throat felt constricted, but his voice was made strong with violent rage. "What did you do to him?"

"Why, I was only looking for a playmate. And Patrick has been such a wonderful playmate at that."

Through the fury, through the futility, the beast's words echoed in Danny's head. It spoke about Patrick in the present tense. As if… is it possible…could Patrick really be…

Danny's voice came out strangled now. "Is he alive?"

"Why, of course he's alive!"

It was like lightning struck Danny's spine. Another Patrick came to mind, an emaciated, lonely Patrick, chained up in this beast's lair somewhere dank and dark, but alive.

"WHERE IS HE?"

"He's in my third stomach, of course! I like to take my time digesting my food." It's grin grew even wider. "Oh look, he wants to play."

Danny's eyes dropped to the beast's abdomen. As clearly as he had seen anything in his life, Danny watched two juvenile skeletal hands push against the sickly gray skin of the beast's abdomen from the inside, clawing their bony fingertips up and down, blindly seeking a long-forgotten outside world. A black horror tugged on Danny like thick, putrid tar, and he could not find the air to shriek. Danny stumbled back, mouth agape, wordlessly shaking his head.

"You're bigger than my usual, but Patrick has always spoken so highly of you. I'd love for the two of you to be together again." The beast stood up straight and shook out its shoulders, its full form gargantuan and terrible and brushing the ceiling. In one fluid motion, the beast unhinged its massive jaw, a span far longer than Danny was tall, and swallowed Danny whole.

Danny could feel the muscles of the beast's esophagus squeezing him, its saliva slick on his skin. It burned. Danny wondered what would kill him first: the acid or asphyxiation. Then he saw the two seeking skeleton hands pushing against that lifeless skin, an image permanently seared into his mind, into his very soul, and Danny realized that he would not die. Not anytime soon.

In the glow of the candlelight, the beast smacked its lips and worked its jaw, gurgling sounds escaping from its maw as it swallowed its prey. It leaned forward on its front arms, hacking and shaking and pawing the floor. It coughed once more, a wet, heaving cough, then sat back on its haunches and grinned. For a moment, the cabin was silent.

The beast stood to move toward the window, when clean out the back of its neck popped the bloodied point of a Swiss Army Knife. The gleaming blade caught the flickering light of the candle. The knife dragged three feet down the beast's back. With a mangled choking sound, the beast tumbled to its side, one of the wooden floorboards snapping underneath it.

Out of the incision came Danny's head, gasping for air. Danny dug the point of the knife into the floor, and he slowly, painstakingly dragged himself out of beast. Lying on the floor, he wiped the saliva from his eyes and looked to the beast, twitching beside him. Danny wished he had a saw or a machete to chop off the beast's head.

Somewhere in the farthest corner of his mind, Danny was dimly away that his skin was still stinging. He walked to the window, and the cool air soothed the burning on his face. He blew out the candle before he left.

In the shower, Danny turned the water up as hot as it could go and scrubbed his skin raw. Then he leaned against the tiles and wept until the water ran cold.

In bed, he wished more than anything that his mother was there to hold him until he fell asleep.

With the light of the morning, Danny returned to Patrick's cabin with a shovel. He hoped more than anything that he would find the cabin empty. That there would be no sign of the beast at all. He hoped that he had somehow dreamt it or hallucinated it. He would rather be insane than live in a world where what had befallen him was possible.

Everything was exactly how he had left it, only now the beast was completely still, and flies buzzed around its open wound.

Danny dragged the beast out of the living room, down the hallway, and out the back door, which had been spared the boards that nailed the front door shut. He dragged it down the ravine and deep into the forest.

With his pocket knife, Danny sliced open the beast's abdomen in precisely the place where he had seen those fingers try to push out. Two skeleton arms, the bones of a child, clawed out of the laceration. They reached the forest floor and touched the earth. In a moment, they seemed to settle, and then went limp.

In a hole as deep as he could manage, Danny buried the beast, filling the pit with the heaviest rocks he could carry.

Underneath the platform, the treehouse, far, far from the beast's wretched grave, Danny buried the skeleton arms.

Danny stopped to vomit twice on the walk home.

Back on his sofa, in front of the television and seeing nothing, something inside Danny shriveled up. He would never, ever tell.

The knowing. The knowing was so much worse.