The Sin Eater

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

Reynolds didn’t hear about this until at least a day later. It was Mrs. Greystone, as always, who brought in the latest gossip and elderly woman’s fears. It was a Friday afternoon, and Reynolds, still the junior-most deputy in the sheriff’s department despite no longer considering himself a “rookie,” was dreading the late-night shift he would have to start when evening hit.

Deputy Pickett, manning the department’s reception area, was in ear-shot when Mrs. Greystone arrived at a little before 7. Reynolds recognized the distinctive wheeze of her emphysema before he saw her approach Pickett at the front desk.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” Pickett said. “How can I help you?”

“I’m looking to report some vandalism, son,” Mrs. Greystone wheezed. “My trashcan’s been knocked over again. Old woman like me, I gotta move heaven and earth to get those things to the curb in a timely manner for the pickup on Thursday, and then I come down to find some punk knocked ‘em over! And not just knocked ‘em over, but scattered all my trash right across the road and into the woods! It’s an unsightly mess, but with my back and my lungs, I can’t be bothering to try and pick all that up, you understand son?”

“Of course, ma’am,” Pickett said. “I understand what a hassle that is for you. But, hmmm, might have been raccoons?”

In his little over a year on the Shawnee County Sheriff’s Department, Reynolds had long ago learned about old Mrs. Greystone. A two-time widower, she lived by herself in a small cottage house at the end of Jefferson Lane, right at the point where the last remnants of the town of Greenhill gave way to “the woods.” The woods, as far as Reynolds could tell, didn’t have an official name. Or, if it did, it had been lost long ago in favor of the much simpler term that the locals knew it by. From what Reynolds had learned, the woods contained some of the last remnants of old-growth forest in that part of the state. This was enough to get the area designated a state forest of ecological significance. But, in the few times that Reynolds had gone out there at night, the overall tall trees and dense clusters of forest gave him a different impression. The lack of moonlight, the shadows that seemed denser than the mere absence of light, the creaks of ancient trees and shrieks and cries of unseen and unknown night creatures left a lingering unease that lasted long after he had left and found his way back to the false safety of his bed.

Across the small station, he heard Mrs. Greystone snort.

“Ain’t no coons come near my place anymore. I seen to that, they know what I got waiting for them in my .22. If this was an animal, I’m telling you it was a bear. Nothing less than a coyote, at least, and nothing I’d want to fight. But, I got a feeling this wasn’t no animal. This must’ve been one of those ‘crystal meth’ heads I seen on Fox News. They’re holding up in one of those cabins out in the woods again! They’re smoking that shit they smoke, plannin’ all kinds of mischief against an old lady like me! Today they’re messing with my trash, tomorrow they’re gonna break in in the middle of night, rob me blind, probably murder me in my own bed before I can call for help.”

“Hmmm,” Pickett muttered. Reynolds rubbed his eyes. He already knew that, whatever this was, he was going to have to deal with it in a few hours.

“What’s this about seeing someone in a cabin, ma’am?” Pickett asked.

“That old cabin, far out in the woods!” Mrs. Greystone coughed through decades of chain-smoking. “I can see it from my house. The old Nell cabin, they called it. That thing’s been abandoned for years, you know? But the other night, I seen a light out there. Like a candle, burning in the window. Someone’s living there, I’m telling you!”

“I see, ma’am,” Pickett said. “Was it just a candle?”

“I know what a candle looks like, son!” she said. “Lord knows I’ve gone through more than enough nights without any electricity, and no moon to shine through my windows. Someone’s living out there!”

“I understand, ma’am,” Pickett said. “I can send someone out to investigate as soon as possible.”

Reynolds cringed and abandoned any hope of an easy shift that night.

“Send two people, at least!” Mrs. Greystone said. “And bring some of that body armor too! Lord knows what those junkies and meth-heads are packing out there in the woods!”

“Thank you for your concern, ma’am,” Pickett said. “But if someone’s living out there it’s more likely than not just a homeless individual.”

“You know that place,” Mrs. Greystone said. From his distance, Reynolds thought that her voice narrowed somewhat, as if she had suddenly fallen into a sudden pit of fear that hinted at dangers far beyond ordinary meth addicts. “There’s dark energies there. Things that only the night knows. Not fit for good Christians. Lord knows what kind of people it’s attracting!”

“We’ll be careful, ma’am,” Pickett said.

You won’t be the one going out there, Reynolds thought as he began to text his girlfriend that he’d probably be late getting home from his shift.

*

“This coffee’s cold,” Mercer said. Reynolds glared at him with a side eye as he squeezed himself into the passenger seat of the squad car. They were parked in front of the 24-hour Speedway next to Route 554, where Reynolds had been sent for the all-important late shift ingredient of coffee.

“It’s what they had,” Reynolds said. Reynolds took another sip and scowled.

“Chalky too.”

“Well where the hell else are you going to find coffee after midnight around here?” Reynolds said. “Besides, this is a small town. It’s not like you’re going to find some gourmet café with artisanal cappuccinos and macchiatos and some other Italian-sounding thing. Gas station coffee’s pretty much all we got.”

Mercer took a long, obnoxious slurp of the coffee and lulled his eyes over to Reynolds. “You know I’ve got a good decade’s more experience than you here,” he said. “I can assure you I am well familiar with our late shift coffee options. But, I’m also well familiar with the importance of dunking on rookies, so, as long as I’m in the driver’s seat, the shitty coffee’s your fault.”

Reynolds managed a chuckle and sipped his own coffee. Not a rookie, he thought. And this coffee isn’t even that cold.

Mercer turned the cruiser on and pulled out of the Speedway parking lot. “Don’t blame me, kid, I didn’t make the rules. Besides, I’m being fairly kind compared to the shit I went through my first year on the force. I trust you’ll pay it forward if you ever manage to get paired with a rookie of your own.”

“Your compassion overwhelms me,” Reynolds said.

In front of them, the flickering lights of the gas station gave way to the darkness barricading them on all sides as the ancient woods surrounded the empty rural road.

“How many times you been out to Greystone’s place so far?” Mercer asked.

Reynolds took another swig of his coffee and tried to pour through his tired mind for a recollection.

“Oh God, I don’t know. Four? Five, maybe?”

“Ha,” Mercer chuckled. “My first year it was at least ten.”

“Maybe she’s calmed down a bit in her old age,” Reynolds said.

“At least she’s not calling in reports of UFOs,” Mercer said. “I tell you about that one?”

“At least three times,” Reynolds said. “I did get a bigfoot call, once.”

“And now she’s just seeing candles in old cabins out in the woods,” Mercer said. “Maybe that’s progress of a sort.”

Reynolds rubbed his free finger against his temple, already dreading the tiredness that was beginning to creep into his brain. He took another sip of the bland gas station coffee, waiting, in vain, for some hint of the caffeine to fire up in his bloodstream. But instead, he yawned and looked out the passenger side window of the squad car as they sped down the dark and deserted country road.

That far out the county spared fewer funds than normal to maintain the trees and branches that stretched out over the road above them. During the day driving out that route was creepy enough, with the thick intertwined sinews of wood and skeletal limbs choking out whatever sunlight was making its way into the woods. But at night it was something else entirely. Juxtaposed against the darkness, the crooked and deformed tendons of the trees blurred into the shadows. Without the cover of light, the trees become larger and more foreboding, their edges hidden in darkness so that Reynolds could never see how far they twisted back into the wilderness, or upward towards the sky. Only the occasional hints of the moon revealed a corner of a brank or cluster of ragged leaves, but even then only clearly enough to conjure deeper and darker monstrosities in his imagination that grew from the jagged and grotesque scenes played out by moonlight.

Reynolds blinked towards where the sky would be through the window of the squad car. There was no moon that night.

He coughed, and dropped his hand down towards the Glock 17 snug in its holster on his waist.

Ahead of them, the thin, bending line of the lane marker appeared in a thin, pale haze as it lit up with the approaching headlines. Beyond the cone of light was nothing more than a thick cluster of darkness. A cluster that somewhere contained Mrs. Greystone’s small house and the supposedly occupied cabin that lay in the woods nearby.

Reynolds shivered and hit the button to raise his window, though it was already up all the way.

“So,” he said in a voice that was surprisingly weak, even to him. “Tell me about this cabin out by Greystone’s place.”

Next to him Mercer took another long, slow sip of his coffee without taking his drowsy eyes off the dark road in front of him.

“The Nell Cabin?” he said. Reynolds thought that he shifted in his seat a bit, though in the low lights of the inside of the squad car, he couldn’t quite tell. “It’s been abandoned since they build the dam. I don’t imagine there’s much left of it. Only reason no one’s torn it down is cause it’s not worth the effort, as far as I can tell. Whoever owns those woods—the county, I guess—figured it’ll just be easier to let the forest take it back.”

Reynold’s ears trembled when they picked up what seemed like a short shudder in Mercer’s voice, as if that train of conversation had accidentally driven over a hidden raw nerve that it had been trying to avoid.

“But,” Mercer said quickly. “I’m sure you’ve got junkies and the like squatting there. I know a few guys who’ve chased them out over the past few years. Be vigilant, of course, but I’d wager the worst we’d have to deal with is a meth-head or two. Assuming that this ‘candle’ is even anything to begin with.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Reynolds said. He felt his teeth begin to strain under the weight of the question that had soured his mouth since that afternoon. “You know anything about what Greystone said about ‘dark energies,’ or whatever?”

“Hmmm?” Mercer reached for his cup of coffee, a little too fast. Reynolds thought he heard a hint of defensiveness in his tone, as brief as it was. As if Mercer was trying to deflect from something potentially unpleasant.

“Back in the station, Greystone said something about the cabin having ‘dark energies.’ I figured she’s just some old bat, but with people like her you sometimes got some kind of folklore they’re tapped into.

“Folklore…” Mercer said. His voice trailed off, as if its spirit was already far away and the rest of it was trying to catch up.

“I only been here a little over a year,” Reynolds said. He tried to keep his voice light and casual, while trying to force his eyes against the impulse to glance out the window and back out towards the dark expanse of night and forest that lay beyond the thin window of the car. “I never heard anything about that cabin yet. I was just curious, you know, if there was some kind of story there, or if Greystone was just making shit up.”

Mercer took another sip of his coffee, longer and slower this time. His eyes focused back on the road in front of them, and Reynolds thought he caught traces of pained thought, as if his partner were trying to work through what to say.

“Well,” Mercer finally said. “There’s ‘folklore’ and shit like that everywhere. Especially among the older women like Greystone. Look at it from her side of things. Old woman, lives alone out by the goddam woods. Always listening to gossip. Shit’ll get inside her head. Now, you got a cabin, abandoned, out in the woods, kids and, hell, even some adults will start coming up with stories about it. And some of those stories will get back to Greystone and proceed to go wild in her imagination. Especially when it gets dark. You get me?”

“Yeah,” Reynolds said. He tried to force some degree of satisfaction in his voice, but didn’t even convince himself. “That makes sense. I was just curious.”

In his lapse in focus Reynolds’ eyes broke free and flicked out the window. Just in time for the squad car’s headlights to catch a vague, contorted cluster of branches overhanging the road. In the palate of darkness and seared colors burned into his eyes by the brightness of the headlights, Reynolds, for a few seconds, thought he saw something like a face emerge from the murky blur of the forest. A face carved in cruel, pained angles, chiseled in its visible corners with mere hints of its expression. An expression that Reynold’s passive unconscious animal reflex placed as either pure hatred or pure terror. Or maybe both.

Then, the headlights passed, and whatever it was returned to the darkness.

“There is one thing,” Mercer finally said. Reynold’s shoulders jumped. Mercer drew his free hand through his hair nervously, as if he had spent the last moment contemplating whether or not to tell the “rookie” what he had to tell.

“Oh, yeah?” Reynolds managed. He realized that his right hand was still on his gun. And his grip had tightened over the past few minutes.

Reynolds managed a fake chuckle. “I mean, if you’re looking for horror stories, you can definitely do worse, I guess. I’m sure Mrs. Greystone has an even better version, but here’s the one I heard.”

“About the cabin?” Reynolds asked.

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “About the cabin.”

In the corner of his eyes, Reynolds thought he saw something—a small, gaunt, slithering creature—scurry across the road in front of them. But it was gone before they passed, and on the other side of the window was nothing more than the heavy barricade of darkness and forest that obscured everything else from his view.

“I heard two versions of this, I think,” Mercer said. “One from my grandma, the other from Paul Barrow. You remember Paul? Died a year or two back? If not, he was a local drunk. Anyway, the best I can remember is some combination of those two stories, so it may be a bit muddled in places.”

Reynolds nodded at nothing. “I’m sure I can follow it,” he said. He suddenly very much did not want Mercer continuing with the story. How long is it to Greystone’s place again?

But he said nothing as Mercer went on.

“So, no one really knows who built that cabin. People call it the ‘Nell Cabin,’ just out of habit. I’m sure there’s records, but no one’s bothered to dig them up. But the story I heard, it was built by this guy named ‘Nell.’ George Nell, I think, was the name I got. This was back after World War II. Lotta folks coming back from war with broken bodies and even more broken brains. Nell, well, he wasn’t from around here. But he shows up, looks like he was in the service, served somewhere in Europe or the Pacific, as far as anyone can tell. Got one of those long, hollowed out looks on his face. The kind you only get with folks who’ve really seen some shit. Around ’45 that look had become a bit too familiar with people here on the home front. People came up with stories about him, of course, he had liberated one of the Nazi death camps. He was a Japanese prisoner of war who had been tortured. Some said he had even been there when they dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and he looked directly into it, saw the end of the world in the fireball. But Nell, he never really talked to anyone. He just showed up in the town one day, made his way out to the woods, and built a cabin. Wasn’t really his land, but no one bothered to stop him. But one thing pretty much everyone agreed on, whatever Nell had done in the war, he brought a nasty morphine addiction back with him.”

On the road ahead of them, a small road sign appeared informing them that they were still on state route 554. The pale white of the sign was smattered with small bullet holes, and as the car passed, Reynolds thought he saw the holes morph into a crude and unspeakable shape.

But they soon passed the sign by and the scene outside the car returned to darkness.

Next to him, Mercer went on.

“Before they built the dam and flooded a good third of the forest, you still had a bunch of people living out there in the woods. And these were old folks, families that had been living there for hundreds of years, going back all the way to before the Revolution, into colonial days. Families that can trace a direct lineage back to England, or Scotland, or wherever in the old country they had come from. And you get people living on one piece of land for so long, so isolated in the dark woods, you get the old world traditions staying alive after so many centuries. You get that?”

“Yeah, of course,” Reynolds said. Next to him, that same woods were passing by his window with the mute venom of twisted branches and a tree cover that allowed neither moon nor starlight. “What’s this have to do with Nell?”

“I’m getting to that. There was one tradition they had—more of a ritual, really. Goes back to rural part of England, I’m talking the places way out in the sticks, the small farming communities, out by the moors and mountains and whatever’s left of their deepest forests. This was called…shit, what did grandma call it? The sin eater.”

Reynolds’ throat went dry, and he instinctively reached for what was left of his coffee. “Sin eater?” he managed through his gulp.

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “I think that’s what it was. Anyway, the idea was something like this. Back in the old country, if you had a relative, like your grandpa, who was dying, you’d want to get a priest to come by and absolve him of his sins. So that when he does die, he can go straight to heaven, no questions asked. You get it?”

“I went to Catholic school,” Reynolds said. “So, yeah, I get it.”

“Well,” Mercer continued. “The problem was, a lot of the ancestors of these people who lived out here, back in England they often lived pretty far away themselves. Sometimes too far away to get a priest or minister there before your loved one dies. And if they died without being absolved of their sins, well, who knows what would happen to their soul, right?”

“Right,” Reynolds said uneasily. He caught an increasing unease in Mercer’s voice. An echo of the same unease he had heard from his grandmother? Or Paul Barrow? Or something else?

“So,” Mercer went on. “If grandpa was on his last legs, and the family didn’t think they had enough time to get a priest there, they would do the next best thing. If you go to the Bible, like deep into the Old Testament, you get this notion of a scapegoat. Not like he we use the word today, but the original meaning. Basically, a village would get a sacrificial goat, and, like, somehow transfer all of their collective sins onto the goat. Then, with the goat stuffed full of human sins, they’d cast it out of the village to go die in the desert. Thus, they’d be free of sins, at least for the time being.

So, these villagers figured they could do the same thing for their dying gramps. Without a priest available, they’d send for the town fuck-up. Usually the local drunk or ne’er-do-well, some jackass who’s in the tavern or brothel far more than he’s in church. And they’d bring him over to the house, and he’d be there to ‘take on’ all of the sins of the dying relative. Much like those Old Testament goats. Literally, he’d be the ‘sin eater.’”

Reynolds blinked a few times. “How exactly do they ‘transfer’ sins from one people to another?”

“Damned if I know,” Mercer said. “But shut up and listen, we’re almost to Greystone’s place. Anyway, once the sin eater had eaten gramps’ sins, the family would pay him a silver coin, and then they’d drive him out of the house. I mean like violently, sometimes. He’d be one coin and several sins richer, and gramps would get to die free of sin and go straight to heaven. Everyone wins.”

“Except the sin eater,” Reynolds said.

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “But he was going to hell anyway.”

“So no big deal.”

Mercer coughed. “No. But, flashing forward to Mr. Nell. He made his home as a hermit out in that cabin. And he lived—not close, but close enough to those old forest people. And neither my grandma or Paul Barrow really knew how, but at some point Nell made a deal with those people. For whatever they had—coins, crops, heirlooms, whatever—he would be their sin eater. He would show up at their homes at the hour of death, and he would eat all of the sins of their loved one, take them all on himself. And then they could drive him from the house, free their loved one from his sins and send him off to heaven unblemished.

“But at some point they started to fear him too. He told them (and this is word-for-word what my grandma told me) that he wanted this. That he was hungry for sins. That he had eaten sins they couldn’t imagine, and it had poisoned him, turned him inside out. Made him crave the ‘taste’ of their sins. They said he was addicted to sin more than he was addicted to morphine. And eventually his whole ‘business’ got turned around. He started signaling to the people there that he was hungry for more sins, and sometimes they would come and ‘feed’ him, however that worked. And he would be the one paying them this time, the same coins and crops and heirlooms he had first gotten for his services. And this went on for years until they built the dam and all those old families finally moved out of the woods. All of them but Nell.”

“He died there?” Reynolds asked.

“Maybe. No one knows. But some people think that he’s still there. When he died, he had too many sins even for hell. He had eaten something, God knows what or where, that hell itself couldn’t swallow. So it spat him out, back to the woods, eternally hungry for sins but with no more to eat.”

Reynolds closed his eyes. The phantasmagoric images that danced behind his eyelids, though, weren’t much better than what he saw looking out the window. One question began to rise into his thought, a question he dreaded even as he heard himself answer it.

“How did Nell signal that he was ‘hungry’ for sins.”

Mercer said nothing for a few seconds. Then:

“He lit a candle in his window.”

The two said nothing until they pulled up at the end of small dirt road where Mrs. Greystone’s house stood.

*

“Ma’am?”

Mercer knocked on Greystone’s door a third time. Silence answered him. Reynolds shined his flashlight into the dark windows of the small, one-story cottage at the end of the lane. Looking in from the outside, the house seemed to be dark throughout. Around them, a slight breeze picked up and the skeletal branches above and around them shuddered in accompaniment.

“Ma’am, it’s the police,” Mercer said. He paused for another few seconds. The house remained dark and silent.

“I’m going around back,” Mercer said. “Radio this in.”

Reynolds nodded, but his attention was held by the dark barricade of woods that extended on both sides. Turning back to the car, he saw the dim, moonless shadows that seemed to descend from above and below. Reynolds almost thought that the woods had encroached upon them since their squad car first pulled up, encompassing and choking any point of escape.

The spotlight on top of the squad car was illuminated and cast upon Greystone’s house, but the surrounding darkness seem to sap whatever life would have been flowing through it. Reynolds shuddered. As he approached the car, he cast his eyes to the curb, and saw Mrs. Greystone’s garbage there, sitting neatly in a row of four, all upright and in unison, with no trace of any garbage scattered across the ground.

Reynolds opened the door and reached for the radio.

“Dispatch, this is Reynolds, we’re at the Greystone house, no sign of occupancy, but…”

He stopped. Nothing came out of the other end of the radio. No voice from dispatch, no whine of feedback, no crackle of static. Dead silence. He pushed his finger down on the button again, then shook it, harder and harder, in increasing frustration.

Nothing.

“Well, shit,” he said to no one.

He looked up.

He knew there was a clearing in the tree cover where the road ended. But, if it was above him, the sky was as dark and starless as the thick and twisted clusters of branches that threatened him on all sides. Without thought his hand once again touched the Glock at his waist, and his eyes drifted to the shotgun perched in the backseat of the squad car. The wind picked up again, somehow colder than before.

“Jesus Christ, Reynolds,” he told himself. “You’re being an idiot. Go get Mercer and…”

Whatever he was going to say next froze in his throat.

The sound he heard wasn’t so much a scream as it was a gasp. A desperate, furious sucking of air against something insurmountable. A terror that went beyond screaming. The gasp, as it was, echoed across a few vague thumps, and then background noise returned to the subtle voices of the woods.

The gasp had come from behind the Greystone house.

Mercer.

Drawing his gun, Reynolds rushed back up the narrow pathway and around the backside of the house.

“Mercer!” He shouted. Nothing answered but the wind. He bit his lip, swallowed his fear, and turned the corner to the back of the house and the beginning of the woods. There, some 50 or so yards away, perched in the heart of the woods and illuminated in a faint orange glow, was the Nell cabin.

A candle was burning in the window.

He had eaten something, God knows what or where, that hell itself couldn’t swallow. So it spat him out, back to the woods, eternally hungry for sins but with no more to eat.

Mercer lay on the ground between the house and the cabin. He was crumpled in a half fetal position. He moved, but only to silently convulse in shallow breaths. Reynolds shone his flashlight at his partner. Mercer’s face was contorted in a twisted expression of transcendent terror. He clutched something shimmering in his hand.

Mercer approached, far past the point of allowing himself any emotion, and shined his flashlight on the shimmering object.

It was a coin.

How long had he sunk down to hell, past hell, through the nothingness, the abyss? How long had he hungered before he found his way back here?

The door to the cabin opened. Something moved in the darkness beyond the doorway. Reynolds, without thought, lowered his gun and began to walk forward.

A hand emerged from the cabin. It was black, twisted and burned, decayed by the grave, gnawed by maggots and boiled in a crucible of sulfur. Reynolds’s feet were drawn forward as the stench of burning death flowed toward him. He watched the hand and the veiled darkness behind it that he knew cloaked a twisted, grave-desecrated and hell-vomited face with gaping, hungry teeth.

The hand held out a coin.