The Haunts of Von Rahnschteen

We drove up the snowy, winding road towards the cozy A-frame cabin. And from the seat behind, I heard the voice of good ol’ Sprite asking why there wasn’t such a thing as a V-frame cabin.

“Well, because if that was a thing we’d all have to stand in a crack and sleep against a slanted wall,” I replied, holding back none of my bluntness. “And there’d be a ridiculous amount of wasted space on the ceiling.”

“Change the gravity,” fired back good ol’ Sprite, “Get them zero Gs up in that place.”

“Make the roof the ground!” interjected Sunkist, or Sunk, nestled up in Sprite’s broad bosom.

Here would probably be a good time to make an interjection of my own, and explain why two of my passengers were Sprite and Sunkist, while two more in the rear were Pepsi and Coca “Cock” Cola, and I— along with the divine Lebanese goddess at my side— were Pibb and Pepper. It was simply because we had agreed to abandon our real-world identities for a weekend, as our primary mission at hand was to take a vacation. So for three days we were to be known as the Soda Six, or Sotasix (a play on our homeland of MinneSOTA), for we had six different kinds of soda with us in the trunk, all suited to our own individual liking, and we were in hot debate for much of the drive as to the one greatest brand of soda pop. Of course, each taste was firmly set since youth, and no opinion could be swayed.

“I’m your ruler; you must all bow down to me,” declared Cock at least forty times, always when there had been a silence for longer than twenty seconds.

“Just because you’re the best seller doesn’t mean you’re the best tasting,” I would rebuke in pitiful defense.

“If I wasn’t the best tasting, why would so many people buy me? Who buys you?”

“That’s true,” laughed the Ethiopian Sprite, “Not many people I know out there drinkin’ Pibb.”

“I’m a hidden gem!” I cried. “I’m not given a fair shot— you can hardly even find me in stores! And if you do I’m only available in twelve-packs. What’s your excuse, Sprite? You are a child’s drink. You’re in your thirties but refuse to admit that you are a drink for children.”

And while Cock, Sprite and myself argued our merits, our lady friends (Pepsi, Sunk and Pepper) sat back in the sweet peace of their covered ears, looking out the windows at the falling flakes of whirling white.

Interjection ended. Now we were arrived indeed at the charming wooded cabin, and the grounds were a jolly sight for that post-merry month of January. Trees in all directions did abound: mostly pines, but some naked elms and oaks as well, and plenty a birch, with their peering evil eyes peeled fast. And the grounds were varied and wide, with rolling white hills here and there, and a collection of steaming hot springs, which gave us our first taste of terror.

A large old woman of a blotchy disposition stood up waist-high in one of these pools. Let it be said in wholesome publications that she was scantily clad in a bathing suit, but let the truth here be known that she was clad full bare. And she stared at us without reprieve as we rolled up, an unwavering scowl planted firm beneath her drooping cheeks.

Sprite and I decided to ignore her in full, upping our speed until we parked in the driveway, and thankfully the others showed no indication of having witnessed whoever that was, so it was a problem for a later time, if ever.

I parked the SUV and nudged the queen of Lebanon at my side— “Paradise awaits, your Lebanese majesty.”

And so we all frolicked out to the front porch, and with eager fingers reached for the keypad, inputting the code which would grant us access to our charming vacation home.

But to our great dismay, it served its purpose not.

“Oh. Well, that’s fine,” spoke the sweet voice of the Lebanese goddess, who was calling herself Dr. Pepper that week, “We’ll just walk around until we get a hold of the landlord. It’s not too cold out—”

“Let’s go… into the woods. That way,” I pointed, not at all wanting to cross paths with the naked woman in the pool towards the direction whence we had come.

My sister Pepsi looked off in the direction I was pointing, and said, “Yeah, no, there’s a terrible idea. There’s no path that way, it’s literally just a cliff. Pretty view, but we can see it all from here.”

“If it is pretty views that we seek, why don’t we all just spend eternity gazing into the eyes of this Lebanese princess, sent from far-distant stars to gift our world with the most glorious vision of everlasting beauty?”

But no one else wanted to spend more than four seconds staring into Lebanese Pepper’s eyes, and Lebanese Pepper wished for that even less. So my efforts were failed, and all my friends headed off down the road, and quickly gave gasps of grief to see the woman I wished would have somehow just disappeared before we had to deal with her.

“January calls,” she began in a low mutter, before springing into a soliloquy which she must have practiced a thousand times, “January reigns! What other month lies so cast aside in the temple of the mind than this? A life of the moon with no holidays! Weep in despair, dearest firstborn, premiere month of the year with no lovers nor fans. All you do despise, and you are despised, go forth. For a time will come bearing your vengeance dear. Sweet, hot revenge, be not far off on the tumbling ridge, when you take from better months their haughty pride and reputation, and bud flowers of your own! Most unholy month, become that which they will know and dread upon the calendar! You— the sole fiend with no proud feast days— rise up with the greatest of them all!”

But we had some questions.

“You saying January’s the only month with no holidays?” asked Sunkist, confused.

“We got MLK Day!” put out Sprite, “That’s gotta count for something.”

“Ha!” cackled the naked old woman in the hot spring. “Martin Luther! As if he can compare with the jolly image of Saint Nicholas!”

“Well— no one can,” surmised Cock. “He’s kind of got a monopoly on iconic holiday figures.”

“Easter Bunny’s a close second,” added Pepsi.

“Easter Bunny MAYBE,” said Sprite, doubtful.

“Hey, what about August,” I contributed. “There’s nothing in August. Not even a boring holiday like Labor Day.”

“Is Labor Day not in August?” asked Sprite.

“It was in September last year.”

“June doesn’t have anything either,” pointed out Pepsi.

“Nah, June’s got Flag Day!” I screamed.

“But only March or April gets Easter, so one of those two is always left without something big,” went Sunk, pointing a teaching finger at the lady half-submerged in the hot spring. “My point is, it’s not just January. Now put some clothes on, lady.”

“You will die ere the last horse of day does neigh,” cackled the bathing lady, and then she raised her arms as if invoking the heavens, “They will succumb one by one, and then the wrath of the First Month’s long-awaited king will spread like a cancer through all the Midwest. Kansas, Nebraska, both Dakotas, Michigan! For their long years of neglect, may the Janeiroan Prince unveil his holy day in bloody splendor! Beware Von Rahnschteen! Hail Von Rahnschteen!”

Here she fully submerged herself in the spring. And just when we began to believe that this was the final act of her life, and she would not reappear, she proved us wrong and leapt out of the pool, running away across the white forest floor, cheeks of all kinds flopping about in a mad fury. We later learned that her name was Wendy.

As we waited for the landlord’s response, we played in the snow and did lewd things with our lovers in the cold. Finally, we received a response— the landlord apologized profusely for the trouble with the keypad and gave us a new code to try. We walked back up to the porch, but to our surprise, the door was already open. Oh great, Wendy’s probably lurking inside, was the thought that crossed through all our minds.

But it was a thin and lanky finger which beckoned us inside. And a cadaverous man looking like something straight out of Dickens appeared in the doorway, tall and hunched, lean as a coat rack and jagged as the jank.

“Von Rahnschteen?” asked Sprite immediately, with no hesitation.

“Why ‘es, how’s it you’ve come to know my name w’out my introduction?” Von Rahnschteen replied, and sure enough, he was British.

“Some nude woman told us to beware you.”

“Better to be nude than lewd, is it not?”

“No. It is not,” said all six of us in a sort of unison.

“Then it seems we’re at some stop of discord,” smiled Von Rahnschteen sinisterly, showing rows of bent and yellow teeth. But his breath smelled of nothing but sweet and tasty garlic. “Call me Von Rahn, or the Reaper if you’d like.”

“So, is the Carolina Reaper thing like your side hustle now?” asked Sprite before 'the Reaper' could continue, “Is it true even the Reaper needs a side hustle these days?”

Von 'the Reaper' Rahnschteen nodded, “You’d be surprised how little money you make killin’ people.”

"Sad."

“Look, I’m tired,” protested Sunk, not wanting to go on with this nonsense. “We’ve been driving all day, I would like to get settled and not have to deal with any more of you unexpected freaks.”

“And who might you be, darling?”

“Sunk.”

“Skunk? Well Skunk, I’ll let you ’nd all your wankerlings here rest in peace if you’ll just put up with a round of the good festivities. You know, the Ninth of Jan jollities? Merriments? Well maybe you don’t know about that yet. But this day’ll be famous for many years to come. It’s like the birth of Christ. The first Christmas? Well this is the first Ninth of Jan. The Hangman’s Holiday.”

And he brought out a gallows onto the porch.

Right about now was the time when me and my Soda Six were beginning to grow quite wary of Von Rahnschteen. But we stayed put, for we soon learned that an electric fence was now activated around the perimeter of the estate, for Cock attempted a stealthy getaway and was swiftly swept to his face, writhing in the snow. And we didn't dare make any quick moves on the bony Brit, for he was armed with a host of knives and needles. So we thought we’d best just entertain him with his Gallow’s Game and be done with it.

“Now then, are we familiar with the game of Hangman?” asked Von Rahnschteen of my own sorry self. I nodded, half sure.

“Good. Quite good,” and Von Rahnschteen put a rope around his own neck. “Always the right and proper custom for the Von Rahn to offer up ‘imself first. So go ahead, think up your phrase— you alone— and write the blanks for your letters up on the window. I’ll guess, and for every missed guess, I’ll be 'anged. First by the head, then by an arm, then an arm, then a leg, then a leg, and lastly by me ass. If you get me hanging by all those spots, you’ve got full right at that point to murder me in any way you see fit.”

“You will be murdered quite,” smiled I, for I had a phrase in mind that Von Rahnschteen would never guess.

“You know why the Lebanese are so perfect? Because their extremities are quite long with excellent variety in their curvature. Never will you find one with a first toe longer than the second, that being a dreadfully jarring quality which has marred so many” was that phrase, and after the game began I quickly realized that I was somewhat misinformed regarding the rules of Hangman.

“What the hell, man,” said Sprite in disgust. “You did a phrase with 25 letters in it.”

“I didn’t know he’d be guessing letters! I thought he’d have to guess the phrase!”

“Okay. Sure. If Hangman was a game where you had to blindly guess an entire paragraph, you would’ve hanged him. Easy. But that’s a nonexistent game. And as it stands, you didn’t get to hang any part of Von Rahnschteen, and now he’s gonna hang one of us.”

“Quite right, good ol’ Sprite!” hammered Von Rahnschteen, putting his arm around Sprite and demanding him to choose a tribute.

“You,” said Sprite, immediately turning to Sunkist, which was shocking to all of us because she was his vacation date.

“Me?! What?!”

Apparently Sunkist was not fine with this decision.

“Well— what do you want me to do?” stuttered Sprite defensively. “What do you want me to say? Have Cock down there get hanged right after he got shocked by the electric fence? Hang Pibb when he’s the one who drove us here? Well, okay, maybe that would make the most sense, but he saved us a lot of money on gas! And his Lebanese girlfriend is… I dunno, you just heard him make a Hangman phrase about her perfect extremities! He claims she’s a god and I’d feel bad hanging God. And Pepsi’s his sister. Can’t hang family—”

“We’re engaged!”

“Yeah… yeah— we are that…”

“Is this because I know Earth’s flat?”

“That’s uh… that’s part of it.”

“If I survive this hanging, you are dead.”

“Well look, here’s the thing— you can think the earth is flat. Who knows, maybe it is. It’s whatever. Your opinion’s not hurting anyone. But when you spend every Tuesday yelling at me for thinking the earth might be round, and won’t even listen to my reasons for thinking why it might be round… I just think this is the way to go. Sorry!”

And so Von Rahnschteen positioned Sunkist under the gallows, and wrote his blanks on the window.

— — — — — — — —

“Anyone fancy a guess?”

We guessed A, E, I—

— I — — — I — —

—B, O, W—

And Sunkist was hanged.

“The answer was Fizz Piss,” clapped Von Rahnschteen, and then he did away with Miss Sunkist most unceremoniously.

“Well that was heinous,” noted Sprite.

“Was it not?” asked Von Rahnschteen, annoyingly rhetorical. “Anyway, she was Sunkist, but now she will be Stove Kissed, for I’ll be cookin’ her inside. You’ll thank me in a day or two, maybe four, ‘cause she’s all the meat you’ll be gettin’ ’til the holiday season ends on the eighteenth.”

“Oh, come on Von Rahnschteen!” we all moaned. “Nine days of this awful holiday? You said you’d let us rest in peace after a round of festivities.”

Von Rahnschteen smiled his wicked grin, and exclaimed for all the woods to hear— “The festival called Ninth of Jan shall last nine days, and the only food to be had is that of the ‘anged! Long live Von Rahnschteen!”

And he whipped up the corpse of Sunkist on his back, prancing into the kitchen and putting her body on the stove. He then disappeared… to where, we never did learn. For the cabin was something of a labyrinth, with a deceptively large interior, and cabinets lining all the walls, and stairs which led down into basements many. In each lower level, the stairs would wrap around to another side of the room, leading down to another level, and each successive basement grew smaller, and less and less ornate, until the ninth level down was reached, which was just a dark and damp cellar with room for little more than one man.

The many basements were each labelled in white paint: the first was BASEMENT, the second was GEORGEMENT, the third was JUDGEMENT, the fourth was TORMENT, the fifth was MENTOR, the sixth was MENFLOOR, the seventh was ELFLORE, the eighth was HELLFLOOR, and the ninth was Hell.

I don’t even know why we went all the way down. Morbid curiosity I suppose. Looking back on it, I think we all were in disbelief that the start of our weekend getaway had given rise to a deadly game of Hangman with a crooked Cockney Englishman prophesied by a naked woman no one asked for, and had resulted in the swift death of one of our friends. It was all so surreal… it was as if we were in a January nightmare. And so we walked all the way down to Hell.

It was creepy down there for sure, so we came back up as the sun was setting, and we decided against calling the police, since Von Rahnschteen was nowhere to be found and we thought the scene would look pretty suspicious and bad on our end. Turns out we were at the wrong house altogether. Our vacation home was up a mile further off the main road— we had just had the fizz-piss luck of running into this particular A-frame which looked remarkably similar to the pictures of the A-frame we had seen online.

That’s the thing about A-frames I guess. They all look so similar. Maybe someone should make a homely V-frame cabin for once, just for the sake of variety. And for the sake of the dead, who passed from this world so unceremoniously on that Ninth of January, now so long ago.