Of the four walls of the cabin, one served as the entrance, two served as wall-length counters, and the rear wall, the one the fire pit sat beside, served as a weapon rack. The weapon rack had been made from saplings, cut and painstakingly tied together with knotted lengths of rope. They formed a squared wooden grid that reminded Emmit of the industrial dishwasher they had had in the dingy kitchen of his old job, the trays lined with compartments and prongs to keep the various utensils separated and sorted. Roy had stockpiled more weapons than his small band could ever use; there were rows of axes and hatchets, knives and spears, mallets and clubs. He couldn't help but marvel at the craftsmanship, the human ingenuity, straining his burning eyes to scan the punji pit of deadly points that thrusted up towards the ceiling like stalagmites. Each of them had been carved and sanded and shaped by hand, designed by a psychopath to be as deadly as possible. Emmit reached out and selected two knives for himself, dragging the pad of his thumb across the edge of one of their dimpled stone blades. He could hear the soft scuffing sound it made against his flesh. Razor sharp.
And easy to conceal.
Pup began to cry out again, and Emmit heard a saturated thud as the boy toppled over.
"Alright Pup, I'm coming, I'm gonna hel--"
His words were choked off mid-sentence as he took in the view of Roy’s prison shack. It was nothing short of a torture chamber; a stone age butcher's shop, where the hunted and defenseless were taken to die and be portioned out. He gasped, then clamped his tongue between his teeth hard enough to draw blood. Anything he could do to stifle the scream that had been seconds from alerting anyone and anything within a mile of the camp that he was awake, aware, and horrified.
The counters than ran the lengths of the walls were made from entire tree trunks that Roy had somehow managed to chop in half lengthwise, sanded down to be reasonably smooth and resting on pairs of X shaped sawhorses. The pale wood inside the ragged half-trunks had once been a creamy white, but now, even by the ebb and flow of the firelight, Emmit could see that it had been stained to a muddy brown.
One counter looked like it had been pulled right out of a novel of the pioneers and log cabin days; it was Roy’s kitchen. The tabletop held a neat line of bloodstained knives and hatchets, arranged by length and purpose, and stacks of wooden bowls and platters. At the far end of the counter was a battered log bucket, the cracks in its sides and bottom leaking syrupy gore. There were coils of rope, miles of it. If he trained his ears, Emmit could hear the faint pat pat pat of fresh blood, trickling slowly from the countertop and onto the floor.
Emmit made himself turn and take a few nervous steps to the other side of the room, not allowing himself to look at Pup. Not yet. He had to take in one thing at a time, or his mind would collapse in on itself like a damaged submersible freefalling in the Mariana Trench. A giant godlike fist, not unlike the fist of Roy himself, held his sanity in a tight and unrelenting grip. At any moment that fist would clench, closing around his shocked brain and crushing it like an overripe orange. Emmit rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear debris that wasn’t actually there, and forced himself to look. Once he had, the vomit was up and out before he could stop it. It spurted from his lips, hot and tart, and splattered across the floor. It was mostly stomach acid, which he was grateful for. He didn't want to see partially digested human remains intermingled with his puke.
The opposite counter was lined with fresh meat, laid out like a deli display case. There were giant hunks of purplish flesh that looked like marbled sirloin steaks, stacked on top of one another like gruesome flapjacks. There was a row of long strips that trailed fat and tendon, lined up in a row like sausages on a hot griddle. Emmit willed himself to lean in, just a little closer, and saw a tiny dish filled with tiny gobbets of meat and gooey fat that resembled chicken gizzards. Next to a bloodied stone mallet was a pair of filthy and disintegrating shoes, placed side by side as if Roy had kicked them off after a long day at work and placed them on the shoe rack like a thoughtful husband. Several pairs of sweat stained socks were stuffed inside them. Beside the shoes, also placed side by side in a neat pair, were two severed human feet. The cuts just above the heels of the whitish-gray feet were clean; no bone poking out of the ragged stumps where calves had once connected.
The bones, pink-smeared mosaics of fractures, had joined a nauseating bundle of others in another of Roy's handmade buckets that rested against the legs of a sawhorse. It resembled a pack of macabre cigarettes. Some of the longer bones, human femurs, had been sharpened into crude points like dinosaur teeth. Roy had even been trying to find a use for the bones of his victims.
He broke the bones to make the
