Legends Are True

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

It was well-known that the tragedy that had taken place there was fit enough to ward off even the most depraved sorts of vagabonds or rouges, so the townsfolk knew there was no reason for anyone to be afoot inside, and most especially not on a night like this. Yet there it was, burning, signaling the light of a stranger and sounding a whispering drone of alarm in Hollow Falls. Cam Burden, a strapping young man who had always had a penchant for gossip, was apparently the first to see it. He came, dripping of sleet and looking a bit disheveled, out of the biting wind and into the Goat’s Hoof, the local Inn’s brewpub. It was round seven o’clock, when the dinner rush had died down and the place had already emptied of most women and children.

“Did you see sommat there, shining out the window of the old Kindrek’s cabin on this night?” His face could barely contain its composure after his first gulping sip of barley malt, as he shared the news with the squat man beside him. Cam loved sharing news. “I was riding my mare back out from pasture about half hour ago, and I couldn’t believe it. There’s somebody in there.”

“Hogwash,” the fat man spat. “There’s nobody taken up in that cabin for years. Not since what happened there.” Cam was sure he saw the bulk under the man’s tight undercoat shiver.

“Suppose someone doesn’t know, then?” Cam’s eyes lit at the thought of a stranger who didn’t know something that everyone else already did. “Whose to stop ‘em from taking a rest in a shelter during a storm like tonight?”

“Poor things,” the only woman still working behind the bar tutted to herself. “Its a bitter cold that could drive someone to such desperation. But who? Surely you would have known if someone was comin’ into town?”

The question welled up and lingered in Cam’s mind in the form of an annoyance devoid of concern. More than anything he wanted to know the identity of a stranger for the pure reason that he didn’t already have it. This was unacceptable.

“You’d be best off to go and warn them, that they mightn’t appreciate the time they spend there after all,” Anne remarked, wiping the last of her bar glasses dry and stacking them neatly in the sideboard. “Somebody should warn them.”

Anne was always a bleeding heart, a woman who cared for others more than was necessary, and also one who also gave credence to superstitions that could surely overtake the better part of one’s mind, Cam thought to himself.

“Its bloody cold out there, and I don’t think there is any way they’d be able to take up another shelter before things really pick up,” he justified. As if in agreement, the wind suddenly blew between the doors near the front of the pub, and a high-pitched whine emanated, chilling the backs of the patrons lining the bar… suddenly everything grew a little more eerie.

“I don’t like nights like these,” the fat man shivered again. “I’d best be gettin’ home in fact.” He started to gulp up the rest of his drink, and grabbing his hat and coat off the seat next to him he swiftly made his way toward the door faster than Cam could have thought him capable. “She’s right though,” he said, shooting a serious look back toward the warmth of the room before he disappeared. “Somebody should warn ‘em.”

Cam thought about it. It was now just a few minutes past seven, and the earliest dusk had gone— now nightfall was setting in and fast. He may be able to just make it to the cabin in time for the ice not to harden under his boots. He was a young man, and capable in the trickiest of circumstances— especially where physicality was concerned. And even more so than that, Cam thought of himself a hero, which helped to bolster his sense of courage even when all of his older companions were already looking to head home to their beds for the night.

“You really should, Cam,” Anne looked to him softly, taking on the gaze of a well-meaning mother figure. “I’ll pack you a bit of warm cheese for your troubles.”

Cam eventually decided, after due deliberation upon how good he would look for taking on the troubles of the poor fool who chose to take up shelter in the Kindreck cabin. He would go, and look the part of the hero. But the better part of him just wanted to know who was this stranger in the cabin before anyone else.

Alone, Cam stumbled upon the path back toward the pasture. The woods looked eerie on a night like this. They looked eerie any night, but the wind and sleet had broken, leaving everything dripping in their aftermath. Occasionally a great gust of it would kick back up, and Cam, clutching at his neckline, was reminded of the greatness of mother nature and how he’d do well to remember it. But his feet were sure of where they were heading— he’d been here more than a hundred times without incident— and so he stuffed his thoughts of the cold and rain and aloneness he felt, and kept upon his way.

When Cam approached the bend in the woods whereby he might look upon the cabin, he felt his nerves begin to rise. The cabin was notorious around these parts since the tragedy, and it was true that everyone knew it. For a moment he found himself wishing that the candle really hadn’t been there after all, that he had had some lapse in imagination or better judgement, or that he had dreamed it up as merely a whimsy, a product of too much of the barley malt he had consumed. But there it was, as he found himself beginning to claw off the beaten path of the tread-upon forest road, taking down bits of dried and deadened moss, wet with the sleet as he went. The candle’s light, even brighter now than it had looked in the early dusk, was shining through the short stretch of woods between the path and the old cabin. It danced and flickered behind the wetted pane, seeming only to taunt Cam with every step he now took.

What was the big deal if someone was staying in the old cabin anyway? How did he get talked into this? Cam thought to himself, wondering if there was any chance he could save face with the other townspeople who had been witness in the Inn tonight if he didn’t go in after all. But by now he knew that the word of the candle had probably spread, and tomorrow folks would be wondering what had happened here on this night. And that was too important to Cam to feel the brunt of his fear.

As he mushed through the last of the wet forest floor, he brushed himself off and came to a full upright stand nearly on the stoop of the old cabin. Its crumbling overhang was seeping with vines and cobwebs, barely visible, but felt by the top of his head as he ducked beneath them. He took one final breath and let out every ounce of withholding, checking once more to see the flickering light of the candle dancing from the window. Cam pried off his glove, and held up a stretched, white hand to rap on the old door.

Before he could knock, it opened. Creeeeeeeeeee…

The light inside flickered dimly, and Cam nearly thought the door opened itself as a terrified trill rang through him. But then he caught the sight of tiny fingers, clutching the door, and a pair of sunken little eyes peering out at him from behind them.

“Holy hell, little lad!” Cam exclaimed, still feeling the numb waves of fear emanating down his legs and into his boots. “You gave me quite a fright!”

The boy behind the door only stared. He didn’t say a word, but kept looking at Cam from behind his curled fingertips, which were still gripping at the door’s edge.

“What are you doing in here, all by yourself? Are you alone?” Cam pressed, thoroughly suspicious and suddenly wanting to account for everyone in the cabin. He had heard of bandits who used the innocence of children to prey on unsuspecting travelers. Suddenly his bravery faltered again and he took a step back from the stoop.

Just then, a maddening crack of lightning lit the entire wooded scene with an electric whiteness, and for a split second, Cam could see into the room of the cabin, which looked just as old, decrepit, and abandoned as it always had on the few occasions he had decided to peer inside during his daytime treks through the forest. The boy was alone, surely. Cam looked to the tiny face again, which was lit with the same fear he had felt a moment ago, and with the onset of a heavy crash of thunder, became so suddenly terrified that the boy let out a small yelp and slammed the door of the cabin abruptly!

“Hey!” Cam yelled, and he pushed forward through the vines and cobwebs once more to shove the door back open. As his eyes adjusted, he took a step into the cabin and found himself alone, nobody in sight. “What in the… Jehosephat!”

It was then that the thoughts of what had happened at the Kindreck cabin, and the tragedy that befell those of that name, finally came rushing to the foreground of Cam’s mind. It was a boy, he was sure of it. A little boy, and the mother and father… the lot of them. All lost in the storm. They found them, froze to death up against a felled tree under the snowbank that next morning. The snow had been the worst they’d seen in years, too thick for them to even find their own way. They were only a few hundred yards from their shelter.

It was a terrible thing. News of the family’s doom had haunted the small town for a decade. And a little boy… not so many years younger than Cam at the time of his demise. Cam recalled that he was a meek thing, prone to a stutter. Not only nine years old if he remembered correct.

Cam’s eyes peeled wildly around in the flickering candlelight, searching for what he didn’t want to find, yet also wanting to find it, to pin it down, to prove that this boy, this little one he had just seen, wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, the same from that very tragic tale. The candle was his only clue, his only claim to sanity, because there it was, still two or three inches in height, burning in the window. Ghosts don’t use candles, Cam thought to himself. Or strike up a flame, for that matter. He steadied his breath and forced his legs to walk up toward it, and passing his hand through the flame, found the candle to be as real as it was hot. Then, he resumed to frantically peer around the small, single-roomed cabin again. It was largely empty of anything, just as he remembered it. There was a small table and a broken chair near the darkened hearth, and a few rusted-out tools still hanging on one of the walls. The bed was gone, and yet there was a muddy pile of straw, probably festering with bugs, in one of the corners.

“Hello?” Cam called out, dumbly, knowing that there was none to be seen in this room that could hear him. “Is anyone… there?” He was thinking through a manner and array of swear words that he could utter out as he ran trepidatiously through the woods and back to the warmth of his bed, disbelieving that he had actually been drawn out here by the presence of an old ghost, when suddenly Cam stopped. The straw in the corner was moving.

“Shite, lad! There you are!” Cam hollered, grasping his chest while his heart hammered. “I was thinking I’d seen a dead boy!” The little boy in the corner was dressed in thin garb. He was cold, clearly, and there wasn’t a crumb in sight for him to have eaten. The gravity of the situation set in as Cam realized: he might be seeing a dead boy if he hadn’t come in to check on him tonight. “What the hell are you doin’ out here, on a night like this?”

“I got lost,” the boy uttered his first words, and Cam wondered if he wasn’t even nine yet by the small sound of his voice. “I don’t know where I am. And this storm…” the boy gulped as another bolt of lightning lit up the cabin and the woods outside. “I was scared.”

Cam was incredulous. “Well, where are your parents? You could die out here on your own. I’m amazed that you’re doing as well as you are in this drafty old cabin!” He began to peel back his outer coat and shake off the sleet to give to the little boy. 


Suddenly the boys eyes widened. “I don’t need your coat,” the boy drew back sharply. “Don’t.” Another crack of thunder boomed around the cabin.

Cam stood there, in disbelief. “I don’t understand.” He held the coat up, taking another step toward the little wretched creature who looked so pathetic to him. “Take this. You need it.”

“Don’t touch me!” The boy suddenly snarled, backing his way into the filthy straw in the corner like a scared animal. “Don’t come any closer!”

“Kid, you’re going to die out here if you don’t let me help you,” Cam insisted. He eyed the boy once more, wondering again if he really was seeing a ghost after all. Did ghosts need coats? Certainly not, he thought.

But the boy was shivering, that much was absolutely true. And in a moment of quiet stalemate, he was sure he even heard his stomach let out a growl. Suddenly the cheese in his pocket was obvious to Cam, maybe still warm, even.

It wasn’t warm, but he fished it out, and tossed it over where it landed on the bed of muddy straw for the boy, who eyed it suspiciously, looking up at Cam once more. Before long, he reached out and snatched it up, and began devouring it voraciously.

Ghosts definitely don’t eat cheese, Cam smiled to himself.

“Now that your stomach has allowed you to come to your senses,” Cam said as he watched the boy lick his fingers, “perhaps you’ll let me help you?” He held the coat out once more, himself already shivering from the loss of his outer layer, and wondering how on Earth this boy was managing to ward off hypothermia. Or perhaps he wasn’t. Cam’s thoughts trickled back to his days serving in the war, and how he’d seen some of his compatriots return from their winter march with blackened toes that needed to be severed off. He eyed the boy’s fingers, and then his feet, which were barely visible in the straw, in the dim light of the cabin. He thought at the very least it was good that he had a pair of shoes on.

“You’re going to want to come with me. You won’t last the night in here,” Cam said with decided authority, and reached again for the boy to pass him the coat.

“I’m not going anywhere!” The little boy yelled out, with ferocity that Cam had not expected at this point. What could he be afraid of, to distrust someone who was merely promising the saving of his own life, so much? Cam thought back to being a young boy and the fear and vulnerability that simply being so young could instill.

Another strike of lightning lit the room.

“I’m not going to hurt you, lad,” Cam said. But the boy, who was breathing harder, had backed himself up against the corner so much now that he looked as though he was going to merge with the wall. And Cam rightly wondered if perhaps he would. Did this seem like a normal boy at all? Another trill of fear, for the first time since finding the boy in the straw, came over Cam, and this time it seemed to ring most intensely in his very skull.

“What is your name?” he finally asked, noting his voice beginning to waver with a little more uncertainty than he felt good about.

“F- Frankie. Frank Miller,” the boy squeaked.

A strange name, Cam thought. He had never heard it. Could this be the boy lost with his family? Well, no. Kendrick was his family name, anyway. So that settles that, Cam reminded himself to calm his own nerves and stop being silly.

“You really need to get back to safety with me,” Cam stated matter-of-factly. “I told everyone at the Inn I would come out here to check on you. What do you think they would do if I left you out here on your own?” Cam began to think of accolades he might receive for saving the young life, and he was about to grow frustrated.

But the boy’s demeanor changed. “You came from the Inn?” He suddenly looked interested, his ears perking up. Finally, Cam thought, he was going to listen. He would likely have known there was a town nearby, but Hollow Falls wasn’t large. It was precarious circumstances that a boy this young ended up alone in this wood in the first place.

“I did, and I know a real bleeding heart of a woman that would love to help you out there,” Cam said, once more extending the coat to the boy, who finally took one last look at Cam’s white hand, and reached out, trembling, likely overcome with cold shivers. He took a hold of the coat and threw it over his little back. It hung down well past his knees, and Cam finally felt a sense of real satisfaction over having ventured out to this darkened cabin. “Anne will take good care of you. You haven’t anything to fear.”

The boy slowly made his way out of the corner and toward the front of the cabin. As he shuffled his strange white shoes out of the straw, Cam took pause. He had never seen shoes quite like them. The boy held his breath, as the last flicker of the candle shone before the two stepped out into the night.

He caught a glimpse of the charred skin peeling back from Cam’s widening smile, and for the first time, truly saw the remains of his stretched wide eyeballs, the skin around them entirely gone.

“You haven’t a single thing to fear,” Cam repeated. “You’re going to like it here.”

***

Millie Thornton was wiping tables in a busy breakfast diner. The sun was shining and the jukebox was playing the undulating waves of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream” behind the din of the morning patrons’ eating noises.

A summer storm had rocked the landscape of the tiny town the night before, sending a lot of the tourists to an early bedtime. Save for the ghost tours, which always ran, rain or shine. The rain even helped to enhance the experience, Millie thought. The historic walking tours were a popular pastime for the town’s visitors, and a bit of a kitschy annoyance for the locals— although like most old places, there was more than enough material out of the town’s dismal past to easily spend the two hours. A colonial-era town, complete with its own history of notable revolutionary war-time involvement, and most especially famous for a particular tragedy having taken place at the town’s historic inn and pub, the Goat’s Hoof. Fifteen good men and one woman had been trapped and burned alive inside, more than a hundred and fifty years before. The Inn was largely unchanged from the olden days, and still in operation, pub and all. It always made the best part of the tour, Millie thought, reminding herself of her college days when she used to work weekends scaring the vacationers passing through her town.

Millie was just pulling herself out of her spotty college memories when a breathless couple came bursting into the diner. “Has anyone seen our son? Has anyone seen our boy?” They held up a portrait of a boy of eight or nine, smiling a toothless grin from the black-and-white photo. The lights of a police vehicle shone outside of the diner, and Millie realized a small crowd was gathering around outside, as the town realized what had happened.

Little Frankie had gone missing only the night before, lost from his parents during the storm when the family wandered into the woods for an evening walk. The mother claimed they were trying to find the ruins of a very ancient cabin that they’d heard tell about while staying at the Inn. According to their source, one could find it only a mile and a half into the woods, just off the old trail head.

The name of the purported cabin was supposedly lost, but Millie knew the story of the cabin well. It was featured on the nightly schedule of the ghost tour company she had worked for. Legend had it that if one lights a candle in the crumbling window frame on the night of a storm— any storm— the candle would represent the one that might have saved the very lives of the family who so long ago had died in the cold, just yards away from the door step and safety of their very own home. It was said if the candle was glowing, a portal would open, and the ghosts of the family would come back from the past to claim the life of the one who lit it, trading places with them. The tour company always made quite a big display of this town legend, using the opportunity to stand huddled with the freaked-out patrons on the edge of the woods and feign seeing a candle glowing, off in the distance. But, of course, it was only a legend, right?

Millie felt shivers as she recalled the old spooky feelings she used to get whilst standing on the edge of the forest during that part of the tour. A forest was a forest, and was honestly spooky enough on its own. It was a sad story— whether it was true or not— what supposedly happened to that little family way back when. It always made her feel wretched to think about it at length.

She felt better when her boss told her it likely wasn’t true. Generations have handed the reason for the existence of the old cabin down, and over time, he was sure of it, the truth had been distorted. But it made for a particularly good ghost story to add to their tour schedule.

When Millie arrived home from her shift that afternoon, she heard from a neighbor that the little boy had been located. She breathed a sigh of relief for him, and his parents… thank goodness that the little boy had been found. She laughed at her own silliness, recalling how spooked she had felt, even in the daylight of her shift at the diner. Those old ghost stories really had gotten the better of her, but Hollow Falls was a safe town, and legends weren’t true, and everything had turned out alright, after all.

Her relief was short-lived.

It was all over the papers that week. Apparently the boy had suffered an amnesiac fugue, the poor thing… According to the news report, he didn’t know his own name or who he was, or remember his parents or anything about his life before he came walking out of the woods that day.

The authorities were still closely monitoring him, but they could find nothing different or wrong with his health— apart from the development of a stutter, probably the product of traumatic stress due to his harrowing night spent lost in the woods.

Millie didn’t know why, but she felt irrationally uneasy upon seeing his face in the newspaper. His expression was so… odd.

She chided herself, silly Millie, even as her thoughts began to drift back again toward the candle in the window.

Outside her door, a wind— far too cold for a summer storm— began to blow.