The Candle's Heartbeat

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. She slid herself across the floor to her nightly perch against the wall, dragging his soul behind her. She took the rusty nail and notched a mark into the wall beside her. 14 notches, two weeks she had been there.

His body was not far from her in the other room. It lay still as it had since day 2 when she had killed him in self-defense. His ghost was closer, it never left her. Where was hell to take him? She cried some more.

She whimpered slightly and rehearsed the memory in her mind again. Going over the events that had led her there. She did this nightly as a way to preserve her sanity. Emma had walked out of the grocery store carefree and walked a certain step quickly to her car. The sun had just gone down and bright orange lit the sky in anticipation of the next day's heatwave. She stopped to glance at it just for a second as she closed the hatchback door. Sudden pain in her shoulder and a sharp force downward and that's all she remembered. Then she awoke in the cabin not knowing how long she had been there.

As soon as she woke he began ranting in between sneers at her. A man was there with her, he was "preparing" her, he kept saying. He was to get her ready for a circuit. She was to be sold and sex trafficked. Panic filled the room. Shock, dismay and all the terrible punched into her over and over again. What monster keeps a dread-filled heart. What life created that thing like this man! He repeatedly beat her, never fed her, and would alternate with stroking her. Never a forgiving glance the hatred within her grew until it consumed her. When she was weak enough, after the sale, the plan was to move her to a bedroom in a house where she would be kept hidden and filled with fear would then comply.

It was an off-grid cabin, empty other than tools that were curiously placed around the walls, tucked into loosely put-together baseboards. The cabin was old and small. There was one chair, a small table, one door, one window, and a small storage room separate, that also held a compost toilet. There was a cooler filled with water bottles, chips, and sausage in the corner of the room. The ice had melted long ago.

he had been clean-shaven, hair to his neckline, scruffy, and wearing jeans. He was average-sized but stronger than her and she was tied. She would have liked to have talked to him to at least try to persuade him to let her go but there was no chance of that. He was clearly mad, bat-shit crazy. She had no experience with this. Who did?

As the night would fall she would wonder again and again how she could have avoided this. Had he been in the store and followed her or was he in a vehicle waiting for her? Her personal security alarm had been in her purse, not her hand and she cursed herself for her stupidity.

Was she on the news by now? Was there Missing Person signs and posters all over the community? How far away from home was she? The home-sickness consumed her. She wanted her mother.

Her arm ached, he had bit it as she was fighting him. Bit it like a rabid animal and infection was setting in and throbbing all day and night. She was pretty certain her ankle was fractured too. Emma had no strength to leave the place and the fear of being found by his accomplices was great. In her half delirium, she went back and forth between the two ideas. Sit and wait for help or try to crawl to help but what if she didn't make it, what if there was no help nearby?

Her greatest fear had almost passed, that there would be others come to look for him and take her but no one else arrived. Assuming they figured something had gone wrong when he did not make his daily trespass to reach his cell phone and make his call.

So she sang. She sang to herself to settle the soul within her. The not-so separate but yearning inside of her. The absolute string of despair was tied to a slender sliver of hope.

Survivor mode is a tricky thing. It means adapting quickly. Every living cell is on alert and the mind thinks rapidly for preservation. If it doesn't shock takes hold then nothing gets done.

She was starving. Emma had rationed it down to four potato chips a day. The sausage went bad on day 5 after the ice melted and it sat there and it had left her with extreme stomach pain. She had to use the compost toilet afterward and use pieces of his ripped shirt, she had laughed hysterically at that. She gradually regained her composure.

So, she ate the chips. Budget Ruffles to save her and what was left of the melted ice. She alternated between singing any song she could remember and fits of tears.

She did not imagine his spirit pestering her. It was there. She did not know the spiritual rules but because he, whether in self-defense or not, was murdered also, it left a time of remembrance for him. A short period in which he could haunt his grounds. In all areas of conflict and trauma after violent deaths, hell is there, however. This she dreamt of.

His head half severed at the shoulder where the flesh met the neckline, and dripping blood sneered at her, inches from her face. He was surrounded by demons. Yoda is not a spiritual master, he is something else, she stifled a scream in her sleep. She was now haunted by the ghost of the man who had tried to kill her, had beaten her, and tried to rape her, along with half of hell. She had no choice in her soul of souls and had no weary moments of guilt. Only moments of how to get the hell out of there.

Never loosening the ties when he had brutalized her and tried to climb on top of her she had fought and in that movement had rolled and inched closer and closer to the wall. Kneeing him, biting him, moving her body as much as she could in one great wiggle she fought him with every ounce of strength she had. Emma in the struggle of her movement was able to loosen the ties enough to reach behind her and grab the cleaver she had noticed before, stuck in the wall behind her. It was close to the floor and stuck in the makeshift baseboard. She did not hesitate and brought the old rusty thing down as hard as she could and as close as she could get to his head. The last thing she remembered before passing out was the look of shock on his face and the cleaver struck bone. She woke much later with his head on her stomach and covered in blood.

Foot throbbing, she dragged him into the other room and it took her hours. She just couldn't look at him anymore. Then she removed her blood-soaked clothes and sat in her underwear. She used the water from the melted ice to wash herself using her cami which she then wrung out and put back on. So there she sat half clean and in undergarments stained in dried blood like blotched tye died rags. In perpetual shock her eyes large, when she could keep them open. A sense of relief, she might actually live.

Then she remembered the candle. Limping back to his dead body she searched his pockets and found a lighter, cigarettes, and his driver's license. She read his name, emblazoned in her mind forever.

Each morning she ate her chips and each nightfall she lit the candle. Someone would notice it eventually. It was camping season. This cabin had to be somewhere noticeable, hunters, hikers, someone, anyone.

The hours went on and on, with no clock to guide her. Her voice hoarse, she continued to sing. "Stoooop that, you cunt," his voice tremored as if beside her. Not asleep she could not see him. She could smell his breath like it was near. Tiny yodas careened the room eating flies. Surely it was the fatigue and hunger, the delirium. She did not speak back to his ghost. She somehow knew, knew that eventually the things from hell attracted to him would take his ghost down once and for all. So she waited for this and for discovery.

She began to pray. Her songs turned into hymns. She was a good girl. No one deserved this and at times a moment of self-pity is a saving grace because it opens the heart. It erases the hatred. Then there was the spirit of her grandmother, stalwart and matronly, "you will be home again, have faith." Emma cried harder.

As she learned to pray again the light in the room extended from her heart. The ghost gravitated toward the door and slipped through, sensing his time was near an end. In his half mind, he was looking for the instrument that killed him while looking for another woman to get. Like a broken tape recorder stuck on rewind, he went through his motions. Without a living force near him, he could not think in the moment. Once the ghost exited the cabin cloaked scepters circled the area to keep the monster in circumference. So evil cannot travel.

The hunter sat on the log about 50 feet away. An icy cold air filled him with a moment of complete terror. What goes on here! Then he was sure he could hear the sound of someone singing.

"Before the ending of the day, from evil dreams defend our sight,

from all the terrors of the night,

from all deluding thoughts that creep

on heedless minds disarmed by sleep.

Then the song would repeat, "before the ending of the day..."

Emma in the cabin unaware of words now softly wept. The words of the song were now in her head, she had hours, maybe moments left, she thought. The sound of her heartbeat filled the room and in her earnest pleas for freedom the candlelight quickened its flickering dance. She breathed deeply.

An elderly woman sat in her house 200 feet away. Quietly she rocked and looked out the window. His friends had come and gone looking for him and she knew, somehow knew, that he was never coming back. She rocked in her rocking chair and looked out the window at nighttime quickly falling. What had he done now she thought to herself. Just as quickly, there the ghost appeared at the window, head half severed at the shoulder and bloody. She stared, she screamed. His ghost screamed back at her mirroring her terror and his essence flew back to the cabin.

The ghost now knowing he was a ghost, sought the only eclipse of light he could see, the candle. Like a genie stemming from a weird puff of smoke with a disembodied head, he sank his essence into the flame and went along with the beat it kept to the timing of her heart. Captured by the light.

The hunter ignored the scream in the distance and drawn to the sound of the singing bursts the cabin door open. Immediately rushing to the girl curled in the corner, "my gawd, my gawd," he says over and over again. Speaking gently he raises the water bottle to her mouth. Seeing herself in the pupils of his eyes, his grey hair across his forehead, "grandmother what big eyes you have," she says, smiling weakly. The hunter called 911 on his cell phone.

The candle was left lit as the entourage of police and med support left the cabin. The draft as they closed the door snuffed the beating flame out. The demons now left the room bringing the soul with them. The scepters vanished.

Two weeks later, Emma sits up in bed, her foot in a cast. Refreshed and nourished now she looks like a different person. Strong now the nightmares vanished. In real-life horrors, there are no twists and returns at the end. The devil takes them all.

Healing has a wonderful element, it's called Forgetting, and the mind is meant to in order to heal from trauma. To relive it suffers the soul. So, Emma forgot the horrid details, the cabin, the man, the torment. Never to live in fear again.

Note: They Hymn with the words, Before the Ending of the Day is ancient and the original title is Te Lucis Ante Terminum, in latin.

~/\~

More of Lachapelle's work HERE

Copyright © 2022 Lisa A Lachapelle. All rights reserved.

Leave a tip or a pledge if you wish to and I in turn will wish for you.

If you would like to be updated on all my writing just sign in to Vocal for free and click Subscribe on my work. Or brighten my day with an email [email protected]