Cabin D (2 page)

She looked down and saw that he had taken a single bite out of each piece of pie.

“There was a guy from around these parts, name of Mundy or Mindy, I can’t remember which. He wrote a book about bad places.”

“A food critic?” Rachel asked.

“Something like that,” Henry said dismissively. “He had a word for these bad places. He called them ‘pressure points.’ I knew a girl once who called them something else. A much more appropriate word, in my opinion.” He paused in remembrance, or maybe for effect. “She called them ‘tornadoes.’

“Do you read?” he asked suddenly.

Rachel shook her head. “Only the expiry dates on the milk cartons at the Food Mart,” she said, and Henry laughed.

“Can I get my bill?”

Rachel took her order pad out of the pouch on the front of her uniform. She flipped through the sheets on which she had scribbled Henry’s orders throughout the day. She couldn’t remember the last time she had to add so many numbers. Finally she scribbled a total at the bottom of the page and plunked it down on the table.

Henry reached into his houndstooth jacket and produced a thick wad of bills bound with a rubber band. He paid the bill and then placed the still-considerable stack of cash on the table. He smoothed it out and placed the origami cow on top of it.

“That’s for you,” he said.

And then without another word, he stood up, ignoring Rachel’s stunned expression, and left the diner.

Rachel turned around in time to see the door swing shut. She heard the sound of Henry’s shoes on the crushed gravel in the parking lot, and a second later she saw him pass in front of the side window on his way around to the back of the diner.

The next time she saw him he was on page four of the Sutter County
Register
.

There are haunted places in the world. Dark places. Shunned places. Forgotten places. All existing in reality and every bit as tangible and accessible as the house next door. Sometimes it
is
the house next door.

But hauntings aren’t restricted to houses. There are also haunted apartments and haunted trailers, haunted farms and haunted restaurants, haunted churches and haunted schools, and, on Lake Shore Boulevard in Toronto, there is even a haunted fish-processing plant.

In the unexpunged edition of
The North American Guide to Haunted Architectural Structures and Supernatural Pressure Points
(Horsehead Press, 1949), paranormal researcher Dale Mundy declared that the most haunted building south of the Mason-Dixon Line was not a house but a cabin. Cabin D, to be exact, at the Crescent Moon Motel in Tennessee.

According to Mundy, no one who stayed in Cabin D—the Crescent Moon’s honeymoon suite—lived to see morning. The cabin had been built away from the others in a clearing in the woods, the thought being that seclusion equalled romance. Mundy didn’t mention exactly how many newlyweds had died in Cabin D, but he soliloquized on vast numbers of young lovers who never even had the chance to consummate their wedding vows. Eventually the owner stopped renting it out, and then, in October of 1923, a hurricane dubbed “The Southern Banshee” tore through Sutter County and reduced every cabin at the Crescent Moon to splinters. Every one except Cabin D.

Some people in Sutter County said the destruction of the Crescent Moon cabins was a blessing; others went one further and called it “nature’s exorcism.” The following summer, the land was bought by a developer and a motel was put up in the cabins’ place—not directly on the site of the demolished cabins but closer to the highway. The new owner was never told about the existence of Cabin D because the old owner wasn’t around to tell them. The Southern Banshee had exorcised him, as well.

The new motel opened in the fall and Cabin D was left to rot quietly in the woods. It had always been a dark place, a shunned place, and now it became a forgotten place.

Occasionally it reminded the world of its existence. Hobos and transients in search of shelter from Tennessee’s brutal thunderstorms sometimes came upon the lone cabin in the woods. Most of them were struck dead before they could get within ten feet of the front door. A few made it inside, but as the saying goes at the roach motel,
They check in, but they don’t check out
.

Despite the lofty theories of pundits like Dale Mundy, Cabin D was not hungry for blood, or souls, or Hostess Twinkies. It simply didn’t like visitors. It had stood in the woods beyond the Crescent Moon Motel for over eighty years, and, like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it might stand for eighty more.

But some people—those who had not forgotten about Cabin D—decided they couldn’t take that chance.

When he reached the edge of the parking lot, Henry kicked off his shoes and continued on barefoot. The grass was cool and damp under his feet. It was incredibly refreshing, and it took his mind off the gargantuan meal he had just eaten . . . and the cancer that was eating
him
.

It also took his mind off the thing that was waiting for him in the woods. The thing that had been masquerading as a dilapidated cabin for the last eighty years.

Cabin D hadn’t killed anyone in seven years—not since a seventeen-year-old runaway named Justin Dugby came upon the cabin one rainy night—but the group Henry worked for decided enough was enough. It was time to take Cabin D out of the game.

Except we can’t do that without taking one of ourselves out of the game.

Henry recalled something one of his science teachers had said, about how energy could neither be created nor destroyed. The poisonous cloud that Cabin D had existed within all these years operated under a similar principle. It could not be destroyed, as such, but the malefic energy that thrummed through its walls could be negated.

Travis had given him the means to do that very thing. A small post-hypnotic trigger that—if it worked—would snuff out both the cabin’s influence and Henry’s life. A fair trade, he thought. The authorities would find his body, eventually, and he’d be written off as just another dead vagrant. He wasn’t carrying any identification, not that it would have mattered anyway. He had been legally dead since he joined the group eleven years earlier.

Passing through the grass and into the dense woods, Henry could feel the pressure building up around him. His ears felt stuffed with invisible cotton. The sound of his footsteps seemed distant, not his own. As he pressed on, the pressure continued to build until he thought his head might explode. Cabin D didn’t like visitors. Travis had shown him a satellite photograph of the woods behind the Crescent Diner, pointing out a number of black dots in the clearing where Cabin D stood.

Birds
, Travis had said with a dark grin.
Makes you kind of glad there are no commercial flight routes that cross over it, huh?

That was part of the reason Henry had volunteered to take out Cabin D. Yes, the cabin was mostly cut off from the world, and yes, more people died each year from lightning strikes and shark attacks, but those were natural occurrences. There was nothing natural about Cabin D. And things could change very quickly. Cabin D wasn’t sitting on prime real estate now, but who could say what would happen ten, fifteen, or fifty years from now? The possibilities were as endless as they were disturbing.

The last few weeks leading up to his departure, Travis had started calling Henry “The Amazing Psychic Suicide Bomber.” Henry didn’t mind. At least Travis was still talking to him. By that time, most of the others in the group were ignoring him completely. In their minds he was already dead. He was like a ghost walking among them. They knew what he was planning to do and they were afraid for him.

And now here it was.

Henry stepped out between two hoary oaks and into a sea of tall grass that wavered gently in the night wind. Cabin D stood about forty feet away.

The wind picked up and the cabin seemed to creak scornfully.

Henry cleared his throat and spoke in a loud, carrying voice.

“Think of this as the return of the Southern Banshee. Back to finish the job.”

He felt the pressure around his body intensify, like he was being squeezed within a giant invisible fist. Cabin D didn’t like visitors in general, and it absolutely hated him. Henry could feel it. That was his freak, his wild talent, the thing his mother had called his “little extra.” It had allowed him to converse with the dead, to read portents in broken glass and animal bones, and now it was the thing keeping him from dropping dead like the birds or any of the unfortunate souls who had travelled into Cabin D’s noxious orbit.

Henry bore these intangible touchings as he waded through the tall grass toward the cabin. He went up the short flight of steps to the front door. He raised his hand and saw the veins sticking out on his arms like bas-relief. He opened the door—it wasn’t locked—and stepped inside.

The air was dry and still. Galaxies of dust motes revolved slowly in the moonlight that filtered in through the windows. Henry realized with a kind of dim awe that he was the first person to step inside Cabin D in over eighty years.

There was still furniture in the cabin: an old horsehair sofa, two puke-green easy chairs, and a wooden coffee table that had been warped so badly by eighty years of moisture that it now resembled some strange piece of modern art. Hanging over the sofa was a painting of a summer landscape that was so sun-faded it could have now passed as a winter scene.

Stepping further into the room, Henry felt the pressure around him turn up a notch. Invisible fingers scrutinized the rondure of his skull like the shell of a hardboiled egg. He went into the bedroom.

The bed was neatly made, though the sheets lay in their own funky miasma of mildew. He went back out into the main room and sat down on the sofa, sending up a cloud of dust that caused him to cough loudly. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

All alone in the honeymoon suite
, he thought.
It doesn’t get much lower than this.
He felt the Cabin probing his eyesockets, his ears, the smooth trunk of his neck, looking for leverage, access.

In his mind he pictured the trigger. Except it didn’t look like a trigger; it looked like a metal ring. He felt the pressure increase again, the hands scampering frantically over his body, patting him down, looking desperately for some way in. The ring was attached to something. In his mind Henry raised an invisible hand and slipped a finger through the ring. He let out a deep sigh and flexed his mind.

Henry slumped down on the couch, a small thread of blood trickling out of his nostril. He wondered dimly if it worked. His eyes flicked to the window as a cluster of shingles fell off the roof and landed in the tall grass. A crack appeared in the front door with a loud splintering sound. A floorboard snapped upward like a drawbridge. There was a low groaning sound that might have been the cabin settling. To Henry it was sound of something dying. He smiled and closed his eyes.

Ian Rogers is a writer, artist, and photographer. His short fiction has appeared in several publications, including
Cemetery Dance
,
Supernatural Tales
, and
Shadows & Tall Trees
. He is the author of
SuperNOIRtural Tales
(Burning Effigy Press), a series of stories featuring supernatural detective Felix Renn. Ian lives with his wife in Peterborough, Ontario. For more information, visit
ianrogers.ca
.

“Cabin D” first appeared in
Supernatural Tales #17
(April 2010).