The Cabin Beyond the Moor

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. I had never been so terrified since the day I ran with Anna.

I had been visiting this cabin beyond the moors since I was a girl back in ‘61. Gran had always warned me not to go across the street and down the hills into the lowlands since the fog was dense and as thick as her old, dusty blackout curtains older than the war.

There were always stories of children disappearing. Something about the fog and mist was as if being transported to an entirely different world. I often stayed on the edge, looking for shadows as some of the other children went down to play. I could always hear phantom giggling as they played among the small hills hidden amongst them.

One morning, I wanted to explore a little more. It was fall and again, in my early teens, I was at Grans and the dusty curtains. That day was the day I wanted to be a rebellious and go against the village’s old warnings. The idea made my heart thrum in excitement. Like being in the face of a giant monster you could feel but not really touch. The children had not come out to play this morning and I had the whole mouth of the moor to myself. There was no one to tell Gran and no one to tell me off for disobeying the well-spoken rules.

I inched closer as the gravel crunched beneath me. The grass was slick under my boots at the top and the hill was steep. I usually saw some of the young ones slide on their trousers and skirts until their bottoms were stained brown and green as they raced to get into the fog before the others. I dug my boots in a little on their sides, climbing down until I was down to the bottom and the mist stood in front of me as a massive natural wall.

The mist itself was so fine, like specks of dust as I stood close to it. Just a breath between my lips made everything spin like breathing on cobwebs.

What Gran didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her right? It’s not like this stuff could follow me. It wasn’t like walking through actual dust. This was just mist and fog and all the usual eerie things that happened back home along the river.

Stepping in, I expected it to feel like fabric but as I walked deeper, it was just cold and miserable feeling. I didn’t get why the kids played in it so much. The more I walked through, the more I could feel the damp on my sweater and soon I could make out the sights of more hills and stones.

This was it? Kids must have gotten more excited because they could play hide and seek without really hiding.

I kept walking and walking, looking back to only see the natural wall again. The hill and the chimney of Gran’s cottage were long gone now.

As I kept walking, the fog formed a tunnel around me until I reached the other side. Here, the moors were clear and the cool highland wind blew through an open valley between the hills. On the other side, I could make out the woods.

Papa, my grandfather, always kept old maps of the area but I never remembered if there was a forest or not. Everyone had to get firewood from somewhere right? Otherwise Gran’s place would be frozen every winter.

Looking back, there was nothing but the big wall of fog behind me and just the open field in front of me. I looked down on the ground and couldn’t see any of the footprints made by the kids who had played in it before. Maybe they only stuck to the fog wall?

“Beyond the moor, there is a door. Open that door, you will see something you want more. If it gives you more, it will take back more than you walked in for.” Gran used to always say when I asked about the fog.

I thought it was just a stupid rhyme to keep me from getting muddy but maybe there really was something more to it. That the moor had a magic to it more than the mist.

As I kept walking, I could only see the remnants of flat stones and a road. It wasn’t even well-worn and much of the dead plants were dormant and waiting for spring crunched under my feet as I walked between the cracks.

I soon found myself at the edge of the woods. No mist swathed between the trees…but there was something. Lingering among the trees, I could see stones stacked up like Gran’s cottage walls and a thatched roof.

The little crooked path lead right to it’s door.

’This is stupid’, I thought then. It’s just an old cottage. An abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods...but it was something different. Something that wasn’t just Gran’s cottage and I could feel the urge to explore it rising in me as my boots started walking and crunching as stone turned to leaves.

There were no lights on inside and moss covered the top of it like blotches of blight.

I could make out the bubbled windows on it’s face. The glass oddly was still intact, the one window in the front a sleepy eye with moth-eaten curtains draped in it partially. I could feel that familiar exciting steady thrum in me again, traveling from my heart down to my fingertips as I ventured closer to take a peek in the window.

There was nothing in there but a few left-behind items: a tin cup, some old newspapers and a few childrens toys that looked half crumpled to dust. Maybe years ago someone used this as their playground just as I was.

Why was Gran so worried about something like this? Why didn’t she say anything about the woods? For a curious teenager, this was the perfect place to escape somewhere boring and already my hands were feeling along the dead ivy and stones until I was at the door.

The old handle was well rusted. I wiped my hands and gripped it, pushing the door inward to see if it was open. It moved, but not much. I tried putting more pressure with my shoulder and it moved a little more. It felt like something was wedged behind it but I couldn’t see what.

As I pushed my way in, I could squeeze myself through the crack until I was completely inside the cabin and could see more of what was inside. The first thing I went to look at was the mantle, spying a few browning pictures of people long gone that might have lived there. The haunted faces of children stared back at me as if asking for help out of taking these photographs.

It was hard to believe such a big family lived in such a small space.

As I looked back toward the door, there was a big heavy cauldron pot that had been stuck up against it that would have been too heavy for a child to move unless they could roll it.

The wind coming through the door rattled the papers enough to make me jump out of my skin. The yellowing pages were cracked and brittle, enough so I thought it would snap off in my fingers. Each of them had a picture and I could just make out the dates in the corners.

1880. 1900. 1920. 1940.

Save for the last one: 1960. Just a year ago.

I brushed off some of the dust and dirt off of them, seeing the picture of a young boy about age seven looking back at me. I drifted over to the window toward the light so I could read the news.

“Jimmy McKinley, aged seven, disappeared from his family home the morning of April 12th after last being seen playing in the moors with other local children. Other parents report their children having last seen Jimmy run past them deeper into the moors. Police are still searching for Jimmy with the last sign found being a boy’s loafer stuck in the soft ground.”I read off to myself. “Parents should be advised to keep their children indoors and be on the lookout for suspicious persons and avoid traveling across the moor.”

Jimmy McKinley.

I did remember him a little.

He was always wiping his nose on the underside of his ugly knitted jumper sleeve and had so many freckles, it seemed like there was no room for more. He was always the loudest kid, chasing after other kids through the fog pretending to be a monster or a witch. I hadn’t been around that day when he disappeared but I remember Gran tutting about it.

“Shouldn’t have let him go into the moors. I tell their parents all the time, they’re going to get into something they shouldn’t. That Jimmy boy got more than he asked and it took him!”Gran huffed about as she made a big batch of breakfast for me and my parents.

I looked back to the other papers and gathered them into the light.

“Arthur Bell. Age eleven. Lucille Henderson. Age ten. Michael McAllister. Age nine. Christina McMasters, age eight.”I read off as I brushed off each newspaper. Each of the children were a year younger than the last. Almost as if it was counting down. Each time, it changed. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy...but what were these newspapers doing here? Why was someone so interested in the missing children?

I put them back on the table, wiping my hands on my trouser leg and looked around at the walls at more of the blankly staring pictures.

“Creepy cabin in the woods, newspapers about missing children…Nothing here Gran.”I openly chided myself for being afraid of it for years.

Yet the mystery excited me! Finding a cabin in the woods with all this was like having my own Sherlock Holmes experience all to myself! If anything, now I had a place to come to on my own that the younger kids didn’t go near and with some luck, I could make this my space.

My space alone to visit and get away from the ugly war curtains and the heavy smell of moth balls and tea.

All I needed was a radio or something, my magazines and I could have a place to be at peace.

I left the cabin as it was, closing the door without care, walking back down the path I came from. As I reached the edge of the woods, I could see something ahead this time in the middle of the path

A small red box that shone in the sun, gleaming with something on top of it. When I got closer, I saw it was a hand radio. A pretty red one with chrome features like I had seen in the shops back home. I knelt down and picked it up, not knowing or hearing anyone come close to the cabin while I was in it.

Finders keepers then. I looked back at the cabin one more time, smiling a bit to myself before walking off.

Over the next few days, I came back to the cabin in the woods, running past all the children playing in the mist to get through it faster and get back to the cabin with my arms full of my magazines, the strap of the radio on my wrist. I told Gran I was just going over to another one of the children’s houses to read and listen to music to which she didn’t care so long as it wasn’t the moor.

Never the moor.

I explored the cabin further, looking around the other rooms and finding more drawers and boxes to probe through. Each one had more papers about the local town, more newspapers about the wars. One had a metal kettle that smelled of old tea and even more children’s toys scattered about aimlessly. Most looked ancient, others looked fairly new.

I would spend all day in the cabin, reading and moving things around to make it more of my own. I stored tins of biscuits and sweets I had taken from Gran’s cupboards to snack on with glass bottles of soda no one would care to miss.

By the time the evening fell, I had read through all of the magazines and eaten nearly all the snacks I had brought that day. On the end of the third day, I felt a little bit bored. There was no one to speak to really and I felt like if I wanted it to be really a hideaway, I should have a friend. If I had any.

Some of the children thought Gran was too crazy to be around so therefore as her grandchild, I must be just as mad.

I would just have to wait until I went home from this stay in the country to talk to one of my mates at school about it.

The next day, I came back but this time, it wasn’t alone. Someone else was singing and playing in the cabin. I thought about the audacity someone had to find my hiding place but it must have been common. I peeked through the window and saw a girl around my age, playing with my red radio. Her clothes were much different, bright and pastel looking while her hair was tied up in a ponytail.

“Who are you?”I asked, nearly scaring her when I came in.

“Ah! Oye, don’t scare the piss out of me like that!”She said, getting off of the floor. Even her shoes looked far different, looking like puffy-versions of sneakers the boys wore. Even her socks looked funny.

“Okay, sorry…but this was my hideout first and that’s my radio. I’ve never seen you in the village.”I frowned. Someone dressed in those colors would stand out in all the grey, blacks and browns everyone wore.

The girl scrunched her nose, the freckles squishing with it. She moved her blonde ponytail over her shoulder and brushed off her pants. “I was visiting my Nan and got bored. Went down the hill to the moor and just walking until I found this place. I’m Anna. Anna Collins.”She said, looking down at my radio.

“Isabelle…”I slowly introduced myself.

“Isabelle? Nice. I tried getting your radio to work but it only plays really old music. Stuff my Mum and Nan listen to.”Anna said, passing the radio to me. I twisted the dial a little and it picked up the local station, playing one of the newest Beatles songs. Anna scrunched her nose at it again, looking down at all the magazines. “These are old too. What you like old retro stuff?”

I could feel the frown pulling on my face. “No, I just like the bands. I just got them last week.”

Anna laughed. “Well, old or not, do you mind if I hang out? My Nan’s place is boring. If I have to hear about the news again, I’ll tear my hair out.”

“Sure.”I resigned.

Anna and I talked for hours. She seemed to experience a whole different side of the world than I did and when she told me about the music she liked, I had to laugh. I had never heard of them and the lyrics she sang while holding onto an old candlestick dancing around the cabin sounded a little much. Music that my Mum would break the record and toss out with the trash they sounded too grown.

By the end of the fourth day, I felt like I had stepped into Anna’s world a little more. A world of brighter colors, ruffles and a care free attitude. We walked back through the moor together and by the time I got out of the thick fog, Anna had disappeared.

It went on for days and each time, Anna and I would meet at the cabin. I brought more magazines from the corner store and she brought hers. Granted, hers looked way crazier than mine! These were something Mum would call ‘obnoxious rags’ and tell me to stay away from them. All the bright colors were too tempting not to thumb through.

Still, we were both running out of things to do. Even when she brought her own music and we listened to it together, after a while, it got boring.

“Too bad we don’t have, like, an arcade or something. Villages like this have nothing! I hate coming out here. There’s nothing at Nan’s to do but watch the news and go to church.”Anna griped.

I laughed. “I know. The only thing exciting that happens here is the Christmas Party the church throws but other than that, the markets are boring.”

Anna sat against the wall, thinking to herself in a silent gap for a few minutes before she learned forward. “Do you know about the old story about this place? About the Village?”She questioned. I shook my head.

“Gran just said that I should never go into the moor.”I looked to the window while I sat on the table, looking out into the trees and the mist beyond them.

“My Nana said that the moor eats children. Every once in a while, a kid goes missing. They find little bits and pieces of them yeah but like…only shoes. Or a sweater. No one’s ever found them again.”Ann leaned forward, drawing her legs up a little. “The last kid that went missing was a boy. They only found his shoe in the mud.”

“Yeah, Jimmy McKinley.”I said, crossing my legs on top of the table. “Gran said that kids disappear because they don’t listen to her about going out here. I decided to try it and that’s how I found this place.”I shrugged, my pigtails falling back over my shoulders. “I’m glad I did. You know the strange thing is that I find things once in a while. I found that radio, and then I found you. I wasnt wishing for it but it seems to know what I need.”

Anna laughed. “Or you’re finding people’s old junk and random strangers in stinky old cottages.”She calmed down and continued. “But yeah…see there was a curse on the moor. Apparently a woman lost her kid a few hundred years ago and blamed the whole village. She thought they all kidnapped her child and thought she was some kind of like devil worshiper you know? A witch.”

Anna looked around the cabin a little. “So she puts a curse on the land. Saying that anyone who’s child went in would become her child until she had a child from every family who punished her.”

“Crazy…So for what? Hundreds of years kids have been going missing?”It sounded too mad to be true.

“Yeah but Nan said a priest came and did some kind of prayer magic woo-woo and scared the curse off. For a little bit anyway. I think it’s dumb. Old people superstitions to keep anything fun from happening here.”Anna sighed. “Still, let’s not let them get us. We’ll stick a flashlight or a candle in the window if it’s not safe if one of us gets here first. Like how people do on Christmas but for ghosts.”

I couldn’t help but agree. The only thing that happened to me was more of a blessing than a curse. I had a friend here for the first time, a means of entertaining myself with something I had really wanted…why not come back? I felt like I was whole before boredom struck again.

Yet this time, I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know what would satisfy that empty space in me that wanted to be filled. I did know though that I wanted to have Anna meet Gran but every time we came to the wall of fog again, she disappeared.

If anything, I wanted to know more about the curse after Anna brought it up. When I went back to Gran’s, I tried looking around all of her books but found nothing about it. In the morning, I tried going to the local library and found just as much. It was like no one ever wanted to speak of it let alone put it in writing.

Writing it must have made it feel real and if it was real, it would just made people curious.

I went back to the cabin in the afternoon where Anna was waiting with a new magazine, listening to her ‘Walkman’. She saw me and pulled one of the earphones off. “There you are. When I came back today I found something.”She said, pulling it backwards so it hung around her neck as she got up and lead me over to a room that had the big heavy wooden desk I had found more papers in.

This time, there was a leather book. When I opened it, the smell of must made my nose scrunch and I squinted at the writing. It was an old style, loopy like lots of the old documents from parliament. “A journal?”I said as I took a seat on top of the desk, not caring about the dust and debris on top.

I could barely read it. I could catch occasional words about the village but someone older could definitely read it. “I’ll take it to Gran and see what she if she can read it. She has handwriting kind of like this too. I can barely read her Christmas cards sometimes.”I said, closing it again. “It’s old though. The first date is from the 1800’s.”

“I bet it’s from the father on the mantle. This place is pretty old.”Anna guessed, sliding off the desk and going back to the main room.

Again, I lost Anna in the fog as we went back home.

I was hesitant to show Gran what I had found the next morning at breakfast. The thought of the wooden spoon in her hand cracking against my backside had me inwardly wincing. If she knew I went down the hill into the moor, she’d likely bury me in her garden. I looked down at the journal in horror of that idea but decided to maybe try a different route.

“So…Gran…I heard someone in the shop talking about the Bell Family a long time ago. Did something happen to them?”I asked her, keeping my secret on my lap.

Gran looked back from her pot of beans and scrunched her beaky-looking nose. She turned around to face me. “Don’t mill around those folks, you hear? That family went through too much.”She shook her head and turned back around. “We all did too when I was a girl.”

“What happened then?”I asked her, sitting on the edge of my seat.

Gran took the beans off the heat and she rarely did so. She always finished a meal but something heavy sat on her shoulders. “I had a sister. Lucille. Gorgeous girl, had the looks of an angel, my Lucy. She disappeared like that McKinley boy last year. The only thing they found was her shoe, still tied like it had slipped her foot.”She shook her head, hobbling over to the loaf of bread to grab the serrated knife to dig into it for toast. “Mr. Bell lost his oldest boy and went mad. Said his cottage was visited by the witch and he killed his wife thinking she’d done it.”

Gran seemed to get anxious, shaking her head side to side while her knuckles turned white. “Everyone’s lost a little one at some point. It’s why we watch out for ours now. I tell them to stay away from the moor! I tell them! Don’t go where you can’t be seen!”

She slammed the knife handle on the butcher block counter, looking back at me with a haunted, sad expression that wrinkled around her eyes further. “You stay out of that moor, Isa. You tell those kids too and keep them safe.”She said and then turned around back to making breakfast.

The look on her face said everything but yet, I feel like all my questions were unanswered. Still…Great Aunt Lucille had been eaten by the moor too. Ten years old. She was only a little younger than me. I wanted to at least return the journal and warn Anna I couldn’t play there anymore.

I went back to the moor and stared at that swirling wall in front of me once more. I made sure it was a spot where no children were playing so they couldn’t see me sneak through.

Anna was there at the cabin again but she looked bothered. She had her arms folded as she looked at the pictures on the mantle. When she heard me, she grabbed me and pulled me over. “Isabelle, I found something. Look at the pictures!”She said, pointing at the pictures of the many children there. I looked at her and shrugged.

“They’re the Bell kids right?”I questioned, pointed at the picture of a gaunt-looking boy. “The oldest kid there is Arthur.”

Anna shook her head, going back to grab the newspaper. She grabbed the most recent paper, Jimmy’s article and brought it over. She took the picture down and held the pictures together. “Look! Doesn’t this kid look like Jimmy?”She said, and I took them to look at them closer by the window.

“Yeah…Yeah but why’s that? Was Jimmy related or something?”I questioned more.

“No! So why would they look the same? I went to the library and found more about it. The Bells only had two children. Two boys. There’s got to be close to ten kids here.”Anna pointed out. I looked around the room at all the pictures.

Slowly the mystery started to piece itself together.

If the land was curse and the witch took the children…she had to have a place to put them right? Maybe Mad Mr. Bell had told the truth.“The Bells built this on her land…so this place…”Anna continued, looking back around all the pictures. There was a girl with pigtails, staring at me with a pleading stare.

Aunt Lucille.

I looked to Anna. “We should go. We have to go!”I grabbed her hand as we can out of the cabin. I held her hand the entire time, running across the field and not daring to look back.

I ran and ran until we hit the mist and I squeezed her hand so tight so I couldn’t lose her.

I nearly ran into the steep hill and when I looked back when Anna was gone. I went back in to the mist to look for her, calling her name over and over again to no luck.

That was the last time I went into the moor. The last time I went to the cabin in the woods.

Until now.

I went back to the village for a funeral. Another child had gone missing a month ago. A girl. Gran had outlived many in the village but she was finally laid to rest next to the empty plot for Lucille near the church.

The night after the funeral, I stood at the hill looking at the unchanging fog. They had added a guard rail now as they had paved the road and needed to keep cars from going into the moor itself. The children no longer played in the lowlands.

I threw my leg over the rail, hopping over. I had been thinking about the cabin. Thinking about the pictures and that maybe, just maybe, it was just my childish imagination looking for something more exciting than Gran’s cottage.

I walked out into the moor, through the swirling mist. I thought that perhaps I would just wander out further to see if it still existed. Just to make sure I hadn’t gone crazy as I grew up. It seemed like ever since I got back on the last visit, things had gotten worse to the point that the final nail in the coffin was Gran passing. Four deaths in a span of twenty years, mingled with misery, pain and debt.

I reached the end of the mist to the open field that now the grass had become even more overgrown, covered in purple heather and thistle. I wandered down the path that was now near impossible to see until I reached the woods.

The cabin was still there. It stared at me like a memorial to my childhood and all the memories I had with Anna.

As I got closer and looked into the window, I could see all the things we left behind and my old red radio on the table. Though, there was something new. Something piled on top of the papers that looked relatively white and crisp. I went to the door, jiggling the door to open it and step inside, going over to the stack.

I grabbed the top one on the pile, weathered but not yellowed like the others and saw a picture that made me slip it from my fingers in shock.

1980. Anna Collins. Age twelve.

I fled the cabin, running and looking back to the cabin once more as if being chased down by an ancient monster. There in the window, a single candle burned.