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A Weekend Like None Other

Despite some disagreements on entertainment, this newlywed couple is about to agree on the most important thing.

By C.J TrumanPublished about a year ago 14 min read
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Dunlap Hollow A-Frame

We drove up the snowy, winding road toward a cozy A-frame cabin. High-reaching, frosted evergreens glittered by at a leisurely pace in the late morning sunlight, and snow drifted down in flakes the size of cotton balls. I stifled a yawn and polished off the last of my energy drink as my husband – how fun it was to finally say husband! – parked our beat-up grey station wagon in front of our temporary home for the next three days.

“Well?” he asked, glancing over at me with an eye-crinkling smile and holding up the cabin's brass key. “Time for a honeymoon like no other, eh?”

“Race you to the door?” I asked, snatching the key from his hand and jumping out of the car without waiting for his response. I leapt up the stairs two at a time, almost drifting on the porch around the corner of the railing to reach the door –

Before an arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me back just before I could touch the brass doorknob.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” my husband said, huffing a bit through the exertion and laughter. “But I do believe I’m supposed to be carrying you over every threshold from now until death do we part.”

I couldn’t help the giggle that bubbled up – it was all too exciting, too fresh, too fun. I let him carry me into the cabin, both of us marvelling at the renovated rustic-chic interior. The entire front portion let in streams of daylight through large triangular panels, mostly protected from the elements by overhanging metal shingles from the roof. Inside, the renovators had clearly preserved most of the original bare wood – the walls, floor, bookcases, and furniture all matched in that smooth, light pine with darker spots and striations.

My husband put me gently down on my feet in the centre of the open space to geek out over the beautifully constructed central fireplace made of grey stone. It had a hollow portion so you could be in the sitting area by the front door, or the dining area near the back, and still see the fire.

I inhaled deeply with a smile. “Mm, pine and campfire. I can already tell it’s going to be hard to get back to the office on Tuesday.”

“I’ll grab our bags and chop some wood!” my husband suggested with a huge grin despite how exhausted he must have been after driving almost the whole night. He sprinted outside while I checked out the bedroom behind the dining area; a simple yet beautiful headboard behind the bed drew my eye immediately. Again, the room was furnished with the same bare pine wood, but the headboard was made of welded gray metal in a pattern of leaves and flowers. It wasn’t snug against the triangular-panelled glass wall, but the backside of the headboard had padding just in case.

A doorway inside the bedroom revealed the most beautiful bathroom I’d ever seen. With the whole room tiled in small gray stone, a single window on the sloping wall to my left let in enough light for now, but I was excited to see just how dark and cozy that massive stone bathtub would be once night came and I could turn on the brass sconces along the walls. There was even a separate switch for more modern-looking ceiling lights in case you actually needed proper light in here.

“Hey, honey!” my husband called eagerly from the foyer. “Wanna come watch me chop some wood?”

I laughed and left the bathroom. “That’s the thing you’ve been looking forward to the most, isn’t it?”

He leaned against the doorway, carefully setting his backpack and my suitcase down away from the wet boot mat, then checked me out in that over-the-top way of his that always managed to make me blush. “Well, there’s one thing above chopping wood that I’m gonna enjoy the most this weekend.”

Still in my puffy black coat and sweatpants, my hair messy from sleeping in a car and my eyes still smudged with a little bit of makeup from our wedding the day before, and even then, I felt like the most beautiful person to him. As well, he, in his red and black lumberjack coat and his silly hat with the earflaps, was the most beautiful person in my world. This was going to be the best weekend ever – our first real vacation together, where we didn’t have to think about any responsibility outside of keeping ourselves warm and fed, and we could spend three solid days sharing in each other’s company without any interruptions.

It sounded like Heaven to me.

Once night settled on our cozy little cabin, my husband and I curled up together on one of the plush couches in front of our blazing fire, each of us having cleaned up both ourselves and the dinner dishes somewhere in between chopping wood and setting the fire, unpacking into the bedroom wardrobe, and… other things. We sipped a fine red wine gifted to us by my parents the day before, planning out our next few days of adventures – hiking trails, ice fishing, pond skating, and more.

After the first glass of wine, I lost track of his words, entranced in his sparkling, excited eyes and the way his lips curled up at the edges when he spoke. With the firelight reflecting off his face and wineglass as he gestured wildly and tried not to spill the dregs, I found myself slipping into slumber as all the hustle and bustle of the past two weeks finally caught up to me.

“Whoa, there,” he chuckled, reaching out to steady me. “Is it past bedtime already?”

I stifled a yawn and looked at my watch. “Geez, it’s only nine-thirty. Marriage really does knock the party animal out of a person, eh?”

“Maybe that’s just all the hectic wedding prep and planning. Are we off to bed, then? Our first night in a real bed as a married couple!” He took my empty wineglass and set it down next to his, standing and proffering his hand – ever the gentleman.

I accepted his help to get to my feet and let him lead me into the bedroom, where I closed the door behind us as he pulled the window shutters down to block out the faint moonlight.

“You don’t think that’s really necessary, do you?” I asked. “According to the map, our closest neighbours are over fifteen kilometres away.”

“Actually, our closest neighbour is an owl that lives in that tree right there.” He pointed to the faint dark outline of one of the trees that surrounded our cabin. “And I’m pretty sure owls can see in the dark, and I do not want an owl to be witness to anything that goes on in this bedroom.”

“You mean like this?” I asked, pulling my shirt off.

He pressed his lips together and nodded. “Exactly like that.”

And I was right. It was like Heaven. Especially when morning came and I woke to the smell of bacon and coffee. Especially when my husband and I bundled up for a hike around the densely wooded property in calf-deep snow; we paused around noon to lay out our waterproof blanket and sip hot chocolate from a thermos, enjoying the hazy view down onto the frozen lake from up on the bluffs. And especially when we returned to the cabin and took a nice, hot bath together as the sun finally poked out from the clouds to dress the cabin in magical hues of pink and orange.

After dinner, when true night settled, my husband and I went out onto the deck to chop some more wood, taking turns with the axe. He took an armful of kindling inside to our already-roaring fire while I stayed out, gazing up at the splash of stars directly above our cabin. The door opened behind me, his footsteps coming up until I could feel his warm breath on my ear, arms wrapping around my shoulders.

“Beautiful sky, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You certainly don’t get a view like this in the city,” I said, leaning into his embrace and listening to his heartbeat. His heart skipped and hastened, grip tightening as he sucked in a sharp breath and asked the question you never want to hear in the woods at night so far away from civilization.

“Do you hear that?”

I froze and tried to listen past his racing heartbeat next to my ear. Out in the surrounding woods, an owl called and a soft breeze shifted frost-covered tree branches with little creaking sounds. “Aside from nature?” I asked. “No, nothing.”

“I thought I heard…” he trailed off, pulling me behind him to stand in front of the railing and look out into the trees.

I kept my ears sharp until he let out a breath and relaxed, shaking his head. “What did you hear?” I asked.

“How far off did you say our neighbours were?”

“What? Oh, the map showed that the nearest cabin is, like, fifteen kilometres away.”

“Okay,” he said with a nod. “Sorry. I thought I heard footsteps close by. Must have been that owl, or something.”

A thought struck me, and I whipped my head around to gaze out into the semi-darkness of thick tree cover, aided only by stars and reflective snow. “If there’s someone really out there, maybe they need help.”

He cupped my cold face with a warm hand, turning my head to look me right in the eye. “Darling. I don’t think there’s anyone out there. I’m sure I just misheard an animal of some kind. It’s really quiet up here – it’s easy to hear things wrong, like how we see lights and fireworks in pitch black, right?”

It certainly made sense.

“Besides,” he continued with a chuckle, “I’ve seen enough horror movies to know how this ends. Hearing strange noises in the woods at night in the middle of nowhere is never a good thing. Let’s get the rest of the wood and enjoy our fire, okay?”

I wrinkled my nose at his horror movie comment. “I don’t know why you enjoy those kinds of films. What’s the point of scaring yourself silly with actors and fake blood on a T.V. screen?”

“The point is so that you know what not to do in case you ever meet a serial killer in real life. Come on, I’m freezing out here.”

We grabbed the rest of the wood and went inside, trying to keep our minds off the possibility of a person walking around our cabin in the dead of night. I made sure all the blinds were shut before we went to bed, plunging our cozy abode into pure darkness lit by only the old-fashioned brass lamps and the central fireplace embers. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, but something had my skin prickling, and I didn’t want the cabin to be pitch black for the night.

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I awoke from a dreamless, deep sleep. At first, I couldn’t pinpoint what had woken me – my husband was on my right, softly snoring into his pillow as usual, and the two lamps in our room were still lit, providing a gentle orange light bright enough to see detail. I spotted multiple demonic faces in the wood patterns around the room, and shivered at my tired mind’s optical tricks.

Then, I heard what must have broken into my slumber. The crunching of snow, right outside, right behind the bed. My chest tightened, and I rolled over to peer around the headboard, trying to see anything through the thick shade over the window. I had to assume there was cloud cover, since I couldn’t make out any silhouettes on the fabric. The sound faded away as whatever it was carried on its path, and I let out a breath, assessing the sound.

I couldn’t be sure how large of an animal, though large enough to sink through the calf-deep snow. Only one set of footsteps. Quick pace. Definitely not the owl, probably not a rodent or raccoon. I tried to convince myself it was perhaps a moose.

Not five breaths later, it came back. I listened intently as it came closer, pressing a hand over my mouth at the realization that I could only hear two feet, not four. I took a few slow breaths, trying to calm myself. I could have been hearing wrong, as my husband had pointed out how even silence can trick your ears; it could easily have been a moose, or potentially a bear going for a mid-hibernation wander.

The crunching stopped directly behind our bed. I laid still as stone, though my heart pounded a staccato rhythm and my skin prickled and flushed with adrenaline. I clamped down on my muscles to keep from waking my husband – he always woke with a start, and I couldn’t risk it. Mind racing, eyes wide open to the vaulted ceiling above and the demons hidden in the woodgrain, I waited what felt like hours before whatever had been waiting at our window finally crunched away, fading into the night.

My husband, bless him, slept soundly through the whole thing. I, unfortunately, didn’t catch a wink, staring up at the ceiling until dawn’s light brightened the room many hours later. I spent the whole time successfully gaslighting myself into believing I hadn’t really heard anything in order to bring my heart rate down.

At breakfast, while we sat around the small table with mugs of steaming coffee and plates of waffles, I told my husband what I thought I’d heard.

“And then I stayed awake the whole night,” I said with a sheepish laugh. “Silly, isn’t it?”

My husband put his knife and fork down to look at me intently over laced fingers. “Not silly at all. If you heard footsteps that close to our window, that can’t have been anyone with benign interests. I’m going to look around back, see if I can determine animal or human prints, okay?”

“I’m going with you,” I said, standing and putting my cutlery down next to my half-eaten plate. “No horror-movie foolishness, right? Don’t split up, don’t run upstairs if the killer’s in the house, and don’t go investigate weird things in the night.”

Despite the situation, he smiled as we headed to the door to put on our boots and jackets. “See? Handy life guides. And don’t forget about getting into a car and running over the bastard before you drive away to call for help.”

“That only works if you’re the one with the keys.”

“You’re right.” He dug around in his pockets, then handed me the car keys. “Hold onto these for me.”

I put my hands on my hips instead and cocked my head at him. “You don’t honestly believe there’s something out there that we would have to run away from, do you?”

“No.” He shrugged. “But it would make me feel better to know you have an easy escape if there turns out to be something we have to run away from.”

I took the keys to make him happy, and we went outside. The snow around our cabin had definitely been disturbed, and upon closer inspection of the trodden ground behind our bedroom, my heart went cold.

“That’s a boot print for sure,” my husband said as casually as mentioning the weather, kneeling to measure with his forearm. “Gotta be a size twelve at least.”

“God!” I exclaimed with a grimace. “What was he doing, just standing here for so long? Nobody contacted us about, like, a repair guy or something coming up here, right?”

He shook his head, standing and staring at the prints with his hands on his hips. “It was only supposed to be you and me this weekend. I don’t like this one bit. Anybody who creeps in front of a window in the middle of the freezing night for a couple of hours isn’t someone we want to get involved with.”

“And if it was someone who was lost or needed help, they would have knocked or made themselves known somehow,” I added, making up my mind. “I want to go home. I want to pack up and go home right now.”

“I agree. Next vacation, we’ll do a resort.”

So we spent the next hour packing and loading the station wagon after my husband confirmed there weren’t any prints around our car, neither of us leaving sight of the other. We said goodbye to the beautiful cabin well before noon and drove off down the snowy, winding road under a dark overcast sky. Once my phone finally had signal, I called the company we'd rented the cabin from to ask whether there was anyone scheduled to be out there; when they said no, I explained the situation and asked for a refund for the last day since we didn’t feel safe enough to stay our allotted time.

And we went home, to live happily ever after with a new respect for how horror movies do, indeed, teach you exactly what not to do.

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About the Creator

C.J Truman

Action-adventure, mystery, comedy - these are my favourite genres to read and write. If you're looking for witty banter, heart-pounding action scenes, and plot twists that make you go "Damn!" then you're in the right place.

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