A New Dawn

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Dawn sat, cross-legged on the splintery floor and began the ritual. She rolled out the piece of sheepskin, affixed it to the boards with an iron nail driven through each corner, and regarded the hand-made ouija board. The alphabet, numerals, and the words “Yes” and “No” were inscribed in her blood on the leather. The cutting had come easily, as it always did. The difficulty had been in keeping her hand steady as she used the stigmata of her other palm as an inkwell. She placed an inverted shot glass on the board to use as a planchette.

As prescribed, a single candle burning in the window, under a hurricane pillar, lit the scene, its miserly flame causing shadows to flit and play upon the log walls. The world is rife with eerie places that echo bitterly of the past, but tangibly haunted environs are rare. The abandoned houses and desolate caves of the former kind are usually inscribed with graffiti, the ground strewn with beer cans, cigarette butts and used condoms. These are places that may abut the netherworld, but the cracks between there and our realm rarely allow more than the whispers of the dead to pass through.

The truly haunted locations are usually relatively undisturbed by comparison. Whether out of fear or respect, most people eschew leaving lasting marks or litter where the dead may notice, or worse yet, take offense. The cabin was one of these places.

The roof was covered in green moss and largely intact, but some holes had let in the rain and the thick wooden planks of the floor were water-stained here and there with discolored spots that formed faces with knots for eyes and wailing mouths. Two bedrooms in the back were crowded with the decayed remains of beds topped with long-mouldering mattresses. Tables, chairs, and dressers had collapsed to pieces on the floor in each room and lay in ruins among shelves that had fallen from the walls.

No wall separated the main living area from the kitchen, where a rusty wood stove stood on a mortared stone platform. An iron ring set into a trapdoor in the floor presumably led to some larder below. Dawn could not help but notice the utter lack of animal activity in the cabin. No birds nests had been constructed in the rafters; no rodent lairs were to be found under any of the debris; not even a single spiderweb was to be found.

The cabin’s tragic story had become so enmeshed with local legend that uncovering the facts required scrubbing away the verdigris of rumor, lore, and conjecture until gleaming spots of truth could be seen. What was certain was that it had been built in 1860 by a carpenter named Tynan Boyle, a first generation American who had used every bit of his skill in constructing it. He had lived there with his new bride for almost a year before the nation nearly consumed itself in a flagrant act of self-immolation. One version of the legend said the marriage had been happy at first, others claimed the union had been doomed from the start.

It was unwise to walk barefoot around the area immediately surrounding the cabin, due to the significant accumulation of broken glass that existed just under the topmost layer of dirt. It was said that these shards were the remains of countless whiskey bottles that Boyle had hurled against nearby trees during his frequent drunken rages.

No serious archaeological investigation had ever been done of the site, as it was remote, and not terribly interesting from a historical perspective, but anyone so inclined could search the local archives and verify certain aspects of the story, revealing a rough timeline of events: a marriage, followed by four years of brutal war, followed by a tragedy.

Boyle had returned from the blood-soaked fields of the south to find the cabin empty. Some said she was motivated by love, others by hate, but his wife had left during his long absence. She eventually settled far across the northern border with an Acadian who had refused The Union Army’s call. The official cause for his desertion was listed in the military records as “congenital cowardice.”

Some said Boyle had hanged himself, others said he had shot himself through the heart with a revolver taken from a fallen Confederate officer, others said he simply drank himself to death. What could be agreed on was that ever after the cabin and forest surrounding it had been possessed of a sour, tainted tang. It had remained unoccupied for nearly fifty years, until the deed had been acquired by a young man seeking solitude after serving in the trenches of another terrible war, where even the air could kill. He had rehabilitated the cabin, but not himself, and was eventually discovered swinging from the rafters.

In the 1960’s the place had been squatted by a group that called themselves “a family,” but were, in fact, “a cult.” The locals had gone so far as to have a town meeting to discuss strategies for eviction, but they needn’t have worried. The thirteen souls inhabiting the cramped cabin that summer had not left a note the night they all consumed rat-poison, administering it to the young ones with a baby-bottle. They had been buried in the white robes they had worn in life, and a dozen nameless grave markers now lay in a row in the town’s cemetery.

Since then the cabin had remained unoccupied, finding a niche in the culture as a place of tragedy. Dawn had discovered it at the bottom of a list of “America’s Top 100 Haunted Locations” on a website dedicated to such phenomena, while searching for a place to look for answers to the questions that tormented her tortured soul. If none were to be found, the cabin seemed like a suitable place to end her journey.

There were instructions online for how to contact the dead, countless rituals featuring mirrors and candles and circles of salt. Most of them had the tenor of childrens’ games, rhyming chants and invocations, the kind of which you’d hear at a young girl’s sleepover party. Some required a sacrifice, and these drew Dawn’s attention, for she had known for a long time that nothing significant comes without a cost.

These procedures called for the death of a chicken, the death of a black cat, the death of a virgin, but Dawn saw the folly in them as easily as she did the nursery rhymes said to summon spirits. She knew that real magic required self-sacrifice, and so had sliced her palm and crafted the thing now nailed to the floor before her. Once she was absolutely certain that the candle, under its globe, would not be extinguished by a stray gust of wind, something the instructions had emphasized would be very bad, she was ready to begin.

Dawn had until sunrise to complete her task. Despite a life lived in shadows, or perhaps because of it, daybreak was her favorite. Her mother, Eve, had only ever called her “my morning sun,” when she was little, and more than once they had cowered together during long nights, allies in their secret war, awaiting the light of day. Later, Dawn had cowered alone.

Dawn paused and a conflict began inside her. She withdrew the whiskey from her satchel and unscrewed the cap, cracking the seal, then snatched the shot-glass from the parchment and poured herself a shot, which she held for a moment, but did not drink. She then carefully poured the measure back into the bottle and placed it on the floor next to her. It wasn’t for her. Plus, she hated the taste of whiskey more than anything in the world and she might need it later.

She closed her eyes and spoke;

You are dead, but I yet live.

Find your way now through the sieve.

The blood I spill,

My force of will,

Bid you now to show me all

The secrets that you have to give.

The candle flickered under its globe as a chill set suddenly into the air. For the first time in a very long time, Dawn was afraid. She had been numb so long that the sensations of pleasure, joy, and hope were like beloved childhood movies now half-remembered, their plots lost to time. It was grief that had sparked this process, a loss so profound that it had eclipsed the rest of her life.

After that had come the fear. That she could remember. The anticipation was the worst. To this day, the sound of a door opening caused her heart to race, but the human capacity for fear is finite and eventually the vessel collapses under its own weight, leaving only indifference behind. Dawn did not even fear death, for not even the devil-designed instruments of Hell could compete with the torments she had suffered in life.

There was no fear when she held the blades to her skin. There was no fear when she met with dark men full of dark promises in dark places. There was no fear while she tried to fit a needle to her vein in the passenger seat of a car going a hundred miles per hour down a highway at night with the lights off, some single-serving girlfriend cackling maniacally behind the wheel with white powder clinging to her upper lip.

The human capacity for pain is infinite, but exists as a series of plateaus. With enough scar tissue in place, a flame held to the flesh cannot be felt. As the nerves die new methods must be devised to feel anything at all. Eventually not even the harshest blows, hottest irons, or longest needles can pass through the thick cocoon of pain, which has, by now, become an armor against the world.

It was suddenly oh-so cold. Within a matter of moments the air in the cabin had passed from balmy summer night, to bitter arctic chill, to the kelvin cold of deep space where metal becomes brittle enough to shatter at a touch. The appearance of the man in the room with her shattered Dawn’s armor. He was not there and then he was there. With a gasp that seared her lungs with ice, Dawn found herself exposed to a fear unlike any she had ever known.

He was about her age, a wispy, slightly transparent, black and white projection wearing the uniform of a Union soldier. His face was puffy, yet sagged, with cruel, hooded eyes set above a sharp, crooked nose that had clearly been broken more than once. A mustache drooped over his thin upper lip. There was a hole in the breast of the uniform and below that, his distended belly bulged at the seams, the eagle-embossed buttons threatening to pop off. He was colorless, but Dawn somehow knew that his clothing was blue, as were his eyes, and that his nose was a glowing red.

The apparition spoke, demanding the bottle. “Give me that,” it said. Perhaps the dead are susceptible to fluctuations of temperature, for though the climate of the room had risen to a bearable degree, his breath spilled forth in a plume of frost that passed over the Ouija board and tickled Dawn’s nose with the scent of her first kiss. Her father had been a whiskey drinker, too.

Dawn’s memory was a shredded tapestry. Any sense of cohesive linearity had been thwarted by abuse, betrayal, and lies. She remembered her childhood up until her mother’s death, but all that came after was a blur, full of impossible-to-reconcile, disjointed recollections that felt like they belonged to someone else.

Later in life, the forgetfulness was engineered. The oblivion of drugs and alcohol provided a refuge, even though seeking solace in such a place inevitably led to terrible moments of lucidity when the supply ran dry. Shaking, puking days of withdrawal punctuated with screaming fights full of excuses, explanations, and apologies formed a pincushion of shame in Dawn’s mind.

She could sometimes remember the places, but rarely the faces, of her past. Friends and lovers passed quickly through her life in a series of uncredited cameos. Some of these episodes she remembered fondly, but if she lingered too long dwelling on them remorse would set in. There had been kindness, but the dreadful anticipation accompanying the knowledge that nothing lasts forever, bid her, each time, to break the precious thing before someone else did.

Dawn had lost and broken many phones. They would simply not be recovered after a night of drinking, or were hurled, in fits of rage, at people, walls, and once, memorably, into the mirror above a bar that had shattered and rained in shards over the bottles below. It was not lost on her that this was yet another way of forgetting. At first, the technology had supplemented memory, but gradually had transformed from an index to an indelible record of our lives.

A humiliating memory could be pushed away or edited to suit one’s needs; a high-definition video of the same event could only stand as confirmation of one’s failures. Worse were the blackouts illuminated with flashbulbs. An entire night erased by alcohol could now be revisited, each instance of foolish, unnecessary danger, each bad decision, now scrolling past in sequence. Dawn found it exceedingly helpful to be able to hurl her memories into rivers or leave them in taxicabs, then replace them with blank slates, devoid of any knowledge of her former self.

Despite her best efforts to forget, a voice, a face, a taste, but most impactfully, a smell, could trigger a cascade of memories accompanied by the inescapable emotional resonance of the initial experience. Ed Hardy cologne inevitability evoked a high-school boyfriend who had cheated on her with her best friend. She could not bear the taste of caviar, for even the briny smell of beluga brought her back to being beaten in a hotel room. The ghost’s spectral breath slapped her in the face and sent her spinning backwards through time to the worst memories of all. Only the shocking inescapability of his presence kept her grounded in the cabin.

“Give me that,” he growled again. Dawn held her breath this time and unscrewed the bottle of whiskey. Boyle grinned, exposing blackened teeth. He waved his hand. The candle flickered as the shot glass rolled off the ouija board and came to rest against her shin. She poured a measure and placed it back on the parchment.

The candle guttered and nearly went out as the ghost reached for the offering. Dawn’s heart seized. She had not been afraid of the dark since leaving her childhood home to be raised by relatives hundreds of miles from the tiny house, haunted by the specter of her mother, where the onset of night drew the monster from hiding.

Much evil in the world was enacted under the noonday sun; more yet in boardrooms, classrooms, and laboratories with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead; but darkness was evil’s ally. A cloak of shadows may not prevent the heavenly host from bearing witness to one’s wrongdoings, but when the air turned to pitch, even survivors looking back might find it impossible to account for the true magnitude of the crimes committed against them.

As the candle flickered back to life, Dawn saw that the shot glass was empty and Boyle’s ghost was grinning. She could tell that even in life he had been one of those people whose smiles inspired fear. Dawn had learned long ago that glee on the face of certain men was a harbinger of terrible things to come. When a sadist smiles, one should run, for the worst of humanity has always been driven by the engines of their joy.

“Pour another,” Boyle rasped. Dawn picked up the bottle. She had been conditioned to obey by a lifetime of trauma, willing to give up agency of herself in return for the most meager of promises. This compounded the problem, but as the scars and psychic wounds built up, the cocoon was woven around her. In the armored shell of indifference, she was protected, though the cost was to be forever denied pleasure, joy, or hope.

No, thought Dawn, remembering that the dead are empowered only by what energies we give them.

“No,” said Dawn, placing the bottle back down. “You have to give me something first.”

The ghost grinned, squinting, his smile growing impossibly wide, stretching to the corners of his cheeks and fanning his mustache out, his visage now evoking some bristly creature from the sunless trenches of the deep, dark sea. “I owe you nothing,” it hissed, “I make the rules here.” As it spoke, the candle guttered again.

Dawn steeled her nerves in the dimness, but could not prevent her hand from shaking as she reached for the bottlecap. As her fingers closed around the thin metal, the candle leapt back to life. “You will answer my questions, Tynan Boyle,” she said, sounding less confident than she wished, but more confident than she felt.

Names have power, and demons guard their true names, for the invocation of such can bind and compel denizens of the netherworld. Rumplestiltskin’s pride foiled him in this regard, and exorcisms can be concluded quickly if the possessing entity could be tricked into revealing this information. Spirits like Boyle, trapped in the liminal spaces between the realms of the living and the dead often lacked this advantage.

The ghost regarded Dawn grimly and said, “I will answer your questions as long as you keep pouring, little girl, but before that bottle is empty you are coming with me.”

Dawn filled the shot glass again and placed it on the ouija board. When it was empty, she asked the question that had drawn her to the cabin: “Why did my mother abandon me?”

Boyle laughed, a sound like rusty nails being drawn across a chalkboard. “In vino veritas,” he rasped, “We both know that bottle is still too full for the hard questions. Ask an easy one. Pour another.”

Dawn understood, so she poured again. Sober minds actuated lying mouths, but alcohol could draw out the truth like a poultice placed against an infection. She had fallen victim to this more than once, her carefully constructed fictions dissolving in vodka, disintegrating plans and evaporating relationships in a saturated solution of regrettable decisions.

“Was this necessary?” she asked, indicating the ouija board. Prior to arriving at the cabin she had imagined that it was a crucial part of making contact, but the apparition’s arrival had cast doubt on that notion, as Boyle seemed wholly unconcerned with the object she had bled to create.

“No,” he said, “You could have come naked as the day you were born, silent and carrying nothing, and still found me.” In that moment Dawn understood that the material and even somatic components of magic were merely touchstones for the spellcaster’s focus.

Most of Dawn’s suicide attempts had gone unnoticed by the world at large, except perhaps for motel housekeepers who would strip the piss-soaked sheets off the beds before flipping the mattresses. By then Dawn would have moved on, regrettably alive, and now without whatever drugs she had impulsively attempted to overdose on. She prided herself on her resiliency, but at times it was a curse.

Her first trip to the psych ward had been as a teenager. She would never admit it, but part of her liked being institutionalized. It was an easier way to live than she was used to, another instance of trading her agency for a bit of security. The bad ones were full of wild-eyed screamers and people beating their heads against padded walls. The good ones had jigsaw puzzles that were only missing a few pieces and regularly scheduled smoke breaks to look forward to.

At one of the good ones she had been exposed to some sort of cognitive behavioral therapy, lighting candles under the supervision of a petite, blonde doctor and writing letters to her abusers before holding the pages to the flame and watching it all burn up in a metal waste paper basket set near an open window. “This isn’t about them,” the doctor had said, “They aren’t here. This is all about you.”

Dawn looked at the grotesque visage of the phantasm before her and considered the therapist’s words. She had such a fragile sense of identity that doing things for herself felt like preparing a feast for guests that would never arrive, not out of spite or rudeness, but because they had never been invited. Why had Dawn come here, if not for Dawn.

She took a new tack, pouring several shots and asking Boyle questions about himself, searching for the spirit’s baseline like an interviewer conducting a polygraph test. Like all men of his ilk, he was a braggart, recounting his acts of heroism during the war, but Dawn knew the truth. Her investigation of the historical record had revealed that Boyle had spent much of his service in the stockade, saved from a dishonorable discharge by the fact that his commanding officer was a drunk as well, and a sympathetic one at that.

As the whiskey disappeared from the bottle, the ghost’s mood seemed to improve. Emboldened, Dawn foolishly asked about his wife. In an instant the good cheer fled from Boyle’s face. “Treachery!” he roared, as his eyes filled with flames, “Treachery worse than any of the southern bastards whose lives I snuffed out! Do not speak of her!” The candle guttered, throwing the room into a darkness lit only by the blazing irises of the ghost.

It hurt Dawn to apologize, as it always did when she had done nothing wrong, but she did so anyway. This was not the first time she had seen a sudden rage overtake a smiling face. More than once she had gasped out an “I’m sorry,” while strong hands gripped her throat.

As they sat in silence after the outburst the candle in the window returned to life as the flames in Boyle’s eyes died down. He took another shot and said, “Would you like to see your mother?” Dawn blinked and he was gone.

She looked down at the half-empty bottle and wondered for a moment if she were on some mad errand, alone in a desolate cabin, drinking herself into some final oblivion. She thought about the rope still concealed in her satchel. Then a voice over her shoulder made her jump.

“Come here,” said Boyle. Dawn turned to see the spirit standing in the kitchen next to the iron ring set into the floor. As if in a dream she rose and joined him. “Open it,” he said.

At first the heavy trapdoor wouldn’t budge, but as she set her weight against the floor and pulled with all her might it opened. The rusty hinges shrieked as the larder was exposed for the first time in memory. Beneath the cabin was an impossibly large cavern. Dawn gazed down at the faces staring up at her.

She felt Boyle’s hands gripping her shoulders. An icy chill passed through her clothes into her flesh as she looked down at the crowd gathered in the shadowy place below. Ten people in white robes stood in a loose circle around a man dressed as a doughboy with a noose around his neck, tied from a rope that led down his uniform before disappearing into the darkness at his feet. Three of the congregants held swaddled bundles in their arms.

All of them gazed up in abject terror. They were black and white, just like Boyle, but Dawn could tell the doughboy’s swollen face was purple above the black tongue dangling from his mouth. She could likewise tell that the vomit on the chins of the others was green, and though they stood still, they held themselves awkwardly, limbs bent stiffly in echoes of the contortions that had wracked them as they died. She could see hints of others moving in the gloom around them. “My friends,” said Boyle, causing Dawn to shiver as he squeezed her upper arms. “This is what you wanted, yes?” he added, the sharp tang of whiskey enveloping her.

“Yes,” was all Dawn could manage, but gazing down into the pit of despair she questioned her own motivations.

“Bring forth the girl’s mother, bring forth Eve,” rasped Boyle at the assembled dead. They shuffled, parting their ranks, and one of the ephemeral shades from the edge of the throng coalesced into a familiar shape as it drifted to the center of the circle.

“Dawn?” her mother said, gazing up. She was wearing a white robe, the same make as the other restless spirits. Her face was exactly as it had been in life, or at least as it was in Dawn’s memory. She seemed unmarked by death, save for the ligature mark that encircled her neck. “Come down here, Sweetheart.” she instructed, a slight hint of urgency to her voice.

As if in a dream, Dawn got down and dangled her legs over the edge before stopping herself as she remembered the purpose of her task. She noticed that she was somehow holding the rope from her satchel. She didn’t remember tying the noose. As she drew the rough hemp through her hands, the unhealed wound in her palm opened. The sight of the sanguine streak re-centered her. “Why did you leave me?” she asked.

“Come down here and I’ll tell you, My Love,” came Eve’s response. Dawn could see a hint of anger in her mother’s eyes, something she had never witnessed as a child. Eve had been possessed of a desperate melancholy in life, but had been impossible to vex. Even the righteous indignation she deserved, in light of her circumstance, was unable to pierce the veil of sadness. Dawn noticed Eve’s belly swelling against her robes.

“Mommy?” said Dawn, looking up from the red rope, “What did you used to call me?”

Eve stepped closer. The dimensions of the cavern seemed to shift as she moved and suddenly the spirit was close enough to reach up and take hold of Dawn’s foot. An icy chill raced up her leg. “I called you my sweet and dearest Dawn,” Eve said, unable to hide the uncertainty in her voice. A hole formed in the breast of her robes, echoing the one in Dawn’s heart as she realized Boyle was no longer behind her.

She turned her head and beyond the candle set by the broken window, could discern the shapes of trees outside. What sky was visible had taken on a purple hue. Time passed strangely in the presence of ghosts, warping perception and memory, but the night was coming to an end.

The glamour broken, Boyle seized Dawn’s foot. “You’re coming with me!” he shouted, and she would have been dragged over the edge had she not found purchase on a broken floorboard with her bloody hand. As she fought with him she truly understood that the dead have only the power we give them. She hurled the coiled length of rope into the pit and kicked herself free, scrambling away from the edge, past the wet, crimson handprint on the floor. A chorus of lost souls wailed from the blackness below.

Dawn lay there as light entered the cabin. The gravity of her grief had drawn her to many dark places, but none so dark as the place beneath the cabin, which she knew existed only within herself. Monsters were real, she wore the evidence of their existence on her body, but worse was the way they drank of your heart, taking their fill, leaving only a shell behind.

We are all haunted houses, it is merely a matter of degree, and some infinities are greater than others, but to give one’s ghosts free reign is to invite all manner of terrible things through the door. They arrive like a battering ram or sneak in through the cracks, vandals carried on false promises of love and security, as we futilely hope they will find a way to warm us in the darkness.

Hope may be the worst of all evils, for it prolongs our torment, but it is also a catalyst. We can carry it like a candle, and if we dare tread into the cellars of our souls we can ignite the pilot light of self-love in the furnace of our hearts. This is life’s loneliest task, for the ghosts that dwell in this most private of places are merely ourselves.

Dawn thought about all this as she lay on the floor. For those who have done their best to close themselves off, epiphany can feel like madness, but true insight calms, absent of the frantic uncertainty of mania. She felt warm in a way she had not for a long time, and could not attribute the feeling to the sunlight now reaching into the cabin.

Dawn sat up and looked into the hole. The length of rope sat at the bottom of the small excavation, no more than four feet deep. She pushed away her rationalizations and simply breathed in the earthy scent of the forest outside. A scratchy scrambling sound behind her caught her breath in her throat, and she turned to see a chipmunk next to her. Apparently unafraid, it sniffed the bloody handprint on the floor, before darting to the edge of the hole. It then turned to regard her a moment before dashing off to investigate the rest of the cabin.

Dawn stood up, free of fear for the first time in as long as she could remember.