The Witch’s Cabin

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

Lightning fractured the inky black sky, illuminating Veronica Lancaster’s destination for a mere moment. The dingy old cabin in northern Minnesota, or “bum-fuck nowhere” as her father referred to it, stood moss covered between two oak trees. Rain soaked; the cabin appeared to be weeping with loneliness. That was until Veronica saw the candle in the window.

It couldn’t be, she thought as she approached in her dad’s old Ford, the drivebelt squealing its protest at the miles driven. She parked the old rust bucket, dropped her head, and chalked the candle sighting up to her imagination, of course there wasn’t actually a candle burning in the window. And upon further inspection there wasn’t.

The truck door hollered out, Veronica grabbed her purse and laptop bag then darted for the front porch of the cabin. Fat droplets of rain hammered her head on the short run, and she skidded to a halt on the slick spongy wooden porch. Veronica fumbled in her purse for, what felt like an eternity before finally presenting the correct key. She slipped it into the rusted lock and crossed the threshold of the cabin.

With another crackle of lightening to help her gather her surroundings she could make out the candle she saw in the window. Unlit, see you’re just imagining things; well, I can remedy this she thought while crossing the room in ten quick strides. She produced a cigarette lighter from the purse and in moments the entirety of the cabin was bathed in candlelight.

Within minutes of occupying the cabin Veronica had found, and lit another three candles, cleared all the offending cobwebs, set up her laptop on an old wooden desk, and slipped her bra from underneath her shirt. "Ahh, sweet relief. No more boob cages until my work here is done," she mumbled to the empty cabin.

She took a seat behind the desk, too wired to sleep after the long drive from St. Paul, and upon further assessment of the cabin, it looked like she’d be crashing on the couch. Veronica Lancaster had seen and slept on nicer couches to put it mildly. This one appeared to be a favorite to every moth in the tri county area. Even before its insect feeding frenzy days, the thing was a muted forest green plaid pattern, striped with rusty red. “Great, I’ll have a sore back to accompany my writer’s block,” Veronica said to the still not answering cabin.

Veronica and her father used to come up to this cabin when she was just a girl. Her mother never being in the picture, Veronica would come up here while her father would do repairs. He had no choice but to let her tag along, but Veronica could hand her father the next needed tool or spare nail like no other. That was nearly twenty years ago and before the accident.

She and her father were clearing the field of brush and saplings behind the cabin one afternoon. The original plan was to eventually install a built-in firepit but while working on an especially difficult stump, Veronica struck some sort of underground pipe or sewer runoff with her spade. “Alright, we need to be done for the day,” he explained to Veronica, “I’ll call the city in the morning for a repair but stay away from this until then. You hear me?” Veronica nodded, always obeying her father, especially when he took a stern tone.

As Veronica Lancaster’s father packed up his tools and headed for the cabin a whisp of smoke licked up at his ankles. The first indication something wasn’t right to Veronica was the smoke’s color, a dark violet and it moved against the blowing of the wind. Veronica yelled out to her father, but it was too late. The explosion fully encompassed her father before throwing Veronica off her feet. Collecting herself, Veronica blinked through the purple haze left hanging in the aftermath, seeing her father lying motionless in the field. Panicked, she swallowed a lung full of the purple cloud causing her esophagus to burn. Hacking and losing her lunch through a raw throat, Veronica clawed her way to her father’s body.

“Roni,” the nickname he always used for her, “is that you?” Both of his eyes were severely burned along with the rest of his body or what was left of it. There was nothing where her father’s legs once were, except the tatters and bloody ribbons of his overalls. “Roni, go get help.” Veronica wasted no time; she sprinted for the cabin phone and spun the rotary as fast as her seven-year-old fingers would allow.

The paramedics came and saved her father’s life. He would never walk again and would turn to abusing alcohol along with all those with enough patience to stay in his life, like Veronica. He later swallowed a bullet in one of his more depressed states. Veronica hadn’t been back to the cabin since, until now.

The Word document on Veronica’s computer was still blank. Lost in the memory of the most tragic day of Veronica’s life, she forgot the purpose of her return to the cabin. Her publisher has been breathing down her neck as of late. “When can we expect the next story? Can you at least tell me what it’s going to be about?” The up-and-coming horror short story writer she was, it was too early in her career to be blanking on her next story and she didn’t have the heart to inform her publisher. So, she did what any responsible adult would do, run and hide at her family’s derelict cabin until she thinks of something to write.

Maybe I should take the Hemmingway approach, Veronica thought as she pushed back from the blank screen that was haunting her. She crossed the room to where her laptop bag laid on the arm of the decrepit couch and grabbed the bottle of J&B whiskey. “Now where did we keep the glasses?” The wind whistling outside was all the response she received. The question was in no need of an answer because she was already grabbing a glass from the cupboard in the kitchenet. As Veronica closed the cupboard door, she caught her reflection in the dusty front glass of the cupboard and behind her the window with the candle in it. Outside of the window was a greasy, grime smudged woman staring in through a waterlogged vail of bangs. Startled, Veronica dropped the whiskey tumbler causing it to shatter at her feet, she spun on her heals but the stranger was no longer there.

Veronica flung the front door on its hinges, she stepped out into the sheets of rain, off the porch to confront whoever was there. She wrote about nightmare creatures and serial killers; she wasn’t going to be afraid of a lost stranger peering into windows. However, she wasn’t going to allow thieves or snoops to rob her or her cabin blind if she had anything to say about it.

The person that was in the window, though she looked elderly, must have been faster than Veronica originally assumed because there was no sign of her. The rain even washed away the foot prints she would have surely left in the mud outside the window. Soaked through, Veronica stood where the stranger had and looked back into the cabin. The rain-streaked glass made for a poor window, probably couldn’t see anything anyway, she thought as the candlelight inside flickered a brilliant shade of purple before extinguishing completely.

The cabin was drowned in darkness and Veronica still standing outside, blinked the rain from her eyes, allowing them to adjust to her new situation. She reached out one hand, using the outside of the cabin to guide herself back to the front door.

After the painstaking process she finally located the door and opened it, instantly blinking away the brightness. All three candles were still lit, in the exact places she had put them earlier. “Ok, what the actual fuck?” Veronica yelled to no one. She was soaked to the bone and starting to shiver, despite the June evening. She began to peel off her clothing, fuck it. If that bitch wants to look in again, she’ll get a good look at my naked ass, thought Veronica, throwing modesty to the wind.

After fumbling the matches with cold, trembling fingers Veronica finally got a fire started in the cook stove in the corner of the small cabin. Luckily there was already a small teepee of wood left in there, the wood was very old as it ignited instantly and with a fury. Veronica stood warming herself near the small black stove when she remembered her father used to keep extra clothes in the front linen closet for these exact situations. Well, not necessarily the situation where you think you see someone outside, so you run out in a downpour drenching all the clothes you brought just to realize you were mistaken and it was all for nothing, but most likely case your clothes were compromised in one way or another.

Veronica peeled her protesting muscles from the warmth of the stove and opened the linen closet. “Looks like you’re not getting a free show after all,” Veronica exclaimed as she grabbed the long sleeve Carhart that once belonged to her father. The shirt cascaded down over her butt, she assessed herself in the mirror hanging on the back of the closet door and said, “I’m gonna have to Winnie the Pooh this shit.”

“Such vile language,” Hissed a voice inhumanly loud in her ear. Veronica’s skin crawled and her stomach dropped but when she spun to identify the source of the voice, she was still alone. “It is no wonder the father took his own life, with a daughter who speaks like this,” the voice graveled on. Veronica backed herself into the corner behind the desk. Though confused, she was almost relieved to hear the voice further explain, “she released us, it is her fault, her father would still be here if it weren’t for her. Veronica Lancaster, she is the reason, she is the chosen, she did this.” Veronica had fallen to a crouching fetal position, her hands clutched over her ears, trying to will the voice out of her head.

The voice disappeared just as quickly as it came. Veronica was alone in the cabin once more. She stood, wiped the tears streaming from her eyes and took a slug from the abandoned J&B bottle sitting on the desk. It burned her throat just as the purple smoke did all those years ago, but she gulped down a second mouth full just the same.

A quarter of the bottle later, Veronica collapsed into the chair at the desk. Maybe I’m over tired, it was a long drive up here after all, Veronica confided in herself. Her eyes did feel heavy and whether it was the booze or the travel, she did not care and allowed the exhaustion to consume her.

Veronica Lancaster woke suddenly, uncomfortably folded on the hard wooden desk chair. The cabin glowed violet but flickered as if the light still came from the candles. Trying to collect her bearings she swept the room with her bloodshot eyes. Her brain still fogged from the whiskey she hadn’t realized every surface in the cabin had been moving. The floor, walls, desktop, even her computer were all covered in hordes of spiders, maggots, beetles and other insects crawling aimlessly. The noise of long micro fibered furry legs scratching one another and beady eyes shifting this way and that, were amplified in the early morning abandon cabin.

Instinctively, Veronica shot up, sending the chair wheeling over the bugs in its path. For every insect killed in the chair’s destruction seemed to spawn thousands more and they began to wriggle up her legs. The creepy crawlies scurried up her, wasting very little time to encompass their pray. Veronica swiped and swatted at the ever-multiplying band of insects, to no avail. She was almost completely covered in bugs when she threw her hands out, head back and screamed at the ceiling. An especially forceful centipede rushed into her mouth and squirmed down her throat when the room’s purple light pulsed. The pulsing light had a rippling effect, its cascade threw the legions of pests like a tidal wave cresting over the unsuspecting coral below.

Just like that the bugs were gone. Veronica fell to her knees and retched up what little amount of J&B left in her stomach, but no centipede came out with it. The vomiting had burst a blood vessel in her left eye, and she could feel it beginning to sting but her vision was otherwise clear. There was no sign of the creatures that just plagued her, not even one old brittle husk of a beetle to prove the events just took place. Then it dawned on her, the cabin is no longer purple.

“You’re learning so fast,” the gravelly hissing hit her like a ton of bricks. This time the voice was accompanied by a figure. The open maw of the door framed the small, emaciated woman from before. Her jet-black hair covered her face and was dripping water softly on the rug under her feet. She stood with an outstretched hand pointing at Veronica. The woman couldn’t be bothered by her own stark nakedness and Veronica had the fleeting thought, it’s hard to tell what’s what, the skin is so leathery. But then the whole, ‘there’s a stranger inside my cabin’ thought slammed back into her, and she shook off the absurdity that was her initial judgement.

A whisp of violet smoke licked upward from the woman’s hand until it was corralled into a perfect sphere. Not understanding why, Veronica mirrored the woman’s actions and to her delight the same purple smoke effect also mimicked her counterpart’s. Before the old lady’s instruction, Veronica seemed to know what to do next and as her anomaly turned spherical, she hurled it. Connecting with the woman directly in the center of her chest. Looks like that softball charity event last year paid off, Veronica thought seconds before being tossed off her own feet and slammed into the wall behind her. How in the hell did that happen, that person should be flat on her ass with my throw, Veronica looked up and sure enough the woman was sprawled out, her head propped up on the doorframe but otherwise unconscious. That was when Veronica Lancaster’s own wooziness took over and she, once again passed out.

Her eye’s blinked open and then snapped wide with her last memory flooding into her brain. Veronica’s head felt as if it were split in two. She sat up, looked across the cabin into the cracked mirror to give herself the once over. She wasn’t lying very “lady like,” as her father’s shirt had hiked itself above her mid-drift giving any passersby quite the show, but that was when she noticed it. Not only is the door closed but it’s over there, on her righthand side. If the figure was where it was when she’d fallen, she’d be looking directly at the door. But she was looking directly into the open linen closet, and the mirror, it’s cracked. Did I miss the bitch and hit the mirror? That would explain why she was also hit but it wouldn’t answer why the woman was laying down when Veronica passed out.

Confused, Veronica stood up and began to investigate. The cabin was back to the way it was when she fell asleep the first time. Was all that other stuff, the bugs, and the woman just a bad dream? “No you idiot, the mirror is cracked,” she answered her own thoughts aloud. She knelt in front of the mirror for a closer look, “think, think…”

“THINK.” Shrilled the voice like gravel. To Veronica’s horror she was looking in the mirror when the voice spoke this time and it came from her own lips. Just as the realization sunk in, the candlelight was bathed in a purple hue, causing Veronica to jump.

Her next thoughts couldn’t be clearer. As if in an instance she was being freed from the worst writer’s block and knew the perfect story to write. Veronica cleared her throat and waved her hands in front of herself, inches apart. As expected, the deep violet whisps began to collect between her fingertips. When she’d gathered enough, about the size and shape of a bowling ball, she clapped her hands together forcing the magic flat and cylindrical. She commanded it on its end and with a flourish drove it down her own throat. Veronica started gagging and spittle gathered at the corners of her mouth, but she was persistent. Her body continued to protest; she could feel the entity inside her latch itself onto something in the pit of her stomach. At her command the purple cylinder gingerly rose from her sore jaws, eventually emitting a small bulbous end with an even darker purple trapped inside. One more swish of the wrist and the smoke she controlled along with what was trapped inside exploded from the cabin.

Veronica had never felt this level of exhaustion, she dropped down to her knees and her eyes were heavy. Just before she closed them for the final time that night, a form stepped forward from the incomprehensible swirling purple candlelight, he said, “You’re free now Roni.”

Veronica Lancaster woke with a start. The June sun baking, Veronica could see through the water-spotted windshield, the old decrepit cabin that her father and her spent so much time at when she was growing up. She must have fallen asleep in her dad’s old Ford pickup, waiting for the rain to break.

The End