The cabin in the woods

Welcome to The Spot Writers. This month, we write about ending the summer with a great hurrah—a dark, chilling account.

This week’s contribution comes from Chiara De Giorgi. Chiara is currently in Berlin, Germany, doing her best to catch up with semi-abandoned writing projects. Her YA novel “Mi chiamo Elisa” was published in Italy by “Le Mezzelane Casa Editrice” in September 2020.

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The cabin in the woods

by Chiara De Giorgi

 

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Leslie had talked about the abandoned house all summer, adding increasingly unsettling details every time. She was a quiet, unassuming fifteen-year-old of Asian descent, and loved to tell stories. We let her, as she was actually quite good at it, and we spent more nights hearing her stories in our teens than I care to admit. She read a lot, so sometimes she related the book she had just finished; other times she would make something up especially for us. She enjoyed casting us as her characters, and we had fun. There wasn’t much to do in the village we came from, after all, and her story-telling kept us from doing exceedingly stupid things. Except when we decided to go to the abandoned house. 

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Leslie said that the house was little more than a cabin in the woods, a few miles East of our village. She said it was once inhabited by a young single mother who had left her own village because, well, because her baby was the mayor’s, who was very married to the local mine owner’s daughter – i.e.: a stinking rich woman. He would never acknowledge the child, not in a million years, and he would never leave his wife, not in a trillion years! Being a semi-decent human being, though, he set the girl up in the cabin and had a trusted man take care of her and the baby’s needs by bringing them food and clothes, cutting wood for fire in winter, and so on. Until, as Leslie reported, one day this trusted man decided to blackmail the mayor because he wouldn’t let him marry his daughter. “I’ll have her, or you will go down”, he threatened. (At this point some of us wanted to know why the daughter could not speak for herself, but Leslie hushed us, so I guess it’s irrelevant.) 

The mayor was both angry and worried. His ex-trusted man had gone into hiding, he could not find out where, and had given him a deadline: “Bring me your daughter at midnight the day before the full moon, or I’ll tell the truth about the woman you hide in the woods! I will be waiting behind the graveyard.”

So, what did the mayor decide to do?

One night, about a week before the deadline, he lied to his wife: “Dear Wife, I have received a message from the nearby village. There is a situation and they need me. No, don’t ask me what the situation is, I cannot tell you, it’s very secret, but you have to trust me. I’ll be back before dawn, and you have nothing to worry, because everything is under control. Blah blah blah. Sleep well.”

The wife believed him and went back to sleep, and the mayor rode his horse to the cabin in the woods. It was a dark night, but despite that and the lack of lamplights, he made it there. (I wanted to know, did he at least have a torch, because it seems unlikely that he managed to find the cabin in the dark, but Leslie hushed me. I still think he must have had a torch of some kind.)

The woman heard him enter the cabin and lit a candle. She was in bed with the child, now five years old. He was a boy, blond-haired like his mother and dark-eyed like his father. The boy didn’t wake up (I say, thank God!) and the woman was a little scared, but also she hoped a little that he had come to take them away with him, or to stay there with them.

He smiled sweetly (Leslie said that. I’d say that he smiled venomously, but it’s her story.) and went to sit on the bed, where – you could not guess – he kissed the woman and made love to her! I know, I did not want to believe it myself, but Leslie insisted, so it must have happened like that, what can I say. After that, he kissed the little boy on the head, then took a blade from his purse and stabbed both the woman and the child.

Once they were dead, he lifted some floor boards and threw their bodies underneath, then covered everything with a lot of dirt, so if someone came into the cabin wouldn’t smell them (I am not sure it works this way, maybe it does. Still I wondered where he got the dirt from. First of all, he must have had a spade with him; second of all, if people came to the cabin, they would see holes in the ground – I mean, there are holes in the ground where someone digs, aren’t they? And all that digging takes hours, plus he was a mayor, not a gravedigger, so he was a beginner digger. Lastly, he would have come back home all dirty and sweaty, and his wife would be suspicious about what “the situation” was. So I thought there were too many plot holes in this story, but I kept quiet because I wanted to know how it ended.)

After the deed, he went back to his home and his wife and his daughter, and when the full moon came he didn’t bring his daughter behind the graveyard, but he invented another “situation” and went there alone and killed his ex-trusted man – which he could have done without killing the woman and her child, I objected, but Leslie explained that the mayor wasn’t sure he’d be able to dispatch (that’s what Leslie said: dispatch) the other man, so he had to take out the woman and the kid just in case. 

The last thing Leslie said, is that the abandoned house was haunted, the haunters being: the woman; the child; everyone who had ever set foot inside the cabin since the murder, which, Leslie said, at the time amounted to 36 people of various gender, age, and origin.  

~ ~ ~

After hearing this story all summer, we decided to go see for ourselves and we went there on the last day of the season. For the record, “we” meant: me (Rachel, 17), my cousin (Thomas, also 17), his neighbor (Josh, 16), his sister (Belle, 14), her bff (Ronnie, also 14), and Leslie.

So on September 23^rd at dusk, we took our bikes and followed Leslie into the woods. We found the cabin, and entered. We’ve been here ever since, our bikes are still out there, although they must be hidden now, by all the vegetation that has grown in the meantime. Leslie apologized for tricking us into the abandoned house. She said she’d been a ghost for weeks already, before she convinced us to follow her for company, but I think she’s lying. How could she leave the cabin? No one else can. When I asked her, she hushed me, as she usually does, so I didn’t push it. Anyway, we’re lucky she is with us, so she can tell us other stories.

 

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The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/