The House in the Woods

"Ticket, please."

Riley shows her phone to the driver standing at the doors of the Greyhound bus she's about to get on. He gives her the go-ahead to climb aboard and she makes her way to the back of the bus, settling into the seat near a window.

She leans her head against the window, hoping to get a nap in before her stop, but as the bus pulls away, a baby a few rows ahead of her starts crying, as if taking offense to the bus doing its job.

After trying and failing to drown out the sound with her headphones and a well-worn Spotify playlist, Riley sighs and opens up Instagram on her phone.

Less than thirty seconds pass before she sees the bright, smiling face of Lila, a girl she'd roomed with at college a few years earlier. Riley had felt fairly neutral about Lila back then but continued to follow her online out of a mix of morbid curiosity and envy. Lila was boringly normal, and normal was something Riley would never feel again.

It's hard to feel normal when you've killed three people.

Scrolling through her former roommate's profile, Riley can all but guarantee that Lila has never killed anyone. Her page is filled with photos of herself, her dog, and "inspirational" quotes she'd screenshotted from other accounts. She uses hashtags like #blessed and #yolo unironically.

But who knows? Maybe it's all a carefully crafted facade designed to disarm people. Maybe Lila's like one of those unreliable narrators in a psychological thriller about bored housewives. Maybe she takes pleasure in killing, unlike Riley.

***

Three hours later, Riley stands deep in the forest, staring up at a small decaying house and listening to it creak in the wind. She's been coming to the house for months and it still gives her the creeps.

After being dropped off in the small town neighboring the woods, Riley had hiked about five miles through the trees. She'd come across this place a few years back when she got lost hiking. It'd taken her a few tries, but she managed to find it again.

Riley's phone suddenly beeps from within the backpack slung over her shoulder, telling her it's time to go inside. The sun won't set for another hour, and it won't be completely dark for another couple of hours after that. Still, she knows from experience it's better to get to the house too early rather than too late.

As Riley reaches for the front door handle, she feels a pair of eyes on her and looks up at the trees. A barn owl peers back at her from a branch of a birch tree.

Riley stares at the owl enviously. They're both killers, but the owl never feels the twist of guilt Riley's become all too accustomed to.

"Asshole," she says to the owl, who blinks as she enters the house.

***

Inside, Riley lets the backpack fall to the floor, kicking up a cloud of dust as it thuds against the wood, and fastens the locks she's installed in the front door.

She crouches down, pulls out a book of short stories her sister had given her and a flashlight, and leans against the door. She shines the flashlight over the pages, looking at the words but not really absorbing them. It's hard not to think about the people whose lives she'd taken, especially now.

Two were an unfortunate couple she'd come across in the park. At the time, killing them had satisfied an urge within her, but the satisfaction was gone within hours, replaced by a sickening sense of self-loathing once she realized what had happened.

Her second alarm of the evening goes off. Riley grabs her backpack and makes her way down a set of rickety stairs into the basement. It's dark, but she keeps a small generator and a small lamp, which she flips on, near the door.

There's not much to be seen in the dim light, just a splintered chair and a couple of empty beer bottles that Riley remembers seeing the first time she found this place. If the house weren't nestled so deep in the woods she’d think it'd be a go-to place for teens to sneak off to and party.

Riley latches the door and begins emptying her backpack, setting the other items she'd brought with her down on the stone floor: a large plastic tarp and two thick four-foot steel chains with large cuffs at each end. She spreads the tarp out over the floor of one corner of the basement and sets the chains down on top of it.

Riley undresses, folding her clothes and setting them aside in a neat pile next to her boots and backpack in the opposite corner of the room.

She sits down on top of the tarp, not wanting the cold stone to touch her bare skin, ties the chains together in a knot, and loops her feet and hands through the cuffs, letting them rest on her ankles and wrists. Now all she can do is wait and think.

Just hours before killing the couple in the park, Riley had been at her sister Amelia's, watching a movie. Amelia went out to pick up dinner for the two of them, and within minutes of returning to her apartment, she was dead.

It still happens as suddenly as it did back then. It's like a flip has switched. Riley can't see the moon, bright and full, but she can feel it, so strongly that she might as well be standing at the edge of a cliff, the light consuming her. She feels it as her fingernails are pushed from the tips of her fingers by claws. She feels it as her teeth fall from her gums, replaced by fangs. She feels it as coarse dark hair sprouts from her skin, as her body contorts, arms and legs thickening, wrists growing until they press against the steel cuffs.

She feels it as the urge to bite and tear and eat fills the pit of her stomach.

Thankfully, Riley could never remember the details of what happened the night she killed her sister, but she pieced it together pretty easily the next day when she woke up naked, with the taste of blood in her mouth.

She'd put in an order for the cuffs the following week, ignoring the smirk she got from the welder, who likely assumed Riley wanted them for some sort of sex dungeon. Nearly a year has passed since then, and so far, the cuffs have done their job. Riley's been unable to get out of the basement of the house.

She just hopes a lost hiker doesn't come across her.