Babes in the Woods

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Celie had been coming back for years, in the dark of the moon. Never when the full moon made it as easy to find her way through the masses of fir and pine as in daylight. Never when the waning moon cast shadows clawing through the underbrush. Never when the waxing moon sparkled off the dew gathered upon drifts of fallen leaves.

She had only ever come up the mountain in the dark of the moon.

The first time she’d seen the candle flame flickering through the absolute darkness had been four years and seven months earlier. They’d been eleven years old then, not quite twelve. Still babes in the woods, as the town boys taunted. Celie and her twin sister Aurrie lived on the mountain with their parents then, back-to-nature types who homeschooled their girls. Life was better away from the towns and cities, they said, free and wild. Growing up on the mountain had been a time of blissful ignorance for the girls. They relied on nothing more than their own hands and curiousity and imaginations, and a deep well of willpower.

The willpower to survive by their strength and wits. That turned out not to be enough.

The town boys didn’t tease Celie anymore, not since the family moved off the mountain. Not since they moved into Uncle Mo’s basement apartment and Dad started work at the lumber yard. Teasing had lost its savor.

The woods around Celie were silent except for the chirping of crickets, the hooooo of a hunting owl, the rustle of woodrats in the underbrush. Her footsteps were equally silent as she crept from among the trees, closer to the rickety porch surrounding the cabin on three sides. It was too dark to see the worn dirt path that wound around broad tree trunks from the porch to the lake, not with her eyes. But Celie’s feet knew the way, knew every stone jutting from the beaten-down soil, every dip where water pooled in the rainy season.

Celie’s feet had the memory of four years and seven months to guide them through the absolute darkness.

She crept onto the splintery boards of the warped porch, setting a half-full red plastic gas can on the porch and shaking the weight of carrying it up the mountain from her shoulder. She felt the old wood shift slightly beneath her boots. Same as always. Celie had trod this route fifty-four times before. This was the fifty-fifth.

Fifty-five’s the charm, she thought, gripping the hilt of her sheathed Mossy Oak Survival. Her Dad’s skinning knife. She’d wrapped the handle in rawhide, weaving the strips into an intricate braid around the bone hilt to give her extra leverage. She couldn’t afford to have the knife slip from her grasp.

Not this time.

Reaching the Dutch door, top half already open into the candlelit single room, Celie silently reached inside to open the latch holding the bottom half of the door shut, then pushed it inward with a faint creak. And hesitated—

Even though it was the dark of the moon, the only light sparking out from the single candle resting on the windowsill, in her mind’s eye Celie saw the abandoned cabin as it was when she played there with Aurrie, five years ago, six, eight years ago. Summer sunlight filtering through the trees outside, the gentle lapping of the pond at the hull of an old rowboat, birds flitting through the upper canopy, squirrels chittering in the still afternoons. In the cabin, Celie and Aurrie played at being princesses in towers, or clever girls fighting off zombies.

Those were the peaceful days when the werewolves and vampires and alien invaders were left behind at dinnertime, waiting for the twins to return to their play the next day, and the next, and the next.

Celie’s shoulders straightened and she pulled the hunting knife from her belt. Candlelight reflected from the 10-inch blade. The polished steel was mirror-bright, doubling the light in the room…

And reflecting off the murky pool lurking beneath the splintered floorboards in the center of the cabin.

Celestine and Aurora McCaffrey—Celie and Aurrie—had begun dreaming of the pool when they were just five years old. Identical twins, they spoke a language of their own, which no one else could decipher. They always knew where the other was, what they were feeling, what their twin wanted. So, when they began having the same dreams—nightmares—waking screaming in unison, their parents put it down to their twinness.

Celie and Aurrie had known better. And then one day when the pool had appeared in the center of their playhouse—

Creeping closer to the edge of the murky water filling the center of the cabin, holding the knife in front of her, Celie peered into the candlelit depths. Fifty-five darks of the moon. Fifty-five times creeping back up the mountain to this tainted place. Fifty-five candlelit nights waiting…

But who lit the candle? Was it the cabin itself? Or some spirit bound there? Celie didn’t know. And at this point she didn’t care. There was only one monster she wanted. Tonight. This would be the night. It had to be.Her eyes flicked aside to the candle on the windowsill. A birthday candle.

Celestine and Aurora’s sweet sixteen.

The murky-dark pool began to ripple from within. Beneath the water a pale face wavered, a hand reaching, a glimpse of a torn T-shirt. Pink. Aurrie’s favorite shirt. The face came closer to the surface, dark hair flowing through the muddied water, duckweed and pond scum coloring the strands. Celie’s heart wrenched, her jaw tightening. Twice before—

Twice before she’d come this close, and nearly fell, a victim of her connection. Her grip on the handle of her hunting knife tightened. Beneath the candlelit water an arm, a tentacle, a water snake…

Something crossed over the pale face, a reflection of Celie’s own. And still she waited. Waited. Wait—

The slime-coated tentacle slashed the surface, reaching for Celie, wrapping around her ankle where she crouched. Acid-suckers burned holes in her jeans as the grip tightened, pulling her closer, and she stabbed. Her knife plunged through the tentacle and into her own calf, but Celie didn’t feel any pain. Her mind was filled with the fury of her need. She pulled the knife out and stabbed again, and again, and again, reaching into the frothing water with her free hand to feel around frantically. Tentacles and slime and water and hair and—finally!—the fabric of her twin’s T-shirt.

Celie dug the fingers of her right hand into the collar of Aurrie’s shirt, fingernails splintering unnoticed. She tugged upwards, pulling with all her strength as she stabbed stabbed stabbed—

And sobbed, as Aurrie’s head broke the surface and Celie yanked her from the monster’s pool onto the splintered floor of the abandoned cabin.

***

It had rained heavily over the previous week, so Celie had little worry about the blazing cabin behind them as they stumbled down the mountain, Aurrie’s sodden body wrapped in her sister’s arms against the night’s chill, Celie limping from the wound in her calf. The foliage was too damp to catch fire. Even so, when they reached the fire road where she’d left their dad’s old pickup, she called 911 from her cell and reported a fire on the mountain. For a moment she considered warning the fire crew about the pool, and the pond.

But they were grown men and women, the mountain firefighters.

Not eleven-year-old girls.

They were used to fighting monsters. Celie wrapped her twin in a rough wool blanket and started the truck, driving down the fire road towards town and home.

For once, the monster had been vanquished.

And once was all that mattered.

***

"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams."

~ Werner Herzog

***

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Author's Note: I've never written a horror story before, so this was a real challenge. I finally drew off an image from a dream I had, of a monster that emerged from a pool inside a room in a hotel situated beside a lake. That monster-in-a-pool is something I've dreamed again and again. I'm sure there is some deep psychlogical meaning to it, but I never explored it. Maybe someday...