Cabin in the Woods

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. On this night, exhaustion and dreaming on my feet are one and the same. The candle, perhaps a projection of madness tempered with dreams of the absurd to make everything palatable guides me. A time forgotten, or perhaps never having been, but a time no less.

A light in the darkness assuages the primordial urge to flee, to distance oneself, myself, from the ever-enveloping darkness. I want shelter. There were many paths to follow, all of them treacherous, twisting, littered with loose rock. All were arduous, but only one led me here, to the cabin.

To leave would be to trek through a coming storm, the very storm I was hoping to outrun, and with the darkness of night, injury would be a certainty. Far better to wait for the light of day. For the moment, a candle is a comfort.

I knock and hear no response. The door opens with extra help from my aching shoulder and a change in air pressure shuts it behind me. Oddly, the light doesn’t seem to flicker although my ears pop and I wonder if the ringing is tinnitus or a distant scream.

Lightning flashes and rain crashes down so violently I worry that the old roof will be crushed beneath its fury. I shrug the pack off my shoulders and slump upon it as it leans on the wall. Rummaging through it, I find an old Slim Jim and some Nilla Wafers to snack on.

My calves knot up from hours of walking and years of inattention. As I rub one, I try to stretch the other for relief and then switch. Time pervious yet impermeable as one, I can only go forward.

I grab water from my pack and a flashlight. Awash with nausea and a touch of vertigo I struggle to catch my breath and notice in the dim light that the candle is on an old table. Beside it are two hand hewn chairs and a third one, broken beneath. A shadow darts past the window outside, possibly a tree in the wind, or maybe someone was home. I call out but hear no answer.

It isn’t musty inside, there is a hint of pine and smoke.

I turn on my flashlight, glance at the door, and notice char marks and scratches, almost like a dog’s claw marks but less pronounced and somewhat more widely spread apart. I wave the light of the flashlight across the wall. There are numerous scorch marks to be seen but nothing to an extent that implies a lack of integrity in the walls. They were burned but not lost.

Another flash of lightning and in the corner of my vision it seems someone is looking in the window. I redirect the beam but what I thought was there is gone. So many things are illusionary, fleeting, they can be felt but not held, like clouds, like smoke. In the dark of a shadow, I feel, simply the cool, the lack of even an extra degree of warmth in the surrounding air, but I can’t grab it.

I feel cold.

The door hadn’t opened, the widows were shut. I was alone. I stand using the wall to steady myself. The candle flickers. Shadows dance about the room. A delusion, a dream or an echo, I don’t know which, but the room holds my unwilling attention in a firm, yet intangible grasp. I don’t understand.

Sitting in the dull light, I feel captured by this rain, confined to a cabin, and I wonder if I need to fear what is outside. Do I barricade the door till morning?

It seems whatever is outside has been content to peer in the window. It’s made no attempt to engage me despite my shouting out to it, despite offering shelter in this storm.

Perhaps then, it is a phantasm created by my exhaustion and inability to sleep, a walking dream from which I can’t seem to awaken. I want to pull myself out with a shout, but I have no words. I must be sleeping.

Harried, warried and somewhat off balance, I stagger to the table and chairs. I hear a scratch at the door and shout again, inviting whomever simply to come in, push hard, but come in and leave the storm. Again, there is no answer. The door remains shut.

As I look through the widow, I can see the wind bending the trees, and I tell myself what I thought were scratches must have been the trees in the wind.

My skin prickles, warm on the surface, yet my bones feel chilled, and I shiver. I feel a need to sit. Again, I’m awash with nausea as if I am out to sea in rolling waves with no shore in sight to steady myself.

I go toward the table to sit down. Now closer to the candle, I again see a face in the window, or more a shadow, it’s not clear. I point my light at it and realize, it’s not looking in, the face is the reflection of a woman, looking out. She’s beside me.

In the window, the reflection turns to me, reaches for my cheek as if to caress it with the back of her open hand and I pull away in horror. I feel only cold.

I see no one before me but I see the reflection strike out, and the flashlight flies from my hand, bouncing across the floor. I see her reach for my throat, and I begin to struggle for breath. She’s screaming but I can’t hear her and then she raises a hand to hit me. Outside of the reflection however, I see nothing.

I slap at the air in front of me, the candle flickers and the reflection in the window falls. I try to run but my legs feel bound, and I tumble. I cry out but there’s no answer. The flesh on my legs burns, but my bones are cold as I crawl across the floor toward the door. I feel my pant legs begin to tear.

I’m screaming as I claw my way up the door. I feel myself thrown against it several times before I can pull it open and run. I run into the rain, into the storm and into the night to tumble down the gully washed trails back toward the trailhead. Bruised and broken, I’m unsure how to ever begin again.