The Cabin in the Woods (18 page)

Jules’s dead eyes urged her to fight on, and the dresser slipped that much closer to the window.

“Keep bashing, bitch,” Dana muttered, and then the sound of Mother’s pounding changed. The whole room
began to shake, dust drifted down from the ceiling, dark spidery shapes scurried to safety in shadows, and then the cabin swayed as a great grumbling sound filled the air. Dana looked around in disbelief.

Earthquake? You gotta be fucking kidding!

“What?” she gasped. “No! No, come
on
!”

The air seemed to vibrate and her vision blurred. She bit her lip—afraid for a second that she was fainting—but then the rumbling started to subside and the floor leveled beneath her. For a moment all was still and even the bashing from the window had ceased.
Let the ground have opened up and swallowed her whole,
Dana thought, but she was already shoving hard against the dresser when the pounding began again.

With one last effort she heaved the tall item of furniture before the window, standing in front of it and pushing so that it was flush against the wall on either side. As if that was a signal, Mother turned her attention to the glass and soon smashed it out, and Dana felt the dresser starting to rock. She leaned against it for a moment, absorbing the impacts, but they were turning harder and harder as the zombie became more determined to gain entry.

Timing the blows, Dana darted to the bed and dragged it up against the dresser, trying to wedge its feet against differing levels in the floorboards in the vain hope that it would jam the dresser in place.

But it was like putting sticking plaster over a compound fracture. It was only a matter of time until the bitch found her way in, and Dana already knew
that the room offered nothing that she could use as a weapon.

At least
I’m
still working,
she thought with unnatural calm. She was amazed that her heart hadn’t exploded with the terror and her limbs hadn’t simply ceased to function.

The dresser rocked and the bed’s legs screeched as they were driven against the floor. Dana went to the door and tried it again. She’d heard the heavy bolts thumping in as soon as the door had slammed behind her, but before she’d been able to investigate the ghostly shape of Mother appeared at the window and started hammering.
So who the hell locked me in?
she wondered, working at the handle. It turned, but the door was stuck fast in its frame, with not even an inch of give. Solid, like a wall.

Now Dana started kicking at the door’s wooden panels, aiming the heels of her trainers at the corners. The feel and sound of each kick was all wrong, as if the wood was simply a veneer, and beneath lay something solid, like metal. She felt panic starting to well up—
Keep calm, calm, I’ve come this far
—

—and then the dresser tilted against the bed, scraping it across the floor with its leaning weight, and around the side of the dresser she saw Mother’s gray weathered hand clasping at the room’s air.

Dana had to make a quick choice: stay and fight with the door, hoping she could get out before Mother got in; or try to kill the zombie before it killed her.
How the fuck do you kill a zombie?
she wondered,
and a hundred images from a hundred horror movies flashed across her mind. Destroy their heads, destroy their brains, burn them, decapitate them, take off their arms and legs and they’ll still come at you, jawing themselves along the ground in their search for your flesh, your heart, your
braaaainnnns
.

She plucked up a bedside lamp and, as Mother peered from behind the leaning dresser, smashed it across her face. The zombie barely seemed to notice. She looked at Dana and continued working her way from behind the tilted furniture, two hands free now, torso, and one leg lifted clear and planted against the bed, ready to kick up and launch herself through the air.

Dana backed against the wall, because she was out of options. She closed her eyes briefly and thought of Jules, and wondered how much it would hurt.

Something thumped with a loud impact, and a shower of glass scraped across her shoulder and past her face. She gasped and jumped, looked down, and saw the bizarre hunting picture, face up on the floor. Then she heard Holden’s gasps and grunts.

She pulled back a little and he knocked out the rest of the glass from the one-way mirror, using a lamp base as an impromptu club. He didn’t smile when he saw her, only looked past her at Mother. From his room Dana could hear thumping, as well, but there were no zombies in there.

Not yet.

She let out an explosive sob and Holden looked at her at last, offering a brief smile.
“My door’s stuck,” he said.

“Mine too!”

“Come on.” He held out his hand and Dana took it, and as she climbed through into his room she expected to feel Mother’s hand clasping her ankle at any moment, the skin cold and rough, the strength impossible. But she fell through onto Holden’s floor, wincing as errant glass shards sliced her scalp and scratched across the bridge of her nose. Holden slipped on something and went down with her, and for a moment they were close and she could taste the panic on his breath.

She checked out his room and saw the pile of furniture stacked against his own window.

“That didn’t do much good for—” she began, and his wardrobe tilted inward and crashed to the floor. It threw up clouds of dust and shook the floorboards, and as she and Holden helped each other up she saw big-zombie standing in the shattered window frame.

“That’ll be Matthew,” she said, and giving the thing a name seemed almost stupid enough to laugh. Almost.

“Well he’s big enough to—”

“The bed!” Dana said. And as Holden tipped it on its end and she helped him shove it against the window, she knew that it was futile. Matthew thumped at the mattress as they pushed it close, and she thought he was perhaps being playful, like a cat knocking a mouse around with only a shred of its full strength before killing it.

They leaned against the upended bed, looking at each other, and the sense of hopelessness was
shattering.
I haven’t even had a chance to take a breath
, she thought, and for a moment she almost kissed him. But that, too, would have felt so stupid, and so final.

So instead she looked around for something else they could use—as a weapon, or to help secure the bed against the wall—and that was when she saw the trapdoor.

“Er... Holden,” she said, nodding to the side. It had been hidden beneath the bed up to now, and already she was thinking of all the stuff down there in the basement that they could use as weapons. Those tools, the chains, maybe even something from Roberto the Limbless Man’s circus. And all the other stuff, the weird stuff.

That picture of Patience staring with dead eyes...

Mother appeared at the shattered mirror. She stood there for a moment, hands clasping at the jagged glass still stuck in the frame’s sill, staring in at them.
Don’t let her smile
, Dana thought.
I don’t think I could handle a smile
.

But Mother did not smile. She started to climb instead, clumsily trying to shove one leg and her head through the small gap at the same time. It wouldn’t take her long to figure it out.

“Go,” Holden whispered, and Dana went to the trapdoor. She grabbed the small rusted handle set in one edge and pulled, fearing it would be jammed tight, and falling back in surprise as it swung up and open without even a squeak from the hinges.

Oiled recently,
she thought. There was nothing but blackness below, and the smell of age.
She looked up at Holden.

“Better or worse, you think?” she asked.

“Lamp,” he said, nodding at the small table beside where his bed used to be. It was still plugged in, so Dana leaned out and grabbed its shade, glancing back over her shoulder as she did so. Mother now had both legs over the mirror’s sill and was trying to press her head through, as well, straggly hair caught on glass shards above. She was growling and keening.

Dana lowered the lamp, holding the cord and letting it dangle when it reached its extreme. She leaned down and looked into the basement. It was empty, just a dirt-floored space below the room. Maybe it connected to the main area they’d been in, somehow, or maybe not, but right then it seemed not to matter. She didn’t think they had any choice.

“It’s empty,” she announced.

Holden shoved the bed into place one last time, glanced across at Mother still struggling at the smashed hole in the wall, then moved to his door.

“Curt!” he shouted. “Curt!”

Moments later the door knob twisted left and right, the door not moving at all. “Unlock your door!” Curt called, and Dana never thought she’d be so glad to hear his voice.

“I can’t, it’s locked!” Holden shouted. “Got Dana in with me. Get down to the basement, we’ve got a way down from here!”

“Okay!” Curt called, and Dana saw the doorknob fall still as he let go.
Holden took a quick look down into the barely-lit blackness, sat on the edge and tipped forward, holding the floor and flipping himself over to land on his feet. For a moment Dana was left alone in his room, Mother halfway through the jagged mirror and forcing herself past the remaining spears of glass, and Matthew shoving at the bed, its metal frame scoring the timber floor as it shifted with each impact.

Then Holden called to her and she sat at the trapdoor’s edge, easing herself down into his arms.

It was suddenly quiet in that dark part of the basement, as if the noise from above was meant only for the bedroom. She heard Holden’s breathing and felt his thumping heart next to her own, and he was holding her tight even though her feet were on the floor. She was glad. And then she looked around and saw
why
he was holding her, and knew they had made a terrible mistake.

The only light was from the lamp still dangling to their left, and it was barely bright enough to illuminate the whole room. But it showed them enough.

It was a torture chamber. A chair stood against one wall, fixed with rough metal clamps to the wall and floor. Thick leather straps protruded stiffly from the arms and legs. Chains and shackles hung from metal rings in the floor joists that made up the low ceiling. Several chains ended in cruel hooks, and others bore manacles, some of them set swinging by the sudden invasion of this place. The chair’s seat seemed stained dark, though that might have been the light.
Against one wall stood a table, and on the table was a vast array of terrible, brutal tools and implements of pain. Saws, hammers, hooks, knives, chains, wooden stakes, pliers, branding irons, axes, cleavers, nails, bolts. A fine film of dust lay over everything, blunting the knives and dulling the intended use of some instruments, yet the small underground room seemed to echo with the horrors it had seen.

“This is the Black Room,” Dana whispered. “What?” Holden asked.

“From the diary. Remember? This is where he killed them.” She was shaking now, not cold but terrified, because everything was coming together. Guilt made her feel sick, and the fear of what was to come strove to empty her of hope. “This is where he kills us.”

“What are you talking about?” Holden asked. “This is just some sicko’s—”

“I brought us here,” she whispered, and the weight of responsibility was crushing. She could hardly breathe, thinking of Jules’s head in her hands. Her vision swam as she replayed Marty’s screams. “I found the diary, read from it, conjured them, and... you’re all gonna die because of me.”

Holden grabbed her upper arms and shook slightly until she looked at him. So strong, so solid, so there, even behind his fear she saw determination and strength. For a second she almost let it make her feel better.

“Nobody did this,” he said. “Okay, it’s bad luck. Horrible fucking luck. But I’m not gonna die and neither are you. We just gotta find the door.”
“There isn’t one,” she whispered, and even though she hadn’t looked she knew she was right. This wasn’t part of the basement. It was a different place, and the distance between here and Holden’s bedroom above seemed endless.

He glanced around, and Dana watched him searching for the door.
Bet he wishes he’d never tagged along now
, she thought, but she couldn’t even smile. He turned back to her and nodded.

“Yeah. Nothing obvious. But there must be something in the wall. Just look.”

His optimism shook her a little, and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Maybe he’s right,
she thought.
Maybe we can’t just give in
. And she moved to the table. She didn’t want to spend too long looking at the tools and dwelling on their uses, so she picked up something that looked like a small crowbar and started running it along the walls, tapping. She listed to the sounds it made to see if they changed—anything that might indicate an alternative material in the construction could mean something different beyond.

She tapped and tapped, but found nothing.

“Curt?” she shouted. If he’d made it down into the basement by now, perhaps he was on the other side of one of these walls. She concentrated, trying to position herself in relation to the outside wall of the cabin, but the geography of the room above them had become confused.

One or both of them will be down here soon
, she
thought, and the seconds seemed to tick away like memories of her life.

“Anything?” Holden asked.

Dana shook her head.

“No.”

He crossed the room toward her. He’d been tapping, too, and she saw a shadow fall over his face even though he tried to fight away his own desperation.
He’s doing it for me,
she realized.
He’ll never say it’s hopeless.

“Hidden rooms were a staple of post-civil war architecture,” Holden said. “There’s gotta be a—” And when he was directly below the trapdoor a shadow swung in, a spiked metal smile on the end of a long chain, catching him beneath the left arm and across the back of his shoulder.

Holden’s eyes went wide and he screamed.

Dana reached for him as the slack chain tightened and he was lifted from the floor. He swung a little as his feet left the dirt and knocked her back, and she clasped his hands and pulled. Above and behind him she saw up through the trapdoor where Matthew’s huge shadow loomed, shoulders flexing and arms working as he pulled. The rusted teeth of the bear trap were embedded, it was only going to take a couple of seconds to haul Holden from the basement room, and then...