by Amy Cross
Copyright 2016 Amy Cross
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, entities and places are either products of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, businesses, entities or events is entirely coincidental.
Kindle edition
Dark Season Books
First published: January 2016
“What happened to you at the cabin was truly awful, but the important thing is that you survived. Now you just have to put your life back together.”
Three years ago, Anna Matthews was kidnapped and held in a remote cabin. After being tortured and mutilated for several days, she miraculously managed to escape, and now finally she's due for release from the psychiatric hospital where she's been receiving treatment ever since. It's time for her to pick up the pieces of her shattered life.
Soon, however, Anna finds that the past isn't quite ready to let go. She experiences a series of horrific flashbacks to the cabin, and starts seeing the faces of her tormentors, even though she knows they're all dead. After a terrifying encounter in a dark street, she seems to be on the verge of a complete collapse, but at the back of her mind she can't help wondering whether someone from the cabin managed to survive.
And then, just when she thinks the situation can't get any worse, Anna learns that her best friend has disappeared, seemingly kidnapped in the exact same way.
After the Cabin is a horror novel about a girl who desperately wants to escape her past, but who finds ghosts and shadowy figures trying to drag her back into the nightmare.
After the Cabin
One
Today
I try to scream, but the flesh between my mouth and my left ear has been burned away, leaving just a few strands of melting skin as I open my mouth and let out a mournful wail. Suddenly the plate is pulled back and I spot my own flesh burned to the surface in dry patches, and then I hear someone laughing as the metal is turned and pressed against the top of my head, burning my hair and scalp.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” a familiar voice hisses, spraying my bleeding ear with spit.
***
“Somebody stop -”
Jolting up suddenly in bed, I let out a breathless gasp as I realize that I'm back in the hospital room. There's sweat all over my body, running in heavy beads down my scarred flesh, and my heart is pounding, but I feel a rush of relief as I realize that it was another dream.
Next to me, the monitoring system beeps steadily, recording my heart-rate and other vital signs. I turn and see that the values briefly skyrocketed, but are now returning to normal.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
Touching the side of my face, I try to dry the spit out of my ear, only to find that it's not wet. Or course it isn't. I was dreaming, that's all. Still, I my run fingers against the flesh on the side of my face. There are no fresh wounds, although I have plenty of scar tissue.
Just a dream, I tell myself again.
A dream and a memory. Even if pain remembered is pain relived.
Sitting in silence, I listen to the sound of my own breath, and of the monitoring system, and of the air-conditioning unit in the distance. All comforting, normal sounds. My room is completely dark, and when I reach over and check my phone I see that the time is a little before 3am. I try to run through the latest nightmare again, but after a moment I realize that there's not really any point. After all, it was just the same as last night, and the night before that, and the night before that too. And tomorrow night probably, and the night after, and every night forever.
I was back at the cabin.
They were doing things to me.
I survived.
That's the important thing, everyone keeps telling me. I survived and I'm here and I have a future. The 'incident' doesn't have to define me. My life is about to start again. I'm going to put all the bad things in the past and move on. It sounds so easy when they put it like that.
Oh, and I'm fragile. Strong, but fragile. People keep telling me that, too. Like I'm a piece of fine china.
Figuring that I might as well go to the toilet while I'm awake, I wince a little as I turn and swing my legs over the side of the bed. My right ankle still hurts from where it was crushed three years ago, my back has several metal plates holding it together, and I can feel hundreds of tight scars criss-crossing my body. My right breast jiggles slightly under my night-shirt, as if to remind me that my left breast is gone. I let out a gasp as I get to my feet and start hobbling toward the bathroom door. My shadow on the wall ahead is stooped, a little twisted.
3am. So it's finally arrived, then. The day I get to leave hospital and go home.
***
“I mean it,” Doctor Larkin replies as he makes a note in his journal. “Don't underestimate the tremendous improvements you've made over the past three years, Anna. There are people who would have been utterly destroyed by the experience you went through, yet here you are, ready to be released. In my book, you're a winner and a truly inspiring story. You're still fragile, obviously, but you're holding together.”
I wait for him to continue, but after a moment I realize that he's expecting me to say something. But what? Haven't I said enough already? Is there really anything else? Ever since the cabin, these little rules of human interaction have seemed more difficult, less automatic.
I force a smile, but I doubt it's very convincing.
“Any thoughts?” he asks. His smile is kind, and genuine.
“On what?” God, my voice sounds so weak and fearful.
“Are you scared?”
“Why would I be scared?”
“Because you're going home today,” he replies, adding another note to his book. Probably something about my lack of enthusiasm, or about my inability to maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds at a time. “It's natural for you to feel nervous, Anna. You've been here for a long time, the hospital must feel safe and comforting, and -”
“Not really.”
He pauses. “Not really?”
“It's just a hospital. It smells of disinfectant and bodies.”
Damn it. I'm doing it again. I never used to be cynical. I guess I'm just being defensive because I'm scared. If I say one wrong thing, one thing that worries him, he might cancel my release and keep me here.
“I see.” He makes yet another note, and I think maybe he's disappointed by my answer. “Tell me, are you still having nightmares?”
I shake my head.
“Are you sure?”
“If I'm having them,” I lie, “I don't remember them.”
“That surprises me,” he continues. “According to my notes, you've mentioned no significant dreams for over a year.”
“I can't help that,” I reply. The truth is, if I tell him about the nightmares I've been having lately, I'm pretty sure he'll rescind his decision to let me go home today. He'll keep me for another month, maybe two, maybe six, maybe a whole year... If I have to wait until the nightmares stop, I might never get out.
“So what do you dream about?” he asks.
I shrug, although I instantly realize that won't be enough for him.
“You don't know?”
I open my mouth to reply, but no words come out.
“Do you not remember your dreams, Anna? Or do you just not want to tell me about them?”
“My dreams are just boring,” I tell him. “I guess I just dream about the same stuff as everyone else. Slightly weird, slightly dull things. Going out the house and realizing I forgot my clothes, or giving a presentation and suddenly losing my notes. You know, normal stuff.”
He stares at me, and it's clear that he's not convinced.
“What about wak
ing dreams?” he asks, shifting his position in the chair. “By that, I mean times when you replay things in your head, over and over. Do you ever do that?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“Am I supposed to?”
“It seems to me that you're burying your memories.”
“Shouldn't I?”
“Not if it's -”
“I know that what happened to me was bad,” I continue, staring at him. “I remember pretty much every moment from the time I arrived at Oslo airport, to when I got to the cabin with Marit and the others, and then everything that happened when I woke up in their basement, tied to a chair with...” I pause, feeling a faint tightening sensation in my chest. Hearing the sound of a knife's blade, I start to turn before realizing that it was just in my mind. I refuse to react to these little hints of the past. “I remember everything that happened after they tied me up and started doing those things to me,” I continue. I can hear the blade again, closer this time, but I know it's not really there. “I remember it all in great detail, it's like a -”
I hear it again, right next to my ear.
Instinctively, I turn and flinch, but there's nothing there.
“Anna?”
I turn back to him. God, I'm so stupid. When will I learn? It was just a sound.
“Are you okay?” Doctor Larkin asks.
Tucking some strands of hair behind my ear, I nod. After a moment I realize that I'm slouching again, so I force myself to sit up, despite the pain in my back. I just want to get through this final session so I can leave. My mother's probably always waiting in reception.
“Is it like a movie?” he asks suddenly. “Your memory of the cabin, I mean.”
“Why would it be like a movie?”
“Well, there was a camera in the -”
“I know,” I hiss, hoping to interrupt him before he goes into too much detail.
“So in a sense, Anna, it wouldn't be that unusual if you started replaying an imagined version of the video in your mind. There's actually a name for that process, it's known as -”
“No.”
“Let me finish -”
“No!” For a moment, I can hear the anger in my voice, but I quickly force myself to settle. I can't afford to seem like I might fall apart again. “It's not like that,” I tell him, trying to sound calm, cool and together. “I think about it sometimes,” I continue finally. “Of course I do, it's only natural. I have over two hundred individual scars on my body, and I remember what caused each and every one of them.” Holding up my right hand, I look at the faint scar around the wrist. “I struggled so hard, the ropes and chains tore me,” I continue, trying to hold eye contact with the doctor but quickly looking down at my knees again. I point at a patch of bumpy skin just above my right knee. “That was Joe, putting out a cigarette.” Next I point at a gnarled ridge a little further up. “That one, the one that looks like a tree root, was caused by Christian digging a razor blade into me. The one next to it is from a screwdriver Daniel used to slash me.”
I hear his pen scratching the paper as he makes another note.
I pull my gown up to expose the inner thigh of my left leg, where a long reddish line runs through the flesh.
“That was a pair of scissors,” I continue, thinking back to the sight of so much blood. “He just cut through me like...”
I pause for a moment, my mind filled with the memory of all the pain.
“It's okay, Anna,” Doctor Larkin says finally. “You don't need to relive each scar. In fact, I think that would be rather unhealthy.”
“I could go through them all,” I tell him, staring at him and forcing myself to maintain eye contact, “if you want. I could describe every single one of them again.”
“Do you want to do that?”
“No.”
Finally he's the one who breaks eye contact, as he looks down at his notebook.
“I want to go home,” I say firmly. My voice doesn't sound so fearful now. “I just want to get out of this place, and I want to go home. I think then it'll finally be over, because all this time at the hospital has felt like an extension of what happened. I want to go back to a normal life. Isn't that what the past three years have been about? Getting me to the point where I can go home and be normal?”
“You use that word a lot, Anna. Is being normal important to you?”
I nod.
“Was it important before the cabin, or only after?”
Reaching up, I squeeze the tip of my prosthetic nose and pull it off, letting him see the holes beneath. “Cool party trick, huh?” I continue, smiling as I see the disquiet in his eyes. I slip the nose back into place. “Sorry,” I add, “lame stunt, I'm going to have to make sure I don't do that anymore. Sometimes I just like to shock people.”
“You're using distraction techniques.”
“Am I?”
He nods. “You might not even be aware of it, but you've developed sophisticated tricks that you deploy whenever you want to change the course of our conversations. Dark humor, pedantry, crude jokes, intentional -”
“I'm just being me.”
“Are you?”
I open my mouth to reply, but no words come out.
“How much would you say you've changed as a result of what you went through?” he asks. “I think this is my last question to you before you leave the hospital. How much did the cabin change you, in percentage terms?”
“I don't know.”
“Fifty?”
I shrug.
“A hundred?”
“I don't want to be analyzed anymore,” I continue, fighting the urge to get up and storm to the door. “Everything I do in this place gets written down and noted, and anyone would seem crazy if they were watched so much. When I get home, it'll be different. I'll be able to have nightmares without someone noting it down in a journal, and I'll be able to go more than five minutes without someone asking me how I'm doing and what I'm thinking. I'm not this delicate girl who'll fall apart in a strong wind.”
“So you think it's getting to the point where being in hospital makes it harder for you to get better?”
I state at his notebook for a moment. How many of those has he filled up over the past three years, with observations about the things I tell him, and about my body language, and about reports given to him by the nurses? Every aspect of my life has been studied in excruciating detail.
“I want to go home,” I tell him again, struggling to hold back tears as I finally realize how close I am to the end of my time here. “That's all I've ever wanted. To go home. So can I please do that now?”
***
“My God, there's a lot here,” Mum says as she puts the final bag in the boot. “I had no idea you'd collected so many books and stuff while you were in hospital. Did I really bring all of these things in for you?”
“I probably could have thrown most of it away,” I mutter, feeling spots of cold rain starting to fall. Looking up, I see that the sky is a darker gray than earlier, but still lighter than the hospital's concrete walls.
“Shall we go back in, then?” she asks. “I bet all the doctors and nurses are waiting to say goodbye. You're a popular girl around here.”
I shake my head.
“You don't want to go and see them one last time?”
“I said goodbye to the ones I wanted to,” I reply. It's a lie, but hopefully it'll be enough for her.
She pauses, clearly a little disappointed. That's typical of her, really. Always so desperately polite.
“Can we get going?” I ask, heading around the side of the car and opening the passenger-side door. “I just want to go home and forget about this place.”
“I'll just pop back in and get your prescriptions from Doctor Larkin,” she replies. “Are you sure you don't want to -”
“I'll wait here.”
With that, I climb into the car and pull the door shut. I wait as my mother hovers a little, but finally she goes back into the build
ing and I lean back, trying to relax. For a moment, the whole world feels completely silent all around, and I adjust the rear-view mirror so I can see my eyes. I thought I'd have a blank expression, but instead I look absolutely terrified. It's as if what I'm feeling doesn't always match my face these days, but I guess I can work on that.
Home.
I'm going home.
The truth is, I didn't go back inside to say goodbye to the doctors and nurses because I already know what they think. I see it in their eyes, they think I'll be back, that they have to give me this chance but that I'm irrevocably broken inside. They think I'll have some kind of mental collapse, and I'll be dragged kicking and screaming back to the hospital before too long. Even Doctor Larkin seems reticent, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're keeping my room open for me. I'm going to prove them wrong, though. I'm going to get through this, and I'm going to be a normal person again. I'm twenty-four years old and I'm not going to be defined by something that happened when I was twenty-one.
I'm going to live a normal life again.
Two
He swings the baseball bat at me, hard enough that for a moment I actually think my head might come off. Instead, I feel my jaw shatter and I cry out, but he quickly hits me again, this time on the other side. Again and again, pounding me as I cry out, hitting me harder and harder until I start to lose consciousness and -
“Do you want a cup of tea?” Mum asks.
Turning, I see that she's already getting two cups off the shelf.
“Thanks,” I mutter. Making tea is Mum's default activity when she's nervous.
“I spoke to Karen over the internet,” she continues, “and she said she'd like to pop over to see you later today, but I told her I'd have to check first to see if you're up for a visit.”
“Why wouldn't I be up for a visit?” I ask, before realizing that I probably sound a little too defensive. “I mean, yeah, sure, I'd like that.”
