The Woman Who Lives In the Cellar

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. An unholy odor akin to wet wool with a hint of singed hair told Marjorie something was wrong before she could make sense of it or even notice the innocuous little light flickering through the sleeting rain and darkness. Her feet were carrying her toward the ramshackle dwelling even though she willed them not to and she found herself repeating a kind of prayer in her head: This isn't real. This isn't real. This cannot be real.

___

Marjorie sat at her old wooden kitchen table in front of the window and looked out at the thick forest that surrounded her small home. She wrapped herself tighter into the afghan she had draped over herself. A cup of tea (decaf black tea with a splash of cream, as always) sat and steamed on the table to her left. September had introduced itself rudely, forcing its cool crisp grip on the rural landscape, and a cold breeze crept into the many small draftways of Marjorie's modest and aging abode. The dwelling was really just a two room cabin made of stone and log, with the kitchen and sitting area combined into one small space, a tiny bedroom, and then a small root cellar with dirt walls and dirt floor beneath. Still, it was home.

Living alone since Earl, her ornery husband of fifty-five years, had passed away, Marjorie had learned not to feel lonely when she was surrounded by the towering trees, the nearby rippling creek, and the whistling wind that blew. She felt at ease in the little old cabin in the small clearing amongst the otherwise dark and ageless forest.

This was despite her late husband’s best efforts, of course. Earl, a heavy drinker and self-proclaimed jokester and taleteller, delighted in trying to scare Marjorie with stories about the deep dark woods. As a young woman, she feigned indifference, but in all honesty, some of what he told her had indeed sown a seed in her mind that she knew would someday come to reap. One of Earl’s stories in particular had always stayed with her and she clearly recalled the night he told it.

"Marjorie…” Earl had begun in a sing-song voice. He was glassy-eyed and grinning. “Have I ever told you about the woman who lives in the cellar?"

Marjorie rolled her eyes, knowing where this was headed. "Oh enough of your ghost stories, Earl,” she said dryly. “It's the whiskey fueling them tonight, I'm sure."

Earl continued on nevertheless. "No, no, no, no, this one’s true. There was a woman who used to live here a long time ago. She lived alone with infant daughter. No one seemed to know who the father was but the woman just kept to herself as most rural provincial types do, raising her kid and carrying on.

“Well one night it rained, and I tell you, it was a hard rain that came down so fast you couldn't see a foot in front of your face. Made for slick-as-snot mud and flooded the whole damn cellar. Well the woman had gone down into the cellar for a jar of jam, fighting her way through the flooded muck and back to the stairs. She must have slipped because of the mud because they eventually found her right where she had fallen at the base of the stairs on the cellar floor. She had been there over a week at that point, body was supposedly puffed up like a balloon and mushy to the touch like a rotten peach. Now-"

"That's enough for tonight," Marjorie had interjected. She set her jaw in a way that told Earl it was time to call it a night.

But Earl’s grin widened and he continued on. “Now, that’s not the worst of it, though. They found her baby too- upstairs in its cradle. Starved to death.” Seemingly satisfied at Marjorie’s horrified expression, Earl stopped talking and went back to his drink.

Marjorie tried to avoid the cellar afterward without drawing Earl’s attention to her fear of it. She hadn’t wanted to give him that victory at having frightened her with one of his macabre yarns. But even now, decades later, and now alone in her old age, she felt a sickening uneasiness when she recalled Earl’s account that night.

____

Marjorie finished her tea, put the cup in the kitchen sink, and began getting ready for bed. She had never felt so exhausted in all her life. She turned off the lights, and in the darkness she glanced out the window to a moonlit scene. Only, something or someone was standing out there along the wooded perimeter. Marjorie adjusted her glasses and strained her aging eyes against the darkness, desperately trying to make out what she was seeing. It was a figure, unmoving against the dark backdrop of the trees, but slightly aglow in the wash of moonlight.

Stepping back from the window, she quickly clicked on the lamp and made her way toward the door. Wearing her tattered bathrobe and slippers, Marjorie stepped outside her door and looked in the direction where the figure stood a second ago. No one was there. She reasoned that she must be seeing things. Her old eyes and the dim light of the moon were not a winning combination, she told herself. She wrapped her bathrobe around herself tightly, and walked back in through the front door.

Marjorie got in bed and eventually fell into a fitful and strange sleep, having dreams she would not remember upon waking, but still holding the distressing feelings those dreams had evoked. In the middle of one of those unsettling dreams, there were three loud knocks on the front door.

Marjorie’s eyes jolted open and for a moment she could not place herself in space or time. What time was it? It was pitch black. Was the sound in her dream or did she truly hear a knock on the door? But who on Earth could be knocking at this hour? No one regularly visited and she was certainly not expecting anyone in the middle of the night.

Another three loud knocks sounded across the room. Slowly, she got out of bed and dressed only in her nightgown, walked over to the door and called out, in a slightly cracking voice, "Who is it please?" She waited, unmoving.

There was no reply.

"Hello? Who is there?" Her voice again betrayed her nerves as she stood still and waited.

No reply.

After a moment of consideration and against her better judgment, Marjorie unlatched the door, and turned the old metal knob. The door creaked open, letting a strong gust of cold air but the front stoop was empty. Marjorie quickly threw the door shut and latched it. She stood staring at the closed door for a moment, trying to work out what just occurred. There were no trees close to the door that could have rapped on it, and she was definitely wide awake and not dreaming.

"I'm losing it," Marjorie startled herself by saying out loud. "I've finally begun to lose my old marbles!" She let out a small laugh, but there was no smile along with it, then she swallowed hard, and tried to still her shaking hands against the soft touch of her nightgown.

Marjorie laid back in bed, moving her feet back and forth to try and create some warmth in the cold sheets. When had it gotten so cold? Suddenly, a loud BANG rang out through the blackness. The sound, she knew, of the heavy wooden front door swinging open and hitting the wall. She cried out and reached for the lamp switch, but the lamp was no longer there. She then fumbled her hands over the nightstand in search of her glasses. They weren't there either. Without her glasses and in the near total darkness, she was essentially blind- the world being a big blur of vague color and shape.

"Who's there??!!" she yelled.

No one answered.

"PLEASE! Who is THERE?"

Silence.

Shaking violently, in a half-dream, half-waking state, Marjorie stood up from the bed, her nightgown hanging loosely and oversized on her small frail body. A cold gush of air came rushing in from the open front door. The room was black, except for the moonlight. Marjorie shuffled along the floor, arms outstretched, and listened to her breath, slightly raspy, and quickened by fear. She was heading toward the telephone, the corded green relic that was mounted to the wall by the table. As she reached the phone Marjorie fell to the ground, her hand pulling the phone receiver off the hook as her body collapsed onto the floor in fright.

She awoke sometime later, opened her eyes and saw that it was still black out. The phone receiver lay silent and dead at her side. No dial tone. Glancing around the room she could see very little, but noticeably absent were the familiar shapes of furniture that should have been hinted at in the moonlight. The room was empty. Marjorie had one solid thought go through her mind before she passed out again. ‘Please help me... God, please. Please.’

She woke again after what may have been a minute or an hour. She had never felt so exhausted in her life. The room was still dark, and appeared to be empty. The phone receiver still lay on the floor next to her, but now a small voice sounded from the earpiece. Marjorie picked it up and put it to her ear. "Hello?" she offered, with a shaking voice.

No answer.

Marjorie reached to place the receiver back on the hook, but before she could do so, she again heard a small whispering voice come out of the ear piece.

"Margie?"

"Who is this?" Marjorie managed.

No answer.

"I'm calling the police," Marjorie retorted, her voice cracking with the threat of tears.

Marjorie stood and slammed the receiver down on the hook as hard as her stunned arms would allow. She took a breath, then picked it back up.

Dead line.

No dial tone. No beeping. Nothing at all.

Not knowing what else to do, and without being able to summon outside help, Marjorie shuffled back into the bedroom to grab her robe. Only it wasn’t there. Nothing was. No bed, no dresser to stub her toe on, no robe. She felt herself coming apart and she started to cry great gulping sobs. Almost immediately she heard the rain begin to hit the roof, and it came down in earnest and with force.

Marjorie ran as best as she could manage to the front door and out into the open air of the cold September rain. There, in the dim moonlight, a small, thin figure appeared to be standing in the mud on the edge of the clearing and facing back toward the house and Marjorie. Marjorie shut her eyes tight, waited a moment, then opened them again and looked out to the treeline and the pouring rain.

No one.

No longer even rational, Marjorie found herself trudging out the front door across the yard to where the figure had stood. Now soaked and shivering furiously, she stopped at the treeline and tried to peer into the abyss of the forest. Turning abruptly back toward the cabin, she smelled an unholy odor akin to wet wool with a hint of singed hair and that somehow told Marjorie something was wrong before she could even see so with her eyes. Her feet were now carrying her back toward the cabin, even though she willed them not to, but when she got close enough to make out the vagueness of its shapes and shadows, she barely recognized the ramshackle dwelling. There stood not her cabin, but the ruins of it. As if the building had aged one hundred years and partially collapsed onto itself in the minute since she had run out of its door. And there, in the window, a single candle light pierced through the darkness. Marjorie found herself repeating a kind of prayer in her head: This isn't real. This isn't real. This cannot be real.

Marjorie walked the rest of the way back to the entrance like a zombie mindlessly following instinct. She had stopped sobbing, had stopped feeling panicked, and was surprised and somewhat relieved to realize she didn’t feel much of anything at all. A warm numbness had washed over her and ushered her back through the cabin’s front door.

Inside the rain continued to pour and invaded through a gaping hole in the roof. A pool of muddy water covered the floor of the abandoned cabin. The only light was the last of the moon and the singular flicker of a candle in the window. Marjorie looked to the cellar door as she heard labored and quaggy footsteps ascending the stairs. Just then, a baby’s cries began quietly then eventually reached a crescendo.