Jack's Cabin

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

It flickered and sent viscous, black shadows scattering across the walls like splashes of paint against the wood. In the tenebrous room I cursed the old handyman who had assured me that I could ‘be up there until Christmas and not have to worry about the power.’ Of course, people in such positions always use those kinds of words, all assuaging and reassuring and disappearing at the first sign of a problem. Even as he spoke, I shuddered silently.

The cabin was completely changed from how I remembered.

It was run down beyond belief. Wind had beaten at the windows; rain had spilled between the cracks of the ceiling moulding the old carpet in front of the fireplace where Jack and I had lay. Where we had sprawled across the floor, kicking our legs idly behind us as he read me Huckleberry Finn or laughed wildly as we played marbles or even fought viciously and angrily, with neither remorse nor mercy.

Jack, of course was here, still. Or so it felt.

It was his place. Was always his place, although I’d disputed this vehemently as a child. On arrival, I had seen the red painted scrawl that read ‘Jack’s Cabin’ hanging at a Dutch tilt beside the driveway, and at last he had won the argument without another word.

I walked down the hallway which felt longer than ever before, the darkness thick like cream around me, lit only by the flickering candle in my grasp. Outside, I could hear the rain and the wind, howling and screaming like a lamb to slaughter. In my mind, there’s Jack that night and the rain coming down on him and down on him. Unrelenting, near everlasting. And my crying, my sobbing, wretched moans catching in my oesophagus like splinters. ‘No, Jack, no.’

Jack’s door was shut before me. Across it was his handwriting, as illegible as ever, but this time it read ‘Jack’s Room’ on the door instead. In the corner was the bookcase with the swollen books, waterlogged by the lengthy negligence they had suffered. I knelt down beside them, placing the candle on the floor, and tore the bookshelf from the wall. It cracked and splintered with age and force, falling into pieces in front of me. The books scattering across the wooden floor with a dull, wet noise.

Then the opening, like a mouth calling to me. The wind blew the boards at the edge like great, chattering teeth, like my teeth chattering from the cold or the fear. The sweat on the back of my neck running colder than a corpse’s finger tracing along the spine. That opening, it stared like an abyss and I stared back, back into the past. Stepping between the boards. Stepping into memory.

*****

‘Jack!’ I called his name as he ran ahead of me.

He was always taller than me and made ground up much easier. I heard his trainers skid to a stop in the gravel of the drive.

‘Come on,’ he shouted when he saw me, waving his hands maniacally. ‘Hurry!’

We’d been at the cabin for two days.

Dad enjoyed the peace of the place and spent much of his time walking alone or gardening, taking deep breaths in and saying things like: ‘feel that country air?’

Mum was a writer. She shut herself up in one of the back rooms, which she called her study, and told us not to disturb her. She was working, she said, although I rarely heard the clacking of the typewriter. More often came sounds of anguish. Frustrated moans and shouts.

We did not go near the room. We had learned early that when she worked we should disappear. We were the ghosts of the cabin and, often, we wondered if our parents even believed in such things.

‘Come on!’ I heard again, from further down the valley. Where the woods began to rise up. Reaching, I always felt, to try and touch the cabin. To brush their leaves against the wood of the walls in silent commiseration for what their siblings had become.

I scrambled down the steep incline, between the trunks and the foliage, listening for my brother’s voice. Above, a canopy of branches obscured the sunlight and cast a dark blanket around me. It was hard to see anything amidst the shadows.

‘Jack?’ I called out.

Nothing. The valley stood silently. You could almost hear the trees stretching and growing toward the sky.

‘Jaaack?’

Still nothing.

The woods seemed darker than ever before, and I had wandered far from the side of the valley. The shadows crept up like giant, grasping fingers reaching out behind me. Snatching at my pigtails as they bounced. Blindly encapsulating everything. Swallowing myself between a wave of insidious black and, suddenly, I felt smaller than I had in all my life as I realised how at mercy I was to the world.

And what was in the darkness, eyes shimmering with ideas of the violence that could be committed on my small body. Of the violence that could have already been committed on Jack, for where was he now? What had been done to him. I was alone, and it was coming for me next.

I ran. My breath quickening into panic.

The trees hid their monsters, as I tried to move between them as quickly and quietly as possible, but my heart was beating loudly in my ears like some sinister drumbeat counting down to the moment of war; to the disaster and violence that lay ahead.

Beneath me the ground gave way and I slipped, screaming and falling, down through branches and mud and landing hard on rock below. My body reacted angrily, flaming with a bright pain in my shoulder, but the fear was stronger, and I pulled myself back to my feet quickly.

I was in a cave. Water dripped from large, pointed stalactites. A small cave river ran, reflecting the moonlight that shone from above like light through a keyhole. It illuminated the walls in streaks of pollockesque moonbeams. I looked around for a way out but there only appeared to be the hole which was a little out of my reach.

My fear was at new heights in here. There was something wrong about the cave, a feeling I had never experienced before. Almost as if more than merely water ran here, something all-powerful, all-present, all-seeing. Something that could look through the dark, picking through the muddiness of my thoughts. When I closed my eyes I could feel it there, even in my own private darkness. It walked like a scavenger across my mind, taking what it wanted and leaving what it didn’t to fester and grow and kill.

There was a clatter from the entrance of the cave, and I stared, numbed with anxiety, as a formless silhouette spewed between the gap and fell the distance to the floor. Only when the light fell upon it did any of my worry disappear. Jack stood in the cave, moonlight staining his face, staring at me. Smiling.

‘Isn’t it cool?’ he said, watching my own face, wide eyed in the darkness.

‘Jack, how did you find this place?’

‘Its right under the cabin!’ He giggled and gestured for me to follow. ‘Come look.’

I followed him to one of the cracked cave walls, revealing a hole just large enough for a teenage boy or small adult to fit through. It was comfortable enough for us and he led me up a small incline. There, muddied but still visible, was a wall of wooden boards much like the walls of the cabin.

‘Its my room, I think,’ he said, looking gleefully toward me.

Something ominous stirred in the darkness around me. We should not be down here, I thought.

‘We’ve got to tell Dad about this,’

‘No!’ He sounded as if I had threatened him, and perhaps I had. I wanted to be out of the cave, I wanted both of us to get far from it.

‘They need to know, Jack. Its not safe having a cave this close to the cabin.’

‘NO!’ His voice echoed across the cave, sending me stumbling backwards down the incline and into the cave opening, Jack in fast pursuit. ‘Don’t. Don’t Eleanor, please. I just wanted you to see it. To understand how cool it is. Its just ours. No one else knows about it, you can’t throw it away, you can’t.’

His eyes were pleading silently. Stupidly, I began to soften.

‘You can’t be down here all the time then, okay? It’s not safe.’

‘I know! I’ll be careful. Promise.’

Still, I don’t understand why it was so easy for me to believe him. Why I was so ready to lie for him. It is too easy to forgive the ones you love; perhaps that is why it is so difficult to forgive yourself.

*****

The incline was steeper than I remembered, and tighter too. The mouth of it closed around me but I managed to squirm between the rocks like a shadow beneath the crack of a door. Mum’s shadow, whom all light hid from.

I remembered her in the days after Jack found the cave. Not by sight but by sound. The sound of her anguish; things breaking and smashing and Jack always being in her way. I was better at hiding than him, better at becoming invisible, so Jack took most of her anger. Jack took most of her beatings and abuses. I used to wonder if there was more I could’ve done, but there was only survival then. We did not have the privilege of martyrdom. Not for ourselves and, certainly, not for each other.

The path led me to the opening that I remembered from my childhood. That Jack showed me so excitedly. There was no moonlight spilling like liquid anymore, but the stalactites still dripped, and the cave stream still moved quietly.

I remembered that night. He came to my room to say goodbye.

‘I’m running away,’ he said. ‘Don’t stop me.’

I looked at him in that dark room. I understood but I was too scared to go with him. I was too scared to stay behind.

‘Don’t go,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave me.’

It was raining hard outside. Jack opened my bedroom window.

‘Goodbye,’ he said.

‘Goodbye,’ I replied.

I watched him walking in the rain. It was heavy and it beat at him with such fury. He looked so small. He was a lifeboat, and the storm was drowning him.

He turned around and I saw him mouth. ‘Come with me.’

He stood there a little while as I began to sob.

‘No, Jack, no.’ I moaned.

He turned away and the rain began to swallow him. I never saw my brother again.

In the cave I felt for the candle in my pocket. Still quite a large wick on it, still plenty of wax. Into the darkness I said one word:

‘Jack?’

And for the first time in twenty years, I heard my brother’s voice come back to me.

*****

The next morning the search began.

It lasted for three days and nights until my family had to drive back home. The police were left with the responsibility and my parents were happy to be relieved of it. It was not so easy for me.

I searched for the cave opening but I could never find it. It was as if it had disappeared or was hidden from me in some way. My parents were not interested in listening to my opinions of where Jack might be.

‘Leave it to the police,’ they’d say.

We packed our stuff the last day. We did not pack Jack’s.

I sat in his room with his toys and his clothes and his books. I wanted my brother back. I wished I had told them of his cave before. I wished I had done something.

It was a flat day, but I could hear wind somewhere in the room. I listened closely. It was as if his books were whistling quietly. I pressed my ear against the bookshelf and heard it louder.

I thought about the cave, how Jack had shown me the cabin walls.

‘It’s my room, I think.’

My mind was racing. What if Jack was behind the wall.

‘Jack?’ My voice was low.

I waited. I was sure he was there. My ear was still pressed to the bookshelf. Was that breathing I could hear? Behind the wall?

‘Eleanor!’ I heard. ‘Time to go.’

I pulled my ear from the shelving and followed my father’s voice out to the car, which led all those miles away to home. A home without my brother in it.

*****

‘Hi Eleanor.’

It was still a boy’s voice, a child’s voice. The same one that had pleaded with me to not reveal his secret cave.

‘Hello, Jack.’

My voice died in the shadows ahead of me. It was impossible to see anything in the darkness. It was impossible to see Jack.

‘I’m glad you came back for me, Eleanor, I’ve been alone here for so long.’

‘I know you have. Come on out Jack, I want to see your face.’

The darkness seemed to move, shifting uncomfortably before me. Swelling and pulsing.

‘You know I can’t do that. But you can help me. You can free me. Don’t you love me, Eleanor?’

There is the moment when I wanted to say yes. Yes, I love you, Jack. But it was only a moment because I knew that it was not Jack that in the cave. I knew that what remained were only shadows of Jack. Like memories.

I remember learning about the Big Bang, I tried to explain it to Jack. Telling him that if you looked far out enough into space, you could still see the afterglow of it. We could still see ourselves being born.

‘No, I don’t love you.’

The shadows advanced on me. They reached with their long tendrils like great boneless fingers and grasped me around the ankle, but I was prepared. Jamming my hand into my pocket, I grabbed the candle, from my other pocket I pulled out a matchbox. The shadows began to rage, they howled like wind, pulling me back into the cave. I clawed at my matches, pulling one out but it slipped between my fingers and fell to the floor, ruined by the water. A shadow hit me in the face, knocking my jaw askew. I scrambled and gripped the matchbox tighter, holding on against the pull of the shadows. I lit a match as the shadows howled louder, they darted back from the flame, flickering and hissing like an accumulation of cobras. I held the flame to the wick, and it caught instantly, lighting up the cave entrance with a powerful luminescence. The shadows roared and the cave began to shake violently, rocks fell and struck me as I scrambled to the passage, squeezing through the gap and back into what used to be my Jack’s room. I heard it calling behind me as the rocks sealed the cave shut.

‘ELEANOR! DON’T LEAVE ME, DON’T ABANDON ME!’

I pulled myself up to my feet and dragged myself to Jack’s old bed, where I slept, candle beside me, until morning.

*****

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

I was eight years old when we bought the cabin. There was no electricity and we had to make do with candlelight. Jack was five and hated the dark. I slept there on his bed all night, holding him between my arms, comforting him as his own parents could not.

I was no saint to my brother. I was not supposed to be. Instead, I was a sister to him. Sometimes that meant being his ally and sometimes it meant being his enemy, but there was always love.

When my parents died, people would say:

‘It’s a shame they never found out what happened to Jack.’

And I would agree, but deep down it meant nothing to them.

Jack is gone now, and so are they, and I am not getting any younger and when I am gone, I will take the memories of them alongside me. Leaving only some light, reflecting their bodies and that cabin, endlessly into space. Eternally between the shadows.