The Cabin, The Veil, and The Deceptively Sweet Pie

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

Soon after the candle emitted its deceptively inviting glow, opaque black smoke rose from the chimney, billowing like haunted sails of a ship through the late evening air. It darkened the sky, shielding the stars, as children played in the creek nearby.

Lara was the first of the children to notice the cabin’s sudden liveliness. She froze as if a bear stood before her, innocent hazel eyes locked on the rotted wood and broken glass of the weathered structure. Tremors overtook her hands as she grasped her elbows, attempting to bring warmth back to her body after the sudden chilly air grew icier by the second. Her teeth chattered as she attempted to yell, “Guys.” Instead, her voice cracked and came out a mere whisper. She tried again, this time an octave higher and her voice a little clearer, “Guys!”

Her twin brother, Finn, heard her broken call for them and came to her side. He looked her over and said, “What’s wrong?”

She couldn’t speak, her tongue felt heavy in her mouth like a swollen lump, unable to move. Her eyes widened and he grabbed her face, turning it towards him. His eyebrows rose as his concern deepened.

“Lara, what’s wrong?” He looked her over again, searching for any sign of an injury.

Her mouth still concealing her rock of a tongue inside, was able to work out the words, “The light.” She lifted her arm, though it felt like lead, and pointed at the cabin, not daring to chance a second glance. “The smoke,” she choked out.

“You’re shaking,” he said, ignoring her words. He took off his windbreaker jacket and wrapped it around her. “What happened?”

“The cabin,” she whispered.

He gave it a cursory glance, shrugged his shoulders, then said, “What about it, Lara?”

She gaped at him for few seconds longer before she realized he wasn’t messing with her. She forced her eyes to move from his to the cabin. The candle remained lit while the smoke still cast them in a blanket of darkness. “The smoke.”

“What smoke?” he asked, looking from the cabin to the sky around them. “There’s nothing there.”

“Finn,” she said, her voice still tainted by the cold. She could see her breath though it had been in the lower sixties when they’d left home just a few hours ago. She managed to spit out, “Don’t mess with me.”

“I’m not,” he said, waving over their friends. “Guys, do you see smoke or a candle in the cabin?”

“I…” she turned her head quizzically at him and was able to continue, “never said… candle. Did I?”

“Yes you did,” he said. His eyebrows knitting together. “You said there was a candle in the window, black smoke in the sky, and a lady inside staring back at you.” His voice deepened towards the end of his words, but by then she was already peering back at the cabin, at the lady in an old white night gown splattered with red glaring at her.

“I never…” she said, her voice clear now, no longer held down by her heavy tongue.

She looked back at her brother, but his smile had gone too wide, his eyes too dark, his skin too pale. Black veins poked out in his forehead and down his jaw to his neck. All of his teeth were showing, though they now had fine points to them. Tears pricked her eyes as she stared at this monster that just seconds ago had been Finn. Her lifelong friend, her other half, her family. But he was nowhere inside this thing.

It raised its hands and shoved her with a force that flung her back into the leaves on the ground. She closed her eyes and wound her arms around her waist as she embraced for impact, but it never came. Instead, she spun backwards, never hitting the ground, and landed in a dark room standing upright.

After a moment of catching her breath, she opened her eyes to see a crackling fireplace with some sweet dish cooking in it. The room smelled sickly sweet like apple pie, but better. There was a window nearby and on the sill was the candle she’d seen from outside. But now beyond the candle was as clear as it had been earlier when she, Finn, and their friends left their homes. The sun set in the distance as the stars gave them evening light, owls hooted outside, and leaves rustled across the ground causing gooseflesh to prickle down her neck and arms, not ending until it reached her toes.

She stepped towards the window, peering around the candle towards the stream. Her brother and their friends were enamored with the waters beneath them, but how could he have forgotten about her? Why wasn’t he looking for her? He’d been so worried and now, he seemed to have forgotten her altogether. Normal, as if his twin sister wasn’t missing. She drew her hands into fists as she prepared to open the door and confront him, but a voice, as sweet as the dish cooking over the fire, said, “Oh, dear, where do you think you’re going?”

Lara’s hand was on the doorknob already but she couldn’t get it to budge. It was locked in place, as were her feet now. She felt the freezing air bite at her again like it had outside. Though the fireplace was close, she felt only the assault of cold, bitter winds blowing around her, whipping her hair into her face so she could hardly see. But she was inside. How could it be this cold and the weather so fierce when there were four walls, a floor, and a roof to protect her?

She screamed through the pain of her raw, cold throat and tasted metal in her mouth the harder and louder she yelled. Her voice like tires on the cement after braking for a minute straight just to stop abruptly. There was no air left in her lungs, no spit in her mouth, only something thick as syrup. Her hands shook as she pulled them up beside her and she tried to face the lady, unsure of where she stood in the room.

“How are you doing this?” her voice came out muffled from the winds and her excruciatingly sore throat. “This can’t be real.”

“Dear, it’s very real,” the woman said as if standing right beside her, mouth to her ear. Her voice made Lara’s stomach turn in hazardous circles. The woman clapped and the winds around Lara stopped, the cold ceased, and the taste of pennies in her mouth was gone. “Have a seat,” the woman said, stepping into the firelight. She wore the same centuries-old dress that Lara had seen her in from the window outside. Only there was no red speckled across it now. “Please, I insist.”

Though Lara no longer felt cold, the fear inside chilled her to her core as this woman before her spoke so calmly. Nothing about this felt normal or alright, yet she was terrified to leave. She’d simply tried to open the door and had been petrified like stone, freezing to death with, what she could only assume was, blood flooding her mouth.

“I won’t ask again,” the woman said with only the faintest hint of irritation entering her melodic voice. The chair moved outwards a little more, facing Lara, without anyone physically touching it. “Sit.”

Lara swallowed nothing and took a few steps towards the lady and the table and sat down. The woman waved her hand towards Lara’s plate, which hadn’t been there a moment ago. It showcased a pristine piece of apple pie that looks so beautiful it might have been plucked straight from a food magazine. There looked to be a cinnamon and caramel glaze inside that slowly crept out the longer she stared at the slice. The apples looked cooked to perfection, soft, but not mush, and the flaky, golden crust had intricate roses carved into it in a three-dimensional pattern. She’d never seen any dessert so stunning in her life. Even her grandmother’s caramel apple pie couldn’t compare and that had always been her favorite dessert over anything else.

The woman pointed to the fork beside the plate and said, “Have a taste. I made it myself.”

Lara broke her gaze from the slice of pie and looked at the woman. She had surprisingly kind sky blue eyes with thick lashes, long black hair mixed with distinguished strands of white throughout, and clear pale gray skin with nary a wrinkle in sight, though she had to be in her late forties to early fifties. Her hands were folded on the table between them, more wrinkled than Lara expected given the woman’s face. They looked like they belonged to someone twice her age; bruised and spotted with age while her fingertips were stained black as charcoal.

“Who are you?” Lara asked, her voice shaking almost as badly as it had outside. “How did I get in here?”

“You don’t remember?” the woman asked, a smile working its way on to her lips.

Lara shook her head and said, “I was with my brother and some friends. We were playing and then… I don’t know what happened. I saw the candle. And the smoke. But then he pushed me… and I was here.”

“Hm…” the woman said, tapping a black-tipped-finger on her chin. “But you don’t recall coming in?”

“No,” Lara said, looking back at the door, trying to remember opening it. But she hadn’t. She’d fallen in. “I didn’t.”

“But you’re here, are you not?” the woman asked, touching one of her deadly cold fingers to Lara’s hand across the table.

Lara pulled back reflexively and saw instantly how she’d offended the woman, who recoiled almost as severely.

“I don’t bite, dear,” the woman said, her voice harsher than before, her eyes darker like the stormy sea now. “Not yet anyway.”

Lara pulled her arms to her chest and tried not to hurl after an overwhelming urge took over her body. Something felt incredibly wrong again. Like she was in a dream, only everything felt too real. Like a living nightmare. Things that weren’t possible, were happening. Yet Lara couldn’t wake up. Because this was the real world. Wasn’t it?

She gave herself a little pinch under the table and found the pain all too familiar. She was not dreaming. This was truly happening. Absurd as it seemed. Impossible as it all may be.

“I want to go home,” she said, her voice a whimper.

“Dear,” the woman said, her voice smoothing out like butter again across the space between them. “You are home.”

This time, when the woman reached her hands across the table, she touched Lara’s arm and a prickling sensation went down to her fingertips. She pulled up her hands from under the table and saw her fingertips were now a very lightly tinted black.

“What are you doing to me?” Lara cried, trying to rub the stains from her fingers. “How are you doing it?”

“Please try it, dear,” the woman said, gesturing to the plate in front of Lara.

Lara’s gaze fell from her fingertips to the pie, now burned black around the edges of the crust and rotting from underneath. Tears fell from Lara’s eyes as she watched maggots crawl out from inside the pie, falling onto the plate. She wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands as she stood and felt the ground go out from underneath her.

The second she felt her body leave the ground she closed her eyes, terrified to see what was going to become of her. She felt the cold creep back in and engulf her, icing her insides over like a wintrified lake. The wind scratched at her skin, leaving wet marks behind that dripped down her neck. Her heart somehow still pounded in her chest, a toll bell dinging off the seconds until it could no longer ring.

“Let me go!” she screamed, blood turning into an icy mixture in her mouth. She spit and yelled again, “Let me go!” She spit, then yelled, over and over again until there was nothing left inside her. Until she was empty of air. Of blood. Of effort.

When she felt her heart give its last definitive beat, she held on to one thing: the sound of the leaves on the ground outside.

Like a newborn suddenly smacked back to life with the force of a hand to the chest, she jolted awake, her eyes wide. She was outside again. Beside the river. With her brother and their friends, all of them hovering around her staring as the woman kneeled over her, breathing life into her lungs.

As she gasped again, she looked at the cabin in the not too far off distance and saw nothing and no one in the window. No smoke in the starry sky above it. Not a damn thing.

Her eyes fell back to the woman above her, older, with bags under her eyes and wrinkles around her smile as she clapped her hands together and said, “You’re back! Dear God, I thought we’d lost you.”

“Who are you?” Lara asked, coughing out water, spit, and the faintest hint of blood in her mouth.

“Are you okay?” Finn asked, jumping between the woman and Lara and wrapping his arms around her. “God, you were dead!”

“I was?” Lara asked. “What happened?”

“You slipped in the creek,” her friend Mari said. “And hit your head.”

“There was blood everywhere,” her brother’s friend George said. “Tons of it!”

Lara touched something wrapped around her head. The base of her neck throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Her fingertips were scraped and raw. She felt woozy.

“I believe you’re mildly concussed,” the woman said. “You’re lucky your friends found me and I know CPR. You still need to go to the hospital to get looked at of course, but I think you’ll be okay.”

“I fell?” Lara asked, looking to her brother. “I don’t remember playing in the creek.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Finn said, hugging her tighter. “You’re okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

“Why don’t you kids go get their parents and bring them here? She’ll need to see a doctor,” the woman said, waving their friends to hurry. They did as she said and took off towards town.

“Now, why don’t you two come on into the cabin and I can make us a little fire to warm you up in the meantime.” The woman’s voice was sickly sweet again as she said, “I just made pie.”