Inhabitation

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. A new family was beginning to make the spacious cabin a home, and that started with their attempts to clean out the clutter and force the dust to depart. The candle that was burning in the window was one among many positioned variously around the house, light which added to that which emanated, along with warmth, from the fire burning in the hearth. These were a temporary necessary compromise with the brute reality of a winter night, because the power wouldn't be connected to the cabin for around a week. They'd moved to this cabin because they couldn't afford their family house anymore; all three members of this family have their own demons. This move is a way for them to try to get away from their past: to get a fresh start, and build a new life. The night is dark and long.

Over the first two days everything seems fine, and the family are settling in. The adults have even been rather cheerful, which is a nice departure from their typical atmosphere, and the children have been playing a lot, something they normally don't seem to have the energy for. The cabin is beginning to look more like a home, and new mess is accumulating - the mess of children. The children have been drawing a lot, drawings that the adults don't seem to take much notice of, and talking in whispers that stop suddenly when the adults enter the room. The adults take no notice, or if they do notice they think nothing of it - after all, it is probably just kids being kids, and the worst that can really happen with that is some hare-brained scheme that has to be foiled at the last minute to prevent a hospital visit. At least when this kind of thing happens there is usually a prolonged moment of silence which is the omen a parent must pay attention to: the calm before the storm.

Sometime on the third night though, the parents started to bicker a little about relatively insignificant matters, nothing major, and the children barely even took notice of the discord which had entered into the household - they were too caught up in their mysterious games. And still, the parents took no notice, although if they had they might have recognized the omen, because the children were still drawing, and there were lots of orange and yellow drawings with a black figure leading the children around - images of fire. On the fourth night, the parents had started to fight in earnest, and were dragging up every single skeleton from the past and bringing it out into the open, but on the children played, keeping completely out of the way of the parents. The parents didn't even register the absence of the children, so wrapped up were they in their tit-for-tat tooth-for-tooth mentality of score-settling every emotional conflict they'd ever had in their long relationship.

At some point the father of the family starts to have sick fantasies, and try as he might to suppress them, his efforts only intensify them. If he had paid attention to the drawings of his eerily absent children, which now litter the floor of the cabin, he would recognize his vision as the same one which the children have been drawing again and again: the candle by the window, and all the other candles in the house, starting a fire that would extinguish the diseased spirit of this family. He has the oddest feeling of being weighed down, as if there were something depressing hs nervous system, and it seems to be suppressing his will to power of any kind: he feels himself to be succumbing to some force, some 'other'. Perhaps this is just his twisted rationalization for wanting to succumb to his baser self; what is important is that he begins to feel as if he has no choice, as if he will have to burn the cabin to the ground with his family in it, because it's the only way to purify their souls from the familial pathology - their special species of sickness.

Before the week is up, there is a night where the father is awake in the middle of the night, with just the one candle burning in the window of the cabin, and he is pacing, pacing, pacing, back and forth. He feels like a man possessed, and cannot rid himself of the impulse to burn his entire family alive, to end their suffering and extinguish their dim and faltering sparks. It dominates his thinking and he feels at this point that it is not a matter of if he will commit the act, but a matter of when. Desperately, he tries to hold out, tries to wait until daylight, so that they will be just one day closer to having power - maybe the tension will subside then. He has a weird feeling that there is something about the candle in the window which is odd, but somehow it's like he can't bring himself to focus on the matter. After a long period of chasing his own tail, finally he realizes: he has never had to relight that candle - it has always burnt.

He is barely able to wrench his attention away from his homicidal machinations, but he searches his mind: did he or his wife ever light that candle when they entered? He assumed that she had - when he unlocked the door, he had simply swung it open and turned back to get more stuff out of the car, and she had taken stuff inside. His mind started to spin but by the time he managed to ground himself he found that there was a stench of gasoline in the air and he had a box of matches in his sweaty hands. He feels a sudden surge of rebellion, the final wave of resistance, but it splashes against the cliffs of his resignation and indifference like raindrops onto roads. Without really knowing what he is doing or why he is doing it, he strikes one of the matches and throws it to the floor.

As the ground around him catches fire, he finds that his eyes are glued to the candle in the window, and he discovers that he can feel nothing. Even as the fire spreads up his arms and legs, even as the children wake up and begin to scream, rushing to the windows to discover that they have been boarded up - all except the window with the candle - he cannot feel a thing, and cannot drag his gaze away from the candle which burns as a solitary beacon in the window. Even as the flames lick at the window frame, and one would expect the candle to begin to melt due to the immense heat, it continues to stand entirely unaffected by the inferno which rages within the cabin. It burns unaffected by everything which surrounds it, and so too does the man, unhearing and unseeing the horror and tragedy which he has brought on his family. They are screaming and burning, but as he breathes his last breaths, he wonders whether the way they are dying is really, after all, that different from the way that they were all living.

x

"And the fire burnt and burnt, and the children screamed, and it's important that you really try to imagine their pain, their incomprehension and terror, at being burnt alive. Imagine the cabin, slowly being transformed into a home, being consumed by flames as the screeches and wails of the children ring out, as they start to die. Really imagine the flames eating up the image in your mind, imagine them consuming wholly the entire fantasy, and imagine the fire spreading, to the surroundings, to the firmament. Imagine the fire in the cabin burning up and destroying the evil spirit - be that the soul of the cabin or the soul of the family - and consigning that being to hell. Imagine that there is no redemption, picture how wholly the fire consumes, and picture that there is no end to what it will devour if one allows it the space. Pour your energies, your attention, into imagining the cabin children, and imagine that the fire is spreading."

"Oh, look at that - the fire's started to spread." As the kids wrench their eyes away from the dancing, flickering flames in the centre of the campsite, they see a writhing ring of black fire marking out a sacrificial prison around the edges of the camp - and the ubiquitous wall is slowly creeping inward. The storyteller suddenly begins to laugh, and his laugh sounds like the rattling of chains, and the children begin to scream.