The Cabin in the Woods (6 page)

The attendant didn’t move to help Marty with the fuel. The moment felt frozen, and Holden wanted to move it along.

“We also wanted to get directions...” he said.

“Yeah, we’re looking for...” Curt began, frowning, looking at Jules and asking, “What is it?”

“Tillerman Road,” Jules said, taking a step closer to the attendant. Holden could see her nervousness, but he also knew that she wouldn’t want to seem afraid. Her hands were fisted by her sides, holding on to control.

The attendant just peered at her, but something about him changed. He’d become still—jaw no longer chewing, body no longer swaying—as if the name had hit home. He looked Jules up and down, and Holden almost saw her skin flinching back from his gaze.

Then the attendant sighed and muttered, “What a waste.” He walked toward the pump, moving with an exaggerated gait as if neither leg belonged to him. Curt stepped aside, and the old man plucked a ring of keys from his pocket—far too many for this shack, surely?— and unlocked a latch on the pump. Marty stayed where he was, regarding the man with hooded eyes.

Sometimes it’s good to be stoned,
Holden thought, and he smiled slightly, thinking how much Marty would appreciate the sentiment.
“Tillerman Road takes you up into the hills. Dead end at the old Buckner place.”

“Is that the name of—?” Jules began.

“There wasn’t a name,” Curt said.

“Ready?” the attendant said to Marty, and when he nodded the old guy flicked a switch, then said, “Okay, pull the handle.” Marty pulled, the pump
thunked
and shook for a couple of seconds, and then the pungent smell of fuel filled the air. Holden wondered how old this fuel was, and whether it had an expiration date, and wished he were back in the city where he didn’t have to think about such things. The numbers behind the glass dome on top of the pump started turning. Holden thought he’d seen a pump like this in an old movie, once. Very old.

“My cousin bought a house up there,” Curt said to the attendant’s back. “You go through a mountain tunnel, there’s a lake, would that be...?”

“Buckner place,” the attendant confirmed, leaning on the pump and spitting a brown slick at his feet. “Always someone lookin’ to sell that plot.” He looked over his shoulder at Curt and smiled, exposing bad teeth stained brown, gaps here and there, and a thick gray tongue that looked to Holden like something trawled up from the bottom of the sea. “An’ always some fool lookin’ to buy.”

“You knew the original owners?” Jules asked.

“Not the first,” he replied, looking the girls up and down again. “But I’ve seen plenty come and go. Been here since the war.”
“Which war?” she asked.

“You know damn well
which
war!” he shouted. He took two steps toward Marty and closed his hand over the nozzle, Marty just letting go and stepping back in time. He caught Holden’s eye and shrugged, hands held out.

Holden tried to smile at him, but the atmosphere didn’t feel light enough.

“Would that have been with the blue, and some in gray?” Marty asked. “Brother, perhaps fighting against brother in that war?”

“You sassin’ me, boy?”

“You were rude to my friend,” Marty said, his voice level, gentle as ever.

The attendant grew still again for a second, and Holden thought,
Cogs turning in there, stuff happening, he’s processing what he didn’t expect.
Then the old man looked at Jules again.

“That whore?”

Curt took a quick step forward but Holden was already moving, aware of what was about to happen. He splayed his left hand on Curt’s chest and held it there until his friend looked at him. He was angry but, Holden was pleased to see, also a little freaked. That was good. That would prevent this weird shit from descending into something more.

“I think we’ve got enough gas,” Holden said coolly.

“Enough to get you there,” the attendant said, removing the nozzle. “Gettin’ back’s your own concern.”
The girls came over behind the old guy and climbed back into the Rambler. Curt threw a twenty at the old man’s feet, aiming for and hitting the slick of tobacco juice. He glanced at Holden, then nodded at the Rambler. Time to go.

Holden couldn’t have agreed more.

Marty was the last one to climb back into the vehicle. The old man was still standing beside the fuel pump, apparently dismissing the money at his feet, still chewing, still staring at them with one good eye and one flushed with blood.

“Good luck with your business,” Marty said, climbing the steps. “I know the railroad’s comin’ through here any day now, gonna be big. Streets paved with... actual street.” And as he started swinging the door shut, Holden heard him mutter, “Fucker.”

Curt was already firing the engine, and even in a vehicle so large he managed to leave a wheel-spin in their wake.
Now will come the joking,
Holden thought.
An unpleasant situation cast aside with bravado, mocking, and rude quips.

But they drove away in silence, none of them catching another’s eye, and it was only as they turned a bend and started the long climb into the hills that the tension started to filter away.

THREE

M
arty lit up a spliff, offering his pre-rolled joints around to everyone else. No one took him up on it, though he thought for a second Holden was going to. They smiled awkwardly at each other.

Yeah
, Marty thought,
he knows too. He knows that was super-weird and fucked up back there. Like, how the hell does that dude stay in business? And where the hell did he just pop up from? And why was he...?

“Why was he looking at Jules like that?” Marty whispered. Across the small table from him, Dana and Holden heard the question but did not respond. Probably because they’d been thinking the same thing themselves, and there was no comfortable answer.

Bland rock played from the radio, Jules hummed in the front passenger seat, Curt cut in now and then with a few badly-sung lines from some song or another. Feigning normality.

“Don’t give up the day job, dude,” Marty said.
“At least I’ll
have
a day job!” Curt said. “I won’t spend my days stoned, wandering the woods, being at one with nature, and wondering how amazing it is that I’m actually alive.”

There was silence for a few seconds, and then Marty responded, “I pity you, man.” And everyone laughed.

That’s better,
Marty thought.
That’s much better. Laughter’s the second-best medicine.
He took another drag on his joint and held the smoke down, breathing out slowly. He was relaxed again now, leaning back in his chair with his head resting against the window. The sun caressed his scalp, and it was good. Holden had fetched them another beer each, and he felt a warm glow, starting at the center of him and reaching all the way to his fingertips and the ends of his toes.

Dana and Holden were sitting close, and though they affected indifference, Marty could see that each time the swaying Rambler nudged them into each other it sent a thrill through them.

Lucky guy,
he thought. Dana was cute as hell and a lovely girl. A
beautiful
girl. They’d been friends for over a year, and to begin with he’d believed that she viewed him as some sort of a joke. Many people did, mostly the shallow types—the plastic people, he called them—who spent more time concerned with what the outsides of their heads looked like, rather than bothering to care for the insides. But he’d soon come to realize that, though gorgeous, Dana was not like that at all. An intelligent girl, both deep and somewhat mysterious, she kept a distance from him
rather than regarding him as a joke.

Maybe her parents had had a thing about drugs of any kind, and it was a hangover from that, or perhaps... but no, he’d stopped thinking that long ago. Perhaps it was because she felt something for him and was afraid to grow too close?
Yeah, right.
Looking at Holden and Dana now, he could see how distant she kept from guys she liked.

But out of their awkward beginning had emerged a strange, close relationship. Marty was sure that Dana knew what he felt about her, and how intense was the first impression she’d made upon him. And Marty was getting to know her more and more every day. Of all the friendships he’d made at college, this one felt as if it would last longer than all the others.

Lucky guy
, he thought again, and when Dana caught his eye he glanced away.

“Guys, take a look,” Jules said.

Marty sat up and, with the others, leaned to look out the front windshield. To their right was a steep ravine, and ahead of them loomed the dark mouth of a tunnel set in the mountainside. It looked impossibly small. The ravine ended in a sheer, bare cliff face, above which rose a steeply wooded hillside, boulders, and rock spurs protruding between greenery like boils on a craggy face. And across the other side of the ravine, another tunnel mouth emerged onto a road ledge.

Must curve through the mountain,
he thought, and he wondered who would have built such a tunnel instead of a simple bridge.
“Hey,” Marty said, “do we really have to go—”

“Yep,” Curt said. He slowed the Rambler as they approached, concentrating, and turned on the headlights. The darkness was pushed back as they entered the tunnel, and to Marty it felt as if they were being swallowed by the mountain. It seemed like an incredibly tight fit, but there was no scraping or crunching, and Curt steered confidently into the darkness.

Marty closed and opened his eyes again several times, enjoying the brash contrast between darkness and the artificial lights of the Rambler’s dashboard. His friends were mere shadows in the barely lit cabin, and he knew that he’d look the same to them.

Halfway through the tunnel, when the faint glow of daylight started to show ahead of them, he suddenly sat up as the hairs on his forearms and neck stood on end. A shiver went though him, like a subtle electric shock, tingling his balls and tickling the insides of his nostrils. He immediately sniffed the joint, wondering if some alien substance had found its way in, and—

•••

Above the mountainside and ravine, a small bird’s free will took it along the route of the rough mountain track. It swept above the wooded mountainside, unconsciously following the tunnel as it rode thermals. Singing as it flew, stomach full from a recent feed, it struck something in mid-air, something that flashed
into view for a second like a vast blue, pulsing grid, and with a shower of fiery sparks the bird plummeted, dead. Its wings were scorched, its insides fried. Its brain had been carbonized, and any thoughts it once held were more remote and immaterial than shadows.

Nothing made the bird fly this way, nothing urged it north instead of east or south or west, but it died nonetheless. Free will was, perhaps, its undoing.

•••

“Oh...
oh
!” Marty heard someone say, and he thought it was Dana. No one else spoke, but he felt the brief, intense level of discomfort in the Rambler; people shifted in their seats, and the silence grew heavier.

Then they were out the other end and heading across the mountainside, the steep drop still to their right, and the glaring sun cleared away any dregs of darkness.

What was that?
Marty wanted to say.
Weird magnetic field? Radiation from the rocks? Someone walking over my grave?
But when he looked around at the others he saw smiling faces, and a growing excitement that they were getting closer to their destination. Curt and Jules were singing badly again, Holden was drinking, and Dana stared dreamily from the window.

So Marty took another pull on his joint instead, and he didn’t even look back.

They drove for another ten minutes. The ledge wove upward, turning back on itself and zig-zagging them up the mountainside. The view that was revealed
alternately to their left and right was staggering, opening up across the ravine to expose miles of wooded countryside, hills peeking above the trees here and there, and dark green valleys hiding their secrets from view. After a short climb they reached a ridge, and then the track weaved them into a forest of towering trees.

Curt drove, Holden and Dana pretended not to notice where their skin touched, and Marty smoked. He was thinking about dynamite and digging machines, and men working with shovels and picks, and just how long it had taken to forge that tunnel around the end of the ravine, following the natural contours of the land except deeper inside. And the road that had twisted and turned its way up the mountainside; that wasn’t an easy build, either. He thought about stuff like this a lot. And sometimes, such thoughts ended with a simple determination to smoke some more.

He lit another joint and leaned back in his seat, dozing.

Curt startled him awake with a shout.

“Behold! Our home for the weekend.” Holden and Dana went first, squatting between Curt’s and Jules’s seats, and then Marty stood behind them, one hand on each of their shoulders to hold himself up. Dana gasped, Holden hummed in appreciation, and Marty had to admit to himself that, yes, this was quite a sight.

The lake lay to their left, surrounded by trees that cast stick-like shadows across the water from the southern bank. Elsewhere the sun glared off of the water, rippling here and there where fish or frogs
jumped, shimmering with a million diamonds of light. There were a couple of small, bare islands sprouting low shrub growth, and on one a solitary tree cast its shadow over the water. A wooden jetty stood out into the water, a rough but sturdy-looking structure. There were no boats moored there, and taking a cursory look around the lake Marty could see several possible hiding places among the reeds at the lake’s edge.

It wasn’t huge, but the plant growth around its edges was lush. The stretch where the Rambler was now drawing to a halt must have been artificially cleared, and Marty found his attention drawn to the right to see why.

The cabin stood maybe a hundred feet from the lake, in a clearing that probed deep into the woods. For a few seconds Marty thought,
Right, that’s like a timber store or something, and the real cabin’s behind it in the trees, because if that’s the place where we’ve got to sleep
. But then he looked closer and saw net curtains in the building’s windows, and its allure slowly grew on him. They weren’t coming out here for a hotel visit, after all. No room service or gourmet restaurants here.