It was dark when they reached the cabin. Though the day was neither grey nor cold, a certain gothic chill stung their throats with every breath. The invisible fingers of death flicked at their elbows. Like the tongue of a lover felt in a dream. A vague sense of uneasiness permeated the company, contrasted by the cheery stars overhead, the warm autumn breeze, the crickets and frogs. Only a faint smell of decay lent any credibility to the notion that all was not right.
The cabin door wasn't locked, but at first no one entered. Pausing at the door, the seeking children huddled together. What had started as a fun expedition was, quite suddenly, more frightening than any logic could explain. Without knowing why, the quietest of them walked forward. He licked his lips, imagining for a second the insects whose legs he used to pull off. One time he'd heard a squeak from behind the pantry, and found a crushed mouse, still warm. This door, this friendly night air, felt equally full of potential. Suddenly eager, he threw open the door and leapt in, ignoring his friend's horrified gasps. The room was everything he could have hoped for, horrible and nightmarish.
There was no blood on the walls, no body strung in a painful scene of recent torture. There was no peaceful corpse, no intimate, tender deathbed of a smiling, contented soul. In fact, there wasn't a single body visible. What could be seen was bones. Ribs, hips, skulls poked out of the walls and floor. Crushed, ground and unrecognizable chunks of white meal, and a sickening reddish brown meal of decaying meat covered the floor. Mushrooms grew on top, and the pile was several feet deep against one wall. Stringy skeins of mold trailed alone the slick, brown surface, greying at the edges. Toward the back of the room, the remains were older, more decayed, more like dirt. At the back window, a small sapling grew in visually ordinary dirt, its branches peacefully reaching toward the glass. Sitting on the rotting sill, a line of fingerbones stretched, laid next to each other. As the fascinated child leaned forward, one hand on the doorframe, his flashlight caught a more pressing sight out the window. A hammock, still swinging, could be seen between two trees behind the cabin. Someone had woken up!
The rest was a blur. Loud footsteps came running around the cabin. The children yelled and scattered. Vague memories of shouting, a huge figure with dark metal in hand, and a sharp pain in his wrist. He must have struggled, twisted, freed his arm from the man’s grip. As he ran, the agonized yells of other children hinted that they weren’t so lucky. None of the others made it back, and he didn’t go back to find them. Finally, in solitary, he stumbled, half running, half sleeping, into his own bed. The next morning he burrowed into the pantry, behind the cans, and with a systematic malice previously reserved for struggling butterflies, sprung and bent every mousetrap.
