Never a Gentle Master

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

Nobody should have seen it, nobody was meant to see it.

Josie and Aaron though, in that tentative stage of teenage enamourment where they weren’t quite calling each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” yet, but were sneaking off semi-regularly to get to grips with kissing, had ventured out into the darkness of the forest to do just that, and so saw the meant-to-be-unseen candle as a result.

“Look,” Josie said breathlessly, millimetres from Aaron’s face, “there’s a light on.”

With his back to the cabin, Aaron had to very reluctantly pivot himself around in order to see, and did his best to maintain the closeness between him and Josie as he did so. Whenever they parted, physically, figuratively, he was always worried they’d never make up the distance again. There’s no doing things by halves in the teenage mind, the heart caves in completely.

However, once he had laid eyes on the dimly glowing candle, Aaron loosed himself entirely from Josie in a fluid and almost trance-like way, taking up a position beside her instead, not even holding her hand.

“Wow, that’s so weird,” he said to her. A quiet nod made the reply. Aaron barely noticed.

The candle wasn’t emitting a peculiar or unusual light. It wasn’t brighter than it should have been, it was the typical, cinnamony orange in colour, and given the lack of draught or movement from within the cabin, it was static in its burning. Granted this can be fascinating in its own right, a lack of motion from something which is chemically all motion, a reaction ongoing and ongoing, but this is true of all candles, and therefore not really special to this candle in particular.

Nevertheless, there was something ineffable about it which had enraptured Josie and Aaron. Something strong, and dense, flowing out from the light of the candle into their heads and snaking its way down into the pits of their stomachs, where it coiled around and within their intestines, weighing them down and keeping them there, filling them up with rich, cinnamony light.

When Josie and Aaron didn’t return home that night, or the following morning, their respective families wailed in alarm and took to the streets of the small town where they all lived. It was a very small town indeed, most of the residents could reel off everyone else who lived there by name, list their occupations, list their children in age order, list the names of their family pets and so on. It was a town that nobody else would drive through, that had abandoned cabins on its outskirts in the woods.

In the silently knowing way of a mother, Josie’s mum Charlotte tempered her worry somewhat by telling herself there was a high likelihood this was all just a case of teenage lust perhaps getting a bit too wistful. Josie had never explicitly said that Aaron was her boyfriend, but she got bashful whenever he was mentioned, and he had become the only name which was uttered in a social capacity; other friends like “Cass” and “Daisy” and “Amanda” all being ceded to Aaron, Aaron, Aaron.

Remembering her own youth, brief trysts and tangles with boys before Josie’s dad Simon was even a face she knew, Charlotte decided to head out to the town’s surrounding woodland. It’s remarkable the way the young mind can turn such scrubby locations, sometimes vaguely smelling of urine, or burnt, or littered with cans and rubbish, always uncomfortable, into pinnacles of romance.

Charlotte thought of the scattered boulders, naturally occurring dolmens, which one could cosy up underneath, especially if it was raining. She thought of clearings with felled trees which made for okayish sitting points. She thought of forgotten fishing spots. She thought of the abandoned cabin.

Charlotte’s second child, Josie’s younger brother, Clarence, was getting a bit restless in her arms. He was probably hungry, but upon recalling the abandoned cabin Charlotte was overcome with a compulsion, a gut instinct, and decided Clarence could be dealt with after she had seen it through. She was so sure Josie would be there.

About halfway to the cabin, the dreary pavements and buildings long behind them now, following a well trod path into the sumptuous greens of the woods, Clarence began to scream his head off. It was that proper, anguished crying young children do when whatever is happening in their heads is truly an inconsolable matter.

Charlotte shushed him absentmindedly, tried to jiggle him around on her hip a bit. The cabin was close now. He could wait.

The peaty, verdant smell of the woods grew more heady the more Charlotte walked. Biting bugs that were hard to catch with your eyes began to bother her, hover over the heat of her head like a rotten halo. Clarence screamed and screamed, red in the face, small body trembling with the effort of it all.

“Shh, shh,” Charlotte intoned, “we’re almost there now look. Almost found your silly sister. Look see, there’s the path opening up a bit… And there’s the silly cabin where your silly sister is… Let’s… Bring her… Home...”

Some birds or other small creatures skittered in the undergrowth at Charlotte’s arrival. She’d had intentions to shout at her daughter, really try to explain just how silly this all had been, but after the sight of the cabin had made her trail off the urge to pick anything back up again had too subsided.

“Hey mum,” Josie managed, just about, as her mother took up position beside her, “look at that.”

“There’s two now,” added Aaron in a monotonous drawl.

Two candles. Charlotte could see. She couldn’t blink, her body was full of molten gold, thick, syrupy cinnamon light. Two candles gently burning in the window of the abandoned cabin.

“Wow,” Charlotte said, her voice quiet, a whisper, “that’s so weird.”

Clarence had stopped crying.

A bird, or some other small creature, screeched, and it started to rain.

-/-

By the time Charlotte was found by Simon, a similar time to Aaron being found by his own parents, there were five candles burning in the abandoned cabin.

Absences begot more absences as a strange ripple made its way through the town. A chain reaction, a Rube Goldberg machine pinging and bouncing around all the degrees of separation that kept everyone in such a stickily spun web.

Simon’s boss at the pharmacy, Andrew, was driven to the woods by Simon’s absence. Andrew’s wife, Molly, a school teacher, came next. Then a flurry of students, more parents, more bosses, more customers, more neighbours and friends and cousins.

Nobody ever felt compelled to call any external authorities. It was as though being struck by an absence infected the host with a tiny, weedling parasitic urge to think logically about where the absent person must be, and then follow that logic through, up the trail in the woods to the abandoned cabin, without so much as a word of this to anyone else, wherein that someone else would then inherit the parasite; chewing, chewing, idly eating away at the brain with syrupy saliva, until that person ended up at the cabin too.

The subsequent candles didn’t really appear in the cabin windows. There was no fading into existence, no vapour, no materialising. Instead it was more like the candle had been there the whole time and perhaps you just hadn’t noticed it.

By the time the last of the town’s residents made his way up to the cabin, an elderly man who spent his waning years propping up the town’s bar, and who was here in pursuit of the barman, it was hard to count just how many candles there actually were. Every single windowsill in the cabin was full of them. They were stacked perilously close together, melting and mutating into one another, conjoining wicks and wax and endlessly burning.

When night fell the whole cabin was enveloped in an ever-so-slightly undulating, amber glow. There was a subtle menace to it, an air of mischief like a Halloween pumpkin; something embryonic about the way the cabin was so full of light and warmth and spilling it out from its windows.

Nobody noticed when exactly it was that the cabin caught fire. Again, it was a peripheral occurrence, perhaps it had always been burning and you just hadn’t seen it.

The fire danced around the decomposing wood, gleeful, just as it danced into the heads and the throats and the bellies of the townspeople. It seared their eyes open. It burnt their mouths shut. It cast long shadows and glazed everyone’s skin with ochre.

Like a laugh, heat and smoke expelled itself from the cabin interior and took the front door with it, allowing an insight into the terrible inferno which raged inside. Everything was orange, everything was hot.

Josie was the first to go. As if that had been her cue, as if that’s what she had been waiting for days to see.

She was gaunt as she went as she hadn’t been eating. Gaunt, damp, smelly. She went slowly, at a measured pace, right up to the threshold of the cabin and the fire within.

The burning wood smelt rich, spiced.

As Josie crossed over and into the cabin, not a soul was moved by the terrible, guttural shrieking that commenced as soon as she did. Everyone silently, dutifully, watched as the young girl thrashed around inside, clawed at her painful skin as the fire devoured it, heaved with the agony of all those bits of herself, cells, nerves, muscle, eyes, hair, torturously being broken down by the flames.

Whether she was overwhelmed by smoke inhalation first, or whether she simply succumbed to the fire is unclear, but as soon as a quiet befell her Aaron began the walk to take her place. His screams were a bit more wet, like something bubbled in his throat, something melting and bursting.

Charlotte went next, with Clarence, who hadn’t cried again the whole time up until now.

The smell of meat, cooked meat, burnt hair, soon mingled with the woody, spicy smell that had been the cabin burning.

As more of the townspeople made their tiny pilgrimage from where they had been observing into the fire itself, the more cluttered their thrashing became. They would trip and fall over the molten corpses already on the ground, sometimes then stay down there with them, skin so hot it would fuse together.

Still, nobody observing reacted to a thing. Every single, horrible, immolated demise barely provoked a blink; even if the body in there was a child’s, even if occasionally someone did scream for help.

It took a long time for everyone to go. The human body is excruciatingly resilient.

The elderly man, the bar prop, paused slightly during his own advance, the final advance, to notice that the inky blackness of night was softening a bit; there was a bluey greyness encroaching, brushing the tips of the grass, and it would be daytime soon. He went nonetheless. He was the only person who didn’t make a sound at all. Not even so much as a whimper.

-/-

Once daylight properly broke it began to rain again. The fire went out. The cabin had been totally incinerated. The townspeople had been reduced to a strangely alien pile of conjoined bodies in what would have once been the cabin’s hallway. You could tell who went first and who went last; the difference between char and pus, ash and blister, black and yellow.

It’s unclear how long it took for all this to be discovered by the outside world, as mentioned earlier this wasn’t the sort of town that anyone ever drove through, it was small and self contained. By the time it was though, everyone was just bones, and deciphering what had actually happened was impossible. Some people blamed a cult, some people blamed mass hysteria, some people blamed the supernatural.

Even with this, what is maybe something of a cautionary tale, it’s difficult to conclude exactly what to be cautious of.

If ever there is a candle burning in the window of a cabin which has been abandoned for years, and nobody is meant to see it, perhaps the thing is just to try your best not to.