The Cabin at the End of the World

by Paul Tremblay

  “So you had an apocalyptic nightmare! So what? We’ve all had them—”

  “First the cities will drown. No one living in cities will know it’s coming—”

  “That doesn’t mean anything! You know that! You have to know that—”

  “The ocean will swell and rise up into a great fist and pound all the buildings and people into the sand and then drag everything out to sea—”

  “There is something wrong with you, all of you, if you believe this—”

  “Then a terrible plague will descend and people will writhe with fever and mucus will fill their lungs—”

  “This is psychotic, delusional! Did you try to get help? Let us go and we’ll get you help—”

  “The skies will fall and crash to the earth like pieces of glass. And then the final, everlasting darkness will descend over humanity and all the species of the earth—”

  “You need help! This is fucking insane, all of this—”

  “This is going to happen and we’ve been shown that only your sacrifice can stop it—”

  “Shown by who? By what? Are you going to answer that?”

  Leonard bows his head and doesn’t say anything. Neither does Sabrina, Redmond, or Adriane.

  That we-can-talk-them-out-of-this window is closed, if it ever was open.

  Eric says, “Come on. Talk to us, tell us more about what you were shown. Who gave you the nightmares? Who told you about us? It doesn’t make sense. Think about it for a second.”

  Leonard remains motionless. Sabrina and Redmond briefly make eye contact and then look away; actively and obviously looking anywhere else in the cabin but at each other. Adriane tightens her circle around her weapon. The only sound Andrew hears in the madness of silence is his own labored breathing.

  Leonard lifts his head and says, “The choice has been made.”

  Redmond and Sabrina walk in front of Leonard, holding their weapons. They step in time, as trained soldiers might. Redmond twists his neck from side to side, the obnoxious tough-guy equivalent of cracking knuckles. Sabrina closes her eyes, inhales, and then adjusts her grip on the wooden staff, the strange curlicued shovel head held like a torch in the darkness.

  Eric says, “Wait, stop, you don’t have to do this.” He strains and struggles in his chair, but there isn’t much strength behind his efforts.

  “Hey, you don’t need those things. You said you couldn’t hurt us.” Andrew strains to pull his legs free, to peel his arms apart; they feel looser in his restraints but not close to free. He yells names and no and stop and he vibrates in his seat. He pushes up onto his toes, and the tipping point is close; one twitchy push-off and he’ll fall over backward.

  From behind him Adriane puts a hand on his shoulder and anchors him and the chair flush to the floor without any struggle at all. One hand and that’s all the pressure needed to keep him pinned to where he is, no matter how much thrashing he does. He throws his head back, trying to hit her but he doesn’t make contact.

  Her hand leaves his shoulder and Wen screams, “Leave me alone!”

  Andrew yells for Wen and twists to see where Adriane went, to see what she’s doing. Legs suddenly appear in front of Andrew’s face, kicking and waving as though attempting to swim up from a great depth. Adriane is lowering his daughter onto his lap.

  “Don’t touch her! Let her go!”

  Wen twists free and hugs Andrew tightly around the neck. Her cheek is hot and wet against his. He says her name repeatedly and whispers into her ear that she has to leave, to run, to push the screen slider out and run onto the deck and run and run.

  Redmond loudly bangs the sledgehammer end of his double-ended staff on the floor. Then he gives Leonard the weapon without an exchange of words. Their movements are choreographed, ritualized. Leonard flips the ends of the staff so that the arrangement of shovel and trowel blades is pointed at the floor.

  Redmond scratches the back of his head and fidgets with his empty hands. He kneels on the hardwood floor, making a triangle with Eric and Andrew.

  He says, “Aw, fuck. Okay. Come on, come on, here we go,” and claps his hands, wipes his face, laughs once, shakes his head, and grunts like a weight lifter gearing up for an inhuman feat of strength.

  Andrew isn’t whispering anymore. “Run, Wen, run!”

  Wen shakes her head and says, “I can’t.”

  Redmond abruptly quits his routine, stops moving, and stares at Andrew with his head tilted.

  Andrew maneuvers his face around Wen’s head so he can see this, whatever it is.

  Redmond’s face has drained of color, and sweat darkens his receding hairline. He licks his cracked, bleeding lips and blinks rapidly. He’s scared and it makes him look younger. He could be one of Andrew’s students, hundreds or thousands of miles from home, in his office to plead for an extension on a paper or for a better grade in the class to ensure he doesn’t lose his performance-based grant money.

  Redmond reaches into the front pocket of his jeans and pulls out something white. It practically glows as he unfolds it in front of his red shirt. Larger than the dressing on the back of Eric’s head, it appears to be a swatch of thin cloth, ribbed or waffled like thermal underwear. He lifts it high over his head, stretching and extending his arms as far up as they will go.

  Redmond winks at Andrew and grins, the kind that makes any face ugly. Andrew has been the recipient of this version of the smug, judgmental, nonverbal fuck you countless times, and it nags at him that perhaps he’s seen this smile on this particular face before today.

  Eric says, “Please God, just let us go, let us go,” in a continuous loop.

  Wen has stopped crying. “What is that? What is he doing?”

  Andrew tells her not to watch.

  Redmond pulls and stretches the material over his head, face, and halfway down his neck. It’s formfitting, like a sock over a foot. The lump of his nose protrudes below his prominent brow and from between the uncanny valleys of his concave eye sockets. A star of red blooms in the cloth over his split lip. He drops his arms to his sides.

  The sun breaks through the clouds, a promise that will one day be broken, and shines into the cabin via the deck, illuminating this reluctant summit. The players are momentarily as still as stone obelisks and their ancient shadows.

  Although Redmond’s face is concealed within the blank, white mask, Andrew feels the man’s stare, and like all stares, it accrues mass with passing time.

  Then, finally, there are two words.

  “Thank you.”

  Eric

  Eric’s litany of please-Gods cuts out and he shrinks from the return of the sun like a vampire. His head is one of the old hot water radiators from their condo and it hisses with pain.

  Redmond in the supplicant’s eternal pose, awash in golden light, is transformed. The red of his shirt is no longer confined to the cloth and slicks into the air like oil in water. Red mists beyond the boundary of Redmond, forming an aura, as amorphous as a storm. There’s a darker spot of red clinging stubbornly to his white mask, a different kind of promise; all will be red eventually.

  Redmond says, “Thank you.”

  Sabrina, Leonard, and Adriane drift into the center of the cabin, creeping delicately, hunters stalking elusive, skittish prey. They form a half circle around Redmond, their gnarly, improvised staffs aloft.

  Something shimmers in the nowhere between Redmond and the doorway to the deck. Like heat waves on summer-baked pavement, the shimmer is whiter and brighter than the surrounding solar light. Eric blinks and the strange refraction realigns, finds a focus, coalesces into a shape, a form, and for the briefest of moments there is an unmistakable contour of a head and shoulders, an outline of another person, a fourth (or another fourth) joining the semicircle encompassing Redmond.

  Leonard and Adriane swap positions. They walk between Redmond and the deck, passing through that nowhere space, eclipsing the vision, wiping it out. It’s gone, whatever it is, made of empty space and the whitest light. Eric do
es not think he saw another person coming in from outside, some secret member of their group, hiding and waiting until the right time to enter the cabin. The vision’s near instant appearance and disappearance only amplifies the wrongness and unearthliness, filling Eric’s head with the snow and crackle of a lost signal’s static. He realizes what he saw is most certainly the result of his injury and misfiring synapses. Still, he’s afraid to inspect too closely the memory of the experience; more than an instinctual fear of the inexplicable that cannot be verbalized, it’s the bone-deep dread of discovery. What if the shimmer and its light did not come from his scrambled brain and was not a trick of the sun?

  That question is followed by another that bubbles up and does not present in his typical inner voice or manner. An ever-evolving mental life is impossible to fully detail, even by the owner, and one generally goes from day to day unquestioning one’s own being or consciousness, with absolute faith in this is who I am and this is how I think. The follow-up question does not fit within Eric’s secret mental code, does not use the unique parts of speech of his interior language; it is not of him. To Eric’s horror, the question feels like an intrusion from a different mind or a terrifying answer to an unspoken prayer.

  What if the shimmer’s light came from the colder spaces of the infinite sky?

  Wen

  Nothing that has happened to this point is as scary or creepy as the kneeling and masked Redmond. The outline and contours of his hidden face fill her with the same mix of fascination and dread she felt when she stared at the human skull that was in her classroom. What if the mask is Redmond’s new skin and underneath there is only the whiter white of bone? She imagines his face and head changing shape while hidden away and then Leonard ripping off the mask like a magician to reveal a grotesque, ravenous monster, the kind so terrible and ugly that just looking at it will kill you.

  Redmond says, “Thank you.” His puppet mouth opens and closes out of rhythm with the words, an amateur attempt at ventriloquism. The cloth through which he speaks is thin, but his voice sounds garbled, modulated. He shouldn’t sound like he does. Wen covers her ears because she does not want to hear anything else he might say.

  Adriane appears from behind Andrew’s chair, floating like a patient ghost, and flanks Redmond’s left side. The bramble of raking claws at the end of Adriane’s weapon passes over her and Andrew’s heads, close enough so Wen can count the tangles of claws and their individual sharpened points plaqued with rust and dirt. Adriane’s face is blank; her facial muscles are rigid scaffolding for her skin.

  Leonard stands behind Redmond, as stoic and still as a brick wall. Wen stares at Leonard, wanting and waiting for him to look at her. Despite everything, she hopes Leonard will show himself to be a good person, the person she thought he was when they were out in the front yard together. She considers waving at him but decides against trying to get his attention. He has the same blank, robot face Adriane has. Sabrina has the robot face, too. She drifts within arm’s reach of Eric and settles to Redmond’s right.

  Wen darts her eyes around the room, memorizing everyone’s position, where they stand and how they hold their staffs. She turns her head and twists her torso, almost falling off Andrew’s lap. Poor Daddy Eric is alone. He alternates between being wide-eyed and squeezing his eyelids shut, exaggerated blinks like he has something stuck in his eyes and it won’t go away. It appears he’s looking above Redmond (not at him) and into the kitchen or out toward the deck. Wen looks out there, too, and then past the deck to the shimmering blue lake, which is a million miles away.

  Wen sinks deeper into Daddy Andrew’s lap and deeper inside herself. Should she go to Daddy Eric? Maybe walking over and simply kissing the back of his head will make him better. Then she’ll talk to him and no one else, shake him if she has to, and tell him she can help if he would just tell her what to do. What are they going to do?

  Maybe she should run like Daddy Andrew said, sprint through the room, dodge the turned-over furniture like a mouse through high grass, then onto the deck and outside and away. She can run fast. Her dads tell her that she is fast, so fast, all the time. And they tell her she is shifty. She knows their races are fixed for her to win, but Wen outlasting the catchers in their catch-me-if-you-can games until Eric and/or Andrew are bent over, hands on knees, gasping for air is legitimate. She is shifty. Wen loves that word. It means hard to catch. It means even better than fast; it’s a smart fast.

  Leonard and Adriane exchange positions: Adriane is stationed in front of the couch and directly behind Redmond; Leonard is now closer to the kitchen and parked to Redmond’s left. The room is bright and quiet but for Andrew’s heavy breathing. Wen rocks and tilts side to side with his expanding and then collapsing chest.

  She knows she’d make it out of the cabin without getting caught if she was to run, but where would she run to? She doesn’t want to accidentally get lost on the dirt roads that fork and branch away leading to nowhere or to worse places than here, and what if she has to ditch the road for the thick woods surrounding the cabin for miles and miles? Her dads were explicit in saying she could not go into these woods by herself under any circumstances because they might never find her again.

  She blurts out, “Go away, all of you! And take off the mask and stop trying to scare us!” No one responds. None of the four, including the masked Redmond, look at her. Wen is terrified but she puts on her own mask, an angry face, the angriest one she has so that hers is not as blank and lifeless as the four others’ faces.

  She shifts her hips and slides her left leg off Andrew’s lap. Her foot hovers a few inches above the floor as a brief test. No one moves to grab her, no one moves at all. She slides down farther until the toe of her sneaker kisses the hardwood. She waits. If no one notices, if no one says anything, she is going to run between Redmond and Leonard and then onto the deck. In her head, she is down the back stairs and running on the dirt road already, with long and shifty strides.

  In one motion, Adriane lunges forward and swings her weapon. The raking claws whistle through the air.

  Andrew

  Even as Leonard and Adriane exchange positions in the common room, Andrew remains focused on and obsessed with Redmond: Why is he so familiar and why is he wearing that freak show of a mask and what can he see through it and why did he say, “Thank you,” and why did he say it the way he said it—low, guttural, breathless, not angry but groveling and as fervent as an ecstatic?

  Wen says, “Go away, all of you! And take off the mask and stop trying to scare us!” She no longer has her arms wrapped around Andrew’s neck and she is not burrowed into his chest. Her weight is unbalanced on his lap. He tempers his efforts at pulling his legs and hands free from the ropes and chair for fear he’ll jostle her and she’ll fall awkwardly to the floor and get hurt.

  She slowly leaks off his lap, to his left, and there’s nothing he can do to readjust her position. He’s about to say her name to jolt her into readjusting herself and staying put when it occurs to him that her sliding off is purposeful, and perhaps she’s getting ready to make a run for it like he told her to. She methodically stretches toward the floor with one leg and he’s now convinced she’s considering a mad dash outside the cabin and beyond. He silently pleads with her to go now and it’s all he can do to not say go out loud. She might not get another chance. If she does run, then one or two of them will go after her and that would buy him some time to work on loosening his restraints. Careful to not give away inadvertently an escape route by staring it down, Andrew surveys potential paths through the common room and possible roadblocks to the deck for Wen.

  Andrew hears the movement first, a quick shuffle of feet coming from Redmond’s direction. Andrew assumes the noise is Redmond scrambling onto his feet, but he has not moved. Redmond is still kneeling on the floor, his spine straight and masked head held high. Then there’s a loud stomp on the floor behind Redmond. Adriane’s right foot is forward, planted only inches behind Redmond’s feet. Her hips pivot and
she swings her staff. The sphere of raking claws comets through the air and the rusted metal crashes into the right side of Redmond’s face.

  He sways with the impact, but he recovers and straightens again and remains kneeling and upright. A slight but visible shiver ripples throughout his body. A high-pitched, animal whimper escapes from under his mask.

  At the same time as the impact of the blow, Eric exhales a loud grunt, as though he is the one who is struck. Wen completes her slide off his lap and is standing next to Andrew and the chair. She turns so she is facing the front door and wraps her arms around Andrew’s neck again. She doesn’t scream or cry. Her mouth is next to his ear and her breathing is off rhythm, exhaling too soon after a sharp inhale, and then too long a pause between breaths, and after the pause, air rushes out like she’s deflating.

  Raking claw tips are caught, stuck in Redmond’s mask and face. Adriane pulls on the handle of her weapon as though working an ax out from a deep gash in a tree. The white mask stretches, stubbornly hooked on one of the claws. The right side of Redmond’s head turns as bright red as his shirt.

  From Redmond’s right, Sabrina crow-hops forward and swings her staff in a horizontal arc, the tapered and oddly curled shovel blade held sideways so as to be more bladelike. She’s close enough to Andrew that he feels the whoosh of parting air. The thin edge of metal mashes into the front of Redmond’s face, in the area of his nose and mouth, and there’s a clang and scraping noise. Redmond collapses onto his side and loosens a wail, a liquid scream.

  Adriane and Sabrina shower blow after blow upon Redmond. The abstract metal shapes at the ends of their handles rise and then strike downward like greedy bird heads. The women grunt with each swing and retrieval of their weapons. The metal configurations of the weapons chime and reverberate with contact, singing joyfully now that they are finally being used as their retrofitters intended. There are also hollow thuds and other sounds that are wet and wooden.