MHOS Part 4: My Demise

It has been a rainy week, the night before we were set to leave, Shawn called to be sure I was still up for it. He thought the soggy mess out in nature was going to change my mind about the weekend away, but I informed him that after a rain comes mushroom, and I love going foraging for them, he chuckled and said he'd see me tomorrow and we hung up for the night.

The weekend has arrived. As I'm packing the last of my supplies for our weekend at Shawn's family cabin I do an inventory check. Two sets of clothes, twine mushroom harvesting bag with a mushroom knife & mushroom ID book, makeup, perfume, deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, first aid kit, toothbrush, toothpaste, a pair of hiking boots.

I'm ready.

Or so I think..

My bag is packed, sitting by the front door and I am eating an early lunch as I have about an hour to wait before Shawn arrives to pick me up. I makes a basic pasta and sauce while I am waiting and decide to write out some more notes for my next short story, I grab my purse to fish out my notebook to jot some things down.

As I reach into my purse in the pocket reserved for my notebook I find it empty..

Where is it?

I flip my purse over and spill all the contents onto the couch and it scatters everywhere, on the couch on the floor, between the cushions "Of for fuck sakes Ella!" I say to myself as I start to kneel down and sort though the mess when I hear a knock at the door.

Shawn? Already? He's early! I get up and let him in stating just that and he responds with "Since we're travelling for a bit I thought I would pick you up early and we could go to lunch before we head out" He leans his head up and deeply inhales the scent of the freshly cooked food in the air and says "I think we should eat what you're cooking though instead, we will be gone all weekend and that smells delicious"

He looks over at the mess on the couch and realizes he walked in on a busy scene and asks if there is anything he can do to help. I explain I was looking for my notebook but spilled my purse in the process. "Oh, I see. How about this.. You clean up the couch, I will grab the stuff on the floor and then we can sit down and eat, does that sound good?"

He already knelt to the ground and began picking up the stuff on the floor and I began to fish out the stuff that was sliding between the couches and when I turned around Shawn was waiting with an oversized handful of stuff in one hand and my notebook in the other. I spot it, smile gratefully, put my stuff away and we sit down to eat before we leave.

It was a shorter drive than I expected, scenic, but short, we were there in 20 minutes. Shawn grabbed our bags and settled them in the cottage and asked if I would like to start the day off with a hike to go out and ID some mushrooms, he'd never done it before and was looking foward to learning. I happily agreed, I was ready to stretch my legs and learn the lay of the land. It's always good to know a little something about the landscape or you could accidentlally wind up leaving a body in a high traffic area after all.

He grabs water bottles, snacks, and my mushroom foraging supplies & tosses them in an old duffle bag he fished out of his closet and threw the bag over his shoulder and reached for my hand as he led me out the door so we could begin our hike. We start heading up a hill following a creek Shawn tells me leads us to a patch of trees that grow mushrooms on them that he never took the time to ID.

It takes us about 10 minutes to reach a location that has visible mushrooms growing on trees, on the ground and before I can even react I feel a sharp, debilitating pain in my head, everything goes dark. As I'm fighting to stay concious I can feel my body getting dragged to a tree nearby.

As he leans me up against the tree he sees that I'm still awake and smiles at me. That same sweet smile that convinced me that going into the woods with him was a good idea. "I didn't think you'd stay awake after that blow, I hit you pretty hard" he said as he used the mushroom knife to cut open the mushroom bag and began tying me to the tree with my own kill supplies.

"I saw you writing in that little notebook when I approached you that first time & needed to know what you were writing about, so I swiped the book when you used the bathroom so I could read it while you were in the bathroom. I flipped though a few pages when the news came on and the story of the missing man seemed a little too familiar. So I kept your notebook and did a little research of my own and found that a lot of those stories had a lot of similarities to missing persons cases. Then I realised that your latest entry sounded an awful lot like me."

As he sliced into my flesh with my own knife he continued "My only regret is that I will never get to read how you would have ended our story, you're actually a pretty good writer. If you didn't kill all your subjects & used a pen name you'd have been a half way decent author.." He leaned forward to look me in the eye as he dragged my own knife across my throat, and the world went black.