The 'X'

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

I dreaded being anywhere near that place nowadays. I would never have gone there by choice.

It has a history soaked in blood.

Two brothers built it in 1979, from a prefabricated two bedroom kit.

They had not been living there for a full year when they had a huge falling out, and ended up shooting and killing each another.

They left the cabin to a woman upstate. She rented it out but never once came to see it.

Some people said both brothers had fallen in love her, and were fighting over her when they died.

Others said she had nothing to do with it. The two men were secret lovers, not brothers, and they had a fatal quarrel.

I don’t know if any of those things are true.

But everyone around here knows those men were not the last ones to die in that cabin.

The ‘Bachelor Party Bloodbath’, as the press dubbed it at the time, was an infamous story.

In 1990, the new owner of the cabin, Michael Evans, and his four closest friends were lodging there for his stag weekend. The night they arrived, two days before he was due to get married, they were all slaughtered.

At least, that’s the theory. Their bodies were never found.

Besides the blood, bespattering every cabin wall, the only physical trace found of the men was a single piece of jawbone with one back molar still embedded.

The piece of jawbone and the volume of blood were enough for authorities to declare that at least one of the men, and likely all five, had died in the cabin.

Other than “violently”, how they died remains a mystery to this day.

To begin with nobody could even say for sure whether the killer was human or animal.

Later, though, another eerie piece of evidence was found at scene, and it pointed to human involvement.

It was a a child’s drawing, pinned with a magnet to the refrigerator.

It depicted the murder scene inside the cabin, in exact detail, in colored pencil. Except for the blood on the walls. For this aspect of the composition, actual human blood had been painted onto the page.

The artist responsible was never formally identified, but I’m fairly certain I have other examples of his work.

His name is Justin Drystan.

In 1983, when I was eight, Justin was the strange, scared new kid that came to my school part way through the year. He was so skinny he looked like a stiff breeze might blow him over, and he was almost pathologically shy. I’m pretty sure my third grade teacher, Miss Linney, worried that the boys in our class would eat him alive, so she assigned me to befriend him.

Quite honestly, I didn’t mind too much. He seemed like a nice enough kid and I enjoyed a little break from some of the in group drama with my usual friends for a day or two.

Justin and I were only friends for a week, but we had a lot of fun. We even played a couple of times after school. Mostly a game Justin called ‘Resurrection’. We would go looking for dead animals, and when we found one, we buried it. Then we did our own wannabe occult ceremony to try bring them back to life as a zombie beast pet.

Justin said he got the idea from a reading a book he found, left behind at the bus stop, when he and his Mom arrived in town. I tried to read some of it but it was a bit beyond my grasp. Justin read everything he could get his hands on, so he excelled at reading even though he had missed a lot of school.

Justin said that he and his mother had moved around a lot for a while, but now they had finally found a place where they felt they could stay, having recently moved to the fateful cabin in the woods.

The pair of them were living there alone, and Justin told me he was happy to have his mom all to himself again. Though he didn’t tell me what he meant by that.

On my one visit to the cabin while he and his Mom were living there, I saw a strange photo in Justin’s room. He and his Mom were standing with a man whose face was crossed out with a large red ‘X’.

What I know now that I didn’t know then is that Justin’s mother Shauna was on the run from a kind of gangster called Eric Marwood, her boyfriend at one point in time.

Shauna used to run drugs for him, but wanted to stop, and begin a new clean life with Justin.

Unfortunately, she had stolen some start up money from Marwood to fund their new life, figuring he owed her some backpay.

Marwood saw things quite differently, so this turned out to be a terrible idea.

At the end of our first week as friends, Justin gave me a colored pencil drawing. It was the pair of us, standing side by side, smiling. At the bottom he had written “thank you for being my friend x” in black pencil.

When I asked him what the ‘x’ meant, he blushed and said he didn’t know. It was something his Mom wrote on all her cards and letters to the people she liked.

I was away for the weekend, visiting my grandparents, but I made my own colored pencil drawing of us both, for Justin. I brought my drawing to school with me to give to Justin on Monday.

But on Monday Justin didn’t come to school. Nor on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

On Friday, police found a scene of abject horror in the cabin.

It was deserted, with Shauna and Justin’s few belongings strewn everywhere. Blood was sloshed across every single wall inside.

Weeks later, a decaying child’s hand was found near the lake. Police believed it belonged to a Caucasian male aged six to nine years, probably Justin Drystan. They surmised the rest of his body was eaten by animals. I had nightmares about that part. Honestly, sometimes I still do.

It was another six months before there was a tip off about what had happened to Justin and his mother.

It came from a man named Charles ‘Chisel’ Warden, who was facing a life sentence for robbery murder.

In order to get a better deal, he offered information about another crime: the murder of Shauna Drystan.

Chisel said he and two other men were hired by Eric Marwood to go to the cabin with him.

As far as he knew, the plan was to “rough Shauna up” and scare her back into line.

Only Shauna wasn’t scared, she was fiery and defiant. She accused Eric Marwood of stealing “far more than money” from her. Shauna said Marwood had taken away who she was, and made her a shadow of herself.

She said if he was there to kill her, he should get it over with. Because she would rather be dead than be trapped into any kind of life with him.

Chisel said the look on Eric Marwood’s face was “demonic”.

He said Marwood “went nuts”, and chased Shauna throughout the cabin, beating her until he killed her.

Then he ordered the other three men to cut up Shauna’s body and feed her to his wolves.

Chisel said the three men did exactly what Eric Marwood told them to do, because he was not somebody to cross.

In one enclosure on the property owned by Marwood police later discovered a piece of jawbone, with a back molar still embedded. Shauna Drystan’s dentist verified it was her tooth from the filling he had given her, found within it.

When asked about what happened to Justin, Chisel said it was just a terrible accident.

He insisted, in spite of what was done to his mother, the men never intended to kill the little boy.

Apparently, Justin wasn’t at the cabin when the men arrived. In hindsight Shauna had probably sent him to hide in the woods when she saw headlights coming for the cabin.

She told Marwood that Justin was having a sleepover at his new friend’s house when he asked her where the kid was.

So when Marwood had gone, and the three other men were tossing the trash bags of Shauna’s dismembered remains into the van, they were startled to see the shellshocked boy standing in the trees, watching them. They had no idea how long he had been there.

Chisel said, once they noticed him, Justin took off, running for his life through the woods.

Chisel said he chased after Justin, calling to him. He tried to let the boy know that he and the other men were leaving now, and nobody was coming after him, but Justin kept running until he went over the cliff.

He was probably dead before he even hit the water.

While parts of Chisel’s story were certainly dubious, law enforcement were looking into it. Thus, because he was a ‘snitch’, Chisel received numerous threats.

One of them came in the form of a child’s colored pencil drawing. It depicted a large dark shape wielding a prison ‘shank’, killing a man who had a ballpark resemblance to Chisel. Human blood was painted onto the page to illustrate the man’s injuries.

Twenty four hours after receiving the drawing, Charles ‘Chisel’ Warden died in an apparent prison stabbing, with injuries matching those he was given in the drawing.

Although Eric Marwood and the two other men responsible for the deaths at the cabin could not be found at the time, the two henchmen also turned up dead within the next year.

The partial remains of one of them, killed in a suspected shark attack, were discovered on a Cape Town beach.

The partial remains of the other man were found in Alaska. Initially, it looked like he had been mauled by a bear, but when the contents of his one intact pocket were uncovered, there was a child’s colored pencil drawing. It was a sketch of the dead, mauled man beside a large, black shadowy shape. Blood was painted onto the page to illustrate the drawn man’s injuries. Therefore, homicide could not be ruled out.

Of course, these kind of gruesome details in the story were only things I learned years later, when I was a teenager. Mainly from a group of kids I went to high school with. We would hang out together at the abandoned cabin to take drugs. Mostly weed, but one night we all decided to try LSD.

I have never touched the stuff since.

I was sitting on the cabin porch when I started to see a child’s glowing hand print on the trunks of each of the trees before me. I felt compelled to follow them, through the woods, along the trail they laid out.

They came to a stop right before a sheer drop into the lake. I recognized the spot at once.

And then I saw him, standing right beside me. Justin Drystan, still eight years old.

He smiled up at me, now I was taller than him. I crouched down so we were at eye level.

I said it felt weird that I had grown up and changed so much while he had stayed the same.

His eyes went black. “I’m not same”, he said.

He told me he had gone into a dark, scary place and it had changed him. He said he could become a monster now, when he needed to be one.

I told him I was glad about that. I told him I was heartbroken about what happened to him and to his mother.

He said he was glad I hadn’t forgotten about him, because whenever he felt lonely he thought about the time when he still had a friend.

He said he wanted me to stay out here in the woods with him, where we could play together forever.

Then he tried to lead me towards the edge of the cliff, smiling, but silently urging me to jump off.

“No, I can’t”, I told him, sadly.

His eyes grew dark again. “You can’t or you won’t?”

The way he glowered made me afraid to answer him. We stood for a moment facing each other in silence.

Suddenly, he was gone, but a low growling noise was coming from the trees nearby. My heart raced when I saw a large black shape looming within them. A glint of sharp fangs caught the moonlight.

As I began to back away slowly, the growling got louder and angrier.

Then the shape started to move closer.

I held my nerve for as long as I could, then I turned and ran for my life, back towards the cabin.

The whole way I could feel a creature snapping at my heels. Its vicious snarling sounded only inches away from my ears.

As I closed in on the cabin I was shouting, wildly, hysterically begging for help.

The others all rushed out to see what was wrong, but I was alone. Nothing had been after me that they could see.

They put the event down to some kind of LSD-induced psychosis, so I did, too.

Until the next morning, when I found the drawing in my pocket.

It was just like Justin’s first colored pencil drawing of him and I. Only this time I was older and taller, and he wasn’t smiling. There was a little blue tear drop coming from one of his eyes.

The words “Thank you for being my friend x” were written beneath the drawing in the same childlike handwriting in black pencil. However, this time the ‘x’ was written forcefully in red pencil.

I threw the drawing away immediately, and vowed never to go near the cabin again as long as I lived.

Soon afterwards, a man called Michael Evans bought the cabin and much of the land surrounding it.

Nobody knew much about who he was, except that he was from out of town.

Evans spent a fortune renovating the cabin, even though he told some people in town he was really only planning to use the place for weekend breaks.

As fate would have it, the very first break he ever took there, with his group of buddies, was the last one for all of them. Because they were murdered on the very night they arrived.

It was only twenty years later, when this cold case was re-opened, that an astonishing discovery was made. When DNA from the piece of jawbone was extracted, it wasn’t just a match to Michael Evans, but also to DNA found on cigarette butts from six other crime scenes. All of them were drug related executions attended by Eric Marwood. Marwood would reportedly offer his victims a final drag on his cigarette before killing them. The DNA match confirmed that Michael Evans and Eric Marwood were the same man.

In another surprise, it was Marwood’s blood on the drawing found at the scene.

According to his fiancee, the man once known as Eric Marwood, later called Michael Evans, was trying to reform. At the time he died, he was a very much a changed man - including his appearance through extensive plastic surgery. His fiancee claimed that when they fell in love, Eric grew tired of his life of crime, and he wanted to try and reinvent himself as a legitimate citizen.

She said he was much haunted by his “monstrous” past actions, most of all by the horrors he had inflicted on his poor former girlfriend, Shauna, while he was still in his “dark place”, heavily using drugs.

Apparently, Marwood, aka Evans, had bought the cabin to try and “exorcise the ghosts”, to give the place a new life, and a new set of memories.

Instead, he became part of a horrifying recreation of the atrocious scene he had produced there seven years earlier.

Eric Marwood didn’t get to have a happily ever after, anymore than Shauna and Justin had.

And nor did the four ostensibly innocent men who died along with him.

My mother sent me several newspaper clippings of articles chronicling every salacious and sensational detail, but back then I refused to read them.

I had done my best to escape from thinking about the cabin and Justin and the whole sorry saga, moving to the other side of the planet at nineteen.

For more than three decades I came home as infrequently as I could get away with, and paid as little attention to what went on there in my absence as I was allowed to.

This wasn’t a winning strategy in the end. For one thing I missed the earlier signs of my mother’s declining mental health. I had to come back home to take care of her two months ago because she has worsening dementia. I need to be the one who remembers everything now, because she no longer can.

My mother has been insisting we go for walks in the woods, and I’ve been doing my best to humour her, and keep her happy, as much as I hate going there.

She keeps telling me about the lovely the little boy who comes on our walks with us, that I can never see. The child she describes sounds exactly like Justin, in both appearance and manner.

Ten days ago she pointed to a child’s hand print scorched onto a tree trunk. My heart nearly stopped. I took her in the opposite direction, but I could hear the low growling behind us as we left.

Later that night something woke me at about 3am. My bedroom door was ajar and there was a child’s hand print, glowing, on the handle.

I was hit by a sudden wave of panic knowing, even before I checked to confirm it, that my mother was gone from the house. Sure enough, her unmade bed was empty, and the front door was wide open.

I was thankful I hadn’t yet managed to sell my mother’s old car as I sped towards the cabin in the woods. The road up to the cabin had not been well maintained, blocked by a fallen tree at one point. So, I had to leave the car and keep going on foot with quite a distance to go.

Glowing out the darkness was a trail of child sized hand prints. They peppered the tree trunks, and led a path all the way to the cabin.

I was breathless when I approached. In the window I could see a candle burning.

My heart was in my throat as I drew nearer, more and more anxious about what I would find inside.

But as I walked through the door I saw my mother, still in her nightgown, smiling back at me as she sat in a wooden rocking chair, beside a lit fireplace. She told me she was fine, and she chatted away with ‘our friend’, whom she could see but I could not.

I told her it was time for us to go home now, but she refused to leave, telling me that we were home.

She handed me a child’s drawing, in the style I was now all too familiar with. It showed the scene unfolding in the cabin at that very moment. There was a middle aged version of me, standing, talking to my mother, who sat in a rocking chair near the fire, while eight year old Justin was drawn holding my hand, smiling.

The same familiar words, “thank you for being my friend x”, were written beneath the drawing in forceful red pencil lettering.

I managed to convince my mother to leave the cabin by reminding her that she still had all her belongings back at the house, and we needed to go get them if we were planning to live in the cabin now.

Once I got her home, and she realized I had no intention of ever taking her back there, she was livid. She told me I couldn’t stop her going back there forever, and she was right. I can’t.

I have had to acknowledge I am not equipped to take care of my mother anymore, especially in light of the interest ‘our friend’ seems to have taken in her. Even if I could care for her full time, I’m not sure if I can keep her safe.

Yesterday, something happened to make her understand that, too.

She suddenly flew into the kitchen and grabbed me into her for dear life. She was sobbing “I’m sorry. What have I done?!”, over and over again.

She couldn’t manage to tell me what was wrong, but she handed me the drawing, and it said everything.

The figure of eight year old Justin was holding hands with the figure of my mother. The figure of me lay dead on the ground, covered in blood - detailed, as usual, in actual blood.

There was his usual message, “thank you for being my friend”, written in childlike black pencil script beneath the drawing.

But this time the ‘X ‘ was crossed through the message … and was written in blood.

We called the police, at once. I told them my whole crazy story, from the very beginning, even though I knew it would make them think I was certifiably insane.

I don’t know whether to be relieved or even more terrified that they took every word I had to say quite seriously.

Apparently, Justin has had more than one friend, afterall - and more than one of them has since vanished.

I had a hunch about who the blood on the drawing would belong to, and the lead detective just called back to confirm my guess was correct.

The blood is mine, and, dementia or not, my mother knows what the drawing means as well as I do.

My old ‘friend’ Justin Drystan plans to “cross me out” so he can live happily ever after in the cabin, and have his new mother all to himself.