The Leppingwell Girl

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. The slow hum and clatter of a thousand wagons traipsing through the unforgiving heat and raw cold had come to an end, the only sound across the Ocrass Valley the low cry of the wind and the lost call of the gulls. Just an empty forest filled with the fast-mourned dead, shallow graves of hungry, sunken faces forgotten by those who survived to tell the tale on the other side of the Blestemat Crevasse. And that cabin, that decaying old cabin sweet with the scent of rotting wood and the burnt taste of tobacco long since smoked. And that candle. I should tell you about that cabin, I suppose.

The Leppingwells built it in the fall of 1848. They, like everyone else in the Crevasse before the plains of Colorado, were just passing through. But something had stirred in them the recognition that the snows were coming, and this was to be a long winter. A winter to be staved out over a hot stove and a bright candle when the wolves came red-mouthed and licking for fat east coast flesh. So Martha and Peter Leppingwell, a carpenter by trade, built the Leppingwell Cabin up against the old flat rock at the foot of the crevasse for them and their little daughter, Alice. The other travellers built lean-tos and tents from what they could and all settled down to wait out the thaw of the crevasse. At first it wasn't too bad, a welcome reprieve from the dust of the road. They survived on strips of dried buffalo meat and cornbread, melting snow for water over the fire with an old tin kettle. But that winter was long, and no one in the party foresaw the snows lasting so long into the next year. The Leppingwells closed that door one day in mid March, and shut fast the shutters and bolts. Let me tell you about hunger, real fast.

Hunger gnaws at you. Hunger clings to your throat and festers and burns in you until your thoughts are riddled with taste, texture, shape, swallowing, until you lick your mouth for the welcome taste of flesh, until you chew at the skin around your finger tips and bite at your knuckles for anything that numbs the unfulfilled urges of your body. It does strange things to a man. The travellers would eye up the Leppingwell cabin at night with that yellow tallow candle and the smoking kettle and lick at their lips and stared out of the dark with round wild eyes. They have food in there, the men whispered. That's why they won't come out. They don't want to share it with us. The rumours rotted deeper into the group. They had bacon in there, they were sure of it. They could smell it on the firewood. They had sugar and flour, and were fattening up behind closed doors while the community starved like wolves. One woman claimed to have seen Martha Leppingwell with molasses at the window, when the curtains twitched. Every day, the men would beat at the door and holler. Open up, Leppingwell, they'd call. Come on, brother. Share what you have. Be Christian about it, old friend. But no one ever answered. Just that same plume of smoke that came out each day from that chimney.

So, like dogs with a fox, they staved them out. They would run out of firewood long before winter was done. They surrounded the house, day in, day out, waiting. Sure enough, one day, no fire was lit, and no smoke rose from the cabin roof. The men waited. But no one left. Not one curtain moved, nor one voice called out. Eventually, on the third night, the men had enough, and half mad with the desperate hope that salvation lay inside in the form of food, they took a large trunk and hammered down that thick pine door, taking eight men to relieve of it's hinges. What they found inside was so harrowing few, if any, ever spoke about that night.

In the gleaming light of the candle, a small, yellow face of a child grinned up at them, sockets sunk, mouth thick with blood and sinew. Beside her, thin and dressed up like a child dresses dolls, were the carved up bodies of Martha and Peter Leppingwell. Around them, on every surface, were strips of flesh, a fire burnt out on the grate. Alice was half dead, but living, living in a nest of corpses of her own making. Like a spider with her bait, she lunged at the men with her knife, biting hard into the arm of Tomas David, a labourer and sucking at his blood. He yelped with pain, and it took three or four men to remove the little child from his bicep.

What do you do with a child like that? They silently agreed to tell their wives that all the party were dead, and to lock the little girl back up in the cabin where she could not come after their own offspring for flesh. So they blocked up the door, nailed up the windows, and crept back to their camps. The next day, the ice began to break over the Orcass and the lucky few who survived staggered over the cravasse and unto California, freedom, and the desperate hope that they might forget what they had seen.

But the native people say the story didn't end there, if you believe such things. They speak of a red mouthed child who roamed these woods looking for flesh, leaving trees covered in strips of the dried carcasses of deer and rabbits. A spirit child, a child left to feast on the souls of others after tasting those of her own parents.

If you believe such things.

All I do know, with certainty, is that there is now a candle burning in that window.