The Cabin in the Woods

hatchet.

“You feint left, and I’ll get it when it goes for you,” she whispered. Holden nodded, tensed, and when the wall was fully open and the flashlight blinded him he darted to the left… straight into the thing’s arms.

“Hey!” Curt said, squeezing his shoulders. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Curt,” Dana gasped.

“Let’s move let’s move!” he said without even pausing to check out the room. Behind him, the chaotic mess of the main cellar was lit by two hanging bulbs, both swinging and dancing as Curt ducked beneath the joists for the floor above and brushed the wire with his head.

Dana followed, with Holden bringing up the rear.

Should’ve closed the door, he thought, even though he’d seen Dana doing a blade- job on the bastard thing. If it gets out—

“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Curt said. He moved quickly across the cellar, knocking a bookcase with his thigh and spilling a slew of moldy books across the floor. Dana walked into a chandelier of fine chains hanging from an old wagon wheel, waving her hands around her head as if to shove aside spider webs. Holden went to help but she was through them, one hand fingering through her hair and bringing the dirty, bloody knots to his attention. She’s bleeding more than I thought. He wanted to embrace her again, and he promised himself that he would. Soon. They would hug soon, somewhere safe where terror couldn’t tear them apart again, and where warmth and safety replaced the stink of age and the coldness of death.

Curt stopped below the storm doors that led to the outside, looking around, kicking a heavy shelf from the wall and hefting it as a weapon. A dozen ornaments spilled from the shelf and shattered on the floor, and as he went for the three stairs leading up to the doors he crunched them into the ground.

He turned around and glanced from Dana to Holden, sizing them up.

“Hurt?”

Dana shook her head, denying the blood. Curt pointed at her nose, her scalp. “Not bad,” she said.

“I’m cut,” Holden said. He hadn’t yet explored his wounds from the bear trap, but he could still feel them leaking afresh. Once when he was a kid he’d fallen and scraped his knee, and keeled over in a faint when he looked down to see the slight dribble of blood. Since then he’d been terrified of blood— especially his own— and the last thing he needed now was to pass out.

He turned his left side to Curt, who looked him up and down without his expression giving anything away.

“Think you can you run?” he asked.

Holden nodded.

“Good. I open these doors and we go for the Rambler, okay?” Dana and Holden agreed with a nod, Curt turned to the doors and shoved them open, and darkness flooded in.

No time to talk and plan, Holden thought. This is controlled panic. None of us really knows what’s happening here.

Curt went first, the heavy shelf held across his chest ready to swing. He climbed the stairs, stood in the open beside the cabin, and looked around.

“Okay,” he said, and Dana followed him up. Holden came last, ready to stand and look cautiously into the darkness between trees, but the other two were already sprinting for the Rambler.

And this is when control gets flushed down the toilet, he thought, remembering every horror movie he’d ever seen. The creeping and peering around corners is over. Now we’re just running.

Holden’s side and back hurt more when he ran, and the cool night air was chill across his flowing blood. But he concentrated on Dana, even smiling slightly as he realized that despite all this he was still checking out her butt, and they reached the vehicle without being attacked by any of the walking dead.

“What about Marty?” Dana gasped as they skidded to a stop.

“They got him,” Curt said.

Marty? Holden thought, feeling a deep loss for someone he hardly knew. Marty’s—?

Curt pointed at the door handle and touched his finger to his lips. Holden looked and saw what had made him so cautious. Dirt on the handle, a wet slick with half a dead leaf trapped in it like a fly in amber.

Marty, Holden mouthed, but Curt shook his head. Whatever he had seen, it must have been enough to mean Marty couldn’t possibly have recovered.

Curt hefted the plank over his shoulder and stepped back, looking from Holden to the door and back again, and Holden nodded in acknowledgment. After three, he thought, crouching beside the door and reaching for the handle. He mouthed one… two… three… then flipped the catch and moved aside.

The door swung open. Curt tensed, shuffling a half step forward. Shook his head.

“Okay,” Dana said. “Okay. Now can we please get the fuck out of here?”

“Seconded,” Holden said.

“Yeah,” Curt nodded.

They climbed inside, slammed the door behind them, and Curt took the driver’s seat. He whispered a prayer and the Rambler started first time. Its headlamps pushed darkness back between the trees. As he steered them out of the clearing, the lights splashed across the front of the cabin. The door was cracked and broken, but still solid in its frame. A lamp still burned in the large main room. There was little to show what had happened there.

Good fucking riddance, Holden thought as Curt swung the vehicle around and headed back along the road they had traveled so recently, and a lifetime ago.

•••

Oh fuck, Sitterson thought, they’ve gone and screwed it up. And much as he always enjoyed the tense competition between themselves and the Japanese, and the friendly rivalry to see who could produce the most perfect, most imaginative, most effective scenarios, he also liked to win. And what he saw on the screen meant that they weren’t out of the woods yet.

And that brought immense pressure to bear.

Hadley had wheeled his chair over to sit beside his friend, an unconscious desire for closeness as they watched the Japanese effort fall apart on their central big screen.

The hideously screaming face of the drowned Japanese girl filled the screen, long black hair floating and waving about her head like a million individual snakes ready to inject their own unique venoms. Yet horrible and terrifying though the floating drowned girl was, both Sitterson and Hadley knew what was about to happen.

To this story, there would be no shock ending.

The screaming face started to relax. She looked bewildered, as if remembering that she had once been a little girl, not this screeching banshee-thing with hair that cast lethal shadows. A warm glow grew around her, driving away the monochrome of dark tendrils and white pasty skin, and imbuing her visage with a semblance of life.

Sitterson sighed as the view pulled back to take in the entirety of the Japanese classroom. Several children knelt at its centre, carefully placing lotus flowers into a large bowl of water above which the floating drowned girl hovered. She seemed smaller now, her hair more lank than wild, her eyes sad instead of filled with vengeful rage.

The kids sang a song whose lyrics Sitterson did not understand, but his skin prickled with the happiness of the tune, the love it conveyed, and any other time he might even had felt a lump at his throat.

But not now.

“This is just too fucking fucked up,” he said.

The floating drowned girl began to glow. For a moment her face dropped in fear, but then she smiled brightly as light enveloped her, spewing from her eyes and mouth where previously there had been only darkness. She waved her hands in the air as if swimming, and her hair drew back and hung across her shoulders, no longer obscuring her eyes.

The light grew brighter still, and then it faded away to a background glow that seemed to fill the whole classroom with sunlight. The girl faded away, as well.

A frog leapt from the bowl of water and flowers, sitting amongst the other girls and looking around.

They chanted something, and at the bottom of the screen a line of subtitles appeared. Sitterson wondered