The Dead of Marrow Hill

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

It was a long way off, but I knew the location well enough. I knew no-one went up there. I stared at it for a good ten minutes, trying to convince myself that the glimmering light from deep in the trees was a stray shaft from the moon or some other natural phenomenon. Nothing to worry about. I was determined not to ascribe something supernatural to it. Marrow Hill was built on old battlegrounds. People waged war on each other here for hundreds of years. The town was full of museums and monuments and the woods were teeming with mass graves.

Everyone had a ghost story.

People joked that there were more dead than living walking around Marrow Hill. In a way, it was charming – like how Point Pleasant has the Mothman and every remote town in the PNW has a sasquatch. Marrow Hill had Snakehead Jake, the Hangman, Long Neck Bill, at least three different headless horsemen by my count, and a veritable army of women in white. I never bought into it. The dead of Marrow Hill were part of the local colour, a tourist attraction, not something to be taken seriously. Millie’s Café sold Snakehead Jake cookies, for Pete’s sake.

I took a deep breath and thanked the Lord that Mike wasn’t out there with me. He’d have given me Hell for my hesitation.

“What’s the matter, City Boy,” he’d have said with a tobacco chuckle. “Afraid of the ghoulies?”

“Screw you, Mike,” I muttered under my breath, trudging towards the cabin, grabbing my radio. “Shannon, I’m heading up to the cabin. There’s someone up there, I think. There’s a light anyway.”

The voice came back wrapped in static. “…The cabin? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I thought I heard a heavy sigh from her end, but it might have just been white noise. “…OK. Be careful.”

I couldn’t see the cabin from the path; it was miles away through the trees, but I knew exactly where it was, even without that faint trembling light to guide me. In my very first week, my supervisor brought me out here, pointed to it and said:

“Son, if you listen to anything I tell you, make sure it’s this: do not go near that place.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t talk about it. We don’t look at it. We don’t go up there, you hear?”

I’d figured there was some local tragedy or crime there that I wasn’t aware of, and that people didn’t like to talk about, but I’d found nothing in the town records or past newspapers. In a town obsessed with ghosts, you’d think a creepy old cabin would be the focal point of a dozen urban legends. Instead, it was a like a black hole of local lore. Nobody said anything about it. It didn’t even have a name.

Maybe that was why I felt so weird about the light. I didn’t think even the most rebellious of local kids would hike all the way out there just to dare each other to go into the place. And it sure was a hike. Did you know the human eye can pick out a candle flame at up to fourteen miles away? The cabin wasn’t quite that far but it seemed it, as I trudged beneath the black canopy. I was used to trees and the sounds they make. Likewise, night birds, insects and all the other things you hear in the woods. I was even used to the eerie silence that sometimes fell, often the indication of a mountain lion or another predator. That night, all the sounds seemed wrong.

I can’t describe it. The sounds were familiar, I could even identify the creatures making them, but there was something alien about them at the same time. Like how things sound if you hear them through a tunnel, weird reverb scuffing up the edges of the noise.

I thought about turning back. Maybe it really was a trick of the moonlight? Even if it was a candle, was it really my problem? Was the cabin even public land? If it was private property, it was nothing to do with me.

“Yeah, but knowing my luck, whatever fool is up there will start a damn forest fire or something and I’ll be the guy that didn’t check it out.” Distracted by my own grumbling, I half tripped over an exposed root. “Be careful,” I mocked myself with Shannon’s words. “Damn, cabin.”

“Dan? You there?” Speak of the devil.

“Yeah, Shannon, still here.”

“You at the cabin yet?” There was something in her voice. Anxiety? Anticipation? It was unusual for her to check back in like this. Normally, she’d just wait for us to call her after we were done with whatever we were investigating.

“Almost,” I replied. “I’m not going inside if I can help it.”

Why did I feel the need to add that? Maybe I was asking for permission in some way.

Her breath caught, like she wanted to say something but couldn’t bring herself to.

I heard movement behind me. “Hold on, Shannon.”

I was armed, but only with a pistol. It wouldn’t do much good against a bear or a mountain lion. I reached for it anyway. The noise and flash of a shot might scare off a predator, if I was lucky.

I turned, scanning for any sign of threat, but the woods were still. My mind bombarded me with every ghost story I’d ever heard. I fought back with every reasonable explanation I could think of. It was a rotten twig falling. It was something swaying in the breeze. It was just my imagination. I couldn’t believe any of them. My gut told me something was very wrong.

Another movement, over to my left. I drew my gun. There were figures out there. I saw one at first, then five, then more. All of them thin as shadows, indistinct as a sand-drawing after wave washes over it.

As they rushed me, I screamed, my gun forgotten in my grip.

#

I woke up on a cold wooden floor.

My body was stiff, like I’d lain there for hours. Where was I? What had happened to me? I tried to think back but my memory stayed firmly blank. I got the feeling something terrible had happened, but I couldn’t remember what.

I stood and tried to get my bearings. The building was dusty and run down but more or less intact. There was no furniture nor decoration. A single candle burned in the window.

The cabin.

I felt a shard of ice in my heart. I had to get out. I wasn’t supposed to be here. The feeling of wrongness was so strong and so primal it almost made me sick, like my body mistook it for poison.

I staggered for the door, then paused. I’d been close to the cabin when I’d seen…I couldn’t think about it. My mind wouldn’t let me. I knew it was terrible, though. Something unspeakable. Did I really want to go back out there?

Sweating, hardly daring to breathe, I moved to the window instead and peered out into the darkness. There was no sign of movement.

I still had my radio. “Idiot!” I hissed to myself. I could call for help. “Shannon? Shannon are you there? It’s Dan.”

“Dan?” The voice came back through heavy static. “Are you at the cabin?”

“Yes! I’m up here. I think I passed out or something. I’m inside.”

“You went inside?”

“Yeah. Or I got in here somehow anyway. Look, can you just send some help?”

“I’m sorry, Dan.”

My blood went cold. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t help you. Once you go inside, I can’t help you.” There was a click at her end.

“Shannon? Shannon, are you there? What do you mean?”

Nothing but white noise from the line. My hand shook uncontrollably. I almost dropped the radio. My lips were numb and my vision was blurred. Had I been concussed? Had something venomous bitten me after I blacked out?

I steadied myself on the wall, and found an unnatural series of grooves there. I traced them, squinting through the growing haze. “Jake Cleverly” was carved into the wood. An old vandalism but I recognised the name. Snakehead Jake, the notorious escaped felon. Some said he got the name from his pointed teeth. Others said it was because he was involved with some Chinese gang. Either way, he was one of the most infamous boogeymen of Marrow Hill, having escaped execution and murdered four people before disappearing into the woods.

Apparently, this was where he disappeared to.

I shook my head. None of that mattered. Survival mattered. I had to get help, no matter what Shannon said.

I tore at the door like a desperate animal, yanking it open. The darkness seemed thicker than before, the shadows taking on a weight that made no conventional sense. Too desperate to leave, I didn’t stop to process it.

I stepped outside and realised that all the stars were gone.

I fell.

The world flew up and away from me, though I could still look up at the shape of it, as though the ground had been replaced with glass. Have you ever had a glitch in a video game where you just drop out of the bottom of the level into nothing, and you can see the map way up above you? It was like that. I was out-of-bounds, between spaces where laws applied.

I saw the cabin, and the vast inky mass attached to it. Pulsing, breathing. Beneath the ground, that darkness reached out across the mountain, across Marrow Hill, probing tendrils of shadow pulling at the world beyond. Testing the boundaries. Looking for food, or a way in. Or both.

I saw the anglerfish-light of the candle in the cabin window. The kind of light a grieving widow might go to, or a convict on the run from the law, or a soldier fleeing a battlefield, or a hundred others that had come before me. All of them lured here to be eaten away until they were nothing more than echoes. The dead of Marrow Hill.

I couldn’t tell if I was still falling. My body was numb, my mass eaten away until I had less substance than an afterthought.

#

I landed on the hiking trail, as though I’d fallen from above and not below. The impact would have broken bones and shattered flesh, if I’d had any left. Everything physical about me was gone. I was a whisper, an echo. There was no pain – only terrible cold and a gnawing emptiness. It wasn’t hunger. Hunger is primal drive. It’s for living things. This was absence. This was the feeling of void.

“You sure he went in?”

Mike’s voice. I turned to see him on the path. He was talking into his radio and staring in the direction of the cabin. The candle no longer burned.

“That’s what he said,” Shannon replied through the handset.

“Poor bastard. He didn’t deserve that. We should have warned him.”

“He was told not to go up there during his orientation. What else can we do?”

“I know. It’s gotta eat.”

“It’s gotta eat,” she agreed. “Better him than everyone else. Better it doesn’t wake fully and come looking for a bigger meal.”

Mike sighed. “One more ghost for Marrow Hill.”