The Cabin at the End of the World Read online

  Redmond’s guttural screams and squeals weaken and become less recognizably human. Wen’s shallow, ragged breathing are Andrew’s own breaths, if he is in fact breathing at all.

  Redmond’s mask remains in place despite the assault. Small puncture holes, black with blood, acne the white cloth, the whole of which has turned pink and red. The contents inside the mask have lost their original shape; the borders of his face and skull rupture and are amorphous.

  His arms never once rise above his chest and shoulders to shield his head. His hands hang down to the tops of his thighs, and they flop and twitch as if attempting to break off and flee. His legs kick out and spasm, his shoes knocking a desperate SOS against the floor.

  Leonard circles behind Redmond, maneuvering between Adriane and Sabrina, mindful of their backswings. He waits and watches, politely waiting for a turn. He widens the distance between his hands on the weapon’s thick handle. A stress crack, a fault line in the wood, runs down the length of what was once a sun-bleached boat oar. He lifts the sledgehammer end into the dusty sunbeam above them all. He yells and powers the hammer down in a looping, accelerating trajectory, splitting the space between Adriane and Sabrina.

  There’s a tree-snapping-and-falling crack and crunch. Redmond’s sternum and rib cage collapse under the weight and force of the anvil-sized block of metal, which punches clear through to the spine. The violence of the impact vibration radiates across the floor and up the frame of Andrew’s chair. A plume of red sprays the rope and Andrew’s bare legs below the knee. The blood is warm on his skin. Red graffitis the jeans and white and off-white shirts of Sabrina and Leonard. Redmond’s limbs cease fluttering. The fingers of his open, pleading hands close into his palms.

  Leonard retracts the sledgehammer and stumbles backward until he knocks into the couch. A crater in the middle of Redmond’s chest fills with blood and it has an absurd depth, perhaps stretching beyond the floor and into the basement. More blood pools beneath his body and flows away, dowsing the cracks and grain of the hardwood floor. That his red shirt somehow remains fully buttoned and tucked into his jeans seems mocking and cruel. Jagged spears of bone peek through two of the gaps in the shirt between buttons.

  Wen hasn’t moved from her spot next to Andrew and still faces away from the carnage. Her odd breathing hasn’t changed though she mixes in a nearly inaudible high-pitched moan or wheeze, like her throat and lungs are clogged. Her eyelashes brush against Andrew’s ear when she blinks.

  He whispers, “I love you, Wen. Don’t look. Don’t turn around, okay?”

  Leonard drops the weapon, and it clatters heavily on the floor. He coughs through his closed mouth, puffing out his cheeks. He steps left, hesitates, and then steps back to the right, apparently unsure of where to go or what to do, until darting into the kitchen and throwing up into the sink. He turns the water on full blast, trying to drown out his puking.

  Adriane’s face is blank, but it’s a different kind of blank. She still has her weapon raised. The ends of the raking claws drip thick, syrupy blood.

  Color rushes into Sabrina’s shocked face, making her cheeks ruddy, almost purple. She twists and tosses her weapon against the woodburning stove. With her back to Andrew and the others, she folds her hands behind her neck, shakes her head, and talks to herself. Andrew can’t hear what she says.

  Eric is slumped in his chair, eyes vacant and staring out to the deck and beyond. Andrew considers calling out his name and asking if he’s okay. By the look of him, eyes glassy and in a half squint, Eric might be better off being lost and hiding inside his own head.

  Andrew needs to regroup and focus on escaping from the chair. The ropes wrapped around his legs and wrists feel like they’ve tightened instead of loosening during his struggles.

  Leonard returns from the kitchen and stands at the head of Redmond’s body. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “Adriane, can you help out here?” He sways, unsteady on his feet. The cabin is a boat pitching in rough seas.

  Adriane doesn’t answer and blankly stares at Redmond’s corpse.

  “Adriane? Hey, Adriane?”

  She moves and talks in slow motion. “Hey, yeah. What? I’m still here.”

  “Help me take Redmond outside.”

  Adriane gently places her weapon on the floor behind her, only a step from the bathroom doorway.

  Leonard bends by Redmond’s head and reaches out to dig his arms underneath the man’s shoulders. Instead he straightens and walks around the body to Redmond’s feet. He is only inches away from Andrew.

  Andrew whispers, “Shhh,” to Wen even though she isn’t saying anything. He holds his breath, afraid that any sound or movement could trigger another frenzy of violence.

  Leonard says, “I’m going to, um, pull him outside, onto the deck there. Grab a bedspread or something so we can cover him up. And can you open the screen for me? Maybe pull that chair and end table out of the way, too?”

  Adriane whispers what Andrew thinks is, “This is all so fucked.” She slides the little end table deeper into the kitchen, the wooden legs complaining as they are dragged over the linoleum. She stands up the small lamp, straightening the yellow lampshade, and turns the switch on and off, two, three, four times, and more. The little clicks don’t result in any light.

  “Adriane?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” She lifts back one of the remaining kitchen chairs and drops it in front of the refrigerator. Then she runs across the room into a bedroom and comes back out with a quilted and light-and-dark-blue-checkered bedspread, large enough to cover a wheat field. With the bedspread folded under her arm, Adriane kicks aside the balled-up curtain and slides open the screen to the deck, careful to keep it in the track.

  Leonard says, “You might have to take it off. I need as much space as you can give me to get through.”

  As Adriane walks onto the deck with the screen slider held out in front of her like a shield, Leonard picks up Redmond’s feet. He tries tucking a leg under each of his arms, but it’s an awkward hold, and the legs drop out and hit the floor with a wet splat. The earthy and iron-tinted smell of blood and piss intensifies with the disturbance of the body, as though the legs are bellows pumping out tainted air. Leonard grabs fistfuls of Redmond’s jeans cuffed around the ankle. With the legs reelevated, the smell further intensifies, and he whispers, “Oh, God,” and breathes loudly through his mouth. He spins the body one hundred and eighty degrees so that the feet point to the deck. Leonard pauses and dry heaves once, dropping one leg to cover his mouth with the back of his hand. He says, “I’m okay, I got it,” and he grabs the leg again, continuing to talk to himself throughout the whole process. He pedals backward hastily, dragging the body behind him, leaving a smeared trail of blood on the floor. Redmond’s masked head wobbles and shakes like an overfilled water balloon.

  Sabrina jogs into the bathroom and comes back out with an armload of towels. She sets the stack down on the floor to Andrew’s right and spreads two towels (one is brown, the other a fraying and tattered Harry Potter towel featuring the cover of the first novel) over the blood on the floor. She stirs the towels around with her feet, halfheartedly mopping up the mess.

  Leonard is on the deck and paused with Redmond’s body half in and half out of the cabin. Hunched over, Leonard says, “Watch out,” to Adriane. He lunges backward and the body goes with him, passing over the glass slider’s metal tracking in the doorway and thunking down onto the deck. The wooden planks knock and echo with the body-relocation effort until Leonard parks Redmond up against the banister railing opposite the doorway and past the picnic table; the body is not out of sight from the interior of the cabin. Leonard inspects his hands and his red-smeared shirt and pants, and then looks at his watch twice. The first peek is autonomic, a reflex. The second look lasts longer and is a conscious attempt at determining the time. It occurs to Andrew that Leonard has been obsessively checking his watch ever since the four of them entered the cabin.

  Adriane covers the body with the blue bl
anket, tugging and pulling the corners over Redmond’s legs. The blanket tents over his feet and its extra length pools over his head and against the railing. Picking the screen slider back up (which has seen better days; the wire mesh is misshapen and sags near the corners of the warped frame), she speaks and gestures with motions of her head at the body and then inside the cabin.

  Leonard says something and he, too, points inside the cabin, and then he turns and walks away from both Adriane and the body. He pauses and says, “I don’t want to look at him, either.” As he ducks into the kitchen the sunlight dies. How quickly it becomes dark inside the cabin alarms Andrew, and he can’t help but imagine the light inside and outside continuing to dim until there is no light at all.

  Eric

  Leonard stands in the same area of the common room where Eric saw whatever it was he thought he saw in the moments before the attack on Redmond: an amorphous image hovering in the air, a bas-relief made of light and outlined in more jagged light, which became a head and shoulders, then a full figure in a swirl of glint and glare. He wants to dismiss it as an illusion, a result or symptom of his injury, but in his memory, the figure animates before disappearing; it turns inexorably to face him.

  Did Andrew or Wen or any of the others see the figure, too? No one reacted like they did.

  To Eric’s right, Andrew shivers like he is freezing. Wen stands on Andrew’s left, arms around his neck. She is in profile to Eric, facing the front door. Her eyes are open and they don’t blink often enough. Did Wen watch the death of Redmond? Eric can’t remember if she was looking when Adriane first swung her weapon. Had she turned away before that? He thinks so but he can’t be sure. Did she see the figure made of light? Is she seeing it now in front of the door and staring back at her?

  “I’m truly sorry that had to happen and that you had to see it.” Leonard’s voice wavers and has active fault lines. He stares at his hands, opens them and closes them. “But we had no choice. We have no choice.” His apparent sincerity, or his sincere belief in his own words, is appalling and frightening. Eric believes for the first time that they will never leave this cabin alive and prays silently.

  When there is no response to his apology and explanation, Leonard slumps and shuffles to the couch. He paws around the cushions and finds the remote control. He turns on the television and Wen’s Steven Universe winks back on, filling the black screen on the wall. Eric recognizes the episode as having seen it before, but he does not remember what is going to happen next or later. Is it an episode he watched previously this summer or is it the same episode that was on earlier, before Leonard turned off the TV? Had everything happened in fifteen minutes? Ten minutes? Less? Eric doesn’t know.

  He doesn’t know what time it is or how long the four have been inside the cabin and he can’t remember when or how he was tied to his chair. He fears that he is forgetting other stuff, too, the most important stuff. Because of the concussion, he is also exhausted and is having trouble keeping his head up and eyes open.

  With her show back on, Wen turns around. She stands unnaturally straight and wooden, her body devoid of the kinetic energy with which she normally emanates. Her thumbs are again inside her fists and held against her mouth.

  Andrew says, “Wen, don’t look outside.”

  Wen shakes her head no. Eric isn’t sure if the no is defiance or an agreement or a meaningless automatic response.

  Sabrina carries the kitchen trash bin to the middle of the floor. She wipes her hands on her jeans as though her hands have already handled the towels and are covered in blood. She bends and lifts the sludgy, blood-soaked towels off the floor, and drops them heavily into the bin and two black flies spin into the air like whorls of smoke.

  With Redmond’s body outdoors and now the towels disposed of, the smell in the room improves enough that inhaling through his nose doesn’t totally flip his stomach. The floor is still slick with blood; it’ll never be clean again. Previously invisible gouges in the wood are angry slashes, scars that won’t heal. Floorboards are tinted red in a trail leading to the deck. Taking the two remaining towels from the stack she brought out of the bathroom, Sabrina spreads them over the floor, end to end. She doesn’t mop or push the towels around; they’re left to be rugs. Then she covers the towels with the slider curtain. The flies briefly crawl on the curtain and then flit away disappointed.

  Leonard says, “I’m sorry, Wen, but I’m going to change the channel, okay? Just for a little bit, and then I’ll put it back. I promise. You’re doing so good, you know that? So brave. Your parents must be so proud.”

  Andrew says, “Go fuck yourself.” His voice goes from child-who-can’t-find-his-parents to full-on righteously angry Andrew in the span of three words.

  Leonard holds the remote close to his face, his hands trembling. He pauses the show with Steven Universe smiling, his plump fist raised triumphantly above his head.

  Eric looks outside at the shaded deck, and the covered body against the railing. A strong breeze ripples through the folds and edges of the checkered blue cloth. That charmingly homey and homely bedspread was half of an apartment-warming gift from his parents when he and Andrew moved in together more than fifteen years ago. The other half of the apartment-warming gift wasn’t quite as charming: a golden framed placard that read, “God bless this home and all who enter,” writ in a looping gothic script above prayer hands pressed together. Eric couldn’t decide if the framed blessing was a rider, a parental compromise between no-gift and gift. Eric wasn’t opposed to the blessing’s sentiment (as tacky as its presentation was) but Andrew ranted like only the deeply offended could. He and Andrew tossed the placard and repurposed the frame. Eric insisted on keeping and using the bedspread for their guest room should his parents visit and stay over. Mom and Dad never set foot in their first apartment. They made their maiden visit to Cambridge and the condo shortly after they adopted Wen, and in the years since, they have visited four more times. For those keeping score, Andrew’s parents drive down from Vermont to visit once every two months. Eric keeps score. His mom and dad have yet to sleep in the condo’s guest room and have instead stayed in a hotel, insisting they didn’t want to be a bother, didn’t want to get in the way. Mom said it so warmly and with such regret, Eric believed it to be true. While Mom acted as spokesperson, Dad would break off eye contact, slump his shoulders, and drop his head like a scolded dog only now reminded of a bad deed, but one he doesn’t regret. It was like watching Dad—this graying and diminishing version of the man who was once as big and strong as Paul Bunyan—remember he wasn’t supposed to be enjoying himself in their company as much as he was. Andrew once asked Eric what he was thinking as he stood at the bay window while his parents left the building and ducked into an idling cab two stories below. Eric said, “I’m happy and proud they’re here.” He paused and Andrew hugged him from behind. “And I’m sad. Infinitely sad.”

  Eric lifts his drooped head and swims up from the warm waters of reverie. Did he fall asleep or pass out, and for how long was he out? He looks around the cabin nervously, and everyone seems to be in the same place they were moments before. He blurts out, “Let’s stop this now, right? We can get you help. We can. I promise. Let us go and we can get you help. Nothing more has to happen. It can end now. You can end it now.” Eric sighs at himself. He doesn’t mean it the way it might sound to them; he shouldn’t be using the words end it now.

  Leonard impatiently shakes his head, brushing Eric off. He looks at his wristwatch and says, “Please watch the TV. It’ll be on soon.”

  The screen blips over to a cable news network. It’s some midafternoon business talking-head kind of show according to the guide bar at the bottom of the screen. Instead of news, a supplemental health coverage commercial for seniors is being broadcast. The pitch comes from a onetime famous actress who speaks plaintively into the camera.

  Andrew asks, “What will be on soon?”

  “What you need to see.”

  “Is it your favorite show?
You just can’t miss it, right? I’ve seen you check your watch every five minutes since you broke into our cabin. Well, it must be a great show. I know I can’t wait. What’s it rated? We don’t let Wen just watch anything, you know. Maybe you should’ve set the DVR.”

  Andrew is pushing too hard and gearing up to push harder. Eric says, “Okay, okay, easy, Andrew.” Eric appreciates that Andrew hasn’t shut down and isn’t giving up talking them out of this, but Christ, they bludgeoned one of their own to death, an act that is as confounding as it is horrifying. What is clear to Eric is the level of violence to which they’ve committed will not be verbally wiseassed away. Perhaps Andrew senses a weakening or flagging of their will to see whatever this is through given how obviously shaken they are in the aftermath of Redmond’s ritualized attack and death. Eric doesn’t see it. He sees zealots, fully engaged with their cause. Further, their squeamishness likely means it’ll be easier for them to abdicate any sense of personal responsibility and continue to attribute their actions to the as-of-yet unattributed source of their professed apocalyptic visions and murderous commands.

  Unbidden and unwanted, questions from a corner in a forgotten chamber inside Eric’s head: Did they see the same figure of light I saw? Have they seen it before they came here to us? Did they see it when they closed their eyes, when they dreamed their Armageddon dreams?

  Two more commercials run. One is for a cleaning product that cannot be purchased in stores, and the other is a seizure-inducing promo for the network’s prime-time political round table. Everyone in the cabin remains quiet throughout the inanity of shouted slogans and loud exclamations as though this is their very own sponsored intermission. The news program returns with a blizzard of garish color that hurts Eric’s head. The infinite news ticker at the bottom of the screen scrolls by with blurry data blips about refugees, unemployment, the death of a beloved celebrity, and the Dow Jones average being down. BREAKING NEWS in large red font bullies the main screen, overlaying the red-white-and-blue-adorned newsroom. A finely pressed newscaster in a finely pressed suit stands in the lower right corner of the screen. He gravely welcomes everyone back for their continuing coverage of a 7.9-magnitude earthquake centered in the Aleutian Islands, which struck more than four hours ago.