“I have no doubt you saw and felt something, just as I have no doubt they were concussion induced—”
“Stop saying that.”
“I won’t, because I love you and I won’t let you do this.”
“I—I know. I love you, too, more than you know. But I’m sorry; one of us must.”
“Is the light thing here now?”
“No.” Eric wishes it was here. He hopes it will show up and take him over like the others were taken over and lead him by the hand. But it’s not here. He feels its lack of presence. There’s only woods, darkness, rain, thunder, and us.
Andrew drops his gun to the wet road. He limps into the woods without his walking stick and stops within arm’s reach of Eric. “So which one of us is it going to be, then?”
We stare at each other’s beat-up, red-eyed, blood-streaked, beard-stubbled, still-beautiful faces waiting for an answer, waiting for the answer.
“Please don’t try to take the gun away from me.” Eric pivots and lifts his forearm so that the gun is pointed under his chin.
“I won’t touch the gun. I promise I won’t.” Andrew inches closer. “Look at me, okay? Maybe you won’t see anything you don’t want to see if you look at me.”
“Stay away, please.” Eric steps back and his heels bump into Sabrina’s legs.
“That I can’t do. It’s all right. I’m not taking the gun. I’m taking your other hand. That’s all. That’s okay, right?” Andrew reaches out and his fingertips make tentative first contact. The back of Eric’s hand is cool and damp. Eric’s fingers clench into a fist as Andrew’s touch springs them shut. “Are you’re going to leave me all alone then?”
Eric unclenches his fist. Andrew closes his hand around Eric’s.
“You’re too close. You should back up. I don’t want you to get hurt,” Eric says.
“Would you shoot me instead? I’d rather not be here alone, without you. Not for one second.”
Eric gazes into Andrew’s face, an ever-evolving landscape more familiar than his own. He doesn’t pray, not to the light or to God. He whispers, “I don’t want you to be alone,” and then he gasps as Andrew gently places a hand on his wrist just below the gun.
“It’s all right. I’m not taking the gun from you. I said I wouldn’t.” Andrew pulls the gun out from under Eric’s chin. He leads Eric’s arm until the gun is turned on Andrew, the muzzle pinned against his chest. “Shooting me would be your ultimate sacrifice, wouldn’t it? Because then you’d be the one stuck here alone.”
“Unless I shoot you and then myself. I don’t think that’s against the rules.”
Andrew doesn’t say anything. He drops his hand away from Eric’s wrist. The gun remains pointed, adhered to his sternum.
Eric says, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Yes, you do. You’ll throw the gun away, Eric. It’ll be hard, but we’ll pick up the truck keys and we’ll walk down the road.”
Our faces are only inches apart. We breathe each other’s breaths, blink each other’s blinks. We squeeze our hands together. The rain traces the lines of our expressions, those characters of the most complex language.
Eric asks, “What if it’s all real?”
“But it’s not, I—”
“Andrew!” Eric yells and Andrew jerks his head in surprise. Eric wants to pull the gun away from Andrew’s chest and nestle it back under his own chin. But the gun stays where it is, and Eric implores, repeating his question. “What if it’s all real?”
Andrew inhales, and his defiant answer is in the exhale. “If it is. Then it is. We’re still not going to hurt each other.”
“What will we do? We can’t go on.”
“We’ll go on.”
We stare, and we watch the rain and we watch our faces, and we don’t say anything, and we say everything.
Eric pulls the gun off Andrew’s chest, lowers his arm, and drops the gun to the forest floor. He leans into Andrew. Andrew leans into Eric.
We lean into each other and our heads are side by side, cheek to cheek. Our arms hang at our sides like lowered flags, but our fingers find each other’s fingers, and we hold on.
The sky is a depthless black, impossible to not attribute malignancy and malice to it as strobing flashes of lightning split it open. Wind and thunder rattle through the forest, sounding like the earth dying screaming. The storm swirls directly over us. But we’ve been through countless other storms. Maybe this one is different. Maybe it isn’t.
We will pick the truck keys out of the mud. We will lift Wen into our arms and we will carry her and we will remember her and we will love her as we will love ourselves. We will walk down the road even if it is flooded by raging waters or blocked by fallen trees or if greedy fissures open beneath our feet. And we will walk the perilous roads after that one.
We will go on.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, thank you to my family and extended family who support, love, and put up with me.
Thank you to my beta readers: my cousin Michael Coulombe, who was among a small group of family to read the first short story I ever wrote more than twenty years ago and I brought him back to beta read for this one; one of my favorite writers and a great friend, Stephen Graham Jones; and my friend and go-to beta reader, John Harvey, who has been reading and critiquing my stuff for more than a decade now. Their input was invaluable.
Thank you to my editor and friend, Jennifer Brehl. In early discussions about this book, she saved me from making a disastrous choice, and after I wrote the book, she was there to clean it all up and pick me up when I stumbled. I can’t imagine writing a novel without her in my corner.
Thanks to everyone at William Morrow for their hard work and getting the book-word out.
Thank you to my agent, Stephen Barbara, for his friendship, enthusiasm, advice, and general awesomeness. I can’t imagine a literary life without him. Thank you to my film rights agent, Steve Fisher, for his tireless work, support, our excellent lunches, and his enthusiasm for this novel in particular.
Thank you to all my friends and colleagues for their inspiration and for indulging my blathering and fretting, with special thanks to: John Langan for our weekly phone calls and his oddly threatening cacti; Laird Barron for being the devil on my shoulder who makes me do right; the band Future of the Left and Andrew Falkous for his friendship, our monthly late and later-night chats, and for another epigraph; the band Clutch and Neil Fallon for two great shows and conversations during the summer of 2017 and for the epigraph; Nadia Bulkin for her inspiring writing, taste in film, and her epigraph; the band Whores, who get extra bonus thanks for loaning their song title “Bloody Like the Day You Were Born” to the third section of this book; Stephen King for turning me into a reader, for his kind support of my books, and for his all-around awesomeness; Sarah Langan, Brett Cox, and JoAnn Cox for being my generous and always-positive friends and Shirley Jackson Awards coconspirators; Jack Haringa for his friendship, his whiskey expertise, his book release interviewer prowess, and being the president we all deserve; Anthony Breznican for being unfailingly kind and taking Sarah Langan and I on a hike through the St. Francis Dam ruins in Valencia; Jennifer Levesque (my slightly older sister-cousin) and Dave Stengel for their love and generosity in always letting me stay at their place whenever I visit NYC, though I suspect I might not be able to with that older crack; Brian Keene for being a superhero and my gun consultant—any mistakes in that area are mine and not his; Kris Meyer for never giving up; Stewart O’Nan for helping me get started and stay started; Dave Zeltserman for fighting the good fight; and you for reading this book.
About the Author
PAUL TREMBLAY has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book Awards and is the author of Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. He is currently a member of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in th
e Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his wife and two children.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Paul Tremblay
Disappearance at Devil’s Rock
A Head Full of Ghosts
Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye
In the Mean Time
No Sleep Till Wonderland
The Little Sleep
Copyright
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Clutch for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Animal Farm,” words and music by Clutch © 1995; to Nadia Bulkin for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” She Said Destroy © 2017; and to Future of the Left for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Hope That House Built,” words and music by Future of the Left © 2009.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the cabin at the end of the world. Copyright © 2018 by Paul Tremblay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover illustration © Mark Owen/Arcangel
Title and part title photograph by Ekaterina Kondratova/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tremblay, Paul, author.
Title: The cabin at the end of the world : a novel / Paul Tremblay.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, [2018] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048369 (print) | LCCN 2017052235 (ebook) | ISBN
9780062679123 (E-Book) | ISBN 9780062679109 (hardback) | ISBN
9780062679116 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Horror. | GSAFD:
Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3620.R445 (ebook) | LCC PS3620.R445 C33 2018 (print) |
DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048369
Digital Edition JUNE 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-267912-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267910-9
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