Cabin in the Woods

I am heading to the cabin.

My family’s cabin is in the northern forest, where it snows for two-thirds of the year and rains the other third. It’s been years since we’ve been back, not since my brother died.

I pull over at the side of the road for lunch. It offers an impressive view of the forest sloping down the mountainside. I pick up my phone to check the missed call I’d had while driving, recognising the number I hit call.

“Joanne,” Susanne, my therapist, answers. “I hope you missed my call because you’re on the road?”

“Just pulled over for lunch.”

“I’m glad you finally agreed to try this, getting to the root of your problems will help.” I make a non-committal sound in response.

“We already know this place messed me up, I don’t see what my coming here again will achieve.”

“Don’t be like that, this will help.”

“If you say so, but if I fall back into the bottle after this trip you’re paying for my rehab.”

“You won’t relapse.” Susanne sighs. “Now promise me you’ll try to take this seriously.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

I hang up and resume my drive, unable to finish my sandwich. I take slow purposeful breaths as I drive the familiar roads and try to keep my grip on the steering wheel relaxed.

I swerve wildly when the beast leaps onto the road. My car screeches its complaint before the engine stalls and dies.

The creature, now standing in the road, could be mistaken for a deer. It is approximately deer shaped, but its size and proportions are wrong. Its body is too big, its legs much too long, and its eyes are far too human. It looks like what someone who’s never seen a deer might draw if a deer were described to them. A warped concept.

It blinks slowly at me once, before it leaps off the road and disappears back into the forest.

My grandmother had often told stories about this forest, she’d spoken about creatures that were twisted amalgamations of human, animal and plant. She’d said how the forest was cursed and that if you died out here, you’d never really die, you’d become part of it, part of the curse that festered here.

My dad had never believed her, but Jason and I had. We’d seen the creatures; we’d known she was right.

The police report about Jason’s disappearance had said that there was no evidence that anyone but us had been in the cabin that night. But I knew that wasn’t true. Jason didn’t wander off in the middle of the night, something in this forest had come into the cabin and taken him.

I should not have come back here.

I swallow the bile rising in my throat. It takes a concentrated effort on my part to get my hands to unclench and release the steering wheel. I start the car and drive the rest of the way to the cabin. 

The seasons have not been kind. I take an hour to clear the leaf litter and muck off the roof to check for damage, and another hour to patch the hole I find. Once the roof is ok, I busy myself with boarding up the windows and finding materials to secure the door.

My phone ringing again startles me.

“JoJo?” Dad says when I answer. “You, ok? I can hardly hear you?”

“Yeah,” I swallow the dry lump in my throat. “I’m back at the cabin.”

“What the hell?” Dad snaps.

“Susanne said that-”

“Leave. Now. Do you hear me.”

“It’s already getting dark out.” The trees around the cabin are moving. Slow, deliberate rustling not caused by the wind but rather something big moving through the foliage. 

“Your cars got headlights. Now don’t mess about. Leave. I don’t want you there tonight.”

“Dad, the night Jason went missing, you chased something out of the cabin.”

Dad is silent.

“It was one of them, wasn’t it?” I can hear something moving outside. Dad is still quiet. “Why won’t you admit what it was?”

“JoJo.”

“You never let us come back after that, you never made fun of gran after that, what the fuck was it? Why can’t you say it?”

“It-” Dad doesn’t finish, my car alarm goes off and the loudest crash I’d ever heard in my life has me dropping the phone and leaping to my feet. I run to the window. My car is upside down on its roof, wheels turning in the air.

“Joanne!” Dad is shouting.

The wall behind me shakes as something big throws itself at the cabin. I hear the wood fracture and I’m running for the door. Another loud crash behind me and I hear the wall collapse, I look back. The creature tearing its way into the cabin looks like a bear. If a bear was twelve-foot-tall, 800 pounds and had a human face. The creature meets my eyes and suddenly I can’t breathe.

The creature has Jason’s face.

It moves with awkward grace and roars. The sound a twisted union of a child’s scream and a bestial roar.

I wrench open the door and run down to the lake. The rain has turned the path into a stream of mud and dead leaves. I skid and slip my way down, sliding right into the lake. The ice water turning my legs numb almost immediately.

The monster tears itself free of the cabin wreckage and lumbers towards the lake.

I wade out into the water. I’m swimming by the time the gas stove explodes, and the wreckage burns. The creature stands on the bank watching me.

“JoJo,” it cries in Jason’s voice. “JoJo come back.”

I cling to a piece of driftwood and pray for daylight.