The Undoing

This story was created for the Vocal Campfire Ghost Story challenge; in which writers were tasked with telling a ghost story one might tell around a campfire, beginning with the starting sentence:

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. It was barely perceptible through the thick fog, but there it was, just as she’d heard- a faint tempered glow beckoning her forward. A waning crescent moon sent sparkling silver waves over the rusty metal roof.

Laura stood at the edge of the clearing, miles of wild forest at her back. The woods had seemed less threatening in the waning daylight, but now she shuddered thinking about finding her way through the trees in the dark. Choking back tears she again wrestled with the weight of the decision, narrowly fighting off the voices in her head telling her to turn back. Laura knew what she had to do. Her breath formed white clouds in the thin air as she clutched her satchel close and stepped forward, moving cautiously. Creeping closer toward the decrepit cabin she took note of the stony winter silence that seemed to engulf the space.

The old woman’s silhouette appeared in the doorway as Laura approached, brushing back silky cobwebs that adorned the crooked stairs.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she said in a faint voice, her open palm outstretched. In understanding Laura reached for her satchel. She carefully retrieved the tattered handkerchief and began to unfold it. Inside sat two silver coins and a sugar loaf. The coins were her entire savings, earned with the summer’s sweat in the kitchen at the large house on the hill. A chill ran up her spine as Laura remembered the particular stagnant and oppressive heat of the day the visitor had come.

The old woman took the handkerchief and its contents, inspecting it momentarily before pocketing it in her skirt. She looked Laura up and down solemnly and then placed her hand gently on her shoulder, guiding her into another dimly lit room. A table, much cleaner than the dusty furniture that surrounded it, came into focus. The woman gestured for Laura to sit upon it.

From the cabin loft the sound of a sudden flutter of wings gave Laura a start. Just bats, certainly, she thought, trying to calm her nerves. She wondered again if she should turn and run. She pictured the anger on her father’s face, the scolding judgement of the faces in the pews at church, her grandmother’s face filled with shame. Her legs felt heavy and weak dangling from the side of the table and she conceded that the time to run had long since passed.

The visitor’s face flashed in her mind, as it often did. In the sweltering August daylight Laura had found him handsome. In the dark, the flashing white of his teeth and scent of tobacco and citrus had charmed her. But what did she know of love? In what felt like seconds the thrill of a kiss morphed into fear and confusion, then pain. A pleasure, too. Then he was gone, and she was alone in the dark night.

Now, in the dimly lit room carpeted with decades of dust, Laura watched as the woman rustled through an old sack, withdrawing linens and vials of dark tinctures. Her breath quickened as she caught a glimpse of a metal tool of whose purpose she wanted no knowledge. Upstairs the sound of fluttering became louder, closer.

“You’ve felt the quickening?” the woman asked. Laura nodded, her eyes welling with tears, as she placed her hand on her stomach. The kicks had begun a few weeks before, making the uncertain certain. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, and knew little of what any of it meant. Overheard whispers in the market had led her here, to a remote and long abandoned cabin, with little more than a bleak hope outweighing the weight of her fears.

The woman removed a cork from one of the vials and handed it to Laura, who drank it quickly, forcing down the bitter taste. She knew hesitation would only feed her shame. She felt the liquid slide down her throat, pictured it trickling into her stomach and then out into her blood, like a thick black ooze. Her visualization was interrupted by a new sound from the loft - a loud thump, a creak, and then another. Was someone descending the stairs? But almost as soon as the thought had occurred, the black ooze as she’d imagined it started to tunnel around her eyes, narrowing her vision. She felt a fuzzy, tingling sensation and realized she could not move her legs or arms. With all her strength she was able to turn her head to look at the old woman, but to her surprise the woman was no longer there. Where she had stood was only a muddy darkness. Before she could make sense of her absence the ooze closed in completely on Laura’s vision and everything turned a pitch black. But for a moment she could still hear the creaking of the stairs, then the floorboards, as someone… or something… approached.

…

Laura awoke to the sound of hushed whispers and pried her eyes open to the same orange glow of the candlelit room. The fierce cold of the room seemed to have been replaced with a heavy and stagnant heat. She struggled to breathe in its thickness and noticed a familiar smell, something like a citrus cologne and tobacco lingering in the air. Her body felt heavy, as if she were under a pile of rocks. Laura struggled to move, struggled to feel her limbs, panic beginning to rise within her. At this moment an unnatural sound broke through the quiet, somewhere between a baby’s cry and a howl. With a concentrated effort she managed to turn her head to the direction of the wail and noticed what appeared to be two vaguely human forms, opaque and stark. They resembled shadows, but nothing else in the room seemed able to cast a shadow of this shape or size. She could clearly make out two distinct heads on shoulders, but they were blank and featureless, hovering over a basket on a table she hadn’t noticed earlier. Laura watched with terror as the figures suddenly straightened and seemed to turn to face her. They moved with an odd disjointed cadence slowly in her direction, accompanied by a fluttering, chittering noise. As they approached the table on which she laid frozen, unable to move, Laura’s vision once again tunneled and all went black.

…

The next time she woke the gray light of day had begun to filter in. The dull silence that had permeated the cabin was now replaced with the joyful sound of birds chirping. Laura sprang upright on the table and noticed her head was throbbing. She scanned the room but found herself alone and felt a flush of relief. Laura took a deep breath and paused to consider what had happened, what she had seen. She’d assumed the tincture would induce a miscarriage, but she hadn’t expected to pass out. She realized she really hadn’t known what to expect at all. But what had she seen? Was that a hallucination? And what about…? Laura placed her hand on her stomach and felt the curve of the incision, the thin thread that sewed it closed. The pressure of her fingers stung the delicate skin. She searched her inner knowing for the answer she had dared to hope for. Intuitively she sensed that her body was no longer a home for another life. Despite the desired outcome she felt no sense of relief for this, only a dismal sadness. The candle in the window flickered, dying, all but down to the wick.

It was nearly dawn. She ought to be starting on the morning chores. Her absence would be noticed soon. Laura slowly stood up, trying to concoct in her mind a story her father might believe to explain her whereabouts. As she steadied herself she thought she heard a faint cry from the loft above, then a thump and a rustle. She was not alone.

Gripped with fear Laura hurriedly rushed to exit this room, to flee from the cabin. She flew open the thin door and fought through the throbbing in her head and the sharp pains in her abdomen, running down the crooked stairs. But before she reached the edge of the clearing she knew she had to see what she did not want to see, what she did not want to know. Her heart pounding, she turned to cast her gaze back at the old cabin, now backlit against a gentle morning sunrise. It was hard to make sense of what she was seeing, or thought she was seeing. In the upstairs window, behind a lit candle, stood the two human shapes she had seen hours before, black as silhouettes. Between them they held a smaller shadow with the form of an infant, their heads lowered to look at it. Laura’s breath caught in her throat as the shadows raised their heads to look out the window and face her.