Xander pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Joey—”
“Besides, who the hell lives in the middle of nowhere? The Unabomber, that’s who. Mother-flipping weirdos and serial killers—which are usually mutually exclusive things. Also, have I never told you the story about what happened last time?”
“You’re not just being a baby and trying to annoy me, are you? You’re for real. You’re legitimately afraid of cabins.”
We’ll return to your regularly scheduled story after this quick scene break to provide a little more context for this conversation.
Welcome to the backstory, baby! I’m your host, Joseph Labrador Hunter.
When I was about ten—just a year or two younger than my now-ruined guns—I had a pretty nasty experience with a cabin in the woods. Imagine your worst childhood experience ever. Now, quadruple that. You’re beginning to understand the type of trauma I suffered.
The year was 1999, I think, and The Blair Witch Project had just come out in theaters. My buddy, Terrance, and I were in the same group home and had wanted to see that groundbreaking masterpiece. Don’t you dare tell me that The Blair Witch Project wasn’t revolutionary for the horror genre, either. I will fight you, and in my current condition, you’ll probably win.
Terry—as we called him—was a big, fat, mean-spirited, nasty kid. He had orange hair and freckles that layered his ghostly skin. I think he was allergic to toothpaste, too, because he never once brushed those pearly yellows, and his breath stank like something gone bad in a refrigerator. And—let me backtrack. When I say big and fat, I’m not being mean—in fact, I’m probably being nice. At twelve years of age—he was a couple years older than me—he stood over six feet tall and had to weigh well over two-hundred pounds. Well, Tiny Terry, as the short-lived children dubbed him, had the idea to steal some money from the group home staff. When he had the cash, we snuck out of the house to watch the film. Of course, we weren’t seventeen—though Terry could have passed—so we couldn’t get into an R-rated movie. But Terry, that conniving little criminal, knew exactly how to game the system. We bought tickets for… shit.
What movie did we buy tickets for?
I can’t believe I forgot—
Inspector Gadget!
That’s right. Oh, how I wish we would have watched that instead. To this day, I still haven’t seen the Inspector go about his Gadgety business, and it haunts my dreams.
So, we stole some money and we stole into the wrong theater—which was super easy to do back in the day. There was no assigned seating that reclined back with the push of a button, back then. We just had to find two empty chairs. No one would ever know the difference.
Well, at around ten thirty at night, The Blair Witch Project probably wasn’t the best movie for a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old kid to watch unsupervised.
That happened on a Friday night.
The next morning, our group home decided on a “coincidental” whim to head out on a camping trip for the first time in their history.
What are the odds, right?
Well, while on this camping trip, one of the staff pointed out a dilapidated cabin a few hundred yards from our location. To Terry and me, it looked exactly like the one from the movie, and our curious little minds went to scheming.
When everyone fell asleep, guess who was serious about investigating the cabin? Ding. Ding. Motherfucking ding. Tiny Terry and saintly old me—two kids no more innocent than a back-alley lady of the night wearing white on her wedding day.
I’m getting off topic, though.
Terry had this wonderful idea to tiptoe away from the campsite and investigate the cabin in the dead of night. Why not? It’s not like witches were real. Ha! What a load of malarkey. If he hadn’t died in a gas station shootout at the ripe age of sixteen, I would have hunted him down by now to tell him how real witches really were. But to T.T., he was the bogeyman and no one else made him piss his own pee—that’s a euphemism for scaring him into wetting his pants. I’m not sure if it landed or not, though.
The wooden floors creaked as we stepped around the collapsed front door.
I remember, so distinctly, my little balls sitting in my stomach like a couple of burning rocks. I wanted nothing more than to leave the cabin and bury myself in my sleeping bag. But I didn’t want Terry to know I was scared, so I tailed after him and ventured further in.
Part of the roofing had caved in and lay in a pile of split wood and jutting nails. We skirted around it, crunching broken glass beneath our heels. Cobwebs caught the moonlight—some of the thickened silk wrapped around my arms and stuck to my face. I nearly had a heart attack as I wiped the webbing from my skin. All I could think about was a fat, fuzzy, black spider crawling beneath my clothes and biting me over and over and over again.
“I don’t like this,” I whispered. My voice came out like syrup, and I realized I’d been crying.
“Quit being a bitch,” Terry had said—a twelve-year-old, certified badass.
Without a flashlight, following the guidance of the moon, he led me further into the bowels of the fallen structure. We turned into the back room. A naked doll lay in the corner, her clothes shredded and her raggedy skin pale. Near her lay a pile of smoked cigarettes, the crumpled pack they came in, and a rusted knife.
“Seriously,” I said with a weak tone, “I think we should—”
A heavy instrument slammed against the side of the cabin. It sounded like someone took a lead pipe to the walls. Whatever it was, it drummed against the siding and drowned all my senses and all my thoughts, and it suppressed my breath. I could barely see beyond the screaming
