The Ax

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Jenny’s sister had packed it for her as a joke, “a little ambience for the next Stephen King'' she'd written on the note wrapped around the candle. Now it would be the only light in the woods; the batteries in the old Coleman lamp died as soon as Jenny crossed the threshold of the cabin. Spooky, she thought to herself as she clawed through her backpack in search of a headlamp that wasn’t there. The light of the fading sun slowly retreated from the dusty entrance making it impossible to see into the void of her pack. She stared into it, willing the headlamp into existence. Maybe this is the start of my novel: idiot woman goes into the wild without a lantern, devoured by the monsters in the dark.

She arrived at dusk, much later than she’d expected but not surprising considering how late she’d left and how long it had been since she’d been to the family cabin. The trail stretched longer than she remembered and the woods seemed darker and wilder than when she was a child. The family had stopped their annual hike-out to the cabin immediately after grandpa died, which coincidentally happened at the very cabin he forced his family to visit every summer. Jenny’s mother, who had married into the family and found the cabin trip to be a particular brand of torture, had found him struck dead of a heart attack while chopping wood, ax still in hand. Everyone was both sad that he had left this mortal plane and elated that they could leave the cabin.

“He died as he lived - forcing his family to come to the shittiest place in the world,” her aunt Mara had stage-whispered when the paramedics, sweaty and wheezing from their trek-in, finally carried his body away. Jenny watched as his arm slipped out from the sheet still holding the ax in a death grip, how it dangled and bounced down the mountain.

It was too late to leave before nightfall - the paramedics had taken too long to collect the body - so the whole family had to stay one last sleepless night in what aunt Mara affectionately named and what forever would be known as the “death cabin.” That night in hushed tones Jenny’s parents whispered about the body while Jenny and her sister pretended to be asleep. He looked wrong. He looked afraid.

In the morning Jenny wandered to the back of the death cabin to stare at the spot where grandpa had died clutching his ax. She tried to will herself to see her grandfather’s corpse, imagining the way his eyes must’ve bulged out of his head in terror as he clutched the ax to defend himself against some ghoul that only children and old people can see. Instead all she noticed was a faint disturbance of earth and ponderosa pine needles where the paramedics had walked through.

As an adult, Jenny would lie and say that this was the moment that drew her to horror stories, her desire to will a monster into reality. But really it was the moment that followed, the one she never spoke of, when she realized her grandfather hadn’t been chopping wood. He had taken the ax and buried it again and again into the side of the cabin. The hacks in the wood oozed like open wounds, filled with sap or blood, filled with something alive.

***

She’d retreated to the largest bedroom, saving exploration and cleaning for the coming days. It still felt strange to be here after all these years. The cabin seemed larger somehow, like it had expanded and swelled. She was afraid to even open the cabinet in the bedroom, afraid it would lead to some other room, a growth that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Jenny reread her sister’s note in the light of the candle and smiled. Only Angela really understood why she had to come back here after all these years. After the final trip to the death cabin, Jenny couldn’t stop telling scary stories. She felt that some of the darkness oozing out of the wounds in the cabin had wormed its way into her heart and the only way to draw it out was to imagine darker things and speak them into existence.

In the months after grandpa died, the girls had refused to sleep apart. Jenny’s mother assumed they were traumatized by the death and left it alone. They would stay up late into the night, pressed together like sardines while Jenny whispered ghost stories into Angela’s ear until their heartbeats, thumping in tandem, sped up with fear. Jenny wondered, could her twin feel her heartbeat all these miles away? If something went wrong would Angela know by the sudden furious beating of her own heart that Jenny was afraid?

She spent most of the evening staring at a blank page. The cabin smelled musky, alive, but she pushed that thought from her mind and instead made a mental list of things to do the following morning: dust, sweep, set the rat traps, chop wood. No, can’t chop wood - there’s no ax. I saw it bounce down the mountain with a dead man. She startled herself with a sharp manic laugh.

It was a long time before she fell asleep. Was that prickling feeling on the back of her neck her imagination or the lizard brain screaming at her that she was being watched, that she was a lamb and there was a tiger in the grass, and he was hungry.

***

The longer summer days mean the candle will last longer; Jenny calculates it will last a week at least until it burns to the end of the wick leaving her in complete darkness. Then she will make the trek back down the mountain, hopefully with some semblance of a rough draft.

In the evenings she writes until the sun dips into the valley below and the light dies in the pine branches outside her window. Then she writes in the gray afterlight that lingers in the main bedroom while the rest of the cabin fills with shadows. She feels them approaching behind her, filling all those rooms with darkness until they creep under the door and begin to advance towards her desk. Finally she lights the candle and writes late into the night. Anything she writes after midnight is bullshit but she can’t shake that gnawing primal feeling of being watched and the writing helps her stay awake. It feels important to stay awake.

***

The evening of the fourth night she finds herself wandering the hallways of the cabin. She must have been sleepwalking. Fuck, the candle! Startled, she turns back in the direction of the main room, terrified she will see flames licking the hallway. To her relief there is only darkness. It is only when she crawls into the safety of her sleeping bag that she realizes the cabin is too small to have a hallway, that the many doors belong to rooms that don’t exist. There is something at the end of that labyrinth of hallways that is waiting for her.

The next morning Jenny begins to count the rooms every hour. In the morning there are seven rooms, at noon nine, then five in the late afternoon. When she sprints outside to check the back of the cabin nothing in the structure has changed but the air around it hums and pulses like breathing. When she puts her hand on the wood, she thinks she can feel a heartbeat.

***

She leaves that night. Half way down the mountain the batteries of the previously useless Coleman lamp come to life; the sudden beam of light catches something metal half buried under pine needles. It is the ax. It hadn’t made it all the way down the mountain with grandpa’s body. Staring at the ax, she knows she has to face whatever's been waiting for her in the darkness, biding its time all these years, and so she throws down her pack, grabs the ax and begins to sprint up the hill.

When she finally arrives, the cabin is waiting for her. It’s opened all its doors to let the shadows out. Jenny swings the ax again and again and hopes the horrible thing she sees oozing from the darkness is just her imagination finally working. She prays for a heart attack like the one that took her grandfather but it never comes. She swings and swings the ax until she finally sees it, the tiger in the grass, and she is screaming, screaming, screaming and yet there is no sound except for the wind in the pines.