Written in Shadows

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

Granted, the cabin in front of her was more a shack than a cabin, the window more of a hole in the wall, and it was midday, not nighttime. But Park Ranger Christie Adams was an aspiring writer, and embellishing the truth was her trade.

The cabin’s walls leaned into one another slightly and the roof pitched at an awkward angle, as if the whole thing was on the verge of collapse. Inside the cabin, amidst the fleshy scuttling of mice feet and the complaining squeal of the walls against the wind, the sound of sinister voices filled the empty space.

Christie shivered, smiling at the line, and wriggled her legs to better support her notebook. In the woods around her, the breeze shifted and twisted the branches of the summer-laden trees with a rustling that sounded nearly like the voices in her story.

Little Grace Woodrow was only ten, and already a raging insomniac. She lived about a half mile down the mountain, in a tiny house with her widowed father and his whiskey and not much else. She walked the woods often when she couldn’t sleep, but could not recall stumbling across the cabin before. She stood outside, puzzling over its presence, her thin white nightdress tangling up around her legs in the vicious gusts of the late summer wind.

She jumped when she heard the voices. All manner of them, whispering something unintelligible that both frightened and fascinated her. As she strained to hear them, the voices inside the cabin grew louder, sharper, until they felt as if they were coming from inside Grace’s own mind.

“Come in,” they beckoned.

And so she did.

With a small frown, Christie glanced back up from the page. That wasn’t where she thought the story would go, at least not just yet. She stood to clear her head and picture what came next. Judging by the sun’s placement overhead, she guessed she had another hour or so before she’d be expected back at the patrol cabin for her next shift.

Go on, the forest seemed to hiss. Christie glanced around, noting for the first time the unnatural way the shadows pulled and contorted around the little shack.

The first thing Grace noticed about the inside of the cabin was the smell. It reminded her of the stench of her father’s alcohol-induced vomit, but underneath there was a sweeter scent–sickly sweet, like strawberries left too long in the hot sun.

The second thing Grace noticed was the shadow-woman.

Christie’s hand began to ache. She paused for a moment to stretch it, resting her pencil next to her thigh on the moss-coated boulder which served as her chair. She puzzled over her words while she shook out her hand.

It felt a bit derivative. And the handwriting itself, she noticed, looked more and more foreign the more she wrote. Her fingers must be more tired than she thought.

But she’d gotten this far, and wanted to know where the plot might take her.

Grace did not scream, nor did she start. She stared into the face of the shadow-woman with little more regard than she would give a stranger on the street.

The woman reminded Grace of thick storm clouds. Inky, with spread-thin translucent spots. The darkness in the woman shifted and swirled in the dim candlelight.

She did not have a face, just two gleaming, coal-like eyes which were a dull red and hidden at times by the shifting of her wispy shadow-tendrils of hair. Below her eyes rested a thin, straight line of a mouth.

“Who are you?” Grace asked. She knew she ought to be afraid, but she wasn’t. After all, what was she really doing but trading one nightmare for another?

The shadow-woman’s eyes brightened, their dying-ember hue sparking with heat.

She opened her mouth, which was darker, somehow, than the rest of her. It seemed to Grace that instead of simply being the absence of light, the woman’s maw was the end of it entirely.

The shadow-woman took a deep, rattling breath, like the sound of dead leaves crushed slowly underfoot.

With a small smile, she blew out the candle.

Christie tore herself from the page. The light around her was thin; the sun had already set. The suggestion of stars in the deepening blue above her ought to have been discomforting. She had not been here that long—had she?

Time felt rather irrelevant. Her rounds through the park could wait.

As she bent back over the page to finish the story, inky shadows gathered in the shack before her.

“I can’t see,” Grace whispered, clenching her fists. Her heart began to somersault somewhere between her chest and her teeth.

“Mmm,” the darkness replied, bemused. “I know.”

The woman’s voice made Grace feel as though she was on the edge of a fast-moving current, only moments from being swept away for good.

Grace asked again. “Who are you?”

There was a long pause, long enough for Grace’s eyes to adjust to the lack of light in the cabin. She noticed with a shiver the silvery shapes of bones scattered around the floor. For the first time in years, she wished that she was back home.

“Why, dear,” the woman answered silkily, “I am you.”

Grace stepped back and nearly stumbled, reaching a hand out behind her in an attempt to find the door. “W-what?”

“I am you.”

And with that, the shadow-woman leapt forward, digging sharp fingers into Grace’s little body, which was paralyzed with fear. She didn’t have time to scream. Instead, the cabin filled with the sound of tearing, rending, and gnawing until there was nothing left of the girl but bone and the blood that soaked into the creaking floorboards.

The next sunrise found the cabin standing a little straighter, in the proud way a flower stands after an evening full of rain.

Christie’s hands shook as she finished the last line. She put her pencil down and raised reluctant eyes to the shack before her. Night had fallen and the woods stood wary and watching under the light of a thin crescent moon.

A single candle burned in the shack, in the space where Christie supposed a window once sat.

Come in, a voice beckoned, and she did, walking through the open doorway as if in a trance.

Inside, the candlelight writhed along crumbling walls. Glass from what used to be the window scattered the floor. The floorboards themselves were broken in some places, sticking up jaggedly between piles of old, dusty bones.

Christie’s lip trembled as the words tumbled from her mouth, sinking like inevitable stones. “Is someone there?”

In the final, pallid flicker of the dying candle, the cabin bared its teeth.