The Blue Room

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

“Stop.”

“It was a cold night and––”

“Dad, please, just…” Sidney Engvall raised her hands and swept them in front of her face. “Stop.”

“What?”

Joseph Engvall believed he had been connecting with his daughter on this camping trip, but it seemed that tonight was a step back from progress.

“What?” he said again, hands raised in confusion, trying to keep the hurt out of his voice as Sid looked at him through shadowed eyes, a smirk inked on her face like a cheap tattoo. Joe shifted his gaze and met hers, chewing back a smile in spite of himself. “Have I told you this one before?”

“No,” Sid said as she quickly flicked her eyes up. “It’s just not scary.”

The fire popped in the pit and a burst of sparks peppered the air. Joe sat back in his camp chair, folded his arms, and crossed his legs. “Figured you might let me get past one sentence before you make that judgment, huh?”

“No, Dad, it’s just…come on: an abandoned cabin? A spooky candle? What is this, 1980?”

“Excuse me, Shirley Jackson,” said Joe. “Now, what’s the matter with a good old abandoned cabin story?”

Sid made a zero with her thumb and forefinger, peering through it at her father as if through a keyhole. “No one, zero people, in the Year of Our Lord, 2022, would approach an abandoned cabin with a candle in the window.”

“No one,” Joe said flatly.

Sid pushed her “telescope” forward for emphasis. “Nope.” She leaned back and rubbed smoke out of her eyes.

“And how exactly would you know that?” At this point in their relationship, Joe was well armored against his daughter’s adolescent arrogance, but it didn’t irritate him any less. Can’t Google that out here, Sid, he thought, cynically. No service. That was the point.

She shrugged and warmed her hands by the fire. “The audience is too smart. We’re too familiar with the narrative. We know there are only a handful of reasons why that candle is in the window in the first place: a cult; a psycho-killer; a witch; a crime scene; maybe a kidnapping. Everyone knows that nothing good is ever waiting inside an abandoned cabin in the woods. Why would anyone even stay near an abandoned cabin? The Yelp reviews would be like, ‘Hey––uh––just so you know, there’s an abandoned cabin next door, just, like, FYI. Murder vibes for sure. Three stars.’ You know what someone would say if they saw that today? They’d take one look and go, ‘Nope. Uh uh. Not dying on vacation.’”

“Alright, alright,” said Joe, sheepishly tossing some moss into the fire. Maybe you could Google it…. “You made your point. Only old dummies like me would look inside and probably wouldn’t make it back out. Christ.” He laughed in spite of himself and Sid laughed, too. Progress. “Come on, though,” he pressed. “Humor me: you wouldn’t even be a little curious?”

Sid tilted her head, pouted her lips and raised her eyebrows all in one seemingly choreographed movement. “Curious,” she said. “But not stupid.”

Joe put another handful of twigs on the fire and nodded, pouting his own lips as he watched the twigs catch flame. “Alright,” he said, “fair enough. No cabin. No ‘spooky candle.’ I’m assuming you got one better for me?”

The firelight caught Sidney’s eyes, hazel, like her mother’s, glowing behind smokey eye-shadow. She bit her lip and looked off into the woods. Joe thought maybe she did have a good yarn for him, but could be she was just contradicting for the sake of contradicting. All teenagers do it at some point. Shit, when he was seventeen he lived to disobey his father. Of course, there were consequences back then. You didn’t have what he called “civil discussions” back then. You didn’t “reason” with kids. You talked, they listened: or else.

The fire popped again and the sound of crickets and frogs pulsed rhythmically around the campsite. The chatter from earlier in the evening was dying down around the campground, and folks were starting to douse their fires and crawl into their tents. “Yeah,” said Sidney Engvall, after some thought. “I got one.” She pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt and leaned forward again. “It’s not just a story, though. It’s true.”

Joe squinted in the fire.

“Hmph,” he grunted.

We’ll see.

“You remember Angeline?”

Joe stiffened his jaw. Of course he remembered Angeline Simmons, the sitter who worked for the Engvalls for, what, two or three years? He nodded, though he was now uncomfortable. “Yes,” he said gruffly. “Why––Sid, do I want to hear this story?”

“Dad, just,” she pressed her open palms toward the fire. “Okay?”

Joe gave her a warning look, but she rolled her eyes. I swear, these kids….

“Anyway,” Sid continued. Her eyes still shone in the firelight, looking into the flames like a crystal ball. She looked uncertain, as if the story she was about to tell were less of a story and more of a confession. She looked up once at her father, then quickly back at the fire. “Angeline came over to watch me one night. You and Mom were at dinner or something. We couldn’t find anything on TV to watch, so Angeline was like, ‘You want to hear a ghost story?’ And I was, like, six or seven, right, so my understanding of a ghost story was, like, Casper. Beetlejuice. Scooby-Doo. Kid stuff. She wasn’t weird about it, the way she asked, she didn’t seem like she wanted to scare me or anything. Not at first. She said it all sweet and casual, but kind of bored, too, like how you might ask someone if they wanted pizza for dinner. So, I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah!’ You know, like, all excited and whatever. And….”

Sidney paused, pulling the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her palms and rubbing her palms over her jeans. She pulled her phone out of her sweatshirt pocket and spun it idly between her pinched thumb and middle finger. Another irritating habit she’d picked up in adolescence, but Joe figured she couldn’t get texts out here anyway.

“Honey…” Joe had a bad feeling about where this story was going. Sid had never mentioned anything about this and the longer she talked, the more uncomfortable she seemed. “Sid––”

She put up her free hand but kept her eyes on the fire, still spinning the phone in her other hand. “It’s fine, I just…I guess I’ve just never told this story out loud before. Nothing happened, like, she didn’t do anything…anything to me.”

Joe took a deep breath and shifted in his seat. What did that mean? ‘Out loud’? ‘Anything to me’? He’d never gone through any of her diaries, though lord knows he had been tempted numerous times, especially after––but he respected her privacy. It was so important in this day and age. Privacy.

Sidney continued.

“She started telling me about this roommate she had in college. She said how this girl went crazy or something, like full on schizophrenic or something. Anyway, as she’s telling me this she has this look in her eye, like…like she’s not just telling a story, but trying to get something off her chest. Confessional. You know? She’s almost crying. Starts talking about how her roommate started having conversations with people who weren’t there, and she would, like, send Angeline weird text messages and tell her about these…these awful dreams she would have, dreams where she would wake up screaming. Angeline tried telling her RA about it, even went to the head of housing, but she didn’t know what to do because, like, no one believed her. There was no evidence. This girl was extremely normal around everyone else except for Angeline. You couldn’t get someone in trouble for having nightmares––even if they might be mentally ill––not unless she actually did anything to Angeline. Still, though, kind of fucked up––”

“Sidney Rosalyn,” Joe warned.

Sid rolled her eyes. “Fine, messed up. Anyway, she finally convinced them to switch her to a different room, but then Angeline started having nightmares, too.” She paused, reaching for her Hydroflask next to her chair, still twirling her phone in her left hand. She took a quick swig then set it back down.

She’s right, though, Joe thought. That is kind of…fucked up. Must have scared the hell out of her.

The rest of the camp chatter had died down and fire had grown low. The frogs and crickets were silent. Sid lowered her voice almost to a whisper, as if she had meant to tell a different story but this one had spilled out instead. The only other sounds were the occasional crackle from the smoldering fire and a soft breeze blowing through the pines, rustling the fabric of their tents. A man coughed once from somewhere around the campground. There were no lights around. Just the glow from the Engvall’s campfire and the eerie silhouettes of cars and tents. A collection of stars peered down on them like a secret audience.

“She told me about one of them, one of the nightmares. She made me promise I would never say anything. She made me pinky promise.” She hooked her right pinky out of her sweatshirt sleeve and wiggled it. “She said she would…that she would hurt me if I told.”

“Jesus,” Joe muttered, but Sidney didn’t hear or chose not to acknowledge it.

“I didn’t want to at that point,” she said, “I was scared, I begged her to stop, but she just kept talking. Her voice was shaking and getting louder, like someone was slowly turning the volume up? She was talking about this room, this bedroom with a blue light glowing around it, like someone had put a filter on it? And in the dream she saw this girl, like, I dunno, spread out on the bed––clothed, she was clothed––but her feet were on the ground and there was a towel covering her face. It was sad, she said, almost like a funeral. She didn’t know who the girl was, but Angeline said she knew the girl was dead. Just like…knew. In the dream she walked up to the bed, slowly, like her feet were sticking to the ground. And as she got closer she, um…started to breath…really fast and heavy, almost hyperventilating––not in the dream, like, in real life, like she could feel herself trying to wake up and start hyperventilating to get her out of the dream, but she wouldn’t wake up. Or couldn’t. And the whole time she was staring right at me and squeezing my pinky in hers, harder and harder, like she didn’t even realize she was doing it….

“Anyway, she gets to the bed and she kneels down next to the girl. In the dream Angeline was crying, but there was this separation where she wasn’t crying in real life and she wasn’t hyperventilating in the dream. It was like she was living two separate lives at once. But she kneels down, right, she’s not, like, scared of this girl, she’s just sad. She’s sad that the girl’s dead because she’s so young. And when she kneels down she starts panting and hyperventilating even more outside of the dream. She could even hear her body panting from within the dream, almost screaming, and she leans in close to the girl, when––”

Sidney shuddered a little and took another sip from her Hydroflask. Joe’s stomach turned for what she might say next, but he held his tongue. He wanted to know what happened next, needed to know what happened next, because he was understanding more and more that this was a true story. More true than Sidney seemed to realize. His heart fluttered in his chest and his palms were slick with sweat. The fire had gone out and was smoldering in a small clump. There’s no way, he thought. We never told her.

“––when her head…turned. It turned, Dad, just looked at her through the towel. She didn’t know how she knew, but when that girl’s head turned, Angeline said she knew that her eyes were wide open and looking at her. She knew that she was smiling a wild grin behind that towel and as Angeline started telling me this she…”

Sidney looked up at her father and her lower lip started to tremble. Tears were in her eyes and her eye-shadow had smudged a little from where she had rubbed at it earlier. Joe had to fight back tears, too.

“She started screaming,” she croaked in a choked voice. “Just, like, screaming right there in the living room. One shriek after another, loud and shrill. I didn’t know what to do, I was so scared and, and frozen, and I kept going, ‘Angeline, Angeline, stop, please,’ like, saying her name over and over and over, but she just kept screaming and looking right at me. Her eyes were like…glazed over, there was no expression, but her mouth was open so wide, I swear I heard a joint pop in her jaw. And this went on for like, fucking, two or three minutes, I don’t know. It felt endless, like it was a nightmare, but it was probably, like, two or three minutes. But can you imagine that? Two or three minutes of someone vacant-eyed and screaming, like she was possessed. Then she just,” Sid waved a hand limply in the air and let it slap down on her thigh. She’d stopped twirling her phone. In the darkness it looked imperceptible, almost like a gun. “She just stopped. Like nothing had happened. She just sat there, silent, staring at me, swaying a little, like she was dizzy, until you and Mom came home. The whole time she was squeezing my pinky until it turned purple, but when the door opened she snapped out of it, and I just––”

At last she broke down and Joe leapt out of his seat to comfort her. How could she have kept this a secret from him all these years? Why would Angeline have told such a horrible story to a girl that young? That he had let Angeline into their house two nights a week for the next two years without a word about the incident…. But then later…. He was furious as he tried to soothe Sid’s sobbing. Tears streamed down his face and he trembled as he held her. She didn’t need to finish the story. He knew the end.

Two years later, Angeline Simmons stopped showing up for work. No calls. No texts. None of her friends had heard from her, nor had her parent. Three weeks later, they found her body in the living room of an abandoned house, some junkie’s house, spread eagle, lying on a filthy mattress, track marks along her arms and legs, a white towel covering her face, eyes wide open, a thin, dry layer of vomit and flaked skin around her lips, chin, and neck. There was a single blue light illuminating the room. It had been in the paper: “Local girl, 25, found dead from apparent overdose.”

The next morning, they packed up camp and drove home in silence. Neither of them had slept the night before. They left at first light, skipping breakfast and the morning fire, Joe’s favorite camping tradition. Joe Engvall never brought up the “blue room” (the paper’s term) ever again. He didn’t mention the party from which he’d picked up Sidney earlier that week, when she called him, in tears, because she had gotten sick from drinking. She had lied about the party, said she was going over to her friend Marisol’s house for a sleepover. He didn’t mention the pictures and texts to some needle-pricked boy named Sam he had found on her confiscated phone. It wasn’t the first time she had lied, either. The lying had become frequent after the death of Tracey Engvall, Sid’s mother, Joe’s wife, two years prior. Whatever gap had emerged between them since her death, the story Sidney told that night had sewn it up like a clumsy surgeon. The gap was closed, but the scar would remain forever. A scar her mother would never see. He remembered how the night had begun, him trying to tell some corny camp-fire story that his father had told him when he was a boy. A story he never would have dared to interrupt. Sidney was right. It wasn’t scary, in retrospect. Not the story. No one in today’s information age would approach something so obviously off limits as an abandoned house with a candle in the window. What was scary to him was his father sitting there in the dark, hunched over the fire, a flask of bourbon clutched limply between two knuckles, insisting the story was true.

There was one detail of the story Joe remembered from the papers that Sidney hadn’t mentioned. When the police arrived on the scene, they were responding to a call from a neighbor of the junkie’s house. The neighbor said that the house had been abandoned for years, until that night, when they saw first a blue light, and then a flame flickering in the window, as if, they said, someone had been trying to light a candle. Joe and Tracey never told Sidney what happened to Angeline. They just said she had taken another job. Besides, Joe said at the time, Sidney was getting a little big for a babysitter. Of course, she must have Googled it at some point. The article probably came up in the first two hits. What other secrets had she kept from him over the years? What other secrets did she still have?

She slept the whole way home, her phone clutched in her hand, and when they left the pines and returned to the hills, her phone began to vibrate with all the stories––all the secrets––she had missed last night.