art of decay

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

The sentence sits on the page in an uneven, typewriter font. There is nothing but an off-white emptiness after the punctuation, space where words should be but aren’t. Elliot’s fingers stay frozen over the keys, worn and faded from years of use. Not his use, but remnants of the previous owner, whoever that had been. Probably the last sorry soul to reside in this cabin with hopes of clearing their head long enough to finish their manuscript.

He hopes they had better luck.

Days have passed—weeks? Months? It’s hard to say. Time doesn’t seem real in the mountains and each day feels hazier than the last. Stagnant, but still moving too quickly to make any real progress.

One sentence. That’s all he has.

It doesn’t feel right, but it must be. There’s no evidence to the contrary. There are no crumpled papers in the trash can. Nothing. But between stout glasses of whiskey, he feels the phantom sensation of metal keys beneath his fingertips. He hears the monotonous sound of typing.

Click, click, click.

Elliot pushes away from the desk and bends forward, burying his face in his hands, pressing his palms into his eyes until spots blossom in the darkness. Right now, he only hears the rustling of trees as the wind rakes invisible fingers through the branches. Somewhere in the distance, a bird chirps as the sun descends on the horizon and dims the world outside his window.

That’s enough for today.

Tomorrow he won’t drink as much, and the words will come flowing out of him like the amber liquid that pours from his bottle to refill his glass. It hurts on the way down, burning hotter than the candle on the windowsill.

The flame flickers, mocking the first line of his draft.

He blows it out.

The cabin was supposed to help break his writer’s block. Hundreds of miles away from the nearest city, Elliot had traded concrete sidewalks for coniferous trees. It was supposed to quiet his head. It was supposed to help him concentrate. No distractions. Unplugged. Remote and away from the world, he was supposed to have more than one pathetic line on the paper.

He’ll try again tomorrow.

—

The mirror shows him everything, every line and wrinkle etched into his skin; every shadow where his face is sunken in, a permanent purple bruised beneath his eyes.

If his sister still cared to call, she would tell him that he looks like shit. It’s been years, maybe closer to a decade. He’d been freshly nineteen, telling her goodbye with a duffle bag flung over his shoulder, ready to catch the next bus out of town. She’d ridiculed him then too, told him that he’d never escape. Not really.

He’s glad she can’t see him now.

But he sees her, a twin reflection in the dirty mirror. The same dark mess of hair; same hazel eyes; the same level of astigmatism that requires a corrective lens. She wore thin, gold-rimmed glasses back then. He wonders what she wears now.

He wonders if she thinks of him at all; if she’d be surprised to know that he’s still running.

Probably not.

With a heavy sigh, Elliot takes his glasses off—thin and gold-rimmed—and splashes cool water on his face. It does nothing to hide how exhausted he is. It doesn’t leave him feeling refreshed. Another splash of cold water and he still feels as stale as the cabin he’s holed himself away in.

Back at his desk, he stares at an empty page and the single sentence, just as unmoved and lonely as the day before. One hand hovers over the keyboard, the other on his drink, but if he writes anything at all, he doesn’t remember.

—

Something smells.

It’s faint, almost unnoticeable until an open window carries in a draft. An animal forgotten in a hunter’s trap, he figures, decomposing somewhere along the tree line. But really, it could be anything. The whole cabin is falling apart, dilapidated, and mildewed from the years left in abandonment.

Inside, the wallpaper is peeling. It’s a horrible mauve between stripes of floral, outdated like something out of an antique dollhouse. Most of it curls at the edges, revealing the dry-rot underneath. The curtains in the windows are moth-eaten, and the window panes have so much dirt around the edges, they can barely be seen through.

But it’s a vignette of grime that Elliot sees a figure in the front yard.

A deer stands in the only clearing of overgrown brush, staring into the kitchen window with large, black eyes. Elliot stares right back, the only movement in his trembling hands. Uneasiness leaves him paralyzed and unable to look away.

The deer watches.

Elliot watches.

The leak in the kitchen ceiling hits the linoleum in a subtle, rhythmic pattern.

Drip, drip, drip.

—-

Isolation is something that he’s used to. Even in the city, surrounded by people, Elliot found himself alone. The cabin is no different. There is no one around for miles. No service. No people.

Nothing.

Just Elliot, a typewriter, and a leak that’s slowly driving him crazy.

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

Strange, I thought, because I was alone.

The words come easily after that, pouring from his fingertips as he connects thought to paper. Someone once told him to write what he knew; to tell the stories buried deep inside his heart through the eyes of someone else; to make an audience feel what he’s feeling by exposing the raw heart of himself under the guise of fiction.

A grin cracks like broken plaster on Elliot’s face and his fingers fly across the worn keys with manic urgency.

He writes about what he knows.

He writes about loneliness.

—

A brutal thump, thump, thump pounds against Elliot’s temple, an intense pressure building behind his eyes. It makes sense, he thinks, considering how long it’s been since he’s last put that many words to paper. Maybe when he first arrived in New York, feeling free and far away from home? Back when his creativity had been reanimated and full of vigor before the countless rejection letters and unenthused reactions to his hard work.

Back before he stopped sharing, before the repeated cycle of isolation.

Maybe this is just another passing phase. Maybe this is step one in a repeated routine. A change of scenery, renewed passion, a candle that burns until the wax is melted and the wick is gone.

Or, maybe, this is the beginning of something new.

Maybe he’s finally done running, finally at the end.

—

The water from the tap is frigid cold against his face, shocking a gasp from him. The pounding in his head persists as he rinses up for the night, a pain that’s somehow both sharp and dull above his right eye. Elliot stays bent over the sink, elbows on the porcelain, breathing through the waves of nausea as they hit him.

One more splash and he rises, meeting his reflection.

Meeting red.

From his hairline, a thin stream trickles down his forehead, tracing the counters of his brow and cheek. It pours, bright and fresh, and it takes Elliot a moment to process what it is that he’s looking at. The pain radiates down his neck and back up to settle in his jaw. Confusion blocks the way for anything else.

“What…” He leans closer, a shaky hand lifting the sweep of curls laid against his forehead to reveal a dark, festering wound. The blood feels tacky and old at the origin, his skin soft like a peach when he presses against it.

The fresh pour that oozes between his fingertips curdles his stomach, and reality smacks him like a hand across the cheek.

Panic, finally.

“Shit,” Elliot hisses, his hand red and slippery as he fumbles with the faucet. “Shit.”

He scrubs, frantic, at his face, splashing water against his temple, feeling blindly at the gash in his skin. His fingertips graze the fold, pushing under the congealed blood, digging into the flesh, and he feels nothing.

Nothing.

And when he raises from the cold spray of water, he sees nothing but wet hair hanging in his eyes. There’s no blood streaked down his face. There’s no wound. His hands are clean. It’s only water that clings to his dark lashes and drips down the tip of his nose. The pounding in his head is gone.

There is nothing.

--

Sleep doesn’t come easy. He lays, tossing and turning in bed, for what feels like hours. Endless. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees the splash of red pouring from his temple.

It hadn’t been real. A hallucination. He’d checked himself ten times over before finally crawling into bed with the bottle. Everything was fine.

Everything is fine.

And now it’s morning and a bird outside his window acts as an alarm, its song going against the current of his migraine. Elliot peels himself from the sheets, sticky with sweat, and bypasses the bathroom entirely, afraid of what he might find in the mirror.

Or, rather, what he won’t.

The kitchen is his first destination. Safer and without reflection, but he gags upon entry when a putrid smell hits him, stronger than it has been in previous days. Foul. Rotten. Fruit flies swarm by the cracked window, zipping in and out, buzzing about, and smacking themselves against the glass, too simple to know that the window pane is only an illusion of freedom. Elliot watches as they fall dead against the sill. Stupid things.

He pulls the window shut, crushing the carapaces, and turns to make his coffee.

—

It’s gone.

It’s all gone.

Every word that’d been written the day prior is gone.

A blank piece of paper sits with faux innocence, mocking him. Blank, save for a single sentence, illuminated in the dim morning light by a candle he doesn’t remember lighting.

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

No, that can’t be right. This can’t be right. It has to be here somewhere. They have to be here somewhere—the pages he’s written, the story he’s telling. It couldn’t have just disappeared. This can’t be another hallucination.

His knees hit the old hardwood with a sickening crack, hands finding the trashcan first, full of wadded paper. He straightens each one out, revealing empty space.

“Come on,” he mutters to himself, standing to rifle through the paperwork on the desk, knowing in his gut that it won’t be there—and it isn’t. “Come on, where is it?”

Nothing.

It’s like he never wrote anything at all; like everything had been a dream. The blood, the writing, the passion he’d felt.

None of it was real.

The rising sun filters in from the window, catching on something in the corner of his eye. An empty bottle on the floor shines gold and amber as his eyes. It mocks him too, and realization slams against his chest like a weight, crushing the breath from his lungs. Shattering his ribs.

He’d been drinking. Of course. That explains it.

That explains everything.

It’s his mug that shatters next, smashed against the wall to add another stain. The pounding in his head only gets worse.

Thump, thump, thump.

—

Pressure builds against Elliot’s chest, heavier and heavier until he can’t breathe; until he can’t move. It knocks him from sleep into a state of lucidity, but only in mind and not body. Paralyzed. Like lead, as if someone poured cement into his bones, and the weight grows stronger with every excruciating second. He opens his mouth to scream and nothing comes out.

Just as well, too. It’s not like there is anyone to hear him outside of the flies. There’s no one.

Nothing. No one.

Except for the deer at the foot of the bed.

What?

Elliot’s eyes adjust to the dark slowly, his vision swimming with his labored breathing. Panic thrums through his body as he tries his best to move. Every movement remains bogged down, every breath coming too slow. Suspended in the aether near the cusp of slumber and wake. The fear only makes the panic rise.

And the deer stares at him, just as it had in the yard, and for a brief moment, that fear takes a backseat to confusion.

How did it get in here?

But opening his mouth still produces silence. The deer keeps staring with wide, unblinking eyes, obsidian black. It stares through him, snarling to reveal teeth too sharp for a herbivore, and far too many. Elliot tries to move again, heart hammering and threatening to break bones, but he can’t. He’s frozen.

A nightmare, he tells himself. It’s not real. None of this is or has been.

But it keeps snarling. Do deer snarl? This one does. The lips keep peeling back, farther and farther in an unnatural smile, exposing red muscle and bone. There’s a pop and crack, and Elliot realizes too late that it’s the body breaking, pretzeling, elongating until it’s deformed, bipedal, and no longer an animal.

Not a man either, but a humanoid figure cloaked in black and shadows, the skull of what it once was resting on its shoulders. An entity existing outside of man or animal.

Elliot closes his eyes, the only part of his body still willing to move, and grits his teeth.

It’s not real.

It’s not real.

A voice rings through his head, replacing his desperate thoughts. Two words reverb through his consciousness.

“Wake up.”

—

The next morning brings a hangover worse than any bottle. Elliot sits at his desk, staring vacantly out of the window, the typewriter nothing but a blur in the foreground of his sight. There was no rest in his sleep—once the Entity released him, he’d been too afraid to close his eyes. Every time he tried, he saw the hollow sockets of an empty deer skull. An abyss that looked back.

Nothing looks back at him now. The yard is empty. Silence, except for the loud buzzing of flies from the kitchen.

Silence, except for the rhythmic leak still pattering against the linoleum floor. Loud, even a room away.

Drip, drip, drip.

Elliot tunes it out. The drip, the flies, and the smell.

God—the smell. It’s worse now, damn near nauseating. Stepping into the kitchen had turned his stomach and sent him right back to his desk. Not even the musk of mildew and pine can mask the odor now. Not even the candle still flickering in the window.

But he pushes through it, placing it in the far recesses of his mind. There is something more pressing.

Elliot refocuses his attention.

He writes about what he knows. He writes about a figure in black; about twin antlers twisting from under a dark hood; about a voice still sounding off in his head, low and melancholy.

“Wake up.”

—

The words are gone the following morning, the original sentence set in place, same as before. No evidence of anything different exists. The same, down to the crooked ‘e’ toward the middle and the slight tear in the corner where he’d fed the paper the first day.

One sentence. That’s all he has.

—

Nightfall brings a visitor.

Black drapes over an outstretched, bony hand. The skin is so white that it’s nearly translucent in the sliver of moonlight cascading through the bedroom window. At the edge of the bed, the Entity sits, hollowed eyes watching the labored rise and fall of Elliot’s chest. Studied and observed like a moth pinned to a board. It’s unnerving. Unnatural.

But this time is different. This time, Elliot can speak.

“What are you?”

The answer reverbs in his head. “Whatever you’d like to call me.”

Elliot can’t help it. He laughs—a dry sound, devoid of all humor. That’s what he gets for expecting a straight answer when this creature is just a product of his subconscious, brought to life in the form of a nightmare. A vague answer for a loaded question.

It doesn’t matter, he figures. None of this is real anyway.

—

Morning has barely stretched across the sky when Elliot shoves the last shirt in his suitcase.

It’s the cabin. It has to be. Something is wrong with it. That, or something is wrong with him—but he can’t abandon himself.

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years…

Maybe there’s a reason. Cursed, or haunted. It’s hard to say. He never put much stock into ghost stories before, but how else can he explain it? Cabin fever? A final crack in his sanity? That’s a likely option, and one he doesn’t want to entertain. Not right now.

Right now, he wants to leave.

And so, he does.

He carries his single suitcase; leaves the typewriter, leaves the candle burning, and hopes like hell it’ll just burn the whole place down. That’d be the best solution. It’s run-down, dilapidated, it’s run its course. Fruit flies, nightmares, leaks, and that god-awful smell.

Elliot covers his nose as he barrels through the front door, gagging on the stench that’s now wrapped around the front of the house. The wheels of his suitcase drag along the dirt, leaving tracks behind him, a breadcrumb trail. Evidence that he’s running away.

Again.

He doesn’t care. Screw this place. Screw this cabin. Screw the person he bought it from, sight unseen. A fixer-upper. Fully furnished. A joke. Maybe that was his fault. Maybe he’d been too desperate to isolate himself again.

The luggage gets tossed in the back, and Elliot slides into the driver’s seat, keys scraping against the ignition as his hands struggle to align them. Twice he tries, and then finally turns the engine over and—

Nothing.

“No,” Elliot whispers under his breath, trying again. The engine doesn’t do more than click. “No, come on. Please.”

Nothing.

—

Elliot sits at the desk, back at square one, eyes glazed over as they stare unfocused at the single sentence still inked across the paper.

One sentence, that’s all he has.

One sentence, a single suitcase, and a bottle of liquor. Nothing else. No one else. Not anymore.

He has this godforsaken cabin now too, he figures. This rotting, dilapidated cabin. This shell of a home houses nothing but nightmares.

Drip, drip, drip.

Elliot groans, leaning forward to cradle his head in his hands. His fingers scratch and pull at his scalp, digging into the flesh until his blunt nail catches on the ridge of something soft. A bump—and for a moment panic flares to life in his chest, a memory of red rolling down his face too fresh in his mind. But this seems to have an organic shape, and not one found in a mound of congealed blood.

It feels like…

Elliot leans up, blinking, blinding mapping out what seems to be a stalk. He follows it to the root and plucks, tossing the offending object to the table.

A mushroom, with a light stalk and brown cap, red and wet at the end where he’d uprooted it from his scalp.

Frantically, he reaches up, searching for another one, and finds it. The back of his head. The side of his neck. He stares at them all in horror, each bloody at the base, barely able to register what he’s looking at. It doesn’t make sense.

Nothing makes sense.

Nothing.

The shock wears off soon after that and Elliot sweeps them from the desk in one, panicked motion. He doesn’t see where they land, but when he drops to his knees, curling in on himself against the dirty hardwood floor, they’re gone.

“Wake up.”

—

Elliot runs.

He runs as fast as his legs can take him with nothing but himself. His suitcase still sits in the backseat of a car that won’t run. It doesn’t matter. He has to get away; he has to get out of here.

The mountainside all looks the same—tall trees in every direction. There’s a dirt path that he’d once traveled but the farther he gets away, the harder it is to see it. His vision blurs, his head growing foggy. All of his thoughts and memories jumble together into one splitting pain that pierces the side of his head.

If he can just make it to town…

Elliot’s knees hit the dirt path, hissing through his teeth as he doubles over in pain. His head is splitting and his vision edges black, light-headed from the pain. Something churns violently in his gut and he rocks forward, bracing himself to vomit, fully expecting nothing but stomach bile.

That’s not what comes up.

From Elliot’s mouth oozes a thick, viscous substance, solid black and smelling of rot. He catches it in his hand, eyes blown wide and shaking.

He crawls less than three feet before coughing up more.

He crawls less than a foot before he blacks out.

—

The Entity is back—is it the one that brought him here? Back to the cabin.

Elliot lies flat on his back, staring up at a skeletal, animalistic face. Nothing feels real, and he’s beginning to think that’s because it isn’t. The Entity straddles his hips, sitting atop him, pinning him down. Its fingers move nimble and quick across his body.

Gardening.

From Elliot’s pale, sunken chest blooms a collection of flowers. Lavender, and blue. Their stems break through his skin like dirt.

It’s another nightmare.

It’s not real.

The Entity plucks the flowers, one by one.

“I want to go home,” Elliot says. He’s in no mood for bargaining or cryptic messages.

The Entity’s hands still, a single purple petal dropping from its grasp. A sad, pitying sensation washes over him. Even with no real face to speak of, Elliot gets the sense that the Entity is frowning.

“You can’t.”

That’s the exact answer he’d be afraid of.

“Please,” he says as if that will make a difference.

“You will.”

The contradictory reply vibrates through Elliot’s entire body and the meaning becomes clear. There is still more. He can’t leave—yet.

Licking his dry, cracked lips, Elliot leans forward, watching as the Entity continues its ministrations, weeding the growth from his chest.

“What do I have to do?” he asks.

Because that has to be it. There is something he still needs to do, a puzzle he needs to unlock. Then he can leave.

Then he can go home—wherever that is.

“Find yourself,” the Entity tells him, and Elliot’s brows pinch together.

“What?”

“Wake up.”

—

Elliot wakes up, alone, shirt unbuttoned but no trace of flowers in his bed. The sickness is still there. He feels it crawling up his throat, and he rolls over the upheave over the edge.

Black. Rot.

Find yourself.

Those two words play over, and over in his head, even as he drags his body from bed and cleans up in the bathroom. He brushes the taste from his mouth, refusing to look into the mirror longer than he has to. He doesn’t just look exhausted anymore. He looks sick.

Find yourself.

That’s what he’s been trying to do—for years, for decades. He’s been looking for himself in everything, a bitter resentment building in his heart every time he finds nothing. On the outside, he blamed everyone else. His mother. His father. His sister. Society. But he’s always known the truth.

It’s his fault. It’s his fault that he doesn’t belong. It’s his fault that he’s so lonely, too afraid to make any genuine connections.

He never bought this cabin to finish his book. He did it to finally be truly alone.

Find yourself.

And so when he sits in front of the typewriter, he fills the pages with absent thoughts. He fills it but fills it with nothing. Every cruel thought he’s had. Every desperate, pathetic confession. He writes about what he knows. Self-imposed loneliness.

It doesn’t matter if these pages expose him. They won’t be there tomorrow.

—

The work is gone, just like he knew it would be, but that doesn’t stop him from snapping. The final piece of twine unravels, the only thing keeping him tethered to sanity.

He’s done.

He’s done writing. He’s done trying to find himself.

“I’m done,” he says to no one—maybe the Entity if it’s listening. “I’m done, okay? I can’t do this anymore.”

Nothing.

“Please. I can’t do it.”

He doesn’t want to find himself. There’s a reason he’s spent years running. He knows what he’ll find. Something he’ll hate because everyone else seems to.

“I’m tired,” he pleads, eyes searching the ceilings, looking in the water stains for some kind of divine sign; for some clarity. “I’m tired of running. I want to leave. I want peace.”

The desk goes next, toppled in one go. A fragile leg snaps as it’s overturned. The curtains follow after, ripped from their hanger. The moth-eaten fabric tears easily—just as easily as the wallpaper. One step at a time, Elliot dismantles the front room. Glass shatters. Furniture breaks. The candle still burns.

And he can’t have peace. Not with that leak sounding off like a metronome keeping time with his breakdown.

Drip, drip, drip.

—

The toolbox in the closet is missing, an almost comical shape in the dust where it once sat. He’d seen that first day—however many days that’s been now. Time doesn’t seem real in the mountains.

Nothing seems real.

Nothing.

It doesn’t matter. None of this does, not anymore. If he can’t fix anything, he can at least fix this leak. He’ll rip the shingles from the roof if he has to. He’ll cave the entire thing in. Burn it down. That’s how he fixes everything else.

It’s been what feels like days since he’s been in the kitchen, the smell almost unbearable. The window sill looks black with the bodies of dead flies, caked against the dingy white and lining the floor beneath it. Even they can’t stand the stench.

The backdoor sticks as he tries to open it, and it’s not fresh air that he’s greeted with when he does. More black bile races up his throat and he swallows it down, holding his breath as he steps off the small patio.

Something isn’t right.

Something is dead.

He sees the toolbox first, open with his contents scattered in the grass. Then, the ladder that’s fallen over on its side.

Lastly, in the overgrown brush beneath the gutter, Elliot sees the body.

“Wake up.”

But he can’t wake up, never again. There, lifeless in a tangle of weeds, is where he’ll remain. Elliot stands over himself, robotic and mechanical, taking in the large gash ripped across his temple; at the rock just next to his head, painted red. He stares at the misshapen, bloated figure of his body, discolored and decaying. The smell doesn’t bother him now. He can’t smell a thing.

A fly crawls over his open, glassy eye.

Slowly, his memory returns to him. A fog that he hadn’t realized existed finally lifts.

It’s been over a month since he’s arrived—he remembers now. The feeling is sentient. A month ago, he’d gotten one sentence into his novel before deciding the leaking would be a problem. Drip, drip, drip. He couldn’t work like that. He’d found the toolbox, but he’d found his bottle sooner. Drunk, he’d climbed onto the roof.

Drunk, he’d lost his footing.

That was it. That was the end. A story finished before it started.

He’d died alone, his life cut short with nothing to show for it. No one to say goodbye to. No one to mourn him. That restless feeling in his chest had followed him to the afterlife, keeping him rooted in the physical world. A world he never truly belonged to, but desperately wished he could. A world he’d been running from, and now it’s too late to return.

“Do you think if I’d—maybe if I’d done things differently?” Elliot asks. He doesn’t have to see the Entity to know it’s there, lurking behind him. He feels the presence all around him. Melancholy and sad, just as it’s always been. He knows what to call it now.

Death.

“Perhaps,” Death says. “But the choices you made in life are what led you here. Accident or not.”

Elliot snorts back a humorless laugh, finally turning away from his corpse. “Okay, sure. I guess it doesn’t matter though, does it? I’m dead.”

“You are.”

Somehow hearing the confirmation is worse than seeing it.

This is real. Everything.

Dragging a hand down his face knocks his glasses askew, but it doesn’t matter. He can see now, meeting Death’s hollow eyes. “Now what?”

“You said you wanted to leave.”

He did say that.

“Where will I go?” Elliot asks, immediately shaking his head. “No, wait. Shit. I don’t want to know.”

“Do you want to stay?”

He doesn’t want that either. For someone that’s spent so much time running, he’s never put much thought into what comes after. There’s the finish line, and then what? How many options does he have—and does he have one? Staying seems to be one, but is that something that he wants? To relive each day, over and over again, watching his body rot and become one with the Earth as his consciousness remains. To wake up every morning to the same, stagnant sentence? To be alone, constantly reminded of everything he failed to do?

No. If hell exists, that is it.

“I’ll go,” he says, and Death extends a pale hand, purple at the knuckles.

Elliot takes it, running away, one last time.

—

The candle in the window goes out.