Mike Sutton's Blog: For prose apply within. - Posts Tagged "game"
A Game in the Woods
The cabin was isolated. That was what Anna so loved about the place. Miles from anywhere and anyone. They didn't even have cell phone service. Just the cabin out on the lake, and only a handful of neighbors to pay them any mind. A little piece of paradise, her grandfather always called it.
The first true week of spring had come at last and the sky was sparkling blue even as the wind retained the snakebite sting of the tail end of winter. The calendar might suggest that the first day of spring was the twenty-first of March, each and every year. Nonsense, as any resident of the North could well tell you. Spring only arrived when enough snow melted that you could finally reach your camp once more. Some years the weather cooperated with the calendar and others it didn't.
Winter was gone, mostly, and spring had arrived, mostly. This was the time of year when winter might utter a death roar and cover the land with a foot of snow as it died and made way for summer's warm embrace.
With the beginning of the new year came celebration. For Anna and her family, the new year arrived with the thaw and not before. The back roads were clear, mostly, and they could once again return to their lakefront property out in the woods.
Winter had not been kind to the property, and at least two different storms had roared through, pummeling the old cabin. Nothing serious, but it took Anna and her siblings a week's worth of hard work to clean everything up in time for their weekend welcome back party. A week of eating the traditional pasties and succumbing to such unpleasant tortures as cleaning out the privy. When all was said and done, her brother and sister went home, leaving Anna by herself to wait for her friends to arrive.
Anna lay back in big brown couch in the living room/dining room/den/parlor, as her friends began to arrive for the weekend debauchery. The small cabin had been a converted church at one time in it's long existence - oh the irony! A small one room building dragged from camp to camp to house divine service for the lumberjacks - men who lived wild lives and who no doubt needed as much spiritual assistance as they could get their hands on in order to come square with their God. Some sort of cosmic balance sheet.
Her great grandfather had purchased the old church and set it down on his property next to the lake. And like that it went from a house of worship to the wonder-funland of a small family. Strange how things worked out in the end. She wondered if even God himself had seen that one coming. In the beginning, the building had only been made up of one large room, but over the coming generations, as the clan grew, they extended it until there were three bedrooms and a screened in porch that looked out onto the lake. The cabin was rustic but comfortable, with more than enough room to house anyone who wished to stay over for the weekend. All in relative comfort (that of course was relative to sleeping outside in the wind and rain).
The cabin had been furnished eclectically, which was a polite way of saying that it had long been a dumping ground for all of the worn, but still serviceable, furniture no longer wanted at their homes in town. The same went for everything else within the walls of the house, down to the twenty year old Zenith television and the dictionary wedged in underneath in place of the missing leg. Books and board games and dishes and silverware. It had all come from somewhere else, and mashed together to give the camp a old homey feel, like visiting someone's grandmother's home.
If you managed to ignore the other half of the cabin's adornments.
For generations, the men of her family enjoyed the tradition of deer camp. That magical time of year(for them) when they got together out in the woods, imbibed much alcohol, and tried to kill a deer. All without getting lost and freezing to death, or shooting one of their friends. As a result of the other half of the camp's history, the walls of the cabin were lined with the proud remnants of trophies long forgotten. From the stuffed bear head over the fire place to the antlers that adorned the space over every doorway like a sculpted bust of Janus.
Guns too. The walls nearly oozed testosterone.
At least until her grandmother had arrived. Then the balance had shifted to something more feminine, frilly and infested with doilies. Her grandmother had come from more civilized climes and had tendencies towards almost a neurotic level of extreme girlyness at times. Thankfully, before she and her siblings were ever born, the balance had shifted back to a happy medium. Sans the doilies.
"I suppose we should get this party rolling!" Anna said a half hour after the last car pulled in, bringing Stacey and Ellen. Seven of her friends had decided to rough the weather and come on out. Three men and four women - herself not included. With twenty invitations and a dozen maybes in response, they were looking fairly good.
"Well? What shall we do first?" Asked her friend Jim as he leaned over the couch and pointed at the bottle of Five O'clock in his left hand.
"Gee, I don't know. Shall we drink?"
"Capital idea babe." Yelled her other friend James from across the room. Jim and James - the only two men present, they were long time friends and roommates cursed with the same name - began prying open bottles, almost at random and mixing the house cocktail for Ellen since it was her first time out at a camp party.
The house cocktail - another tradition, albeit a relatively new one - was best not contemplated for too long. Even so much a whiff of it's pungent aroma was enough to make some unfortunate souls - Anna sadly included - nauseous as they recalled their own experience with the mad cap, even insane, mixture of querulous booze. All to be drunk as quickly as humanly possible, meaning that it was a long and painful experience not soon forgotten.
Ellen was making good headway with her drink the first blast of wind from the oncoming the storm shook the cabin. Howling like the wolf from the story as it tried to blow her house down. For a moment the lights flickered and the party stopped, as seven half drunk students looked around at the walls and waited for them to collapse.
And then the first gust passed - the lights calmed down, and the kids started urging Ellen onward towards acceptance, glory and finally hangover. With some possible stops at nudity, loud uncontrolled laughter and uncoordinated attempts at dancing in between. Ellen would be well on her way to social lubrication to help her be at ease with a bunch of strangers. Ellen was her partner in Chem Lab, a girl from Detroit who fell in love with natural beauty here in the wilds of the north. She first encountered the woods during a class trip and arranged to come back for college. She was intelligent - proof enough that she eased Anna through their nearly incomprehensible lab-work in chemistry - and sweet, extremely shy and so very out of her element. She loved the beauty of the surrounding wilderness, but she was a city girl through and through. A strange match, since Anna was a local. Anna and her friends adopted Ellen and tried to teach her the ways of the north. Which involved drinking beer and using the sauna.
Ellen was now rather accomplished at both skills. But she was still a lightweight. Two beers were enough to get her drunk. The entire cocktail would knock her on her ass for most of the night. Good thing they had the entire weekend to play.
As darkness came, the storm seemed to spring up, rattling the windows in their frames with each violent gust.
"Wish I had known that this was coming." Anna complained as she looked out the window at the rippling forest.
Jane joined her at the window and put her arm around Anna's shoulder. Anna returned the gesture, glad for the companionship and the warmth. "They've been predicting it for the last four or five days babe."
"Too bad I've been out here working on the camp. Would have been nice if someone told me."
"What for? So you could cancel the party?"
"No, I can't cancel the party. I just would have figured on more things to do inside. Brought more movies, you know. Some of those old VHS tapes were on their way out when they were brought to camp. A few years roasting through the summer and freezing through the winter couldn't have been much of a favor for them. Really though, who wants to see the Adventures of Gumby anyway?"
"Me! I do!" James yelled, punching his fist into the air.
"Do what?" Jim asked.
"Forrest Gump. We're watching Forrest Gump! I love that movie."
Stacey yelled at him. "Not Forrest Gump you deaf idiot, Gumby."
"Gumby? You mean that green clay guy? Who the hell would want to watch that crap for? Screw that."
"Hey, I brought this along just in case it rained and its raining," Stacey slurred her words as she pulled a battered box out from her backpack. It was an Ouija board. "I've always wanted to try it. I got this one from Vinnies for like fifty cents a month ago."
James picked up the box, looked at it for a moment and then said, "Vinnies? You have to be kidding."
"Why? Yeah I got it at Vinnies." Stacey was beginning to get that pouty look on her face - the one that screamed 'no sex for you' loud enough for even the newcomer Ellen to hear it. But James seemed to ignore it. Damnedest thing how he could do it, since they had been dating for two years and she seemed to wear that look quite often when he was near by.
"They're a Catholic charity. Why would they be selling Ouija boards? Isn't that against one of their rules?" James shook his head.
"No," Jim said, "They sell pretty much anything they can get their hands on. Beggars can't be choosers after all. Really though, it's a stupid game for suckers."
"Well," Jane asked as she put down her beer glaring at the boys, "what do we need to play your game?"
"I think we just need the game itself. I looked inside and everything is there. But we might also want to set the mood too."
James sighed. "What sort of mood do we need to set?"
"Something mysterious. I brought candles too, just in case." Stacey opened her bag and yes indeed she did bring candles. All shapes and sizes. "We can light them all and put them around the room and turn off the lights."
"I'm going to grab another drink," said James. "Anyone else want one?"
"I'll take one," Jim answered, "if we're going to do this, I'll need something to help me through it. Vodka, straight." How he could stomach straight Five O'clock was a secret that Anna hadn't learned yet. She did know that switched to peer booze when he was in a dark mood. Anna and Stacey walked around setting out the candles and making sure that each and every one had some object underneath to catch the wax - something fireproof of course - though Stacey was drunk enough to suggest sheets of paper at first.
They all gathered around the table with the board set between them. Jim kept on about how stupid the whole thing was, so Stacey set him to playing secretary instead and pushed him off to one side away from the table. The rules required this, and Stacey read them aloud to silence a protesting Jim - "No non-believers in the circle, they disrupt the energy!"
Jim turned the lights off and the room was bathed with the warm glow of candle light. Romantic, sexy and spooky. All in one. Anna began to feel a little excitement rise within her.
James suddenly stood up and walked to the door. "Before we start, I gotta empty the snake something bad."
"Ditto!" Said half of the room, as they scurried out into the windy night, jostling one another for the best place in line out at the privy. Anna had a vague notion that it would be better to wait inside just in case it started to rain - but that notion passed and she sat back to enjoy her buzz, saving her seat for when the game began despite the fact that tradition meant that nobody could steal a seat of the host. Rank had its privileges. There she sat drifting in and out. Dozing a little. She hadn't realized how tired she was.
Boom! Anna shrieked and jumped from her seat and spun around as a huge noise flooded through the room.
The door!
She ran to the door and found that one of her friends had left it unfastened - giving it to the tender mercies of the wind. No damage done, if she ignored the fact that she almost wet her pants. Anna stood for a moment, staring outside as the wind drove large snow flakes by the door. She decided then and there that she didn't really need to use the privy just yet.
"It's snowing again. This place is crazy." Ellen sat down next to Anna and rubbed her arms to warm herself. Melt water dripped from her hair onto the floor.
"That happens some times. Even all the way into late May. Usually when a storm comes down out of Canada. The snow never stays around for very long though, and we rarely get too much. So we should be OK." Anna leaned sleepily against her friend, unsure how much longer she would be awake. It had been a long day, and the addition of alcohol to the equation didn't help much. She decided that she would goto the privy after all, and then retire for the night.
She fell asleep to the sound of her friends talking and arguing around the table. Who would they contact? President Lincoln? Ghandi? Madonna? Madonna's still alive you idiot, she just put another album out a couple years ago! Oh. Is it any good? Stop pushing! Stop pushing! You're supposed to let it move on it's own! I'm not pushing! Yes you are! Yeah, there's no way that anything out there would spell 'James is sexy'! They sounded like they were having fun, and Anna felt suddenly happy that they were there and full of love for these people. Then sleep came.
Something was jostling she shoulder. There was a breathless squeal in her ear. "Anna! Anna! Wake up!"
"Wazzit? Wajyawant?" She asked through a sleep laden haze. The jostling became more violent and the voice more intense. Finally Anna opened one eye, only to be blinded by what seemed like the noon day sun being focused on her face. "Gah! What do you want Ellen?"
Ellen's voice dropped down to a whisper. "There's something out there Anna. Something moving around out there." She pointed the flashlight towards the front door.
"It's probably a deer. They're all over around here. Come by the house all the time."
"No, it's not a deer. I've seen deer before, that wasn't a deer." Her tone became more high pitched with the flow of each and every syllable, until Anna could barely understand what she was saying.
"Ok, one of the neighbor's dogs, or a coyote."
"Not a dog. It had red eyes Anna! Red eyes. They glowed." She began crying. "And it looked at me. It stared at me. Right at me."
Red eyes? Anna had never heard of an animal with red eyes. How much had Ellen had to drink? The night was fuzzy and Anna could hardly keep up with her own tab. Ellen had finished the cocktail, but everything after that was indistinct. "Please Anna." Ellen begged. She didn't sound drunk. Sloppily drunk at least.
She sounded terrified.
Anna rolled out of bed, or at least she tried, only to find that she was lying sideways across the bed. She pushed herself up to her hands a knees and slid down off of the bed to stand next to her friend.
"What the hell is wrong?" She asked, still feeling a little groggy from drink and sleep. Anna squinted, looking around.
"I went outside to pee a few minutes ago. And when I got back i heard something." She pointed at the door, her hands wrapped around the flashlight in a stranglehold. Her voice dropped to a whisper, "Then I saw it."
"You're not fucking with me are you? James and Jim really like to play practical jokes, it's probably them."
"No. They're both asleep on the couches in the living room."
"James is sleeping on a couch?"
"Stacey didn't want company tonight. He started acting really stupid after the game got started. It laughed Anna."
"The couch?"
"No, the thing outside. It looked at me and then it cackled."
"Cackled?"
"Yes, it laughed. Then it said 'hello Ellen'." Anna only looked at her, she could think of little else to do. Ellen began whimpering. Then in a broken whisper, "It knows my name Anna, it knows my name."
The candles had all either burned out or had been blown out before everyone finally stumbled off to their beds, leaving the entire room in the dark. Anna pushed Ellen ahead of her, out towards the living room table. She still had no idea what was going on, or what Ellen was talking about. Just a dream she suspected, or she would have if Ellen had any sort of imagination.
She looked over at Ellen, who was taking baby-steps towards the table. A chill ran down her spine.
Anna ran her eyes down the page, a long column of text, spelled out one letter at a time as if it were written by a child just learning his letters. Defiantly Jim, his handwriting had always been terrible. Writing one letter at a time would make a bad situation become even worse.
h a h a h a
h e r e
n o t t e l l i n g
m a y b e
No
Yes
Down to the last line: i d l o v e t o m e e t y o u a l l i l l b e b y l a t e r. The last line
I'd love to meet you all, I'll be by later.
That was the last thing written on the page. Anna read through the entire page and tried to figure out what what questions had been asked. "Who the hell did you guys find? What did you do last night? What does this mean?" Anna asked
"He said that he had died here on this land and that he was related to your family. That it was buried on the property somewhere, and had been murdered."
"What else did it say? That there was treasure or something."
"Yeah. It did. It told us all sorts of horrible things about your family. And funny things too. James was laughing and laughing."
Horrible things about her family? James laughing? He would be the one to talk, his family was one of the most wild and eccentric in the entire county. His grandfather was a convicted murder, killed his own wife. "What else happened?"
Her voice dropped down to a whisper. "James said that he would like to see it, and asked if it would come for a visit."
"Here I am Ellen, it said, here I am." She sobbed once, her entire body shaking. The entire time her voice never rose above a whisper.
Anna walked over and kicked the couch that James was sleeping on, trying to rouse him from his blessed unconsciousness. He grunted, drooled a bit and then rolled over and continued sawing wood. Jim was no better. They had always been heavy sleepers after a night of drinking - sometimes that worked in Anna's favor, and other times it didn't. Too bad she wasn't in the mood to dip their hands in warm water.
Where were the men when you needed one? The wind seemed to have died down some, but the snow was still coming down, harder now that even before, and Anna didn't really want to go outside to search for Ellen's phantom friend. Especially if Ellen was having herself a royal melt down. The Cocktail sometimes addled people's brains.
She flashed the light through the door, out into the darkness of her yard, spraying the light across the tree-trunks with the wave of an arm. Nothing was there.
Something was there.
It moved. Fast. Charging through the beam of light as if the mere touch burned its flesh. Anna, swung her arm through the air and tried to track the thing. Was it a deer? Or a coyote that she had startled with her sudden appearance? Some harmless creature there picking through the garbage? Maybe a bear even? They were known to come in from time to time. Bear were fast. But they weren't grey colored. Not usually. That thing would have been a small bear.
There. Out of the corner of her vision. Two points of glowing lights stood hovering shoulder-high in the darkness. They swayed back and forth and then latched onto her own. Slipping in towards her soul. That was no... words failed her. She didn't know what it was. A hideous cackle. Anna shivered and jumped back inside, slamming the door behind her, shaking the house. Nobody stirred.
"Did you see it?"
"I think so. What was it?" A glimpse, that was all. Even now her mind was trying to convince her that she had seen a deer, or some other harmless forest creature.
"Was it..." Ellen sat down in a chair by the table. Her breathing was ragged as her eyes darted around the room, as if she were a rabbit searching for a hole to bolt down.
"I don't know. The gun!" Anna reached up and took the old double barrel shotgun down off the the wall, tradition held that it hung on that wall. It had been her grandfather's favorite weapon, he brought down numerous deer with it and counted it lucky. Even a wolf once, or so he claimed. Anna could use that luck now.
She checked the chambers.
Empty.
Anna cursed. Ellen sobbed and sat down in a corner and tucked her knees underneath her chin. She searched the mantel for shells. None. There were always shells on the mantel, for as long as she could remember. Tradition failed. Her first impulse was to throw the weapon down and scream, to empty her lungs of air. She came a hairs breath from doing so.
Instead, she replaced the weapon and joined Ellen to think.
What did they do?
What the hell did they do? The minutes ticked by as Anna sat pressed against Ellen in their corner. Neither dared to speak and barely to breathe. It was dark, and so quiet. If she closed her eyes, maybe she could convince herself that it had all been a wild dream. Maybe she was just hallucinating the entire experience.
A scream tore through the silence, an animal dying. Horribly. Ellen began crying in earnest, a river of tears and a storm of weeping.
Silence again.
"It lied to us Anna. When we were talking to it. It lied to us, and now here it is."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. It said it was your relative. But it lied."
Then the scratching came. On the walls.
Around the house.
And the laughter. It was driving her mad. Chills ran down her back with each outburst.
There was a clicking sound on the windows. First one and then the next.
Around the house.
*Ellen, you smell so sweet. Come out and talk to me some more.* Laughter.
Ellen covered her ears and buried her face. "No! Go away! Leave us alone."
Cackling. The laughter sounded like bones being ground up, while someone ran their finger nails across the chalk board. *We'll return later my sweets*
Dawn arrived. Spreading her rosy fingers as Homer might say, the poet, not the Simpson. Anna shook Ellen awake and they in turn woke everyone else in the house. Nobody else had stirred. Anna would have guessed that they had not lost so much as a wink of sleep, enveloped as they were in a protective cocoon of whiskey and dreams.
Anna stood up slowly, her muscles ached. She walked to the nearest window. The storm had dropped a foot of snow on the ground outside.
Outside, by her car, there was a shredded, half-eaten deer carcass lying in a puddle of blood, half buried in the snow.
The tires on her car had been slashed.
The tires on the other vehicles had been slashed.
There were gouges torn out of the siding all around the house.
No tracks. Just the pure driven snow.
"Oh." Ellen whispered.
"What the hell did you guys do?" Anna asked. She wanted to cry.
The snow was pristine and white and glittered in the morning sunlight. A foot of snow. Heavy and wet. They were five miles to the nearest road. A two lane dirt track that was never plowed. Ten miles further to the highway. Fifteen miles to safety.
"What the hell did you do?"
The cabin was isolated. That was what Anna hated about the place. Only a handful of neighbors and no cell phone service to call for help.
The first true week of spring had come at last and the sky was sparkling blue even as the wind retained the snakebite sting of the tail end of winter. The calendar might suggest that the first day of spring was the twenty-first of March, each and every year. Nonsense, as any resident of the North could well tell you. Spring only arrived when enough snow melted that you could finally reach your camp once more. Some years the weather cooperated with the calendar and others it didn't.
Winter was gone, mostly, and spring had arrived, mostly. This was the time of year when winter might utter a death roar and cover the land with a foot of snow as it died and made way for summer's warm embrace.
With the beginning of the new year came celebration. For Anna and her family, the new year arrived with the thaw and not before. The back roads were clear, mostly, and they could once again return to their lakefront property out in the woods.
Winter had not been kind to the property, and at least two different storms had roared through, pummeling the old cabin. Nothing serious, but it took Anna and her siblings a week's worth of hard work to clean everything up in time for their weekend welcome back party. A week of eating the traditional pasties and succumbing to such unpleasant tortures as cleaning out the privy. When all was said and done, her brother and sister went home, leaving Anna by herself to wait for her friends to arrive.
Anna lay back in big brown couch in the living room/dining room/den/parlor, as her friends began to arrive for the weekend debauchery. The small cabin had been a converted church at one time in it's long existence - oh the irony! A small one room building dragged from camp to camp to house divine service for the lumberjacks - men who lived wild lives and who no doubt needed as much spiritual assistance as they could get their hands on in order to come square with their God. Some sort of cosmic balance sheet.
Her great grandfather had purchased the old church and set it down on his property next to the lake. And like that it went from a house of worship to the wonder-funland of a small family. Strange how things worked out in the end. She wondered if even God himself had seen that one coming. In the beginning, the building had only been made up of one large room, but over the coming generations, as the clan grew, they extended it until there were three bedrooms and a screened in porch that looked out onto the lake. The cabin was rustic but comfortable, with more than enough room to house anyone who wished to stay over for the weekend. All in relative comfort (that of course was relative to sleeping outside in the wind and rain).
The cabin had been furnished eclectically, which was a polite way of saying that it had long been a dumping ground for all of the worn, but still serviceable, furniture no longer wanted at their homes in town. The same went for everything else within the walls of the house, down to the twenty year old Zenith television and the dictionary wedged in underneath in place of the missing leg. Books and board games and dishes and silverware. It had all come from somewhere else, and mashed together to give the camp a old homey feel, like visiting someone's grandmother's home.
If you managed to ignore the other half of the cabin's adornments.
For generations, the men of her family enjoyed the tradition of deer camp. That magical time of year(for them) when they got together out in the woods, imbibed much alcohol, and tried to kill a deer. All without getting lost and freezing to death, or shooting one of their friends. As a result of the other half of the camp's history, the walls of the cabin were lined with the proud remnants of trophies long forgotten. From the stuffed bear head over the fire place to the antlers that adorned the space over every doorway like a sculpted bust of Janus.
Guns too. The walls nearly oozed testosterone.
At least until her grandmother had arrived. Then the balance had shifted to something more feminine, frilly and infested with doilies. Her grandmother had come from more civilized climes and had tendencies towards almost a neurotic level of extreme girlyness at times. Thankfully, before she and her siblings were ever born, the balance had shifted back to a happy medium. Sans the doilies.
"I suppose we should get this party rolling!" Anna said a half hour after the last car pulled in, bringing Stacey and Ellen. Seven of her friends had decided to rough the weather and come on out. Three men and four women - herself not included. With twenty invitations and a dozen maybes in response, they were looking fairly good.
"Well? What shall we do first?" Asked her friend Jim as he leaned over the couch and pointed at the bottle of Five O'clock in his left hand.
"Gee, I don't know. Shall we drink?"
"Capital idea babe." Yelled her other friend James from across the room. Jim and James - the only two men present, they were long time friends and roommates cursed with the same name - began prying open bottles, almost at random and mixing the house cocktail for Ellen since it was her first time out at a camp party.
The house cocktail - another tradition, albeit a relatively new one - was best not contemplated for too long. Even so much a whiff of it's pungent aroma was enough to make some unfortunate souls - Anna sadly included - nauseous as they recalled their own experience with the mad cap, even insane, mixture of querulous booze. All to be drunk as quickly as humanly possible, meaning that it was a long and painful experience not soon forgotten.
Ellen was making good headway with her drink the first blast of wind from the oncoming the storm shook the cabin. Howling like the wolf from the story as it tried to blow her house down. For a moment the lights flickered and the party stopped, as seven half drunk students looked around at the walls and waited for them to collapse.
And then the first gust passed - the lights calmed down, and the kids started urging Ellen onward towards acceptance, glory and finally hangover. With some possible stops at nudity, loud uncontrolled laughter and uncoordinated attempts at dancing in between. Ellen would be well on her way to social lubrication to help her be at ease with a bunch of strangers. Ellen was her partner in Chem Lab, a girl from Detroit who fell in love with natural beauty here in the wilds of the north. She first encountered the woods during a class trip and arranged to come back for college. She was intelligent - proof enough that she eased Anna through their nearly incomprehensible lab-work in chemistry - and sweet, extremely shy and so very out of her element. She loved the beauty of the surrounding wilderness, but she was a city girl through and through. A strange match, since Anna was a local. Anna and her friends adopted Ellen and tried to teach her the ways of the north. Which involved drinking beer and using the sauna.
Ellen was now rather accomplished at both skills. But she was still a lightweight. Two beers were enough to get her drunk. The entire cocktail would knock her on her ass for most of the night. Good thing they had the entire weekend to play.
As darkness came, the storm seemed to spring up, rattling the windows in their frames with each violent gust.
"Wish I had known that this was coming." Anna complained as she looked out the window at the rippling forest.
Jane joined her at the window and put her arm around Anna's shoulder. Anna returned the gesture, glad for the companionship and the warmth. "They've been predicting it for the last four or five days babe."
"Too bad I've been out here working on the camp. Would have been nice if someone told me."
"What for? So you could cancel the party?"
"No, I can't cancel the party. I just would have figured on more things to do inside. Brought more movies, you know. Some of those old VHS tapes were on their way out when they were brought to camp. A few years roasting through the summer and freezing through the winter couldn't have been much of a favor for them. Really though, who wants to see the Adventures of Gumby anyway?"
"Me! I do!" James yelled, punching his fist into the air.
"Do what?" Jim asked.
"Forrest Gump. We're watching Forrest Gump! I love that movie."
Stacey yelled at him. "Not Forrest Gump you deaf idiot, Gumby."
"Gumby? You mean that green clay guy? Who the hell would want to watch that crap for? Screw that."
"Hey, I brought this along just in case it rained and its raining," Stacey slurred her words as she pulled a battered box out from her backpack. It was an Ouija board. "I've always wanted to try it. I got this one from Vinnies for like fifty cents a month ago."
James picked up the box, looked at it for a moment and then said, "Vinnies? You have to be kidding."
"Why? Yeah I got it at Vinnies." Stacey was beginning to get that pouty look on her face - the one that screamed 'no sex for you' loud enough for even the newcomer Ellen to hear it. But James seemed to ignore it. Damnedest thing how he could do it, since they had been dating for two years and she seemed to wear that look quite often when he was near by.
"They're a Catholic charity. Why would they be selling Ouija boards? Isn't that against one of their rules?" James shook his head.
"No," Jim said, "They sell pretty much anything they can get their hands on. Beggars can't be choosers after all. Really though, it's a stupid game for suckers."
"Well," Jane asked as she put down her beer glaring at the boys, "what do we need to play your game?"
"I think we just need the game itself. I looked inside and everything is there. But we might also want to set the mood too."
James sighed. "What sort of mood do we need to set?"
"Something mysterious. I brought candles too, just in case." Stacey opened her bag and yes indeed she did bring candles. All shapes and sizes. "We can light them all and put them around the room and turn off the lights."
"I'm going to grab another drink," said James. "Anyone else want one?"
"I'll take one," Jim answered, "if we're going to do this, I'll need something to help me through it. Vodka, straight." How he could stomach straight Five O'clock was a secret that Anna hadn't learned yet. She did know that switched to peer booze when he was in a dark mood. Anna and Stacey walked around setting out the candles and making sure that each and every one had some object underneath to catch the wax - something fireproof of course - though Stacey was drunk enough to suggest sheets of paper at first.
They all gathered around the table with the board set between them. Jim kept on about how stupid the whole thing was, so Stacey set him to playing secretary instead and pushed him off to one side away from the table. The rules required this, and Stacey read them aloud to silence a protesting Jim - "No non-believers in the circle, they disrupt the energy!"
Jim turned the lights off and the room was bathed with the warm glow of candle light. Romantic, sexy and spooky. All in one. Anna began to feel a little excitement rise within her.
James suddenly stood up and walked to the door. "Before we start, I gotta empty the snake something bad."
"Ditto!" Said half of the room, as they scurried out into the windy night, jostling one another for the best place in line out at the privy. Anna had a vague notion that it would be better to wait inside just in case it started to rain - but that notion passed and she sat back to enjoy her buzz, saving her seat for when the game began despite the fact that tradition meant that nobody could steal a seat of the host. Rank had its privileges. There she sat drifting in and out. Dozing a little. She hadn't realized how tired she was.
Boom! Anna shrieked and jumped from her seat and spun around as a huge noise flooded through the room.
The door!
She ran to the door and found that one of her friends had left it unfastened - giving it to the tender mercies of the wind. No damage done, if she ignored the fact that she almost wet her pants. Anna stood for a moment, staring outside as the wind drove large snow flakes by the door. She decided then and there that she didn't really need to use the privy just yet.
"It's snowing again. This place is crazy." Ellen sat down next to Anna and rubbed her arms to warm herself. Melt water dripped from her hair onto the floor.
"That happens some times. Even all the way into late May. Usually when a storm comes down out of Canada. The snow never stays around for very long though, and we rarely get too much. So we should be OK." Anna leaned sleepily against her friend, unsure how much longer she would be awake. It had been a long day, and the addition of alcohol to the equation didn't help much. She decided that she would goto the privy after all, and then retire for the night.
She fell asleep to the sound of her friends talking and arguing around the table. Who would they contact? President Lincoln? Ghandi? Madonna? Madonna's still alive you idiot, she just put another album out a couple years ago! Oh. Is it any good? Stop pushing! Stop pushing! You're supposed to let it move on it's own! I'm not pushing! Yes you are! Yeah, there's no way that anything out there would spell 'James is sexy'! They sounded like they were having fun, and Anna felt suddenly happy that they were there and full of love for these people. Then sleep came.
Something was jostling she shoulder. There was a breathless squeal in her ear. "Anna! Anna! Wake up!"
"Wazzit? Wajyawant?" She asked through a sleep laden haze. The jostling became more violent and the voice more intense. Finally Anna opened one eye, only to be blinded by what seemed like the noon day sun being focused on her face. "Gah! What do you want Ellen?"
Ellen's voice dropped down to a whisper. "There's something out there Anna. Something moving around out there." She pointed the flashlight towards the front door.
"It's probably a deer. They're all over around here. Come by the house all the time."
"No, it's not a deer. I've seen deer before, that wasn't a deer." Her tone became more high pitched with the flow of each and every syllable, until Anna could barely understand what she was saying.
"Ok, one of the neighbor's dogs, or a coyote."
"Not a dog. It had red eyes Anna! Red eyes. They glowed." She began crying. "And it looked at me. It stared at me. Right at me."
Red eyes? Anna had never heard of an animal with red eyes. How much had Ellen had to drink? The night was fuzzy and Anna could hardly keep up with her own tab. Ellen had finished the cocktail, but everything after that was indistinct. "Please Anna." Ellen begged. She didn't sound drunk. Sloppily drunk at least.
She sounded terrified.
Anna rolled out of bed, or at least she tried, only to find that she was lying sideways across the bed. She pushed herself up to her hands a knees and slid down off of the bed to stand next to her friend.
"What the hell is wrong?" She asked, still feeling a little groggy from drink and sleep. Anna squinted, looking around.
"I went outside to pee a few minutes ago. And when I got back i heard something." She pointed at the door, her hands wrapped around the flashlight in a stranglehold. Her voice dropped to a whisper, "Then I saw it."
"You're not fucking with me are you? James and Jim really like to play practical jokes, it's probably them."
"No. They're both asleep on the couches in the living room."
"James is sleeping on a couch?"
"Stacey didn't want company tonight. He started acting really stupid after the game got started. It laughed Anna."
"The couch?"
"No, the thing outside. It looked at me and then it cackled."
"Cackled?"
"Yes, it laughed. Then it said 'hello Ellen'." Anna only looked at her, she could think of little else to do. Ellen began whimpering. Then in a broken whisper, "It knows my name Anna, it knows my name."
The candles had all either burned out or had been blown out before everyone finally stumbled off to their beds, leaving the entire room in the dark. Anna pushed Ellen ahead of her, out towards the living room table. She still had no idea what was going on, or what Ellen was talking about. Just a dream she suspected, or she would have if Ellen had any sort of imagination.
She looked over at Ellen, who was taking baby-steps towards the table. A chill ran down her spine.
Anna ran her eyes down the page, a long column of text, spelled out one letter at a time as if it were written by a child just learning his letters. Defiantly Jim, his handwriting had always been terrible. Writing one letter at a time would make a bad situation become even worse.
h a h a h a
h e r e
n o t t e l l i n g
m a y b e
No
Yes
Down to the last line: i d l o v e t o m e e t y o u a l l i l l b e b y l a t e r. The last line
I'd love to meet you all, I'll be by later.
That was the last thing written on the page. Anna read through the entire page and tried to figure out what what questions had been asked. "Who the hell did you guys find? What did you do last night? What does this mean?" Anna asked
"He said that he had died here on this land and that he was related to your family. That it was buried on the property somewhere, and had been murdered."
"What else did it say? That there was treasure or something."
"Yeah. It did. It told us all sorts of horrible things about your family. And funny things too. James was laughing and laughing."
Horrible things about her family? James laughing? He would be the one to talk, his family was one of the most wild and eccentric in the entire county. His grandfather was a convicted murder, killed his own wife. "What else happened?"
Her voice dropped down to a whisper. "James said that he would like to see it, and asked if it would come for a visit."
"Here I am Ellen, it said, here I am." She sobbed once, her entire body shaking. The entire time her voice never rose above a whisper.
Anna walked over and kicked the couch that James was sleeping on, trying to rouse him from his blessed unconsciousness. He grunted, drooled a bit and then rolled over and continued sawing wood. Jim was no better. They had always been heavy sleepers after a night of drinking - sometimes that worked in Anna's favor, and other times it didn't. Too bad she wasn't in the mood to dip their hands in warm water.
Where were the men when you needed one? The wind seemed to have died down some, but the snow was still coming down, harder now that even before, and Anna didn't really want to go outside to search for Ellen's phantom friend. Especially if Ellen was having herself a royal melt down. The Cocktail sometimes addled people's brains.
She flashed the light through the door, out into the darkness of her yard, spraying the light across the tree-trunks with the wave of an arm. Nothing was there.
Something was there.
It moved. Fast. Charging through the beam of light as if the mere touch burned its flesh. Anna, swung her arm through the air and tried to track the thing. Was it a deer? Or a coyote that she had startled with her sudden appearance? Some harmless creature there picking through the garbage? Maybe a bear even? They were known to come in from time to time. Bear were fast. But they weren't grey colored. Not usually. That thing would have been a small bear.
There. Out of the corner of her vision. Two points of glowing lights stood hovering shoulder-high in the darkness. They swayed back and forth and then latched onto her own. Slipping in towards her soul. That was no... words failed her. She didn't know what it was. A hideous cackle. Anna shivered and jumped back inside, slamming the door behind her, shaking the house. Nobody stirred.
"Did you see it?"
"I think so. What was it?" A glimpse, that was all. Even now her mind was trying to convince her that she had seen a deer, or some other harmless forest creature.
"Was it..." Ellen sat down in a chair by the table. Her breathing was ragged as her eyes darted around the room, as if she were a rabbit searching for a hole to bolt down.
"I don't know. The gun!" Anna reached up and took the old double barrel shotgun down off the the wall, tradition held that it hung on that wall. It had been her grandfather's favorite weapon, he brought down numerous deer with it and counted it lucky. Even a wolf once, or so he claimed. Anna could use that luck now.
She checked the chambers.
Empty.
Anna cursed. Ellen sobbed and sat down in a corner and tucked her knees underneath her chin. She searched the mantel for shells. None. There were always shells on the mantel, for as long as she could remember. Tradition failed. Her first impulse was to throw the weapon down and scream, to empty her lungs of air. She came a hairs breath from doing so.
Instead, she replaced the weapon and joined Ellen to think.
What did they do?
What the hell did they do? The minutes ticked by as Anna sat pressed against Ellen in their corner. Neither dared to speak and barely to breathe. It was dark, and so quiet. If she closed her eyes, maybe she could convince herself that it had all been a wild dream. Maybe she was just hallucinating the entire experience.
A scream tore through the silence, an animal dying. Horribly. Ellen began crying in earnest, a river of tears and a storm of weeping.
Silence again.
"It lied to us Anna. When we were talking to it. It lied to us, and now here it is."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. It said it was your relative. But it lied."
Then the scratching came. On the walls.
Around the house.
And the laughter. It was driving her mad. Chills ran down her back with each outburst.
There was a clicking sound on the windows. First one and then the next.
Around the house.
*Ellen, you smell so sweet. Come out and talk to me some more.* Laughter.
Ellen covered her ears and buried her face. "No! Go away! Leave us alone."
Cackling. The laughter sounded like bones being ground up, while someone ran their finger nails across the chalk board. *We'll return later my sweets*
Dawn arrived. Spreading her rosy fingers as Homer might say, the poet, not the Simpson. Anna shook Ellen awake and they in turn woke everyone else in the house. Nobody else had stirred. Anna would have guessed that they had not lost so much as a wink of sleep, enveloped as they were in a protective cocoon of whiskey and dreams.
Anna stood up slowly, her muscles ached. She walked to the nearest window. The storm had dropped a foot of snow on the ground outside.
Outside, by her car, there was a shredded, half-eaten deer carcass lying in a puddle of blood, half buried in the snow.
The tires on her car had been slashed.
The tires on the other vehicles had been slashed.
There were gouges torn out of the siding all around the house.
No tracks. Just the pure driven snow.
"Oh." Ellen whispered.
"What the hell did you guys do?" Anna asked. She wanted to cry.
The snow was pristine and white and glittered in the morning sunlight. A foot of snow. Heavy and wet. They were five miles to the nearest road. A two lane dirt track that was never plowed. Ten miles further to the highway. Fifteen miles to safety.
"What the hell did you do?"
The cabin was isolated. That was what Anna hated about the place. Only a handful of neighbors and no cell phone service to call for help.
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