The neighbors

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Maybe most people wouldn’t register the light flickering between the gaps in the old boards haphazardly covering the windows–but I had seen that warm, unsteady glow often enough over the years. All the neighbors had.

***

It’s a right of passage for local teenagers. Visit The Cabin. Number 17.

Most of them come in the Fall. In the weeks leading up to Halloween there’s a fresh crop of high school sophomores every Friday and Saturday night, the oldest newly sixteen, with four or five friends jammed into some old beater. Even at the height of October we’ve never had a problem with the usual teenage detritus, condoms and Coors cans. Most kids simply park and spend a few minutes poking around the outside of the cabin, shining flashlights into the windows and glancing warily over their shoulders. A few of the braver ones used to break in, jimmying open the old fashioned locks or shattering the windows. I once watched from my front window as one gang of kids inside the cabin unwittingly terrified another group outside. The Cara Conroy I knew would have gotten a kick out of that one.

When, I used to wonder, does a murder house become an attractive nuisance? After about 10 years of casual trespassing, when the window panes were all broken and the front door hung crooked from a single hinge, a couple of deputy sheriffs came out to secure the old place. They scared away the raccoons who’d made a home for themselves in the kitchen cabinetry, installed padlocks, and boarded over what they could. The teenagers still come, but now all they can do is look.

I suppose all these thrill seekers must believe Number 17 is haunted. But if so, who, exactly, are they afraid of? The only ghosts here are the spirits of the victims. Cara Conroy, my friend for the 10 months she occupied this cabin during 1986 and ‘87. A young mother, a cosmologist with perfect frosted hair and a penchant for Van Halen. Her fifteen-year-old son, Ryan. A shy kid, who loved baseball and looked after the little ones like only the oldest child of a single mother can, sweetly slicing the crusts off his younger brothers’ sandwiches when he babysat and never forgetting to remind Nadia about her inhaler. And Nadia herself, just twelve when it happened, splashing around the river in denim cut offs and jelly sandals. But then, Nadia wasn’t found in the cabin with the others. Her spirit, if it lingers, haunts a bend in the river fifteen miles downstream.

None of the teenagers who make these scary-story pilgrimages to Number 17 understand that the most dangerous thing out here is us–the neighbors–both back in ‘87 and today, 35 years later.

***

It was after midnight when I caught sight of that candlelight glimmering almost teasingly between the boards at Number 17. I make a habit of watching the cabin during the busy season, just in case. With my shotgun across my lap and my cordless phone in easy reach, I sit in my darkened front window from dusk onwards, waiting for all the misbehaving children to return to their cars, and hopefully, their homes. I do it because he still lives here, and because, like me, he is always watching. I do it because I wish I had done the same for Cara.

That night–the candlelight night–I must have drowsed in my chair. When I opened my eyes and saw the glow coming from Number 17, every part of me froze–my heart, my breath, my hands, my brain. It was real, that light. For the first time since the padlocks and boards went up almost two decades ago, someone was inside Number 17.

I glanced up and down the cabin court. The other cabins were dark, except for the blue light of a TV flickering in the window of Number 5 at the far end, nearest the river. His place. Impossible to know if he, too, was awake. He left that TV on night and day. Misdirection? I sometimes wondered. Was he trying on purpose to make it seem as if he were home, minding his own business? Or did he just hate the silence that much?

It took another minute for me to spot the unfamiliar car, parted a little way up the road, already pointed back toward the highway. A family vehicle, made for team sports and Sunday breakfasts, borrowed from someone’s mother. I watched as the candle moved around the interior of cabin 17, dim, then bright again as it flickered and flared. Dimly, I could hear voices on the breeze, indistinct and excited, an edge of nervous laughter. Kids are never as quiet as they think they are.

Then I saw him–or thought I saw him. Just for a second, loping between the cabins, keeping to the dark backyards and tree cover, moving as quickly as his stiffening knees would permit. I’m past 60 now and my night vision isn’t what it once was, but I swear I could almost feel him out there, stalking his prey.

I wanted to stay in my chair, safe in the secret dark, but I knew I couldn’t do that. Not this time. Keeping my shotgun close I rose, unlocked the front door, and stepped cautiously out onto the porch. I’d last spotted him between cabins 11 and 13, a shadow and the shine of an eye, halfway up the court and getting closer. I took aim at the gap between 13 and 15, and waited for him to make his move. I didn’t bother to hide. I wanted him to know I was there, waiting like always. The old bastard.

Without warning, a blast of music shot across the court, quickly silenced. I turned, startled, to see that the parked car was running, headlights beaming yellow columns swirling with dust and insects. Inside, the figure of a girl, faintly illuminated by the dashboard dials, a small face half hidden behind a curtain of long, straight hair.

Across the way at Number 17, a scramble of feet, and a teenage girl appeared in the doorway, raccoon eyeliner, a flannel shirt, and a tumble of long, waving hair.

“Sarah! Shut up!” she hissed, pure older sister.

Then she saw me, an old woman with a shotgun at her shoulder. The girl screamed in terror–the sound so dissonant and unsettling that I was frightened myself.

In the car, her younger sister–Sarah–turned toward the window, her mouth a horrified O. She was maybe twelve or thirteen, the age Nadia had been when he murdered her mother and brother, and took her away for a night and a day, downstream, where no one thought to look until it was too late.

For a split second we all stood still, a frozen tableau. Then the older girl turned, and ran–not toward the car, not toward safety and escape, but toward the woods, where he waited. Another girl appeared in the doorway, and sprinted after her, and another, hard on the heels of the last.

“No!” I shouted, my voice strangely weak, “Stop! Wait!”

I could hardly comprehend it. Three teenage girls had broken into cabin 17, leaving a little sister tag-along to wait in the car while they explored. And I had let my guard down. I had failed them. Instead of protecting them as I intended, as I had protected all the others over the years, I had driven them into the woods, into danger.

I lowered the rifle and followed the girls into the woods. As I ran past Number 17 I sensed the candlelight at the edge of my vision, glowing brighter and brighter. Behind me, in the cabin court, light after light bloomed as the neighbors woke, drawn by the sound of screaming as they had not been 35 years ago.

Out in the nighttime forest there was only the sharp snap of branches, the swish and rustle of pine needles underfoot, my breath loud in my ears, and ahead, the sounds of the girls, running. I wanted to reassure them. To make them understand, I was only here to protect them.

I could have stopped, just let them go–but Cara’s killer was out here too, somewhere. One of these bodies dashing madly between the trees belonged to him. I just couldn’t tell which one.

Somewhere in the dark a girl screamed. A crash of brush and undergrowth. I ran toward the sound, sure I would find him, mid-attack. Instead, I saw only the girls–two at the top of the embankment, the third at the rivers’ edge. She’d fallen and slid 25 feet or so down the steep slope to the shore. That was the sound I’d heard.

“Please don’t,” one of the girls cried, sounding as if she were begging for her life. “We’re sorry. Please don’t!”

“I won’t hurt you,” I promised, panting hard. “I’m trying to keep you safe! He’s out here!”

I looked around at the dark forest, the trees thick with green lichen, like they were covered with hair. That lichen seemed to glow neon during the day, but now everything was so very black. Everything was still. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him, behind me, beside me, creeping closer.

“Ellison!” I yelled into the dark. My voice was hoarse, but I knew he could hear me. I raised my rifle to my shoulder and scanned the forest around us through the notched sight. “Ellison!” I shouted, going slow, looking for any movement that would give him away. “I know you’re out there! I know what you did!”

Pain exploded over me, so sudden and strong I couldn’t even tell what part of my body hurt.

***

Black and red pain. Agony, like a burn. I lay on my back, looking up. My vision blurred. My head felt hot and wet. I concentrated on the pine needles under my back, such a familiar feeling, and so specific, sharp and spongy at once. I smelled smoke on the breeze.

Above me someone stood looking down. Just a shape at first. I expected it to be him, my enemy, Cara’s killer, my killer. Instead I saw a girl, maybe 12 or 13, a small face obscured by long, straight hair.

“Nadia?”

***

We didn’t touch the old woman after my baby sister hit her with the tree branch. My friend Jackie is a lifeguard at the pool. She knows CPR and everything, but it didn’t seem like there was much point. The woman was gone; that much was obvious even in the dark. Later, in court, we learned her skull was fractured. She died of bleeding in the brain.

Holly couldn’t manage to climb back up the steep hillside from the river. The clay soil kept crumbling under her, the roots she used for handholds kept breaking away. Finally, we just walked in parallel, keeping one another in sight: me and Sarah and Jackie along the top of the cutaway, and Holly down below, splashing through the shallows and jumping rock-to-rock until we came to the rickety old staircase at the end of the cabin court. When we were all together again at the top of the stairs we hugged, all four of us. We hadn’t done that since we were little.

It had taken longer following the meandering river than cutting straight through the woods. By the time we stepped back into the street, the whole place was lit up like midday. Lights blazed from nearly every cabin. Number 17 was on fire. Our fault, it turned out–we’d knocked over a candle running out of the house. Even the car dome lights were on. Sarah left the engine running and the drivers’ door open when she followed us into the woods.

Only two cabins remained dark: the one where the old woman lived, across from the murder house, and cabin Number 5, a single window lit by the blue lights of a TV.

When we gave our statements, someone recognized the name the old woman had screamed: “Ellison.” He lived in cabin 5. The police found his body in the Lazyboy in front of the TV. He’d been gone a while–a month or more, probably. Natural causes. The dry air had thinned his skin and stuck it to his bones like a mummy. At least that’s what they told me. I didn’t look. The fire didn’t destroy Cabin 17–not even close–but it did highlight how dangerous the old ruin of a house had become. The county paid to have it bulldozed, and cleaned up the rubble so no one could take any souvenirs. Later that year the newspaper reported that the murder weapon used in the 1987 murders of Cara Conway, Ryan Conway, and the rape and murder of Nadia Conway had been found. The article didn’t describe the weapon, who found it, or where. The sheriff was quoted as saying he was reasonably confident he knew the identity of the murderer, but that all the suspects were now deceased. The case is still technically open.