I Know What I Saw

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

I’d known about the cabin for years – decades really. It was about a mile up the trail through the trees behind Sally Baker Park, near the edge of town. It was maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet, very small to be a home but just right for a hideout. Nobody knew who owned it although there were rumors, the more lurid of which were the most popular with the kids I’d gone to school with. Some said it was owned by a rich guy from the city who used it as a for playing perverted sex games. Not that any of the kids repeating this story had any idea what “perverted sex games” might consist of, but it sounded like something a person might get in trouble or maybe even go to hell for. Others said it must belong to a serial killer, or the owner had died a long time ago and his skeleton was still in there. In summer when the sun set late, groups of us would walk out to the cabin after dinner to see if anyone was there, but with only one narrow window there was never enough light to see much of anything inside. The front room appeared to be empty, but there was a wall with a door that led to a smaller, windowless room. No one ever dared to try the front door or to break the window. Our fear of whatever might be in there outweighed our desire to find out. Even the older high school kids didn’t hang around the cabin to drink or get high; instead, they followed a single-file path to a group of large boulders, each taller than three men, that obscured them from the view of anyone following the main trail.

When I was in sixth grade, one of the boys in my class brought his older brother with us. Rob was kind of a big deal in our group because in addition to being in eighth grade, he went hunting up north with their dad in the fall and claimed to be an expert tracker. He looked around the cabin and insisted that no one had been there in several years at least, because he saw no evidence of tire tracks. As kids, we never stopped to think about weather and erosion erasing any tracks. In hindsight, while we never saw any obvious improvements, the place was never as run-down as you might expect if no one ever came by.

As we got older, we stopped going out to the cabin, leaving it to the next group of middle-schoolers who wanted desperately to believe in ghosts and superstitions. Especially once we got our drivers’ licenses, there were much cooler places to hang out. Then we went off to college and the cabin faded to an old memory of things we did as kids, like jumping off the old dock near the bridge at high tide or spending rainy days hiding in the stacks at the library, reading grownup books that our parents wouldn’t let us bring home. I was reminded of it shortly after I lost my job due to the pandemic.

I had some savings, and because I hadn’t taken a vacation or sick day in the fifteen years I’d been at my job, my last paycheck was fairly substantial. Still, my lease was almost up, and I had no idea how long this would last. I moved back in with my mother – it was cheaper to split the taxes and utilities for the old house than to pay the rent on my city apartment, and on a fixed income, she could use a little help too. I hoped that things would be back to normal by the time my cash and unemployment benefits ran out, and I could find another job closer to home. Needless to say, I was a little surprised when my mother said, while helping me put some things away the second or third day I was there, “Michelle, do you remember that old cabin in the woods that you kids used to hang out at when you were younger?’

“What?” I said, “You knew about that?”

“Oh, honey, everyone knew about that. Rogers Elders used it as his ‘office’ for his writing, but he died when I was young. He’d put his money in a trust, which kept paying the bills for the property tax and a caretaker to come out every couple of months to check on things.”

“Whoa – the Rogers Elders, the horror writer? Why didn’t anyone ever tell us that back then instead of just letting us make up stories?”

She laughed. “Well, the rumors about it being haunted started because he wrote a lot of stories that were set in cabins in the woods like that one. He had kept his own cabin a secret because he liked to be alone and have total silence when he wrote – he wrote everything in longhand and had his secretary type it up for him, did you know that? When he died, a number of his fans came out to pay their respects and visited his home and gravesite, but nobody told them about the cabin. We didn’t want them overrunning the park, ruining the baseball field and all. Kids my age, our mothers would keep us away from there by telling us that if Mr. Elders caught us in his woods, he’d eat us up and use our bones for toothpicks, but we couldn’t use the same story with our own kids. We let the rumors spread and do the work for us. Most people eventually forgot who it belonged to, and the superstitions kept kids from vandalizing the place, so I’d say that tactic was pretty successful.”

“I guess you’re right. But it still would have been cool, to know it back then.” Rogers Elders – known to friends, family, and dedicated fans as Brian Rogers Elders – wasn’t hugely popular anymore, but being the only published author from my hometown, everyone there had read at least one of his books if not all of them.

My mother winked at me. “Well, consider this making up for it now. Brian Elders Jr. made a lot of financial mistakes in the 1990s. The trust never fully recovered, and after he died last year, the city took the property for unpaid taxes. My friend Leigh is still the city clerk downtown, and she told me they’re only asking two thousand dollars for it, just to get it off their hands. You always said you wanted to be a writer when you were younger, so I thought you might be interested.”

I inhaled deeply. I could afford it, but then what if I ran out of money before I could get another decent job? Then again, she was right – I did always say that I wanted to be a writer, and I’d been saving up ideas in my head and a collection of notebooks ever since. I decided that I might as well. Even if it all came to naught, there were no utilities to pay for, and I could probably sell it for much more than the purchase price if I advertised it as Elders’s retreat. Somehow with my mother saying it, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea.

With the sale due to be announced to the public on Monday, we made sure that we had an appointment as due to the pandemic (again) City Hall was closed to walk-ins. Leigh already had the documents out on her desk when we walked in. A bank check and a few signatures and I was suddenly the owner of the cabin in the woods, plus an acre or so of land around it. Leigh pulled down the grate over the clerk’s window and the three of us went out for brunch at the one place in town that had open patio seating, toasting my new property with mimosas and more blueberry pancakes than any three humans should be able to consume in one sitting. After one last round of mimosas, Leigh went back to the office and came out with the mayor, who drove us out to the park himself for my first look at the cabin in over thirty years.

“Wow… is it smaller than I remember, or is it just because I’m a lot bigger than I was in middle school?” The city had clearly gotten someone to come out and clean the place up a bit. The grass around it had been recently cut to less than an inch; tiny but level lines of fresh white wood in the grey clapboard showed that the instrument used had been a weed whacker. In a few years the wood would weather again so that the marks would be barely noticeable. The biggest change was that at some point after I’d gone off to college, the trail had been overlaid with gravel to make it easier to drive all the way in.

“I was a huge fan of Elders when I was growing up,” Mayor Hathorne said. “I’m very happy that another writer will be working here.”

I blushed. “Well, I’m not a writer... not yet at least. I’m hoping some of whatever magic he had will rub off on me, if I’m in his place.”

“I think you’ll do fine.” He waved his arm as a gesture for me to open the door. I did, and only realized I was holding my breath when it came rushing out of my lungs. Just as it had appeared when we tried to peek through the window so many years ago, there was nothing in the front room. The long, narrow room behind did have two secrets, though: a hand pump for water at one end, and a sort of latrine in a closet at the other end. “It’s quite deep and lined with cement. Had to, with the pump so close by.” He seemed proud of his knowledge of the place, and I smiled.

“Thank you, sir. I need to think about how I want to arrange things in here. Some things anyway. If you wouldn’t mind giving us a ride back downtown so we can get our car?”

On the drive back, I was mostly silent. It still didn’t have all the comforts of home – no electricity, heat, or hot water – but it wasn’t quite as uncomfortable as I’d expected it to be. I could bring lunch in a cooler and spend all day there if I wanted. My mother and Leigh chatted animatedly about the things they would do if they had a little cabin, or She-Shed as Leigh kept calling it. Every now and then the mayor would interject some dad-joke humor into the conversation, but for the most part I was left alone with my thoughts. I needed to worry about bringing out a desk and chair; did they even still make typewriters, or should I do it longhand like Elders?

Over the next few days, I found a second-hand desk in not-too-beat-up condition at a yard sale and ordered a sturdy but comfortable rolling chair online. I bought a few notebooks and a big pack of pens, but then on my way to deliver all these things to the cabin, I noticed that someone had put a manual typewriter out for trash collection. I pulled over and tossed it in the passenger’s seat of my car. Worst-case scenario, if it didn’t work, I’d put it out for the trash again, but it just seemed to need a new ribbon, which was surprisingly available to order online as well. I got my father’s old army cot and sleeping bag out of the attic along with an extra pillow, because sometimes writing made me unaccountably tired. My last stop was at a home improvement store to get a bag of lime for the latrine. I got everything put where I wanted it, then realized that I might also need some candles, even with the desk set up near the window. I had a camping flashlight with a battery almost as big as a car’s, but that battery could still run down or I just might want a candle for atmosphere. Who knew? The novelty of having a writing cabin begged for some experimentation.

I gathered my purse and water bottle to go home for dinner, and snapped the padlock shut. It was funny how quickly I’d gotten used to thinking of my mother’s house as home again after so many years. Then again, now it felt as though my apartment had never really been home anyway. It was where I slept, showered, ate takeout. Everything I owned fit in my car, except my futon, which I’d sold to a neighbor. My mom had recommended a handyman who did odd jobs for her when the house needed work and he would be coming by tomorrow to install a heavier door with a couple of deadbolts at the cabin. I didn’t have anything especially valuable there, but word would get out that the cabin had been sold and I didn’t want to be a sitting duck if the wrong sort of person came nosing around while I was there. I was having the handyman put a couple more deadbolts on the door to the back room, too. I didn’t plan on sleeping there regularly but the cot was there just in case, and I wanted to make sure I’d be safe if I did.

Finally, two weeks after signing the papers, I had dug out some of my old notebooks to go with the new ones and decided it was time to see how this plan would go. I tossed a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches in a cooler with a few cans of soda and a bottle of cheap champagne to christen the place and drove over to the park and down the old trail. Settling in at the desk, I popped a can of Coke and opened a fresh notebook. I would start in longhand and then type it all up once I was finished editing and felt confident about each page. I decided to start with a memoir about growing up in a famous writer’s hometown and how it had brought me to this moment. I could maybe get an excerpt printed in the local paper as a break from the gloom and doom of the rising COVID cases and lack of effective treatment. If a literary magazine picked it up, I could even recoup some of my investment in the place. At first, I struggled with describing how it all felt, but then the words just started to flow through my pen as if I was pulling them from the ether. By the time I felt like I was done and read it through again to make sure I was happy with it, I glanced up at the window and saw that the light was starting to fade. Where had the day gone? I hadn’t even eaten the lunch I’d brought or opened the champagne.

I opened the door and stood there to watch the sun finish sliding down through the trees, painting them with fall colors only blindingly bright instead of soft and rusty, then noticed the mosquitos hovering in a hazy cloud. Bug spray – I made a mental note to pick some up before the next time I came here. I went back in and moved the cot to the other end of the cabin’s main room, took the sandwiches and champagne out of the cooler, and had a very modest but satisfying candlelight supper. Once it got to be fully dark out and the heat of the day cooled the mosquitos would settle again, but I didn’t feel quite ready to go home yet anyway. I brought the bottle of champagne back over to the desk (glasses, dammit, even plastic ones or Dixie cups would be better than straight from the bottle) and read through what I’d written again. Maybe it was just the mood I was in, thinking about my new connection to the late horror writer, but I suddenly noticed a noise that I’d never heard before, not in the last couple of weeks nor all those years before, sneaking around the place with my friends and believing that it could be haunted – which certainly would have been the time to hear a creepy noise, wouldn’t it? Skree-ee-ee. Ugh. A tree branch scraping on the window, had to be. I glanced up and saw no branches within even a few inches of the window. It came again – skree-ee-ee. This time I could tell it came from the other side of the building. A branch rubbing against the outer wall, then. The exterior was rough clapboard, that could definitely make a noise like that, and there were branches close enough to that side that a breeze could drag them along the side of the cabin. Another mental note: bug spray and my mother’s garden trimmer. I could just go outside right now and snap off the offending twigs, but something about the darkness and the single candle burning in the window made me uneasy. I glanced again at the window and panicked at the sight of a round, pale face until I realized it was only the moon reflecting off the glass.

This is ridiculous, I said to myself. Had I ever even really believed that the cabin was haunted, even when we were kids? No, not really. It was fun to go along with, and at least in not knowing its true history, it was kind of mysterious. But nothing ever really happened there that we knew of, and if as my mother said the adults had known all along, if there was anything really dangerous, they would have told us to stay away from there. It was my mother and Leigh’s idea for me to buy the place, after all. Just my imagination working overtime again. I took one last gulp from the near-empty bottle and as the fizz hit my brain, a memory floated up that I hadn’t thought of in years, possibly because in the cold light of day it made no sense and somehow cost me my best friend since kindergarten with no further explanation.

It was 1990. Diana and I had both recently turned 21. I was commuting to Boston University and she’d gotten into Yale as a legacy student; her parents had met there. She came home in the summer to hang out and catch up. Neither of us drank (then, anyway) or did any other recreational substance abuse (at least I still didn’t; I hadn’t seen Diana since that summer), but we enjoyed going to clubs to see bands play and always talked about how after we graduated, she would move back and we’d start our own punk band on the side of whatever else we were doing to make a living. She wanted to go into medicine, maybe as a plastic surgeon. I was studying finance but had already decided that was only until I either got a recording or publishing contract. What did it say that after our friendship had ended, I’d given up on my dreams and was still working in finance until recently?

We’d been driving home from The Living Room in Providence – yes, we’d gone to see Nuclear Assault. Funny how something I’d buried three decades ago was still so clear once I’d thought of it. I was driving my mother’s old Ford Tempo. Diana didn’t have her license at the time, so I did all the driving. I didn’t mind. The car was white, with a dark-red velour interior. I was so excited because the cloth seats meant I could wear shorts without my legs burning and sticking on hot days, unlike our previous car with vinyl seats. And that night was hot. We’d come out of the club streaming in sweat only to find the humidity was twice what it had been inside. I had bottled water in the car. It would be warm, but still thirst-quenching. We ran down the stairs to the parking lot and immediately grabbed two bottles each, draining one after the other. I splashed the last few drops on my face and it felt good, trickling the taste of salt to my lips. A group of people our age was still hanging out in front of the club, and we sometimes would stick around for a bit and chat with them – we knew most of them well enough to at least say hi to – but it was too hot to climb back up those stairs again. We high-fived each other and jumped in the car, cranking up the air conditioning, or at least what air conditioning the car could muster. It was a running joke that the a/c worked best in the winter, but it still beat walking when it was really hot.

Even though we’d been spending most of our free time together since she’d gotten home two weeks earlier, we never lacked for things to talk about, nor did it feel awkward when about halfway home we lapsed into companiable silence. We always did at that point. There was a long stretch of Route 95 with no lights except for our headlights and those of the few cars on the road at that hour. I always got quiet when we were in that area at night. If asked, I’d have said that I wanted to concentrate on driving, but only because it would have sounded weird if I said that being at the wheel in the darkness made me feel at one with the car, to the point where I sometimes forgot that there was anyone else with me. As we got closer to Boston, the city lights illuminated the night and we started chatting again. She’d met a guy at school, but it was nothing serious. She hadn’t even told me about him before because they were really only just talking. She’d given him her number when she left Connecticut, but he hadn’t called until that morning, so she’d figured he wasn’t that interested. “What about you, Mick?” she asked. I never told her how much it annoyed me when she called me that, because she was my best friend and because I knew she’d given me that nickname because she’d had a crush on Mick Jagger since she was thirteen. I was happy being plain old Michelle, but for Diana I would be Mick if she insisted.

“Nah. You know me. Classes, work, and too many hobbies. Trying to help my mom around the house when I can. Maybe if some hot guy came along with a winning lottery ticket so I could drop the classes and work part.”

We both laughed. She knew I wanted to be settled in a creative career before I thought about having a real relationship, but she never stopped hoping and trying to convince me that I should have a little fun in the meantime. And it wasn’t that I didn’t, but “a little fun” was where it ended. The guys I met were always too something – arrogant, clueless, whatever it was, it always made them boring after two or three dates. One liked an ungodly amount of onions on his pizza, which was too bad because he was really cute and always had new pairs of cool sneakers, some of which he painted himself, but the only thing he ate seemed to be onion pizza so our dates never lasted past dinner. Another had a nose that was just too small. So was mine. What if we had kids, would they even have a facial profile?

We reached our exit and fell silent again. Just down the hill past the high school, then through town to drop her off and looping back around to go home. We’d just crested the hill when I noticed a figure down in the school’s upper parking lot, the one for the teachers and staff. I couldn’t tell if she was wearing a long dress or a nightgown. Either way it seemed to be light colored, yet the figure was shadowy. She turned and flung her hair over her shoulder, then started across the street toward the elderly housing complex. Probably staying with her grandparents, but why’s she out so late? I wondered. The car was coming down the hill a little fast, so I pumped the brakes. There was plenty of room, but I wanted to let her know that I saw her and she didn’t have to rush. She seemed to hesitate for a moment and I slowed the car to a crawl. We were about twenty feet away when she suddenly vanished. I hadn’t spoken until that point, but as I nosed the car to the side of the road I asked, “Diana, did you just… see… anything?”

“Yeah, I saw, um, feet. Walking across the road. Just feet. Bare feet. I didn’t know why you were slowing down because obviously I was hallucinating, I must have inhaled something when we walked past that group of guys outside the club.”

“I saw an entire girl crossing the street, but then she was gone… like she evaporated, like the Cheshire Cat. And those guys were just smoking cigarettes. You know I get a wicked headache just being around people smoking weed, I wouldn’t have been able to drive home for at least an hour if they’d had anything stronger than regular tobacco.” It was true, and she knew it. I’d deliberately worded my question so as not to give any hint as to the answer I was looking for. While she hadn’t seen the exact same thing I had, it still aligned with what I’d seen.

“Still, it was the moon or something, reflecting.”

“It can’t be. Look at the clouds. We’re going to have a thunderstorm before morning. If we can’t see the moon, it can’t reflect on anything. I don’t know why you saw just feet and I saw an entire person, but we both saw something that we can’t rationally explain.”

She sighed. “Maybe you can’t explain it, but I just did. Like that stupid haunted house you were obsessed with when we were kids.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“That place in the woods behind the park that you were always trying to prove was haunted.”

“I – what? I never tried to ‘prove’ it was haunted. You were the one always insisting we should go out there more often to look for clues!”

“Fine. I had a crush on Rob, ok, and it was an excuse to be around him once he started going with us. But he was convinced it was really haunted, and you kept promising to serve him up a ghost on a silver platter, so he barely noticed I was even there.”

I laughed. “Is that what this is about, because I was friends with Rob? He wasn’t interested in you or me or any other girl, if you know what I mean. But he was interested in every crazy theory he heard about that place. I showed him how to do research in the reference section at the library and helped him try to find historical records. We just never found anything for real.”

“OK, so Rob’s gay. I’m not still upset about that. I lost interest when he started drinking a ton in high school. He’s probably going to die of cirrhosis by the time he’s forty.”

“No he won’t.” I paused, then decided to just drop the news. “He was knifed in West Hollywood last year. Which if you’d actually cared about him as a person, you would have known.”

“He – oh, shit. I’m sorry. You could have told me sooner though.”

“Why? You hadn’t hung out with him in years, and I didn’t want to seem like a ghoul.”

“Alright. Look, I’m sorry, I’m just shaken up, ok? At least you saw a whole person even if she vanished. I saw freaking disembodied feet, of course I thought I was hallucinating. Give me a chance to absorb all of this.”

I nodded. It was late, and it had been a long hot day. With the thunderstorm coming, neither of us looked to get a decent night’s sleep.

Diana took a bus back to New Haven the next day. After months of no contact, I sent her a Christmas card. It didn’t come back, but I didn’t receive a reply either. The same with the birthday card I sent in May. I tried to find out if there was any explanation for what we saw, but nobody else seemed to have reported seeing anything in that spot and if a girl had been hit by a car in that area, there were no available public records. I finally gave up looking. Maybe the ghost was me, or maybe it was Diana.

The whole recollection had played in my brain in a matter of seconds. The sun was still not quite fully set, but almost. I lit a fresh candle and set it in the melted wax of the first one. Diana might not like it if she ever somehow found out that I’d written about our shared experience, but it was my experience too. I slid a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter. I knew exactly the words I wanted to use.