The Rental

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

“Yeah, because I lit it!”

“Stop. Who are you right now?” Stacey whipped around and shot her friend an annoyed look from the desk in the corner that she had designated as ‘her creative space.’

Lyndsey grinned, then responded with a fabricated look of hurt. She poured the noodles for the mac and cheese in a pot of boiling water in the kitchen.

“I’m someone who just heard my dearest friend write the most cliché start to any horror story ever,” she gave her friend a matter-of-fact look and twirled a wooden spoon in the air. Lyndsey continued, “Scarier than that is the fact that we forgot charcoal and they didn’t stock the bathroom. We’ll have to go down into town tomorrow.”

“How will I get this done if I am distracted, or delayed, all the time? Must I go?” Stacey’s voice was anxious, reminiscent of all the delays with this trip – over half she blamed on Lyndsey. Even today, they didn’t arrive at the cabin until after sunset because boarding Lyndsey’s psychotic bloodhound had been priority and problem #1.

“Thirty minutes only geez, Stace. I’m not at your beck and call just because you have a deadline. And you are going tubing.”

Stacey turned back to her laptop, grabbed the glass at its side, and finished the rest of her rum and coke in a huge, noisy gulp. She set the glass back down on the desk, hard. The cursor blinked, blinked, blinked on “window…” She had no follow up words to type. She let out a small, annoyed sigh.

Right on cue, like the good friend she was, Lyndsey appeared beside her with a fresh can of Coke and the rum. “No worries, just picking,” she said making them both a drink, a strong one, “I know this is important to you. You’ll get a plot together or something,” Lyndsey clinked the bottom of her glass on the rim of Stacey’s. “Drink up, author.”

She returned to the kitchen and Stacey returned to the light of her screen. Blink, blink, blink.

“OK. How would you start off a horror story then?”

Lyndsey furrowed her brow and went to drain the pasta in the sink. She thought a bit, smiled, then replied, “The year was 2021, the aisles that once sustained life with commodities were run over, picked bare. The ninth aisle held the most horror – only 10 packs of single-ply, generic, TP in the entire city…”

“Never mind!” Stacey said getting up in a huff to grab something out of their weekly stash. “Where’s a lighter, maybe this will help.” She gestured at Lyndsey with a joint between her fingers.

“Indeed!” was the cry from the kitchen.

And just like that the night was lost to lots of rum, weed, junk food, and YouTube videos. While opening a bottle of wine, for they had finished the rum, Lyndsey found emergency candles on top of the fridge. She crept over to the window facing the front yard. She lit the candle in the window. Slowly backing away, she spookily said, “The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window…”

Stacey gave her a dirty look, but then fell to hysterical laughter on the couch. “I’m going to change that intro!” she choked out between laughing and Lyndsey joined her. In this way it continued on well past midnight.

They slept deeply that night, enjoying the peacefulness away from campus and the effects of too much alcohol and food. The night was clear, the beds were warm, and the noises moving through the house woke no one.

------

The noises were made by the person in the woods who had seen the candle.

That same someone also came into the house, knowing that the back door latch was inoperative. Though by the time Lyndsey got up to pee in the earliest hours of the morning, the house was empty except for themselves once again.

Lyndsey slowly made her way down the hallway and slid her hand over the wall to flip the switch in the bathroom. The vanity light blinded her with searing pain and she stumbled back squinting. She needed Advil before returning to bed. She turned on the tap, caught water in her hand, and swallowed three tablets, knowing full well that their hangovers would be fierce later in the morning.

Returning to her room, she hit the lights and found herself blind. She blinked, tried to adjust to the darkness, and walked in semi-zombie fashion in order not to run into anything along the way.

She passed by the hall window facing the woods.

She jumped.

“Oh!” she said and almost flung herself up against the wall. “Oh.” She sighed, realizing it was the silhouette of a scarecrow or something. ‘Scarecrow, scare the crows, guarding the garden,’ she thought as she continued down the hallway to her room. She was practically asleep when her head hit the pillow.

Stacey slept through the night soundly, or she thought she did. A loud scuffling in the attic above her head briefly brought her out of a dream around dawn, but she trailed off again until Lyndsey woke her up at eight o’clock.

It was a rough start the next day, but they managed to cook a greasy breakfast to feed the hangovers and soak up last night’s excess. Before leaving the cabin, they surveyed its open plan. Leftover mac and cheese dishes filled the sink and the ‘creative space,’ which is where the empty rum bottle ended up. Coke cans, half-finished bags of M&Ms and chips were laid out across the entire room. The culinary aftermath of breakfast took up most of the kitchen. The griddle held leftover bacon and pancakes, and pancake mix had spilled on the greasy counter. The couch was covered in popcorn with an overturned wine bottle and glasses on the floor in front of it.

They looked at each other and shrugged, then headed to Stacey’s car out front. While trying to walk like a normal person, one that was definitely not as hungover as she was, Lyndsey bumped into something. She said “excuse me” to the scarecrow that sat near the driveway, but then had an odd feeling that she couldn’t quite contextualize.

She shrugged it off as Stacey started to complain about her Lit class. In fact, complaining made the trip seem shorter and they got into town by 9:30. At the local shop they bought TP, charcoal, a few frozen pizzas, saltines, and a lot more rum.

---

When they returned to the cabin the kitchen had been cleaned – spotless. Perplexed, they both stood just in the front door refusing to enter. The cabin grew eerie, but after a few seconds, Lyndsey perked up and decided that the landlord had finally come to stock the toiletries and cleaned out of a feeling of guilt.

‘Yes, yes that must be it,’ thought Stacey, but she had a strange feeling beyond the constant nausea of the hangover.

They put away the groceries and fell into their own rhythms. Lyndsey wiled away the day with the stash, sunbathing at the lake out back, and studying for her chemistry final, while Stacey sat at the desk and barely made any progress. Her fingers just touched the keys wistfully, feeling the smooth plastic squares for a minute or so when she heard a cry from the boathouse. She jumped. She turned in her chair, “Lynds?”

“Oh my God!”

“Lyndsey!?”

A minute later she found Lyndsey feverishly taking photos on her phone a few feet outside of the boathouse’s open barn doors.

“Look!”

Stacey stared at her friend. Lyndsey repeated “Look!” and raised an arm to frantically point in the boathouse.

Stacey looked.

“What the fu….” Stacey’s exclamation morphed into an inaudible whisper of disbelief. She whimpered and then froze.

“Some proper Blair Witch shit right here! I want to change the first sentence of my story from last night – it’s the breakfast aisle.” Lyndsey joked, trying to disarm her fear. “Damn, no signal, I wanted to upload these,” she continued while laughing nervously.

Stacey stared at the scene.

She gave Lyndsey a sideways glance and then laughed nervously along with her. There was a BANG from the house like a door slamming. They jumped and turned, but then turned back quickly, preferring not to have their backs to the scene. They stood there, looking from the open boathouse to the cabin, back to the boathouse, and did not speak.

They listened.

Stacey felt her lip curl in disgust, or distress, she couldn’t decide which. ‘What was this?’ she thought as her brain reeled against the scene.

“Mannequins?” she whispered.

At the table, two mannequins, one dressed in Stacey’s clothes and the other dressed in Lyndsey’s, were about to have a perfectly normal looking breakfast. Half of the boathouse had been transformed into a dining room of sorts, with a ramshackle table and two broken chairs in addition to the one in which the Lyndsey mannequin sat. The tablecloth was once yellow with flowers, matching the pattern on the chipped and cracked plates.

The two plastic friends enjoyed a meal of leftover bacon, pancakes, and the neon yellow scrapings from last night’s mac and cheese pot. The Stacey mannequin held the frying pan and offered more pancakes to the Lyndsey mannequin. The Lyndsey mannequin had a menacing grin painted across her face and held up her hands in a “no please, I can’t eat anymore” position.

Stacey was going to be sick. She backed away, stumbled away from the boathouse and into the cabin, forgetful of the loud noise a few moments earlier. She was going to faint or puke or both.

Lyndsey called after her, “No, Stace, not the cabin!”

But it was too late, Stacey needed to splash water on her face, something, get her stuff, then throw up in the toilet, so she made her way to the back hallway.

She stopped.

Running water.

‘Running water?’ she thought and slowly inched towards the bathroom.

It was water – running water in the shower.

She went in as stomach bile rose up in her throat. She started to hyperventilate.

‘Someone was in the shower?’

Her brain fought against a decision to look behind the curtain, ‘In no way should you look behind the curtain,’ her mind thought angrily at her.

But she had to.

She drew back the curtain. There was a mannequin taking a shower. She didn’t know if it was supposed to be the Stacey mannequin or the Lyndsey mannequin because it was naked.

It was touching itself as the water ran down its body.

Stacey sprayed the floor in front of her and her clothes with any leftover breakfast still in her stomach. Choking, she backed out of the bathroom.

She stared and did not hear Lyndsey trotting up behind her.

“Stacey. Stace we need to leave. Where are your keys?”

“Countertop,” she mumbled.

Lyndsey dashed over to the kitchen counter and shoved Stacey’s keys in her pocket.

“Stace!” But Stacey didn’t budge.

“Hey!”

But Stacey seemed intent on something further down the hallway. She started to move towards the back bedrooms.

“Stop!” Lyndsey, hesitant, called to her, but then followed. The hair on the back of her neck stood and her breaths were quick and shallow.

When she caught up with Stacey down the hallway leading to the bedrooms, Stacey was staring up the ladder into the open attic hatch.

“What are you doing?” Lyndsey said strongly and seriously, “Let’s get the hell out of here now!”

The attic was nothing but a black, gaping maw. A terror void. Lyndsey stared up into the dark with Stacey, transfixed. An overpowering waft of Axe body spray came down from the attic and broke her hypnotic stare.

Lyndsey shook her head as if returning from a daydream. She turned and slapped Stacey’s face, hard.

Stacey came to.

“What the hell Stace?” Lyndsey hissed looking around, “Let’s just pack what we can.”

They slid against the wall past the attic ladder and into their bedrooms. In the room, a Stacey mannequin had already started packing for Stacey. It had neatly folded most of her clothes and was holding up a linen blouse. It looked at it fondly with its head tilted ever so slightly to the left, as if it remembered the pleasant day trip when that blouse was purchased.

It was wearing the outfit that Stacey had worn on their first day here, a travel ensemble of linen and jeans – now its travel ensemble. She shook her head trying to will the scene away. She left everything behind and went into Lyndsey’s room.

Lyndsey was wrestling a pair of jeans off of a Lyndsey mannequin, gave up, then punched the mannequin in the face.

“We gotta go.”

They both spilled out into the hallway.

They stopped.

Lyndsey’s heart skipped a beat.

A Stacey mannequin sat at Stacey’s ‘creative space’ dressed in the only formal clothing that Stacey had packed. It sat at the laptop. It had contributed to the story, but at the present, its fingers just touched the keys wistfully, feeling the smooth plastic squares.

Stacey let out a moan as if in pain. They both inched towards the desk, so close that their shoulders touched. They gripped each other’s hands to steady themselves. Blink, blink, blink went the cursor, but on a line further down the page than where Stacey had left off with, “The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window…”

It read, “You look pretty while you sleep.”

Lyndsey frowned, shaking her head from left to right like in a spasm.

Stacey started crying, and reached out to hit the delete button. She trembled, her fingers shook. She had just barely touched the delete button when BANG, behind them, the attic trap door shut.

They swung around.

A dark figure stood in the hallway - looking.

It stood there looking at them.

Lyndsey let out a whimper and jumped towards the door while Stacey grabbed her laptop and was out in the front yard right after Lyndsey.

She stopped a few feet from her car and screamed. A Stacey mannequin was already behind the wheel. She started to make a sobbing sort of sound, but dryly without tears. She looked at Lyndsey for help, but Lyndsey was busy throwing a Lyndsey mannequin out into the yard.

Stacey blinked hard, swayed, then ran to rip open the driver side door. She threw the laptop into the backseat, threw the mannequin into the back seat, and got behind the wheel. Lyndsey handed her the keys while screaming, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!”

They tore off. They sped down the driveway and away from the cabin, kicking gravel high up into the air as they went.

A second later, the figure appeared at the door. A man in a dark plaid shirt and jeans, barefooted. He removed the plain, burlap sack he used as a mask.

He griped, “Took one of my mannequins. I hate this Airbnb shit.”