A House of Angles

“The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.” Devin’s words come in halting bursts, but he punctuates them with an ironic laugh, wondering why he can’t resist scaring himself just a little bit more when the situation is already dire. His sneakers turn up furrows of leaves with every step as he departs the pitted mountain road for a lane that has gone untended for years. He goes without looking back, having given up glances over his shoulder over an hour ago.

Behind him, the winding curves and dense forest have done as much to conceal the silent hulk of his car as the moonless night. Aside from stars and satellites, and maybe Mars, the only light he has seen since the headlights went dark is the light flickering through the pines.

The last hemlock branches slip behind him, and Devin gets an unobstructed view. The flame appears tiny at this distance. He wonders how he spotted it from so far away. He also notices that the triangular window in which it rests, high in the A-frame cabin’s face, lies at least a foot left of center. He takes both details in stride while covering the last few yards to the porch.

His teeth chatter loudly enough to hear. He is dressed for daytime highs rather than the dark of mountain night, and his only concern is that nobody is home.

Stomping up the three steps on feet gone numb below the ankles, Devin falls against the door and knocks, strong and hard. The sound returns from the trees behind him, as gently mocking as the stars that observed his climb up the mountain and offered no help. Devin bites his lip and pounds his fist against the rough wood again. It’s rustic, this place he’s found, the sort that sits empty for months until hunting season or a family reunion makes it necessary again. He reaches for the knob before propriety can stop him.

“The hell?” he asks aloud when it turns. He throws his body into the door. The old wood has swollen in the jamb and offers enough resistance to make his shoulder smart, but it yields.

For a moment he stands there, studying the interior as he rubs his shoulder. The cabin is a spacious, open-floor design with raised kitchen opposite the entry. A log ladder climbs to a balcony in front of an enclosed second-floor bedroom. The air is full of pine and cedar and accumulated dust. Then the wind gusts across the back of his neck and he spins, shutting the door before dropping his forehead against the wood, breathing hard, eyes shut tight.

When his breathing is steady, he peers up through a pair of hexagonal skylights placed asymmetrically above the living area. A smattering of stars provides scant light, but Devin realizes that the room is illuminated almost entirely by the candle that led him here. He backs into the cabin, peering up until he sees it, perhaps eight inches long, producing a brilliant, orange light against what appear to be storm clouds gathering in the direction of his dead car.

“Damn,” Devin whispers, but he’s already determined that he will weather the storm here and leave in the morning. He looks down and spots his footprints in the dust. He glances back up again, the hairs along his arms and the back of his neck prickling.

Who lit you?

His imagination warns him to leave right now and keep walking till he finds another cabin, even if it means enduring an early autumn mountain rain. Rubbing his sore shoulder, he tells his imagination to shut up and take a seat.

Then: “Phone.” Devin scans the living area but there isn’t even a television. He ignores the brick hearth, Antlered Beast on display, and the empty wood rack. His eyes linger on the gun case, home to three hunting rifles but with space for a fourth. Devin frowns at the empty slot before making his way to the kitchen, mounting the single step to the elevated floor. He scans the area below the cabinets, next to the old fridge—it’s the color he thinks of as “seventies gold,” although he has no idea when appliances were made in that horrid mustard shade—and he notes the lack of microwave. There is a gas stove and a sturdy table with a few objects at one end.

There is no phone. Devin moves to the table for a better look at what’s arranged there. So far from the entry, the candlelight is feeble, but the old camp lantern and box of matches capture his attention. He lunges at them as if the candle might choose this moment to fail. Sliding the box open, he counts five matches, then goes to work. The first one breaks against the rough strip along the side of the box. Devin stops, consciously breathing, scanning the remaining two items on the table and wondering what the note next to the recorder might say. When he trusts his hands to apply even pressure, he tries again. The second match catches.

It takes him two more matches to learn the proper combination of inserting a burning match into the glass dome while turning the knob to release the gas. When it finally ignites, there is a flash so brilliant that Devin laments he has burned the cabin to the ground, killing himself in the process. He overreacts, stifling the flame by twisting the knob all the way off.

He studies the last match.

“You can light a damn lamp,” he whispers, and with steadied hands, fills the kitchen with warm light.

He stands there, listening to the faint hiss, inhaling the smoke of dead matches, and considering the two remaining objects on the table. The first is a cassette recorder, the type old-fashioned reporters click in movies. Through the smokey plastic window, Devin spots a tiny cassette. The final object is a square of yellowed paper with four words written in block letters:

LIGHT ME

PLAY ME

***

He stares across to the gun rack as his thumb depresses the play button. The empty slot, where a fourth rifle should dwell, distracts him. Is it normal for hunters to leave guns behind when they leave for the season? Or to just take one—maybe a favorite—and leave the rest? He shakes his head, knowing his imagination is spooking him again. If he’s not careful, he really will convince himself to forsake shelter as a storm sweeps the mountain.

Does it snow up here in October? he asks himself.

A new hiss, louder and closer than the lantern, startles him. He leaps back, and when the sound of the cassette recorder follows him, he almost drops it before realizing it’s static.

“Dumbass,” he whispers, grateful for the moment that none of his friends are here to witness his ridiculous jig. Then the old lady’s voice begins to speak, and he comes closer than ever to acknowledging his imagination has been right all along—this place needs to be vacated immediately.

“Hello, dear,” she says, her voice a weird combination of sugar and good humor that makes Devin think, Stranger danger. Garbled by the venerable tape, she is doting, promising hugs and candy but dancing on the edge of a manic outburst. Devin’s eyes drift towards the gun rack.

“My name is Amelia Sorenson, and this is my confession. I must warn you that my last words will not be an easy thing to bear. I have committed terrible crimes, things that will linger after—”

Devin shuts off the recording as floorboards creek in the bedroom. He wants to swear again, but the realization that he is not alone holds him fast. He registers where he is, in the kitchen of someone’s home, as far from the entrance as possible without climbing into bed with whoever was sleeping upstairs. He’s struck their remaining supply of matches and he’s literally two steps from opening the refrigerator and Goldilocksing whatever groceries they’ve stored in there. And they’re armed.

Mustering his courage, Devin steps down from the kitchen, except his foot catches on something and he stumbles up before dropping awkwardly to the living room floor. He glances back, brow furrowed, but he can’t see anything that could have tripped him. There’s no time, though, because his awkwardness has left him in plain view of the bedroom door and the gun-toting mountain he expects to emerge.

Devin opens his mouth to call out, but now he feels foolish. He’s churned up a fresh zephyr of dust to fill his nostrils. He recalls stomping up the steps, crashing through the front door, and then slamming it shut behind him.

“Boards creek,” he says.

He returns to the kitchen, mindful of the step, and places the recorder on the table, bidding a silent farewell to creepy-ass Amelia Sorenson and her confession. He sits and listens to thunder rolling closer. Fifteen minutes pass. Rain patters against the oddly shaped skylights. Wind moans beneath the eaves like breath blown across an empty bottle. Devin utters a wry laugh, imagining how freaked he would get listening to the recording.

He paces the kitchen. The fridge is empty, room temperature. He hops down to the living room, skipping the step, to gaze into the glassy eyes of Antlered Beast. He explores everywhere except the balcony, but for fifteen minutes he stares up at the candle, still flickering, undiminished. He makes it almost an hour before he presses Play.

***

“I’m gone,” Amelia Sorenson says, and at first Devin doesn’t realize she is completing her sentence about the lingering impact of her crimes. In the long pause that follows, these two words produce an unintentional double meaning.

“This is stupid,” Devin whispers, but now he’s started the recorder. He can’t bring himself to stop it again. This might be the worst possible time for a ghost story, but it’s also the best, and someday he’s going to have one hell of a tale about the night he broke down on Jack’s Mountain and sheltered in an abandoned cabin with a magic candle.

Now Amelia speaks again, her voice layered under by the sibilance of the tape, unflagging in its barely restrained mirth. “If you listen to my full confession, dear, you will find your way to a special reward. All I ask is that, if you begin this journey with me, you travel to its end.”

Turn it off, whispers a voice in Devin’s mind, the one he thinks of as his imagination. The thought is fully formed, though, and for a moment he thinks someone has whispered at his bruised shoulder. That gets him on his feet again and pacing across the living room. He regards the sofas angled to face the fireplace and wonders what might have nested in them over the years. Beetles? Mice? Squirrels? He can smell the rain, cold and cleansing, and assumes there’s a sizeable opening somewhere, maybe a broken window in the bedroom. Anything could have entered, and anything could be in here with him right now.

“People are going to say I committed murder,” Amelia says, her words bringing to mind round, rosy cheeks and a wide smile full of straight teeth, “and since my Jeb’s body is upstairs on the bed, well, that will be hard to deny.”

Devin stares at the ceiling above the kitchen, telling himself that the boards did not creek again. And they definitely did not imply motion in the direction of the bedroom door. He resists the urge to close his eyes, for fear of what might stand in front of him when they opened again.

“And, if we haven’t already met,” Amelia giggles, a self-deprecating chortle, “then I am most likely up there lying right beside him. Till death do us part; he made sure of it. But the folks who talk about my husband’s murder are refusing to see what happened under these angles. There are things worse than death, and that’s not just a saying, dear. Trust Auntie Amelia.”

“Not my aunt,” Devin whispers. His finger hovers over Stop. That degree of familiarity is too much.

“My husband Jeb had to die,” Amelia says after the perfect amount of time to sound conversational, and Devin assures himself it’s coincidence. “He was a terrible man, and not just because he skipped out on bills and slipped extra supplies into the truck while the boys were loading it. Not just because he was selfish, vengeful, and even cruel when his patience ran out. A lot of men are no different. But Jeb was worse. He built the cabin. And then he brought me here.”

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” Devin says, drawing out the word as he looks up from where he sits, running his eyes over the slanting ceiling, past the skylights, down to the balcony, and, finally, back to the candle, still no shorter.

“Yes,” says Amelia, and Devin winces. It’s too damn creepy the way her pauses synchronize with his reactions, but he knows he has been interjecting after she completes a thought. Most likely, Amelia spent that time choosing her words. “The cabin is beautiful, especially considering how long ago it was built, from your perspective. Let me tell you, in our era, it is a marvel. Every intersection precise, every board intentionally placed. If I’d known how precise and how intentional, I never would have joined him here.”

Devin places the recorder on the floor at his side and rubs his cheeks and forehead with sweat-slicked hands. The hearth is dark and cold, but he is abruptly flushed. He pushes himself to his feet and begins pacing again, but he lets the recorder have its say.

“Very few will understand.” Amelia could be telling him that she left a tray of cookies in the oven as a sweet surprise for her dear nephew. “In fact, you may be the only person who ever does. That will have to do. Before I can tell you more, though, there is something you must do. Flip the tape over.”

***

The empty hiss of the cassette plays out a few more seconds before the recorder clicks off. For a moment, Devin stares at it, not understanding. Then, slowly, he gets it. He picks up the recorder and returns to the lantern to read the worn names along the buttons until he finds Stop/Eject. It’s an unpracticed motion, but he removes the cassette and reseats it with the B-side facing the nearly opaque window. A little pressure and it clicks shut. Devin rests his thumb on Play.

“I don’t want to do this,” he whispers. If the floorboards creek overhead, he will throw the recorder into the storm and be done with it. He hesitates, listening, willing the cabin to make a sound. Provide any excuse.

Nothing.

“I’m such an idiot.”

“You’re going to need to walk with me now,” says Amelia Sorenson so quickly that her voice seems to precede the noise of the tape. Devin shakes his head, mouthing What the fuck? so he doesn’t speak over the dead woman as she asks him to climb the ladder and find her corpse.

“I know I’m asking quite a bit,” she says, and Devin barks another laugh. “There is so much I must tell you. About my husband and what I was forced to do to save everyone. Now, bring the lamp. The sanctuary candle will burn for twenty-four hours, but it serves a different purpose, and you’ll find the bedroom hungry for light.”

“Run, Dev,” Devin says, lifting the lantern, making his way to the log ladder. “Get out while you can.”

He’s a young man, though, and young men so rarely listen to voices of reason when there’s a certain degree of danger afoot. It’s the other voice that takes the wheel, the one promising immortality till you die. Amelia waits patiently as he maneuvers the lantern and pockets the recorder.

He reaches the balcony with only the crackling recording and the increasing gallop of rain for company. Amelia asked him to go on a journey with her, and by the time Devin reaches the top his forehead is slick from exertion. The muscles of his arms and legs ache as if he’s climbed a much greater distance. Worse, his shoulder throbs where it impacted the front door.

“In a moment, dear, you will open the door.”

He pulls out the recorder to stare at it. It feels oddly heavy in his hand. None of this is possible, but he sits level with the candle now, and possible no longer seems as relevant as it once did.

The realization affects him in a way that is both psychological and tangible. Part of his mind shifts, separates, begins to drift. He feels only minor concern, as he’s sure that the house won’t let anything stray far. Otherwise, Amelia wouldn’t be in the bedroom with old Jeb. Maybe it’s the candle—the sanctuary candle, Devin corrects—or maybe it’s all the perfect angles, but he doesn’t think he has to worry about losing his mind here. It’ll be bouncing around the cabin if he needs it.

“Don’t waste any effort looking for us,” Amelia says, drawing him back. “After the convergence Jeb engineered, and all the years, there won’t be much to recognize.”

Devin blinks, but Amelia is talking fast now. “You’ll need to be quick, dear. Like lightning. When the door opens, grab my locket. Removing it is the last thing I will do, and I must do it in the bedroom for containment. I will drop it on the nightstand if I can. Take it to the candle and burn the picture of Jeb and me. It’s where he trapped our essence, and when the architect dies, his structure collapses.”

A hint of tension enters Amelia’s voice, as if, this close to the end of their journey, she’s begun to doubt. Somehow, her trepidation is the last piece Devin needs for him to believe. He slips the recorder into his pocket, takes the knob, and turns steadily until latch bolt disengages.

“Quickly, dear!” Amelia cries, and Devin leaps.

There is a rush of air, as if he’s opened the entrance of a tomb, which he supposes he has. He gasps it in, unintentionally filling his nostrils with scents of old bread, heavy wool, a lingering mélange of citrus and peppermint and something else, deep and floral. It is not the way he imagined decomposing human to smell, and his revulsion fades as he staggers inside.

It’s hard to see. The corners of the room are wide in a way that must be an optical illusion. They recede farther than should be strictly possible, and Devin imagines they are siphoning light into their depths. He looks away quickly, but the sense of peering into someplace impossibly deep lingers.

His focus shifts to the bed, where two hillocks molder among the sheets. A fine growth of dark bristles has spread from the Sorensons, across the bed, to spill onto the floor in straining pseudopods. Devin wastes no time trying to determine which mound recorded the message that guides him and which built the cabin. He tears his eyes from the bed—are the tiny quills bending towards the light, hungrily?—and finds the bedstand.

Despair grips his throat when he sees it is a total loss. The husk of a human arm bridges the gap from the bed, and a thick mass of quivering thorns has engulfed everything down to the floor. Devin hops from foot to foot, eager to be quick as Amelia said—like freaking lightning—trying to glance everywhere at once.

There! A perfect circle of untouched hardwood near to the bed, and in the center an ivory locket. The spines around the periphery of the clearing appear burned.

Devin steps forward, extending his hand to pluck the locket from its resting place, and he sees the rifle. It rests against the wardrobe, one step in the opposite direction, well away from the nightmare bed. Jeb Sorenson may have placed it there, but Devin thinks it more likely Amelia used it before lying down with him for the last time. As he hesitates, he feels drawn toward each corner, as if gravity has four new sources here.

He lunges for the gun. A squeal of dismay peals from the recorder. His fingers close around the barrel, and out of the corner of his eye he sees movement. Not the shift or straining of individual bristles but an upheaval of old cloth and fermented flesh rising from the bed in a burst of spores and gas, sounding exultant.

“Run, dear!” Amelia cries, and Devin obeys. Two strides carry him out of the bedroom and off the balcony. Too late he realizes that he has misjudged the distance. Devin twists about as his feet pass the ladders’ top rungs, fingers clutching, but it his chin that catches the rough edge of the floor. His teeth crash together, pain explodes behind his eyes, and then, briefly, he is aware of falling.

When he wakes, before the pain hits, his first thought is that he missed Amelia’s explanation about what she did to her husband and why. A moment before the tiny speaker squawks next to his ear, he realizes he can still hear the hiss of the tape. Her words bring him fully awake.

“You’re going to need to flip the tape again, dear.”

***

For a moment he is a child again, awakened on Christmas Eve to find Mrs. Claus in his parents’ house instead of Santa, only to have her gaze into his eyes with deepest sorrow and say, “Shit went DEFCON-1 while you were sleeping, dear.”

I really hoped it wouldn’t come to this, that voice says.

Also: I had a lot riding on you, Dev.

Overhead, the lip of the balcony is uneven and active. Rough tendrils have curled halfway down the ladder, and the surfaces writhe. The lantern radiates a wavering halo along the balcony where he dropped it, but the light is drawn back, pulled by the gravity wells of the bedroom till the living room is again illuminated almost entirely by candlelight.

Devin thinks, At least it didn’t break and burn the whole place to the ground.

He understands that he has failed, and that’s what compels him to pick up the cracked cassette recorder instead of shambling into the storm, holding his head as if to keep his throbbing brain from splitting his skull. Amelia seemed a kindly woman, and by all accounts as much a victim as Devin. He had been her only chance, and he let her down.

He is not surprised when the tape plays a different message than before. Amelia would blame it on the geometry of the cabin, and considering the weird windows, the kitchen higher on entry and lower on departure, the square bedroom’s obtuse corners, Devin does, too. The tape flips to a third side.

What he hears when he presses Play for the last time is not Amelia’s pleasant voice but rather the static explosion of an overworked mic, garbling the resonant voice of an evangelist holding forth in full-throated ardor. Devin flinches and pain shoots from the toes of his left foot to somewhere in the region of his lungs. His heart shudders. Unwanted tears spring to his eyes, forcing him to lie still.

“Pythagoras!” shouts the speaker, and an invisible crowd roars the name back. Devin blinks. A measure of the response came from within the cabin. The sheath of AstroTurf along the side rails of the ladder and the balcony’s edge has gone rigid, with every quill thrust towards the recorder.

“Isoscles!” roars the voice, and when the crowd responds, Devin watches the quills, and the firmament in which they are embedded, quiver and reply in kind.

“Jesus!” Devin cries, all his delusions of living forever shattering in a static pop.

“We…” cries the speaker, pausing for effect, and a shape, vegetable and bloated, humps up over the top rung of the ladder, directly above Devin.

Devin flails about for something solid.

The speaker delivers: “We are the bastard children of complementary angles!”

The crowd on the venerable cassette tape roars, and the full length of growth along the ladder shakes and unspools, dropping in long, ropy vines to the floor.

Devin’s hand closes around something long, firm, and light enough to lift. He maneuvers it like a crutch, pushing himself to standing using his right leg. He glances down at what he’s found and finds himself staring down the barrel of Jeb Sorenson’s hunting rifle. He cries out, jerking away and nearly overbalancing.

“This world is recursive!” bellows the speaker. “But the Overmind breaks old patterns! We unite in communion and prepare for the day barriers are torn asunder!”

Devin considers pointing the rifle at the recorder and squeezing the trigger. He dismisses it as madness but immediately reconsiders when the shape above him begins swaying to the rhythm of the speaker’s voice. Devin attempts to bring up the rifle, intending to aim at the mass instead, but pain in his shoulder causes the joint to seize. He nearly topples.

“Any help?” he cries, glancing over his shoulder to the sanctuary candle to see the flame flare and die. Devin grimaces, unsurprised.

“The door is open! The Day of Inflection is come!”

Devin plants the butt of the rifle against the floor and hops twice towards the door. A thunderbolt blasts from the sole of his foot to the crevasses of his teeth, tilting his perception and making the sofas to bob as if his expedition with Amelia has led to the surface of a haunted lake.

Go, he thinks. Maybe some crazy fungus might creep out of this cabin in the middle of nowhere, but he can outpace mold, even with a broken leg.

He hops again, and the agony forces his eyes shut. The leg of his jeans is wet. He screams and jumps one more time. His full weight comes down on his good right leg—and he balances with the hunting rifle—but his left twists below the knee as he comes down. Tears pour down his cheeks in rivulets.

The floor shudders with the sound of a gourd exploding on pavement. Force like a great hand shoves Devin against the door, and he slumps, turning as he falls so his back pins it shut.

He opens his eyes. At the base of the ladder lies a cracked vegetative mass, lit from above by the struggling lantern. It is egg-like, and split open on top like an empty, rotten banana peel. At first Devin thinks the hand is a trick of light, but he blinks and there it is: five fingers splayed but connected by gauzy webbing, pulpy flesh an overripe green, ready to haul its way out of Sorenson’s egg.

I don’t want to know this, Devin thinks, but he understands that whatever emerges will walk like he does, affording him no chance of escape.

He glances towards the bedroom door and seizes with manic clarity on his one remaining chance for survival. It was the first message Amelia left him, after all, even if the subsequent part had seemed so much more important the first time he read it: LIGHT ME.

Devin raises the hunting rifle to his shoulder, grinding his molars in anticipation of the pain, blinking repeatedly as he lines up the sights.

The recorder bellows to life: “All minds bend to one will!”

It might be Jeb Sorenson or the madman who convinced Jeb that tearing holes in reality was a solid plan. Devin does not consider that there could be others who know about fungus worlds beyond geometry, just as he tries not to think that the sides of the old gun might be out of true. He squeezes the trigger.

The lantern hops, its shattering enveloped in the echo of the rifle’s report. At first, Devin thinks nothing has happened, but then he registers the flash and the fire dancing along the wall around the bedroom door, eating down the ladder as it gorges itself on the rich growth. The shape inside the egg begins wailing before the fire reaches its vessel, a high, feminine sound. A second pulpy hand emerges, then a third.

Devin can see no more. He throws open the door and joins the screaming with his own terror and agony until he drops onto a soft bed of fallen needles beneath a hemlock. He watches, imagining the fire burning toward Amelia’s locket, her essence, and just as importantly, Jeb’s. When Jeb Sorenson is gone, his convergence will fail.

The triangular window where the candle burned is dark. Devin stares at the glass for a long time as the rain saturates his clothes. Until flames rise behind it.

“Nothing is coming,” he says, shivering from more than the cold. “Stop putting this off before you bleed to death.”

It’s going to hurt getting the leg of his jeans up high enough, but his imagination begins turning over the word tourniquet in a way that spurs him to action. Teeth clenched, Devin grasps the cuffs of his jeans and pulls.

The smell of old bread alerts him, even before he sees the dark, thorny bristles overtaking his flesh. Maybe it happened while he was unconscious on the floor. Maybe when the gas and spores filled the bedroom. Maybe it was the moment he crossed the threshold of the old cabin with its weird angles and the beckoning, now extinguished candle.