Up in Smoke

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

The writer frowned at the sentence from his cramped little desk in just such a cabin, but he kept writing anyway.

It wasn't practical, but the writer thought it helped set the mood as it cast a light on the page that was warm, alive. He did his best work at night.

"Well, not so far," he mused to himself. But he kept going, thinking that if he just got the shit out of his system, he would strike gold. He gulped down some piss-warm coffee, finally reaching the bitter coffee grounds at the bottom of his chipped mug, and continued.

But so did the ghost of his landlady's husband.

He rented the cabin from an old lady for a week's writing retreat, but he didn't know if she'd ever been married. He didn't care. It wasn't like anyone was going to see this anyway.

He was a drunk bastard who got what he deserved. But that didn't stop him from seeking vengeance against his widow. After she fled, he lay dormant in his shallow grave, never quite at rest, waiting for his chance. Then he sensed the writer's presence and stirred in the dirt.

The writer smiled ironically and threw back the rest of his coffee, this time without noticing the grounds that stuck to his teeth. His pen flew across the page now, occasionally crossing something out, but he never lost his momentum. Even if he didn't write anything good tonight, he was at least having fun with the process again.

The air felt charged as he wrote until the candle in the window and even the lantern at his desk wasn't enough to see the words on the page.

He still thrummed with energy when he stood from the desk, his ass sore from the hard little chair. Regardless, he blew out the lantern and candle, then fell into the creaking bed without undressing. He slowly drifted off, wondering what to do next with the story.

. . .

A tremendous boom woke the writer, shaking the cabin and rattling the dishes in the cupboard and shaking loose soot from the chimney. In the silence that followed, he lay wide-eyed and paralyzed on the sheets, wondering if the sound had been real or a dream, unsure of what to do in either case.

Then a small glow warmed the dark cabin, rousing the writer. He turned his head towards the candle in the window. It had flickered to life.

He sat up in bed, groaning almost as loudly as the frame. He shuffled across the floorboards and stopped at the desk, staring at the innocent looking candle before looking out the window beyond it. Smoke billowed from the gravel road about fifty yards away, almost obscuring the car that had wrecked itself on a tree. The writer squinted, wondering if he imagined the dark figure slumped over the steering wheel.

Unsure of what else to do about the candle, he plucked it from the windowsill and used it to light the lantern before returning it to its proper spot.

Once outside, brandishing the lantern like a shield, the writer shook his head at himself as he trod toward the car. Here he was, outside in the middle of the night investigating a car wreck when he should have simply phoned the police. He hadn't even checked to see if his phone was charged and in service.

Just like some jackass in a bad horror movie who thought he was the hero. This would be the perfect opportunity for some zombie or axe murderer to stalk him; not quite attack just yet, but lie in wake to build anticipation.

The bushes rustled to his left and he flinched, his heart pounding.

Just a raccoon, he told himself. Hero, indeed.

Now in range of the smoke, he thrust his lantern forward and waved his other hand to clear the air, coughing at the smell of burning rubber and spilled oil. The car had hit a tree head-on and crumpled the front bumper. Smoke poured from beneath a hood that folded around the tree trunk like an accordion. The driver's side window was gone, providing a clear view of the cracks that spiderwebbed across the windshield.

The driver's seat was empty, save for broken glass that glittered in the lantern light.

He turned back towards the cabin. If the driver had wandered off, there was nothing the writer could do to help him unless he had backup. He wondered briefly if he'd only imagined the figure in the driver's seat, but dismissed it immediately. The car had to have gotten there somehow.

The car . . .

The writer slowed and stopped at the dirt path where his own car was parked leading to the front door of the cabin. There'd been a junker out front. Hadn't there?

He picked his way over overgrown weeds to where he thought it'd been. There was no exposed dirt, depressions, dead grass, or any other sort of indication that there'd been something big and heavy rusting away.

A stray breeze raised goosebumps along his arms and he instinctively scrunched up his shoulders as if to shield the back of his neck. All he heard were the typical sounds of the forest, probably just owls or possums. But each rustle of leaves or creak of a branch made him flinch just a little as he hurried up the steps and locked the door behind him.

The writer leaned his back against the door before an image flashed through his head of an axe bursting through the door. He jumped away from the door as if it were burning and stumbled into the kitchen, placing the lantern on the counter.

After he put some coffee on, he rubbed a hand briskly across his face and went to the desk. He didn't know if he'd have service out here, but he had to try to report the accident, as well as a possible missing and injured person.

Phone in hand, he glanced at the candle in the window, still cheerily flickering and throwing shadows against the glass pane. He turned away from it as he dialed. The phone was silent against his ear. He looked at the screen again and raised the phone above his head. It was still trying to dial and couldn't pick up a signal. The screen went idle as he waved the phone around, stepping from side to side to try to find a good spot.

Over the sound of the percolating coffee machine that filled the room with the smell of roasted hazelnut, over the sound of is own footsteps pacing the creaking floorboards, the writer heard a footstep that wasn't his own. His phone's black screen, for a split second, picked up the reflection of the candle and what looked like a man's silhouette staring through the window.

The writer whirled towards the desk. Nothing. Just a stupid little candle that was starting to drip wax.

"Goddammit," he breathed, putting a hand to his chest.

He tossed his phone on the bed and tried the landline. Not even a busy signal.

He slammed the phone in its cradle. He'd have to drive out to the police station, and if someone was hurt, he couldn't wait till morning. He poured hot coffee into a travel mug and grabbed his keys. He paused at the desk and bent to blow out the candle. A thin line of smoke rose from the wick, and the writer scratched his head uncomfortably. He felt like he'd just been caught stepping on someone's grave.

This would be another great opportunity to get whacked by Jason or Freddy, he thought has he walked to his own car, taking great care to control his pace. As he paused to find the right key, he froze.

Was that hissing?

He fumbled with his phone before he finally managed to turn on the flashlight and shine it on his tires. He swore as he circled his car, finding each tire slashed and flat.

Something dropped and shattered inside of him as he stepped back from his now useless car, like he'd known this would happen all along and had been powerless to stop it. He had that feeling of being watched again and ran back inside the cabin, slamming the door this time. He paced the room, his mind running through rationalizations.

One: the driver from the wreck was somehow uninjured enough to sabotage the only working vehicle. Maybe he wanted to avoid a trip to the hospital or police station? Maybe he was delirious with a head injury? Maybe he was just a prick? There weren't many explanations that made sense for that scenario.

Two: it was just a bear. A bear that made extremely clean cuts with its claws and teeth.

A third possibility bubbled just beneath the surface at the back of his mind, and it was one that was so absurd that it wasn't worth thinking about.

He hoped it was a bear.

His gaze landed on the desk by the window, where the candle burned happily once more. From this distance, the words he'd written and scratched out and rewritten looked like shadows that morphed and moved, that had a life of their own.

The writer heard the glass shatter mere seconds before he felt a sudden pain at his temple. A rock thunked to the floor, wet with his blood and hair. He quickly followed it, vision blurring like breath on cold glass. He watched, dazed, as a dark hand reached through the window and planted itself on the papers scattered on the desk. It stumbled through the jagged glass portal it'd created and fell hard to the floor. Somehow, the candle in the windowsill remained lit and undisturbed.

The silhouette crawled toward the writer, its face still too blurry to see clearly but still somehow familiar, like a mirror image of someone he knew. As the writer's vision faded to black, he thought of the soiled papers on his desk and realized that he hadn't written an ending yet.

. . .

When the writer came to on the floor, everything felt wrong precisely because there was nothing wrong. He didn't know why he'd expected a mess, but everything was in its proper place, right down to the lit candle in the window. He had a pounding headache, but when he put a hand to his temple, he felt no wound. Had he hit his head when he fell?

Dragging himself to the desk, the writer used it as leverage to hoist himself to his feet. He blinked at the pages of his story, smeared with dirt. He put a hand to the window pane, but it was intact.

He frowned. Why would it be broken?

A light, more powerful than that of the moon or the candle before him, shone in his face and he instinctively threw up a hand to shade his eyes. He lowered it just enough to see the headlights of his own car beaming from the gravel road.

The tires spun and squealed, flinging dirt and rocks in its wake as it bumped over uneven forest floor, dodging trees, roaring straight for the cabin.

The writer dove away just as the car crunched into the stone foundation of the cabin. It didn't quite drive through the wall, but the window shattered inward, the frame splintering and cracking. The desk had skidded away from the wall and tipped over, the lantern smashing to the ground and papers fluttering like confetti.

The candle's flame didn't so much as waver.

This, too, was familiar, and the writer didn't know how or why he knew, but he felt in his gut that there was something more terrible than some drunk driver coming for him.

He pushed the upended desk against the open window as tightly as he could, placing the candle carefully on the kitchen counter before doing so. Then he shoved the bed, scraping and screeching in protest, against the closed door. He paused in his work, hearing foliage rustling just outside. The meager moonlight that filtered through the cracks around the desk darkened.

The writer doubled his efforts, slipping on the pages that littered the floor, feeling his chest tighten with panic. Anything that wasn't bolted to the floor–the dresser, his bags, the end tables–were used to reinforce those barricades. He got it into his head that if he could just hold out until daybreak, he'd be okay. Something this horrifying couldn't possibly exist in the light of day.

When there was nothing more to grab, the writer stopped, training his eyes on the window and holding his breath, listening.

More rustling outside, then scraping and scratching punctuated by loud thunks. The noises started at ground level and slowly worked its way up the side of the house until they reached the roof. There, the writer heard footsteps traversing the roof.

He frowned up at the ceiling, where his shadow wavered in the candlelight. There was a pause, and then a soft scraping and the sprinkle of soot in the fireplace.

Shit. He'd forgotten about the chimney.

Abandoning his post at the front door, the writer yanked open several cabinets in the kitchen and then used his own deadweight to tear the doors of their hinges. He slammed them against the corner of the chimney until they splintered to pieces, tossing them into the fireplace. Then he retrieved the candle and scrambled about the cabin, collecting and crumpling the scattered pages of his story, a story that described a dead thing trying relentlessly to break into a cabin that only recently housed a living being.

He stuffed little balls of paper under the cabinet doors, remembering how his father used to build a fire when he was a child. His hands trembled as he held the candle carefully to the edges of the paper, forcing himself to take his time even though the thing in the chimney was halfway to the hearth.

Crouching on his hands and knees, the writer brought his face close to the weak little flames and blew gently, coaxing it into tongues of fire that blackened the edges of the paper and began to lick at the finished wood, crackling softly.

He'd expected the larger pieces of wood to take time to ignite, as the logs in his childhood fireplace had, but they impossibly roared to life in seconds. The thing in the chimney screamed. The writer smirked, though he couldn't imagine how the fire could be hot enough already.

"Don't you know I'm a writer?" he quipped. "It's my job to blow smoke up your ass."

But with the blockage, the smoke quickly filled the room.

The writer stood and waved his hands through the haze, coughing. His eyes burned and he could barely see anything past the tears and the smoke. When he finally remembered what his father had told him about fire safety, he dropped back to all fours in search of a pocket of oxygen, but his head already felt stuffed with cotton. His breath came too quick and shallow as his eyes fluttered shut, unsure whether he'd just saved himself or killed himself before the landlady's husband got the chance.

. . .

The writer already heard footsteps before he'd fully regained consciousness. Several, dragging footsteps all around and above him.

He slowly shook his head, trying to rouse himself, as three figures entered simultaneously.

The first shattered the window over the desk and ragdolled onto the floor. The second landed with a thud and a cloud of ash in the fireplace. The third one, the cocky bastard, simply opened the front door and walked right in.

That one's new, he thought to himself. He didn't know how he knew the other two, but he had the distinct feeling of having lived through this before. He didn't move as they approached his prone figure, close enough now for him to see the deep burns that seared and blackened their skin, their limbs broken at odd angles.

He couldn't move. All he could do was study their faces. Their noses were the same length and shape, though one was broken, smashed to the side like he'd landed on his face. Their mouths had been badly burned, some revealing exposed teeth, but the jawline and chin were the same on all three as well. Patches of the same wavy, brown hair remained, but it was the eyes that did it. One had an eyeball that appeared to have gone blind, but it was the same color as all the others.

His eyes.

These burnt specters were not the writer's mirror image–he was used to seeing his own reflection. He saw himself now as others saw him.

Only a minute had passed as they studied each other. Then the one that had come in through the door raised a hand and snapped his fingers.

It didn't make a loud sound, but the writer saw the candle, ever on the windowsill, catch fire. But this time, the flames leapt higher than ever before, quickly engulfing the curtains and singeing the desk. They spread faster than they logically should have. And the writer was paralyzed, surrounded by three versions of himself that either existed in another time or didn't exist at all. But they seemed plenty real to him.

He could only watch the flames climb to the ceiling and spread across the walls, silhouetting the dead things once more. Once again, the writer passed out from the smoke before the flames could reach him, before he and his doubles, watchful and resolute, all went up in smoke.

. . .

There is no cabin in the woods, abandoned or otherwise. Only a small rock marking overturned dirt where even weeds refused to grow. And on the rock, a candle whose flame never flickered in the breeze, never sizzled in the rain, and never burned low.