Caffeine and Magix

caffeinewitchcraft:

Dialogue Prompt: “I wouldn’t open that door if I were you.”

Jania thinks she may have miscalculated.

The cabin lists to one side, away from the treeline that is a good deal closer than she remembers it being in her childhood. The roof rolls like ocean waves, water damage evident in the edge of the shingles. The front door is barely on its hinges and she has an unpleasant feeling that, when she opens it, she’ll find that the only think keeping it upright is the rusty padlock keeping it shut.

“Yeah,” Edmund says from behind her. “I wouldn’t open that door if I were you.”

Like the house, Edmund is different than she remembers. When she was a little girl, he’d seemed so handsome and strong, like the lead actor of a soap opera about a farmer. Now, he’s slouched, balding, and a good deal less friendly.

“Then how,” she asks, “do you suppose I get in?”

Edmund squints up at the boarded attic window. He chews his cheek and the wrinkle between his bushy eyebrows deepens. “You a good climber?”

Jania bites back her first thought. Of course she’s a good climber—one of the best in the world in fact. She’s got six medals hanging on the wall of her apartment at home that say how good of a climber she is. It’s because she’s a good climber that she knows better than to even try to find a good handhold in the mildewing wood.

“I’ll think of something,” she says. She digs in her peacoat’s pocket until she comes up with the crinkled envelope her mother had given her. “Here. Thanks for driving me.”

Edmund takes it from her, his old, calloused fingertips grazing the back of her hand unpleasantly. “Want me to stick around until you see if the phone’s working?”

She frowns down at where his skin touched hers. “No, thanks. I have a cellphone.”

“Cellphone’s aren’t reliable up here,” he says.

“It’s a very good cellphone.”

Edmund shrugs, flannel shirt rucking up above his belt line. There’s a faded tattoo low on his wiry torso.  “Suit yourself.”

She watches him climb back into his truck. The truck at least is new with big tires and a mounted set of floodlights on the cab. He peels out of the sloping, bare driveway and is out of sight within seconds, even the sound of the engine swallowed up by the dense foliage.

Jania kicks at the sparse gravel. She’s going to need to get that fixed first thing. While Edmund’s truck might be able to handle the crumbling dirt road, her Honda Accord back in the city won’t be able to even make it up halfway.

She picks up the duffle at her feet and tries to decide if it’s even worth the effort of going around the back. The plant life clearly hasn’t been cut back in at least a year and the small, cobbled path that once led to the kitchen door is hidden completely under weeds and wildflowers. Not for the first time, she wonders what she’s doing. She’s no country girl. She shouldn’t be here.

“Do you really want to go back?” she mutters. There’s no small amount of bitterness in the words. She already knows the answer to that.

She drops her luggage off on the sagging front porch. The windows to either side are boarded up tight. She scans the weathered bench under the one to her right, almost hopping to see a crowbar or even a heavy piece of firewood. No luck. That’s alright. She’s pretty strong.

She gets lucky with the boards under the left window. They’re loose and, if she had to guess, were put up at the last minute. Maybe two or three nails to each side rather than seventeen hundred keeping the other window locked up tight.

I hope there aren’t any spiders. She threads her fingers through a gap in the wood and yanks. With a loud crack! the first board comes loose. Her fingers and arms are stronger than the average person thanks to climbing. The rest follow quickly.

She heaves her bag through the newly opened window without a care for the contents. Just a couple changes of clothes, some water and snacks. Her mom’s confident the place still has running water, but Jania’s never been one to take chances. The last time she’d believed someone about there being enough water, she’d ended up on her own personal version of Survivor for a month straight.

The inside of the cabin is, at least, in better repair than the outside had led her to believe. The floorboards only flex under her weight here and there. The kitchen stove turns on when she tries it and, to her surprise, so does the water. She frowns at the way the spout sputters and leans down to smell. Her nose wrinkles. Okay, maybe she shouldn’t be drinking the water just yet.

The house creaks as she heads from the kitchen to the stairs. Here’s where things might get a little dangerous. Some of the stairs look alright but there’s one in the middle that’s sagging. She looks up and finds the culprit; there’s a leak in the ceiling of the second story.

Jania gingerly puts her full weight on the second step. It holds. Then the third. The fourth. The fifth steps sags and she stops, knuckles white on the bannister.

“Right,” she murmurs. She’s not going to test fate. There’s an inspector coming out to the house on Thursday, just two days away. She can stand to live on the first floor until someone who actually knows what they’re doing arrives.

Her duffle bag is on the dining room table. She grabs water and food out of it, zipping it up and putting it back on the floor. It’s eerily quiet out here. She touches her phone through her pants’ pocket. There isn’t a strong enough signal out here to watch anything, but she’s got some videos saved on her phone.

Most of those videos are of Matt.

Pain spikes through her and she closes her eyes, riding it out. She can’t bear to look at a video of him right now. Her wounds are still too fresh. Too raw. She understands why he called off their engagement, she does, but—

She can’t forgive him quite yet.

She eats dinner in silence, listening to faint wind outside. This is what she’s here for. Peace. Solitude. Quiet. Time to recenter herself and get out of the competitive head space climbing’s kept her in for the last ten years.

Matt’d been ready to settle down. Get 9-5 jobs. Maybe have some kids. Maybe if she takes her time out here, lives a little more slowly, she’ll finally understand why traveling the world was no longer enough for him.

“Then you’ll make up and live happily ever after,” she says. She laughs without humor. Last she heard, he was already dating someone new. The answers she finds out here won’t be enough to get him back. They’ll only be enough for her and her alone.

Still, she can’t help but hope.

Sleeping in the cabin is just about as miserable as she expected. Her sleeping bag is rated for 30 degree weather but feels too thin. Every pockmark in the wooden floors seems to imprint itself into her skin. She feels like she’s sleeping naked, almost, and has to zip it up all the way so she can at least feel a little bit sheltered.

The woods are loud at night, filled with rustling foliage and strange chirps from insects. She thinks she even hears a mountain lion, screaming in the distance, but can’t be sure. For all she knows, that’s the sound squirrels around here make. She doesn’t know enough about nature to tell what’s what. She just knows it’s eerie enough to raise all the hair on her arms.

All told, she wakes up in a bad mood with hardly any sleep under her belt. She drags herself to the kitchen and brushes her teeth with bottled water. She blinks out the window over the sink with bleary eyes. Trees press up right against the glass, branches gently knocking against it. How did the trees grow so close? She didn’t remember them ever being this close when she was a little girl.

She goes to grab new clothes from her duffle. She stops short of the table, toothbrush still clutched in one hand. A cold chill spreads out from her locked spine and through her stomach.

Her bag isn’t on the table where she left it.

She takes an instinctive step back before she catches herself. There’s a distant memory in her head of waking up last night and needing water. She came into the kitchen to grab it from her bag. She’s a heavy sleeper and it’s not uncommon for her to move things while half-awake. She must have brought the whole bag to the living room where she’d set up camp and not realized it.

She drops her toothbrush back into her bathroom kit and wipes her sweaty palms on her sleep shorts. The house smells wet and heavier than it did yesterday. She’s being too paranoid—there’s nothing to be afraid of here. Her bag’s by her sleeping bag. She knows it is.

Still, even though she knows it, it’s relief to see it in the living room, open and with her clothes spilling out of it. Jania figures she must not have seen the water bottle on top and dug through it like an animal to get to the extras packed on the bottom.

She changes quickly into a pair of jogging pants and a loose, long-sleeved t-shirt. Her mom said that the woods have had a tick problem this year and she’s been afraid of them since she was a child. A morning run will wake her up and rid of her of the scare she gave herself.

The old path is not as grown over as she feared. The markers her mom put up are still visible, florescent flashes of orange metal pinned to the trees every ten feet or so. She starts out at a slow pace, but soon grows more comfortable with the uneven and unfamiliar terrain.

It’s different running through a forest than through a city. Her calves burn with the effort to adjust to the uncertain footing her her eyes start to water as her speed makes it harder and harder to keep up with the trees. Once, she misjudges a branch and winces as it catches her across the cheek. She slows to a walk after that one, breathing hard. The woods creak around her, leaves rustling in a slight breeze.

Matt would have loved it here. He’d always preferred their national park climbs over their desert climbs.

“What am I doing?” She’s hardly aware she’s spoken the words out loud. Her chest burns at the thought of him. She’s not supposed to think about him—this trip is about her. She stares unseeing into the forest. She needs to reprioritize her life. She’s getting older and there aren’t that many forty-year-old climbers in the business—

Movement drags her back to reality with terrifying swiftness. Her eyes lock onto a tree, twenty feet ahead. Her heart is pounding in her chest before she realizes what drew her attention. There’s a butterfly, about the size of her palm, sitting on the bark. What had attracted her eye was its wings, opening and closing.

Jania drops her hands onto her knees, leaning over to catch her breath. She glares at the butterfly. “You scared me—”

A hand appears around the edge of the tree and crushes the butterfly in its fist.

Electricity shoots through Jania and she’s running before her brain even realizes what’s happened. Someone was behind that tree, someone she hadn’t heard or seen on the path, someone who was hiding out of sight—

Her feet slip and slide across the pine needles as her ears strain for any hint that she’s being followed. She’s fast and fit. Whoever it is won’t catch her. She needs to get to the cabin. She hadn’t thought to bring her phone, like an idiot, so she needs to get to the cabin and to her phone.

Someone sighs in her ear and Jania lashes out on instinct. Her hand connects with air and her swing off balances her. She slips on the path, body twisting. She crashes into the ground shoulder twist and hears a familiar pop! As it dislocates. A second later, the burn hits and she cries out, writhing to get her weight off the injury.

A branch snaps and she looks up into the empty eye sockets of a monster.

Jania doesn’t know how she gets back to the cabin. She takes in the grinning skull, the strips of rotting flesh, the clearly human hands and bipedal form of the creature in snapshots. The nails reaching for her. The clawed feet digging into the ground.

And then the woods are rushing by her again, her lungs seizing and her dislocated shoulder almost numb while being jostled. The muscles in her legs are starved of oxygen and feel like logs, but she can’t stop. Behind her she can hear the creature barking and it sounds almost like a human laughing.

She hits the cabin door without remembering the lock and bounces off of it. Her ass throbs from the impact with the porch, but she’s working off of pur adrenaline now. What was that? What was that in the forest?

She lunges through the open window without grace, her pants tearing on the jagged nails still sticking out of the walls where she’d ripped the boards. The pain of the nails sends her to her knees, but she can’t stop. She staggers to her feet and bolts for her bag.

It’s not in the living room.

Jania stares at the spot she last saw it with something like horrible disbelief. It’s not possible. It was on the floor by her sleeping bag—or was it in the kitchen? Now that she thinks about it, she never remembers even taking it to the kitchen at all, not even when she first arrived and remembers even less bringing it in here in the middle of the night—

A floorboard from the second floor creaks.

No. Jania can’t think. Her mind feels frozen, like a slushy’s been poured through her ears. Her eyes are watering. Or is she crying?

Another floorboard creaks, closer to the stairs.

Jania turns as if in a dream. Her nails dig into her hurt shoulder as she forces her legs to take a step. Then another. She walks to the bottom of the stairs and counts the steps.

First step. Nothing.

Second step. Firm.

Third step.There’s something wet there.

Fourth step. There’s a puddle.

The fifth step is sagging .

The sixth step looks like a swamp and then there, there at the top of the stairs is her duffle bag with a single butterfly sitting on top.

Behind her, metal tears and the door cracks off its hinges as the chain is torn away.

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