by Jeff Gunhus
“I don’t really know.”
Chapter Three
Rachel watches John’s truck disappear down the lane. She doesn’t remember seeing his vehicle when she parked her own, but she doesn’t think much of it. She’s not exactly on top of her game and she knows it. As she watches the taillights grow smaller, she is surprised to feel disappointment at being left alone. She turns back to the cabin, holding her arms across her chest as the wind blows colder. The sun is lower in the sky, muting the hues of the world around her. Even the lake that appeared vibrant and filled with life when she first arrived now looks brown and sluggish, lapping at the dirt edges of the shore.
As she gazes across the water, she’s struck by the sight of a second cabin on the far side of the lake. She doesn’t know how she could have missed it before. It’s plain enough to see. A single story cabin made of rough logs. It has only a few windows and these are small and widely spaced, so different from the modern style with walls of glass to maximize a view. This cabin was built for utility and bears no resemblance to the wide-open structures built by damn fools who’d never had to survive a harsh New England winter. There’s a campfire in front of the cabin and a trail of white smoke spiraling up into the sky.
She squints and thinks she can make out the shape of a person wrapped in a blanket sitting on the far side of the flames. It’s a good distance away, maybe a quarter mile across, and it’s growing darker, so she can’t be sure. But it feels like someone’s there. It feels like someone’s watching her.
She shivers and hates herself for the weakness. So what if someone was watching her? She was watching them too, right?
“Hey!” she calls out, raising her arm in a wave. “Hello.”
It’s meant as an act of bravery, but her voice is swallowed up by the world, carried away on the wind and lost among the trees. She lowers her arm, feeling small and alone. She wonders for the first time whether coming to this place had been a mistake. Turning her back on the stranger watching her, she walks inside.
It’s dark in the cabin and the light switches don’t work. John-the-landlord gave her the five-cent tour and showed her how to work the generator outside, even offering to leave it on after he demonstrated how to start it. The thing had growled and shook like it might blow up, so she’d assured him that she’d be fine without it. But after fumbling around in the dark for a few minutes, she thinks the noise would have been a small price for the convenience of a light switch that worked.
Once she finds the lantern and gets it going, the cabin fills up with all the light she needs. She grabs her duffle bag out of the bedroom and brings it out into the living room. Underwood already waits for her in the middle of the table, an optimistic stack of blank paper next to him. Earlier, she’d moved the other three chairs from around the table into the second bedroom so that it felt more like a desk. The single chair faces the sliding glass doors and the view of the lake, now just dark outlines of the hills to the west.
She empties the contents of the duffle onto the table. A couple pairs of jeans, some shirts and sweaters. Underwear. Toothbrush. Then something heavy wrapped in a thick cloth hits the table with a dull thud.
She holds the object in her hand. Of course she knows what it is. It’s hers after all, but still the sensation of holding it makes her pause. There’s nothing else in the world that feels quite the same as a loaded gun.
Carefully, she unwinds the cloth around it, not willing to bet that she’d put the safety on when she’d packed it. The fact that she can’t remember putting it in her bag at all isn’t a good sign.
Pulling back the last layer of the cloth, she gives a low whistle. It’s a beautiful thing to behold. Blued steel. Oiled so the surface glistens. Crosshatch pattern on the handle. She releases the magazine and catches it as it slides out. It’s full, all fifteen rounds accounted for. Something seems wrong about that, but she can’t quite put her finger on what it might be. As she’s thinking it through, she hears the first wolf howl.
It’s a forlorn sound, high-pitched and aching. Seconds later, it’s joined by another voice. And then another. She slides open the glass door and steps out onto the deck, pushing the magazine back into the gun. The wolves are some distance off, at least as far as she can tell, but they are putting on a show. She closes her eyes and listens to the sound, the way the howls rise together until they reach a pitch, and then hang suspended in a single pure note. There’s language in the sound, she can sense it. And the language is filled with grief and pain and regret.
A vicious snarl erupts right in front of her. Her eyes bolt open and she raises her gun, pointing wildly into the dark. The snarl turns into a barking sound, only there’s something wrong. It’s unnatural. Almost comical.
Then the sound turns into laughter. As she watches, a man walks out of the dark, hands up in the air, grinning like a tomcat.
“You should see your face,” the man says. “Looks like you just shit yourself.”
The man’s old, early seventies maybe, with short spiked grey hair that twists in all directions. His face looks emaciated, the skin stretched so tight against his skull that it looks like it might tear. The lantern casts deep shadows, turning his eye sockets into dark holes. But for his age, the man’s body is surprisingly muscled, coiled tight as if ready at any minute for violence.
“What the fuck was that?” she says.
“Take it easy,” he says, smiling with yellow tobacco-stained teeth. “Didn’t mean nothing by it.”
She waves her gun in the air. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”
“Got a gun, huh? Good. Everyone ought to have a gun.” He lifts his soiled denim work shirt and shows a gun sticking out from his waistband. Behind the gun, she sees a jagged scar that runs in a convoluted pattern from the man’s abdomen, up through his navel, then disappears under his shirt. It’s like no scar she’s ever seen. Whatever hacked the man’s body open, it hadn’t been a scalpel. That much was certain.
“Are you the neighbor?” she asks, aware that her finger continues to brush back and forth across her gun’s safety. “From across the lake?”
The man grins and it makes her shiver. “That’s right. I’m your neighbor. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” He pauses only briefly, jumping into the space normally reserved for someone to carry their half of the conversation. “Name’s Granger. Horace Granger.” He points to the cabin. “You like the place?”
“Just got here today.”
“That’s no answer.”
“Look, it’s late. You got me at a bad time,” she says. “Maybe we can talk in a couple days after I get settled. Or next week?”
“You heard the wolves, didn’t you?” Granger’s voice drops in register. The fake home-cooking, good-ol’ boy grin is gone and he examines her with a level of interest that makes the hairs on her arms stand on end. The look makes her feel exposed. She crosses her arms in front of her like the old man just caught her stepping out of the shower. She doesn’t answer. “That’s OK. I thought you might hear them. Scary at first, but they won’t hurt you. Unless you let them, of course.”
“Why would I let them?” she asks, hating the quiver in her voice. There’s something about this man that has her on her heels.
“Seems that’s a question only you can answer,” he says. “But I suggest you figure it out sooner than later. This here’s the hungry season. And that’s the truth.”
A sudden stab of memory from her childhood strikes her. A day at the zoo with her dad, probably when she was eight or nine. She knew from her many trips before that the lion was usually asleep in the back cage, always to her disappointment. But on one day, the lion was wide awake, pacing back and forth in its enclosure. Eyes bright. Coat twitching at every sound and smell. It looked right at her, safely on the other side of a moat and a fence, and yet she knew without question that the creature wanted to kill her. To run her down, sink its claws into her back and drag her to the ground. It wanted to feed on her flesh, drink up her sa
lty blood, chew on her rib bones until they cracked open and gave up the juicy marrow inside. All this she knew with a look into the creature’s eyes.
Granger fixes his eyes on her the same exact way. And there’s no moat or fence between them.
“Thanks for the advice,” she says. “I’ll be on the lookout. Be safe on your way back.”
Most people take such an overt hint, but Granger is clearly not most people. He takes a deep breath and looks around as if taking in his surroundings for the first time. He produces a silver flask from his back pocket and holds it out to her.
“No thanks,” she says.
“Do you mind if I…” He holds up the flask.
I don’t give a shit what you do, just as long as you do it while you’re getting your ass to your side of the lake, is what she wants to say. Instead, she motions for him to go ahead.
He unscrews the cap and raises the flask in a salute. “To hell with the wolves,” he says before putting the flask to his lips and suckling it greedily. Brown fluid dribbles from the corners of his mouth and he doesn’t bother wiping it away. When he lowers the flask, he gives an extra long contented sigh.
“I don’t want to be rude,” she says.
“Which is what people say right before being rude,” Granger says. “I might be old as shit, but I’m not dumb as a turd. I can see you want me to move along. And that’s fine,” he says, his eyes taking a tour of her body. “Fine, indeed.”
She holds up her hand, the one with the gun. It’s not pointed at him, but she means it as a reminder. “See you around.” She turns, walks to the sliding door and opens it. She’s about to walk inside when Granger calls out.
“Just one word of warning about the cabin,” he says.
It’s tempting to just ignore the man and walk inside, but something in his voice makes her stop. He has one arm up in the air, a bony hand that’s not much more than a claw pointing at her new home. “When it tries to tell you something, just be careful. It won’t always be the truth.”
With that, Granger walks away, the night swallowing him up so quickly that she wonders for a second if she dreamt the whole thing. If she’d been drinking, she might have lingered on that idea a bit longer. But she hasn’t started yet. She decides that might be the problem.
She walks into the house, slams the slider shut and checks the lock. She walks past the table and gives Underwood the middle finger, finds it lacking, so doubles it up with her other hand. Underwood sits there, sturdy, unflinching, patient. His worst qualities.
She grabs her bottle of Jack, skips the glass and goes right for a long, satisfying pull from the bottle. She feels the tickle of whiskey dripping from the corners of her mouth, but she wipes it away. She’s not a Goddamned animal.
The drink calms her nerves and she swallows another mouthful, hearing a song in her head, oddly voiced by young children as if they were jumping rope.
One is good,
Two is best,
Three puts Mommy down to rest.
The whiskey goes down like water. Good thing she knows the song up to the number twenty. She pours the Jack into the glass for the next one, like that will slow her down enough to make a difference.
Four is cool,
Five is tight,
Six makes Mommy feel all right.
The song goes on and on. And as she sings it, the wolves stay quiet. And the cabin doesn’t say a word.
Chapter Four
“Hello, miss?” a man’s voice says.
Rachel opens her eyes slowly and squints against the bright sunlight. A shadow looms over her, a head with a halo. An angel, maybe?
“It’s John,” he says, ending the mystery. “Are you all right?”
She raises herself up on an elbow. She’s out on the deck, a blanket from the bedroom bunched beneath her and pillows from the couch piled up near her head. She has no recollection of moving her party outside the night before. It seems odd that she’d have chosen to leave the cabin, especially after that freak show Granger had shown up. But there she was, sprawled out in the same clothes she’d been wearing the day before.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she says.
“You know, you rented the whole cabin. You’re free to use either of the bedrooms,” he says.
She climbs to her feet. “No one likes a smartass, John. That’s just one of those truths in the world. Like—”
“Like don’t pee in the pool?” he asks.
She nods. That’s something she says all the time. Granted, it isn’t terribly original, but it’s still odd to hear one of her sayings parroted back at her. She ignores it as coincidence. “Anyway, I slept outside to see the stars. Beautiful.”
John looks up to the sky. “Pretty cloudy last night,” he says. “Don’t think there were many stars out.”
“And your point is?”
John holds up his hands. “If you were watching the stars then you were watching the stars. Who am I to argue?”
“Exactly.” She stares down at the two grocery bags on the deck next to him. “You moving in?”
“No, I just thought you could use a few supplies. Just the basics. Bread, milk, eggs, sausage. The usual.”
“You do this for all your renters?”
“Just the ones who look like they could use the help.”
She finds herself annoyed and charmed all at once. “I thought you New Englander-types were good about staying out of other people’s business. Keeping your Yankee selves to yourselves.”
He grins. “Who said I’m from here? So what’s it going to be? Do I take this stuff home with me or can I cook you up some breakfast?”
Her stomach growls as if to voice its vote. She hates to admit it, but she’s famished. “Well, technically, it’s your place.”
“I’ll take that as a yes please,” he says. “If you’d like to use the shower, there’s hot water.”
“Is that a hint?”
“Take it any way you want to,” John calls over his shoulder as he carries the groceries into the cabin. “Just saying there’s soap and shampoo with your name on it.”
She knows she ought to be offended, but a whiff of the shirt she’s wearing and she knows he’s right. She follows him into the cabin. Underwood remains unmoved from the night before, the little stack of blank pages still there. No author elves have shown up overnight to hammer out the next Great American Novel. Hell, after the reception of her last book she’d make do with an Amazon bestseller in some weird, random category that no one had ever heard of. Something like Kindle—Literature—American author—Suspense—Tragedy—Written While Hammered—Somewhat Incoherent—Epic. The sad truth was that a category like that probably existed and her last book hadn’t even shown up there.
The shower feels better than she expects. She intended to make it quick since she didn’t trust the hot water heated by the single solar panel out back to last very long. But once in, she luxuriates in the waves of steam trapped in the small bathroom. The coarse bar soap exfoliates layers of her skin, scraping away the outermost layer of herself. She rubs until her skin glows pink and wonders if she kept going whether the bar of soap would eventually act as an eraser and just erase her out of existence all together. The thought’s tempting, but the abrupt end of the hot water sends her jumping from the shower.
By the time she’s dressed in new clothes and has towel dried her hair to an acceptable level, the cabin’s filled with the smells of breakfast. When she walks out, John already has scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and sliced oranges plated.
“Coffee?” he asks.
“Sure,” she says, poaching a piece of bacon from one of the plates.
He pours some milk and a teaspoon and a half of sugar into a mug, fills it with steaming coffee, then hands it to her. She takes a sip and savors the dark roasted taste in her mouth. Sometimes the first cup of coffee in the morning is better than a week of orgasms.
“Good coffee,” she says. “How’d you know how I take it? Down to putting the milk and sugar
in first?”
John shrugs. “That’s how I take it. Just a habit.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, spying the black coffee in his cup. He sees her notice and looks away, caught in the lie. She feels a chill, like a stranger’s fingers have touched her skin. She wonders how he knew this detail about her and, even more strange, why he would lie about it. But it’s just a cup of coffee, not exactly earth-shattering mindreading skills on display. Likely just another coincidence, the way some ex-lover liked her coffee prepared. He looks embarrassed enough that he was caught lying that she lets it go. “Should we eat outside?” she asks.
“You mean in your bedroom?”
“Remember that whole thing about smartasses?”
They go outside and sit opposite one another on the rickety picnic bench on the deck. She has the better seat facing the lake but she hardly notices it. Once she starts in on her breakfast she eats through it like it’s her first meal in months.
“Saw your typewriter,” John says, his mouth full of eggs. “That’s pretty old school.”
“It belonged to a friend of mine. I inherited it after his death.” It was mostly true, so much so that she doesn’t even feel a pang at the little white lies inside of it.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She washes down her toast with long slugs of the coffee, then shrugs. “It was a while ago. Time has a way of smoothing the edges on things like that.”
John puts his coffee down. “You think that’s true?”
She considers the idea and sees the need in John’s face that hadn’t been there seconds earlier. So caught up in her own mess, she hasn’t even thought to consider why a good-looking guy like her new landlord is living up in the middle of nowhere. There can’t be much of a social life up here. No good-looking women to chase. No office to go to for some hard-charging career. No, he’s out in the wilderness just like she is. And she recognizes the look in his eye as the same one she sees in the mirror each day.
