The Last Forty Feet

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. We all crowded around the South side of our fort staring out with our mouths open.

Brucey was always the one in the window with the binoculars looking at that stupid cabin, but this was the first time there had been anything worth talking about.

“Do you think somebody moved in over there?” John-John asked, his voice kind of squeaking.

“Of course not, moron!” Dale barked, popping him in the back of his head so that he had to push his glasses back up on his nose. “Would you buy a cabin where someone murdered eleven people?”

“No!” John-John answered, mortified by the reference.

My name is Bougie. Short for Beauregard. (My little brother couldn’t pronounce my name so Bougie just kind of stuck with me.) I popped Dale back.

“Leave him alone, Dale. He can’t help your mom moved into the old cabin.”

The rest of the guys “oooohed”. Ordinarily this would lead to the dueling “your mama” jokes, but Brucey yelped from the window.

“Something’s moving down there, guys!”

We all crowded back around trying to see, but whatever he saw must have gone because none of us saw anything.

“It’s probably just your imagination, Brucey.” Dale muttered. “And if the old man was down there? He’s gone now.”

Camp Grayson is local to our town. It sits just on the outskirts behind the woods and before you get to the lake. The rumor is, that old man Ghant had gone off the deep end one day and murdered his whole family and neighboring campers, along with anyone else who had stayed at that cabin since. We had no idea who survived the ordeal to tell what happened, but every kid in school knew about it because it had been passed down to us from every class before.

“Bougie?” John-John ventured after a few minutes of silent staring. “Do you think he came back?”

“No.” I told him. “Dead people don’t come back.”

Dale turned to me with a stern look.

“Didn’t you goobers even watch The Living Dead? Of course they come back.”

“Zombies aren’t real.” Joey piped in.

“Says who?” Dale asked.

“Your mother.” I responded.

Everyone got quiet and turned their eyes to us. Dale started laughing.

“My mom actually did say that.”

We all laughed for a few minutes when Brucey had a passing thought. He was the thinker among us.

“What about all those paranormal shows on tv?” he asked. He had turned the flashlight almost up his nose to be spooky and I’m sure had no idea how ridiculous he looked. “Ghosts are just people who come back, right? Suppose it’s his ghost?”

“Jeeze, Brucey!” I answered. “Do you think a ghost would need a candle to read by?”

“No.” He conceded. “Probably not.”

As we all stood there in the silence of the tree-fort in the woods, thinking about the paranormal and old killers in their long johns standing in the dark ready to shoot people to bloody pulps, Joey’s phone rang. We all jumped so hard it’s a wonder we kept our clothes on!

“I gotta take this.” He groaned. “It’s my mom.”

“Again?!” we all shouted in unison.

“She does know her cabin is like forty feet from here, right?” Dale smarted off.

Joey ignored him and answered the phone.

I looked around at my friends while Joey told his mom again that he had his clean underwear on and some mosquito spray. His mom had been bringing us here every summer since the second grade.

Dale was the strong one, tall and stocky. His blonde hair could be seen in the dark even if there was only a little light. Even now, with us just in the fifth grade, girls were already lining up to stick love notes into his bookbag and pockets.

Brucey is the smart one. We all cheat off his homework and ask him the really hard questions. If he didn’t know the answers, he could usually figure them out. He was the only black guy who would hang out with us, and we didn’t feel cool enough for him sometimes. He had this walk. He was a snappy dresser, too. Sometimes, I would swear he was like thirty or something, but he seems content just hanging out in our fort, measuring farts like they were on the Richter scale.

Joey was like me, basically a regular guy with a regular family. We both showed up tonight in jeans, sneakers and a horizontally striped t-shirt. I have brown hair, his is red. John-John is my kid brother. His hair is lighter than mine, but we’re basically the same. He’s really not old enough to hang with us, (third grader), but we let him because it beats hanging out with Joey’s mom in the cabin. No kid deserves that!

“I said, hand me a soda, goofus!” Dale remarked. I guess he had been talking to me, but I didn’t hear him.

“Get it yourself, loser.” I answered as I reached into the cooler and pulled out a soda. I made sure to shake it up before I handed it to him.

“Seriously, Bougie.” He said as I handed him the drink. “Do you think old man Ghant could come back from the dead?”

“If he did Dale, I doubt he’d be lighting candles to let people know he was home.”

“Yeah.” He agreed.

“Well, I’m telling you guys, somebody’s down there.” Brucey said from behind the binoculars.

We all scrambled to the window as Joey told his mom he had to go. This time, we could make out a shadow moving slowly from window to window inside the cabin.

“I saw it!” I shouted. Everyone was shouting they saw it! “It was like a white… like a white shadow!” I yelled.

“See?” Brucey added. “Told you it was a ghost!”

“Just cause it’s white don’t make it a ghost, Brucey.” I told him.

“Yeah, racist.” Dale put in, to which Joey laughed so hard he snorted.

At that moment, I noticed John-John had this weird look on his face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Quiet.” He whispered. We all instantly fell silent. “Do you guys hear that?”

“Hear what?” We all whispered in unison.

“Shhh!” he kind of whisper-yelled at us.

Everything was silent. We literally heard nothing.

“I don’t hear anything.” Dale broke the silence.

“Don’t you think that’s weird?” John-John asked.

We all shrugged at first but then Brucey, whose art it was to state the obvious, woke us up.

“Think about it. I mean before we saw the candle, we could hear crickets and birds, sounds of nature. There’s nothing right now, which usually means that mankind is in the woods.”

“Dude? We’re here”. I put in.

“No offense to your manhood or anything Bouge,” Dale responded. “But I doubt Jiminy Cricket’s family is worried enough about you to suddenly start using their “inside voices”.

Dale made fake quotation marks with his fingers as he quoted our math teacher.

“No really.” John-John said, still whispering. “Something’s wrong.”

I instinctively put my arm around John-John for comfort. He was so scared his face had turned white and tears were pooling at the bottom of his eyes.

“It’s ok.” I told him. “We’re all a little scared because it’s dark and the only light out there is in that cabin. It’s not a big deal, bud. We’ll be ok.”

“I’m not scared.” Dale barked. "If you girls want to go back to the cabin and bake cookies with Joey’s mom, knock yourself out, but I ain’t running off scared.”

Brucey sucked at his teeth and rolled his eyes as he made his way back to his perch.

“Uh. Guys?” He called to us. In seconds we were all back at the window.

The light in the cabin pirouetted like my cousin’s ballet routine, casting eerie shadows on the ground outside the cabin. And in one of those shadows, something big was moving… something black, like a bear with no weight to it. It slipped in silence onto the porch, and through the front door as if it wasn’t even there.

None of us said a word. Moments flashed by for what seemed like dream-time, where things move fast, but you can’t run. Then the shadow moved swiftly inside the cabin and before we had time to figure out what we saw, an old man’s face hovered over it, wicked light dancing on his sunken cheeks.

I wanted to scream, and my mouth was open, but nothing came out. John-John’s hand trembled in mine and I somehow managed to squeeze it for some reassurance. The old man’s face seemed fixed to the light of the candle, his evil glare piercing through the shadow of the woods and staring through our very souls. In a moment that seemed like forever, he gave us the finger and blew out the light.

I screamed and everyone followed suit… everyone except Brucey. He put the binoculars down, walked over to the lamp and clicked it off.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dale grumbled.

Joey’s cell phone flickered as he hit the flashlight function.

Brucey explained.

“Look. It’s hard to catch a target you can’t see. Why do you think he blew out the candle?”

“I say we run for the cabin.” Joey put in.

“Suddenly, that 40 feet seems like a long way to me.” Dale reminded him.

We all nodded in silence.

In a moment we could hear the sound of footfalls not far from the tree house. My heart beat so hard I felt like we should all be dancing to it.

“What are we gonna do?” Dale whispered to me.

We were the biggest, the oldest, it should fall to us to get the others to safety but all I could think was; ‘Oh please don’t let pee run down my leg!’

“I’ll call my mom.” Joey said. “She’ll know what to do.”

“If your mom loses her mind over you being out here with some lunatic old man on the loose, she’s liable to run out here, Joey.” I told him.

“Yeah” Dale added. “And if he gets her, we’re all dead!”.

Something “clumped” to a stop at the foot of the stairs. We scarcely realized we had been listening to the sound of someone coming until it stopped.

Dale put a finger to his mouth to shush us right before Joey doused the flashlight on his phone.

When I was still little like John-John, my grandma once said that silence was golden, but it wasn’t tonight.

I was suddenly so tired! I was tired of school, tired of trying to stay up for everyone when I really wanted to crawl into a dark corner, close my eyes, and dream of good things to make this agony disappear. Then John-John hugged himself closely to me. I owed it to him to figure something out. I had an idea.

We had a crate of rocks that we used as a counterweight, (Brucey’s idea), when we were in a hurry to get down the tree. We’d pull the basket up to go down, and let it drop little bits at a time to bring the piece of plywood up. Tonight, we had pulled it up and set it aside.

Since we had a little moonlight coming through, I pointed at the crate to Dale, then kind of played charades to tell him that I thought we should dump the rocks down the ladder if anyone tried to come up. It was super heavy, and it took two of us to lift it.

Immediately Dale and I made for the milk crate full of rocks. We stood near the mouth of the opening in the floor in complete silence and darkness. No one moved.

We were all beginning to think we dreamed it up when we could hear someone climbing up the tree. We were just about to let the crate go when a voice called out to us in the dark.

“You boys want some cookies?”

“Of my GOSH Mrs. Roberts!” Dale shouted. “I nearly soiled myself!”

She laughed as she came up and Brucey clicked on the lamp. I grabbed her and pulled her up quickly.

“What are you doing?” she asked me, almost dropping the basket of cookies she had baked.

Looking around I posed the obvious question.

“As great as the cookies are, do you guys hear any crickets?”

We all fell back into attack mode. Dale and I grabbed the rock-crate and stood at the opening in the floor.

Mrs. Roberts seemed confused.

“What are you boys doing?” She asked.

She looked pretty funny bent over in the dim light, too tall for the ceiling height in the tree house, but I couldn’t laugh. I knew what I saw.

I nodded to Brucey to fill her in because we couldn’t stop guarding the opening to tell her.

“That’s so silly.” She assured us.

“That man rented the cabin this morning. We spoke at the market while I was buying the chocolate chips. He was waiting for the power to be cut on when we spoke, and they probably didn't come. Maybe he's just tired of you kids watching his house!” She laughed.

We all breathed a sigh of relief. Dale and I still clung to the rocks, though.

“Under the circumstances.” She told us. “I think everyone should come back to the cabin for the night.”

We all did our best to make it seem like she was making us go, but I know John-John and I were grateful and probably the other guys were too.

As we all reached the ground at the bottom of the tree house, Mrs. Roberts pointed at the starry sky.

“It’s a clear night.” She said with kind of a soft tone in her voice. “Aren’t the stars beautiful? Like a blanket of sparkly jewels.”

Before any of us could answer, a man’s voice thundered from the woods behind us.

“Nobody touches my jewels!” There was a gunshot that split the night.

We all started running for the cabin. The evil presence moved fast through the trees behind us. It was stifled only by the sound of my breath and my heart beating. The lights of Joey’s mom’s cabin appeared ahead. I held John-John’s hand in mine, struggling to drag him along with me. I couldn’t hear any voices anymore. I knew without looking we were alone. I cried hard, tears streaming down my face.

“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.” I cried. My mom was going to kill me if I didn’t get John-John safely home to her!

As it turns out, forty feet is a lot farther than you think.