by Ian Rogers
He thought of the record at the cabin, but it was gone, smashed to pieces.
He tried searching for it on the internet even though he had nothing to go on.
He searched and searched until he realized the answer couldn’t be found on a computer.
The song was out there, somewhere, and he had to find it.
Before the silence took him.
* * *
Winter.
Mark couldn’t sleep. He would drift, he would doze, but he could never enter the proper restful state that most people took for granted. It wasn’t due to shock or stress or guilt or any of the other one-word diagnoses the doctors proposed to explain his condition. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel tired; he did, immensely so. He was simply incapable of shutting off his waking mind. It was like he’d forgotten how to sleep.
He tried drinking, he tried drugs, he tried drinking and drugs. He tried tricking his body by going through the ceremony of his sleeping routine: brushing his teeth, putting on his pyjamas, climbing into bed, putting his head on the pillow. All in the hope of drawing the attention of the Sandman.
To no avail.
His parents wanted to send him to a sleep clinic, but Mark refused to talk to any more doctors. They couldn’t help the others—Donna dead, Chad missing, Annabelle crazy—and they wouldn’t be able to help him.
Eventually he grew to accept his sleepless state—mostly because he didn’t have a choice—and began to explore the new vista that had opened up before him.
Nighttime.
While everyone else was tucked into their beds, luxuriating in slumber, Mark walked the streets in his neighbourhood. He explored other people’s houses, sneaking in through unlocked doors and windows. He never stole anything or damaged anyone’s property. He simply strolled from room to room, checking things out, admiring the interior world of other people’s lives. He told himself he was only killing time, of which he had plenty these days. It never entered his mind that he was practicing for his future career.
On one of his late-night wanderings he ended up at the police station. He’d been there many times over the summer, usually during the day and in the company of his lawyer. It felt strange to be there now, alone at night. And yet, in another way, it felt perfectly right. As if he’d been drawn to this place.
He took to watching the police station. It was never closed, but late at night there were usually only a couple people working in the building, sometimes only a single desk officer manning the front counter.
Sneaking around to the back of the building, Mark broke a basement window and slithered inside. He landed on the concrete floor of an exercise room, with various pieces of workout equipment and a stack of gym mats against one wall.
He exited into a darkened hallway and wandered around until he found what he was looking for.
The evidence room.
The door was locked, but on the wall next to it there was a key on a hook below a handmade sign that said: RETURN KEY WHEN YOU ARE DONE WITH IT. DO NOT TAKE IT HOME WITH YOU!
“Fair enough,” Mark said.
He unlocked the door and went inside.
The evidence room was a long dark cave divided into narrow corridors by a series of free-standing metal shelves. Mark flicked a wall switch and fluorescent tubes sputtered to life overhead, filling the room with a cold, sterile light.
The shelves were lined with banker’s boxes, each one with a different case number written on it. Mark didn’t know their case number, so it took him a long time to find what he was looking for.
When he did, he sat on the floor with the box in front of him. It was like Christmas morning and he was about to open his present. Only he already knew what he was getting.
He opened the box and dug through a pile of evidence bags until he found the one with the gramophone’s tone arm in it. He took it out—the cylindrical tube with the hook of black glass on the end—and held it on the palm of his hand. It felt like nothing. It felt like everything.
He remembered the night at the cabin when Marcie snapped it off the gramophone. He’d thought she was going to attack them with it. That she would let out a primal scream and come flying through the air, slashing and stabbing. That’s what they told the police.
What really happened was that Marcie hovered in the air for a moment, clutching the tone arm in her fist, then she drew the obsidian hook across her own throat. As the skin parted and blood spilled out, the music grew louder and louder. It was unlike anything they’d ever heard before. It was the opening of something terrible, or something wonderful. They never found out which because they didn’t let it finish.
Mark wondered now if that had been a mistake. If instead of killing Marcie and destroying the—
The door opened.
Mark leaped to his feet.
He expected to see the outline of the desk officer framed in the doorway, but it was a different shape. A familiar shape.
“Chad?”
“Hello, Mark.”
Chad stepped into the room. His expression was calm, almost serene, as if he expected to find his friend here waiting for him. His gaze fell to the object Mark was clutching to his chest.
“I haven’t been able to sleep,” Mark blurted suddenly. “Not since the cabin. I thought if I found it…” He stared longingly at the tone arm. At the Shard.
“I have a song stuck in my head,” Chad said. “The song. I thought that”—he nodded at the Shard—“would help me find it.” He tilted his head to the side. “Maybe it’s a lullaby.”
Mark looked up hopefully. “It could help both of us?”
“Maybe,” Chad said. “But I think we have to help it first.”
“What do we need to do?”
“Things,” Chad said. “Awful, horrible things.”
Mark noticed his friend’s hands. There was blood on them. He thought of the desk officer.
“They’ll probably write books about us,” Chad said.
“What about songs? Will they write songs?”
Chad smiled. He reached out and put his hand around Mark’s, so they were holding the Shard together.
“I think they will.”
And what beautiful music they would make.
* * *
Spring.
Annabelle couldn’t stop spinning. Her thoughts were awhirl as the one-year anniversary of the cabin approached. Her attention span was in tatters; sleep was virtually impossible. Her mind kept going back to that night—not to Marcie and the music, but to the game of Spin the Bottle they’d been playing before the horror began.
She should have been thinking about the violence of that night, the loss of her friend and the miracle of their own survival, but what kept popping into her head was the idea, the conviction, that Chad only wanted to play the game so he could kiss Donna. He had denied it at the time, but of course that’s what she expected him to say.
In the weeks and months following the cabin, she became trapped in a circuit of denial and disbelief—thoughts of Chad and Donna kissing, touching, fucking, kept spinning around in her head like a torrid tornado—and there seemed to be nothing she could do to break herself out of it.
She stopped talking to them—which was easy to do, since the others stopped talking to her as well—but it didn’t stop the whirling dervish of her thoughts.
The only thing that provided the slightest bit of relief was staying in motion. Walking, jogging, running, sprinting—it didn’t matter as long as she wasn’t standing still. When she stopped moving, that’s when the thoughts returned, falling on her like a horde of vampire bats.
She went for long walks around town and in the woods behind her house. She went out at any hour, day or night, whenever the images in her head threatened to overwhelm her. Her parents grew more and more concerned, especially when a woman in town went missing. They tried to get Annabelle to limit her wanderings to the daylight hours, but she ignored them. She walked when she had to walk. This was the way it had to be. She knew there was
no hope of clearing her mind; the best she could hope for was to quiet it.
And it worked.
For a while.
Over time the thoughts began to infiltrate her sleep, filling her dreams with images of Chad and Donna, their naked, sweaty bodies locked together, writhing on the gritty floor of the cabin, with the empty vodka bottle next to them, spinning, spinning, spinning.
On a cold morning in March, it all became too much to bear, and Annabelle was flung from her noxious nightmares like a circus performer shot from a cannon. She could actually feel her mind coming untethered, the guy wires of her sanity popping loose one by one.
She ran outside in only a T-shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms, her bare feet punching holes in the fresh blanket of snow that had fallen the night before.
She ran and ran, but the images in her head remained. She couldn’t outrun them, couldn’t push them out of her head as she’d done before.
Crying out in fury and frustration, she picked up speed and ran headlong into a thick oak tree. She struck it hard, throwing her arms up at the last second to brace for the impact, and went stumbling into another tree. She bounced off it, her feet moving frantically to keep her from falling, and pinballed off a third.
She continued to twirl around, waiting for the inevitable moment when she’d hit something hard enough to knock her down. While this was happening, she became aware of something: those poisonous thoughts of Chad and Donna had vanished. They’d been knocked from her head just as her body had been knocked from one tree to another.
Finally she came to a stop, her breath pluming in misty gasps, her feet so cold they were numb. In the same instant, the relief she’d experienced began to evaporate and the thoughts slipped insidiously back into her mind.
She threw her hands at the gray sky and shouted, “What do you want? What do you want?”
She spun and screamed at the trees, her feet pounding the snow into the frozen ground … and the thoughts dissipated again. She slowed and felt them return.
It was the spinning, she realized. Not just moving but spinning! That’s what kept the thoughts away.
She started twirling around and around with her arms stretched out to either side. The thoughts melted, like the snow beneath her feet, like the tears spilling down her cheeks.
She kept spinning until she made herself sick. Stumbling against one of the trees, she gripped the rough bark in one hand while she bent over at the waist and vomited onto the pristine snow.
She’d never felt better.
From that moment on, everywhere she went, Annabelle was spinning. She was like a human top, twirling and pirouetting as she walked around the house or strolled down the street. Step, step, spin, step, step, spin. She didn’t have the grace of a ballerina, or the balance, and the dizziness that came with all the spinning contributed to a lot of falls and collisions. One time, on her way to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich, she walk-spun through the dining room and stumbled into the hutch containing her parents’ wedding china. She was barely able to get out of the way before it toppled over and landed facedown on the floor, plates and cups exploding with a rattling, ear-splitting crash.
Her mom and dad were pretty upset about that one, but their anger turned quickly to concern for her mental state. They told Annabelle, as calmly as they could, that it wasn’t normal for her to be spinning around everywhere she went.
Normal? Annabelle wanted to shout at them. I left normal a long time ago. I left it at the cabin.
That was when it first came to her, the thought of going back, although she supposed it had always been there, like the images of Chad and Donna that had taken root in her brain. Because the times she felt better—or as close to better as she got these days—were when she was outside, walking and spinning her way farther and farther from her house. At the time she’d thought it was only the relief of being away from her parents and their well-intentioned but mostly annoying concerns. Now she realized it wasn’t just the spinning that drove the images away, it was the fact she was moving as she spun, spiralling outward from the nexus of her life to some unknown destination.
Only it wasn’t unknown. She knew exactly where her spinning was trying to take her.
The cabin.
Going back was the last thing she wanted, but she knew there was no way she could keep spinning for the rest of her life. Unlike the empty vodka bottle, she would have to stop at some point, and when she did, all those horrible thoughts would be waiting for her. She wouldn’t live like that. She couldn’t.
So she went back.
She took her parents’ car, telling them she was going shopping. They were relieved she was doing something so normal, something the old Annabelle would’ve done. They told her to enjoy herself. She said she would. They told her to take her time and enjoy the day. She said she would.
Even though she remembered how to get there, Annabelle took a circuitous route, driving away from her house and through her neighbourhood in wider and wider circles until she left the orbit of town and entered the woods.
When she finally arrived at the cabin, she was surprised to see it looked the same. She’d heard it had become a site of morbid notoriety for true-crime buffs, and that one particular kill club had even recorded a podcast here shortly after the police released the crime scene. She was especially surprised to find it empty today of all days. The one-year anniversary. Maybe the cabin was keeping them away.
Annabelle got out of the car and walked up onto the wide front porch. The door was open. She went inside and looked around and around, spinning as had become her practice these days. She expected to see skeins of old police tape on the floor, or empty beer bottles from the kids drawn to this place with tales of murder and mutilation. But there was nothing. It looked exactly as it did the day she and her friends had come here.
She was walking and twirling across the floor when her foot struck something and she went stumbling toward the fireplace. She managed to grab onto the mantel, then turned to see what she had tripped on.
It was the ringbolt in the trap door.
She went over to it, performing a quick spin without even thinking about it, and knelt. She remembered Marcie coming up from the cellar with the gramophone. She remembered the music that wasn’t music, sounds that shouldn’t have existed when Marcie tore off the tone arm, but continued to pound out of the brass horn. She remembered the way it felt when those sounds poured into her ears and entered her mind.
She remembered killing Marcie, their poor sweet friend, and destroying the gramophone and the record. Only that didn’t put an end to the sounds. Because they weren’t really coming from the brass horn. They were coming from Marcie. So they fell on her and dismembered her, chopped her body to pieces because that was the only way to make it stop.
And she remembered what happened afterward: the others taking the Shard and marking themselves with it. Donna slashing her arms. Chad drawing a jagged line across the side of his face. Mark stabbing himself in the side.
When it was Annabelle’s turn, she stared at the Shard in her hand, the others watching her expectantly … and dropped it on the floor.
She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t. She remembered the bottle, the one that wouldn’t stop spinning until Donna smashed it with the poker. She remembered telling them she didn’t want to play their game. She didn’t then and she didn’t now. She refused to mark herself.
Only it didn’t matter. She was still marked, and the music was still alive, still playing in their heads over and over and over again.
That’s what this was all about. That’s what had brought her back to the cabin.
It was the song, and it wanted what every song wanted: to be heard.
She pressed her finger into the dust on top of the trap door and drew a spiral curving outward and outward. Then she made a fist and knocked on the old, dry wood.
She went over to the couch and sat down.
She didn’t have to wait long.
Shortly after
the sun went down, the trap door rose. Chad and Mark climbed out. They were filthy, their clothes smeared with dirt, their faces streaked with dried blood.
Annabelle was no more surprised to see them than they were to see her.
The dirt was from the cellar. The blood was from their victims. There had been seven, by her count—or at least that’s how many people the news had reported missing in the past few months. The police were baffled. No bodies had been found. Annabelle could’ve told them where they were.
Chad and Mark crept stealthily across the room toward her, tiptoeing across the creaky wooden floor. Chad had something in his hand. Even though it was too dark for Annabelle to make it out, she knew what it was.
The Shard.
“You heard it, too?” Chad said.
Annabelle nodded.
“Can you make it stop?” Mark asked.
Annabelle said, “No,” and Chad and Mark hung their heads.
Then she reached into her jacket pocket and took out the gun. It was her father’s .38 revolver.
She looked up into their blood-streaked faces.
“Wanna play a game?”
* * *
The police found the bodies a week later.
All three lay sprawled on the cabin floor, their heads surrounded by bloody halos.
Detective Russo crouched next to Annabelle’s body. The revolver was still in her hand. Even though her finger was no longer capable of pulling the trigger, the cylinder continued to spin around and around.
Across the room, one of the uniforms hissed in pain and dropped something on the floor.
About the Author
Ian Rogers is the author of the award-winning collection, Every House Is Haunted. A novelette from the collection, “The House on Ashley Avenue,” was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. His work has been selected for The Best Horror of the Year and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Ian lives with his wife in Peterborough, Ontario. For more information, visit ianrogers.ca. Or sign up for email updates here.
