Cabin #8

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

Grace was supposed to be babysitting that night, but she had snuck out as soon as she'd put the kids to sleep. There was a party at the old campgrounds, and Randall was going to be there. And if he was going, then she sure as hell was too.

The campgrounds weren't far from the estate where she'd been babysitting, and she knew a path through the woods. Of course, she'd heard the tales of the cabin that was situated on a hill along the path, but those were just kid stories. Ghost tales, told around a campfire to a bunch of pre-teen boy scouts who probably still thought that kissing a girl meant getting her pregnant. Hard pass.

She stopped dead in her tracks. The light from the candle cut through the night's gloom. The sickly light illuminated the breath billowing in front of her face. The creepy effect caused the plumes of air to resemble ghostly faces, as though each breath was a damned soul escaping into the world.

Grace had never seen any lights in the one-room, one-story log home. It was abandoned decades before she was even born, but she knew kids often went inside, dared by their asshole friends to go into Haddonfield's famous haunted cabin. That was probably what was going on up there right now. Either that, or some freaky couple was currently in the process of getting freaky.

A twig snapped behind her, as loud as a bone breaking. Snap! She spun around, arms in front of her, a soft yelp escaping her bubblegum-pink lips. There were only trees, and beyond them, darkness. She stood there in the middle of the woods, not daring even to breathe, listening for anything out of the ordinary. All she heard was the chirping songs of the cicadas, and the breeze bristling through the susuring leaves.

She turned back towards the cabin. It sat at the top of the hill, solitary, stoic. The path to the campgrounds, and Randall, twisted off to her left. She had taken that path dozens of times. She knew it would skirt around the base of that massive hill upon which rested Cabin #8. Once on the other side, the path would stretch on for another mile before it emptied out into the campgrounds, where the local high school seniors held their annual summer bash. That was where she was supposed to be going.

The cabin sat silent. The woods waited. The candle burned.

Grace stepped forward off the path and into the thick brush at the base of the hill. She was certain there had once been a path up to the cabin, but it had surrendered to the indefatigable will of the forest long ago. Now there were only thick blackberry bushes and coiling vines.

She struggled up the hill through the grasping underbrush. Sharp branches and briars dragged long shallow cuts in her legs and arms, and each steep step made her muscles scream. She didn't stop moving. There was something about that light that was peculiar. It was...somehow different than normal candlelight. It made her extremely curious. More curious, in fact, than she thought she'd ever been about anything, which was strange in and of itself. All she knew for sure was that she absolutely had to know what was so damn strange about this candle. And who had lit it.

At the crest of the hill, the candle's light ripped through the darkness like a frozen explosion, illuminating the entire perimeter around the rotting old cabin. The single tiny flame burned with a fiery brightness that rivaled the sun. Unlike the sun, however, this light held no warmth. The orb of yellow emanating from the candle felt more like the yellow of sick than of actual fire. It was a cold light that beckoned with orange fingers long since rotted through to the bone.

Grace stood only fifteen feet back from the cabin's wooden door. She was awash in the light from the candle, close enough to see the wax dripping from its burning wick down into the brass holder beneath it. The yellow light had grown colder and colder; she was freezing. Shivers ran up her spine and into her chattering teeth.

The candlelight also felt heavy. Its glow had a weight to it, as though the light was pressing in against her body from all sides at the same time. She could feel that photic pressure slowly squeezing the air from her lungs, as she might squeeze a tube of toothpaste for the kids to brush their teeth with. Brian always wanted mint, because that was the flavor his daddy used, but not little Samantha. She held firmly to her belief that "bubblegoop-flavored" toothpaste tasted even better than actual bubblegum (a conviction which instigated many pre-bedtime arguments). Grace had caught the young lady feasting on her bubblegoop toothpaste on more than one occasion. For a brief moment Grace wondered what flavor goop would come out of her once the candle-thing was done squeezing her with its mystic light, and a crazed smile played over her lips despite the situation.

The brief memory was enough to break Grace from her reverie. She wasn't going to die here, strangled to death by a candle. Why the hell was she even up here? Randall was down on the other side of this hill somewhere, just waiting for her. Well, not exactly waiting for her, but she was sure he'd come around. As long as she was there to keep him away from Jennifer Markovich, at least. She needed to hurry, though. Jennifer Markovich works fast.

The strange candle's spell broken, Grace turned and started back the way she had come. She had barely gotten more than a few feet when a loud wooden crrrreak split through the dead night air. She whipped her head around, eyes wide, staring through the cabin's window, past the candle and its frigid light. A shadow disappeared around the corner. A shadow that had long, straggly white hair.

"Hel..." Grace tried to speak, but there was no air in her lungs. She hadn't been breathing at all.

She sucked in a huge gulp of life-giving oxygen, and tried again.

"Hello? Is someone there?"

There was no answer from either the unkempt shadow or the candle.

"You guys had better stop screwing around or I'm gonna call the cops!"

Nothing.

Anger exploded through Grace's veins like lava, the heat from her rage staving off the candle's cold light. Somebody was messing with her, and she did not like being made a fool of.

"Alright assholes, if you're not gonna come out, then I'll just have to come to you!"

She stormed across the grass, impervious to the candle's strange pressure. She cleared the few feet to the cabin's front door in seconds, but she hesitated before entering. The front door consisted solely of a few rotting planks lashed together with bailing wire. Splinters of wood jutted out from the door frame like tiny spears held by an army of territorial ants who dared anyone to come closer. Above the door, there was a number made out of iron nailed in place.

#8.

A tremulous shiver racked Grace's spine. That one number held so much weight in this town. So many stories existed about this cabin, and none of them good. She had grown up with those stories her entire life. Now, standing at the entrance to the house of horrors itself, she wondered if any of it had been true. That minuscule grain of doubt was enough to make her second-guess going inside, but she knew that if she hesitated for too long, she would talk herself out of it.

Grace took a deep breath, screwed her eyes tightly shut, and shoved herself through the front door.

The inside of the cabin was every bit as dilapidated as the outside had been. Beaten, weather-stained, covered in dust and cobwebs and rot, the cabin's interior looked more like an abandoned mine shaft than a person's home. It was a one-room cabin, with different portions of the space apparently divided and designated as different areas.

There was a living room, which consisted of a couch, a few cushioned chairs, and a coffee table strewn with yellowed books and magazines. There was a boarded-up fireplace set into the left wall, which the couch was positioned to face directly.

There was also a kitchen with a gas stove in the corner, a couple more rickety wooden chairs, and a dining table with a broken leg that had evidently crashed to the floor decades ago. The only other piece of furniture in the small room was a twin-size bed against the right wall.

Grace walked slowly through the room. Dampness clung to the log walls like a cancer; the air was stuffy and stale. She eyed every shadow with suspicion. Although the candle provided sufficient light for a traveling circus outside, in here it barely seemed to penetrate the gloom. What little light was cast in from the candle's perch only served to cast longer and more sinister shadows through the room. Grace thought it might be better that there was no light at all rather than this.

In the kitchen, she opened up all the cupboards, searching for any clues that somebody had been there recently. All she found was a few cans of beans and a dead rat. It didn't look like anything living had been in this cabin in years.

A deafening thud split the quiet stillness in two like a cleaver might a man's head. The shrill soprano tinkling of glass shattering immediately followed the intrusive boom. Grace screamed, adding her own soprano to the two-second symphony.

The noise had come from behind her. She spun around so fast that her knee cracked into the slanted corner of the table. Grace cried out again, and stumbled forward, her left leg buckling underneath her. She just managed to catch the edge of the gas stove and stop herself from falling right on top of the table's edge.

Pain seared through Grace's leg, but she welcomed the agony. It cleared her mind and stoked the fire of her adrenaline, making her focus on locating the source of the noise. She stared across the cabin in the direction the crash had come from, but what she saw didn't make sense.

To the right of the fireplace, facing the back wall of the cabin, there was a staircase.

Her mind told her the sound had come from upstairs, but that didn't make any sense. There hadn't been a staircase there earlier, she was sure of it. This cabin didn't even have a second floor. How could there be a staircase?

Grace blinked tears of confusion and pain from her eyes. Her attempt to clear her vision had no effect on the staircases' existence. She shut her eyes, rubbed them aggressively with the flats of her hands, and looked again. It was still there.

She took a step towards it, and nearly collapsed. Her knee was hurt more badly than she thought. She gritted her teeth and pressed forward. Walking hurt like hell, but it was manageable. She hadn't broken anything.

Grace reached the foot of the stairs. They were definitely real; the bottom step felt thick and solid against her foot. She peered around the corner of the wall and tried to see what was up there, but it was too dark. The space above the stairs was like a wall of still ink. It was a darkness that was more permanent and unyielding than any that she had ever seen before.

Once again, she considered abandoning this pointless quest and leaving immediately, but when she turned to longingly regard the front door, her breath caught in her throat. The candle was no longer in the windowsill. It was now perched on one of the living room chairs. And it was directly between her and the door.

Panic gripped her heart with fingers of red-hot steel. That feeling of pressure was back, adding the weight of an elephant onto her chest. The candle's cold glow reached out to her like a serial killer reaching for his next victim. She knew she was going to die then. The only question was whether she'd be killed by this cabin, or by her heart just simply giving up.

Grace backed slowly away, eyes locked onto the candle. She wasn't sure what she would even do if it were to move at all, and she thought that if by some insane twist the candle leapt at her, she had no way of defending herself. Her heels thudded dully on the stair behind her. Without looking at it, she stepped up and onto the staircase. Her fingers groped blindly for a wall or railing to guide her backwards ascent, but there didn't seem to be anything within arms reach. Still, she moved upwards, favoring her left leg, until she was around the corner and the candle was out of sight.

She was in total and complete blackness. She could see nothing around her, and nothing above her. The only thing she could still see were the final steps at the bottom of the stairs. Flickering red light gently caressed the rotted bottom step. The candle was still there, but at least it had not followed her.

Grace navigated backwards up the stairs, her eyes fixed on the bottom step. She didn't want to look away from the one thing she could see. If she did, she feared she might never exit this stairwell again. She'd be trapped for eternity, doomed to walk blindly up a staircase that she couldn't see, headed for a destination she would never reach. It would be like using the stairmaster at the gym, except it would never end. She shuddered at the thought of an eternal workout. That would certainly be the cruelest of fates.

Finally, Grace's foot did not find a stair behind her, and the totality of the darkness lessened. She had reached the top of the stairs.

Relief flooded through her like an ocean wave cooling the sand beneath her feet. Deep down, she wasn't sure she would ever make it off the stairs. The thought of being trapped in some preternatural stair dimension was ridiculous, but of course so were stairs that materialized as if from nowhere and candles that moved by themselves.

What little comfort she gained by reaching the top of the stairs was instantly washed away by the smell. This new room had a pungent odor that assaulted her nostrils and stung her eyes. It reminded her of when the family dog died behind their shed, and stayed there for a week before she found it. Underneath the stench of death, there was another smell she couldn't quite place. It was old, like worn-out leather coupled with musty book pages. It was...ancient.

A loud wooden shrieking went off like a gunshot. It was the same creaking noise she'd heard earlier, when she had seen the shadow in the cabin. Grace screamed and threw herself against the nearest wall. The room was small, with only a few pieces of furniture. Bitter moonlight shone reluctantly through the grimy windows, illuminating only parts of the tiny room. The corner furthest from the window was shrouded almost entirely in darkness. Steeped in that darkness was a rocking chair. It let out another low crrreak as it swayed gently back and forth. There was something in the chair. Someone. Their legs were draped in black cloth. One gray, diseased hand gripped the crumbling armrest.

"Grace."

The name came out of her mouth like sand from an hourglass. It was quiet, almost whispered. The voice's texture was like sandpaper grating against her eardrums. All the saliva in her mouth and throat evaporated instantly, as if the room itself was scorching instead of freezing cold.

"When the candle comes, it makes its choice. Who it chooses, it does not voice. But the ones it calls, cannot elude. When the candle comes, it brings my food."

As the horrid stanza ended, the chair abruptly stopped rocking. Silence fell with a grim finality, as though in the timespan of a second, all the sound was sucked from the room. This was a quiet that was as complete and total as the darkness in the stairwell. Grace could swear she felt her heart stop beating in her chest, its frantic drumming an intrusive affront to the resounding silence.

The shadows in the corner shifted. The creature leaned forward with maddening slowness. The ashen moonlight streamed through the window, slowly revealing the monster's visage. Straggly white hair, like strands of rope made from bone. Gray, rotting skin that hung from her exposed cheekbones in patches. Pupils that were only tiny pinpricks of white. The whites of its eyes were black, dried up, and shriveled, like old raisins. Its teeth were the same sickly yellow color that emanated from the candle. They jutted out from dessicated gums and a lipless mouth, like the jagged rocks of a cliff reaching menacingly for any who might slip and fall.

The witch smiled at Grace. The action split the skin below her missing nose, sending tiny rivers of ooze trickling down into her mouth.

"I just wish the candle would bring me somebody plumper for once."

Laughter erupted from the witch. It was the most awful sound Grace had ever heard. Underneath the high-pitched cackling, she could hear that same wooden creaking, as though that sound had never been floorboards or a rocking chair, but rather the witch's vocal cords flexing for the first time in decades.

Terror froze every ounce of blood in Grace's body. The ice in her veins chilled her muscles, locked up her throat, cut off the oxygen to her brain. She wanted to run, but where would she go? She was certain if she entered that staircase again, she would never come out.

As if on cue, the light in the room changed. The silvery slivers from the moon became intermingled with a dirty yellow glow. The moonbeams watered down the sudden golden light, turning it into a pale, deathly shade that slowly filled the room. With this new light came a fresh wave of frigid air, colder than ever before. The temperature must have dropped at least fifteen degrees in seconds.

Grace turned her head. The candle sat at the top of the stairs. Watching her. Relishing her fear. She got the sudden sense that the candle fed on her fear the way its master would feed on her flesh. Bile rose in her throat and threatened to spill out of her and onto the candle, though she held no illusions that the ghastly flame would be so easily squelched.

The candle's arrival pulled Grace's attention away from the witch. Behind the candle, on the rightmost wall, she caught sight of the window.

Hope swelled within her. It mixed with her fear, creating a cocktail of primal emotion that woke her up as effectively as a shot of adrenaline. She exploded across the room, running for the window with a speed she'd never exhibited during her one semester on the track team. She made it to the window in seconds. She grabbed blindly for the latch, missed it, tried again, caught it this time.

The witch's laughter grew even louder.

Grace's fingernails scrabbled at the bottom of the window. She didn't dare look over her shoulder. It didn't sound like the witch had left her chair; she was still cackling her ass off. Grace hoped she'd choke on her own laughter and die.

She was finally able to wedge her fingers under the window. She heaved with all her strength, but it was old and didn't want to be moved from its slumber. She pulled again, three times, then four. On the fifth try, the window frame cracked. The wood split, but the window moved upwards along its track. Just a few inches. Just enough.

She slipped through the window as quickly as she could. Splinters lodged in her skin, as though the cabin itself was trying to eat her. She ignored the pain and shoved herself out of the impossible second floor.

There was no roof underneath the window. Grace flew out into open air, grabbed frantically for anything to hold onto, found nothing, and fell to the ground.

White-hot lightning shot through her knee like lightning. She screamed in agony. This time, she might've broken something. But at least she had made it out.

Grace scrambled onto her knees, determined to get as far away from this nightmare as possible. She managed to get her feet underneath her, closed her eyes, and stood up. The pain was renewed tenfold. Her knee was screaming.

When she opened her eyes, any hope of escaping this nightmare was sucked out of her. The world around her had completely changed. She was no longer at the top of a hill. The ground around her was as flat as if it was merely a table that had been handcrafted by a master carpenter. There were no trees. There were no buildings. Only dead grass and dirt for what looked like miles. And every inch was covered by candles.

There were thousands of them. They varied in size, shape, and color, but they all gave off that same cold, oppressive light. The collective light of the candles bounced off the face of the moon in the night sky. It was as bright as daylight. And as cold as a frozen tundra.

Grace looked back at Cabin #8. It stood against the backdrop of maddening candlelight like an ancient monument that was impervious to the fires raging around it. The witch was perched in the window of the newly furnished second floor. Her laughter was louder than ever, but Grace didn't hear it. Hatred seared through her like a wildfire. It was a deep, savage hate that reached into some part of her nature that evolution thought it had disposed of. She stared at the witch's disgusting face and wished more than anything that she could run back up there and strangle the life out of that wretched bitch, but she knew she couldn't. The candles stood between her and the front door. She could already feel their weight pressing down on her, suffocating her. Her life was being snuffed out as though she was the candle.

Grace wished more than anything that she hadn't tried to go to that stupid party. Her sudden hatred for the witch was far outweighed by her self-loathing. She had made an irresponsible decision leaving the children, and this is where it had gotten her. Her parents were fond of saying that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. They were wrong. The road to hell was not a paved road. It was a dirt path that led to the top of a hill, where a candle guided sinners and saints alike into oblivion.

She regarded the sea of candles once more, no longer able to stomach the sight of the witch and her smug laughter. She sank to her knees as the candles sat still and silent, watching her wither. Now, as she stood on death's door, she could see something else in the flames. They were faces, distorted by shifting flame and by pain. Each face a different shape, each face a different color; each face a perfect match to the candle beneath it. As her vision slowly blurred at the edges, and the last breath of air was squeezed from her lungs, she wondered if anyone had ever felt such despair. Probably not, she decided. Most people had never been defeated by a candle.

She hoped Jennifer Markovich would treat Randall well.