The Cabin in the Woods

Marty? Holden thought, feeling a deep loss for someone he hardly knew. Marty’s-?

Curt pointed at the door handle and touched his finger to his lips. Holden looked and saw what had made him so cautious. Dirt on the handle, a wet slick with half a dead leaf trapped in it like a fly in amber.

Marty, Holden mouthed, but Curt shook his head. Whatever he had seen, it must have been enough to mean Marty couldn’t possibly have recovered.

Curt hefted the plank over his shoulder and stepped back, looking from Holden to the door and back again, and Holden nodded in acknowledgment. After three, he thought, crouching beside the door and reaching for the handle. He mouthed one… two… three… then flipped the catch and moved aside.

The door swung open. Curt tensed, shuffling a half step forward. Shook his head.

“Okay,” Dana said. “Okay. Now can we please get the fuck out of here?”

“Seconded,” Holden said.

“Yeah,” Curt nodded.

They climbed inside, slammed the door behind them, and Curt took the driver’s seat. He whispered a prayer and the Rambler started first time. Its headlamps pushed darkness back between the trees. As he steered them out of the clearing, the lights splashed across the front of the cabin. The door was cracked and broken, but still solid in its frame. A lamp still burned in the large main room. There was little to show what had happened there.

Good fucking riddance, Holden thought as Curt swung the vehicle around and headed back along the road they had traveled so recently, and a lifetime ago.

Oh fuck, Sitterson thought, they’ve gone and screwed it up. And much as he always enjoyed the tense competition between themselves and the Japanese, and the friendly rivalry to see who could produce the most perfect, most imaginative, most effective scenarios, he also liked to win. And what he saw on the screen meant that they weren’t out of the woods yet.

And that brought immense pressure to bear.

Hadley had wheeled his chair over to sit beside his friend, an unconscious desire for closeness as they watched the Japanese effort fall apart on their central big screen.

The hideously screaming face of the drowned Japanese girl filled the screen, long black hair floating and waving about her head like a million individual snakes ready to inject their own unique venoms. Yet horrible and terrifying though the floating drowned girl was, both Sitterson and Hadley knew what was about to happen.

To this story, there would be no shock ending.

The screaming face started to relax. She looked bewildered, as if remembering that she had once been a little girl, not this screeching banshee-thing with hair that cast lethal shadows. A warm glow grew around her, driving away the monochrome of dark tendrils and white pasty skin, and imbuing her visage with a semblance of life.

Sitterson sighed as the view pulled back to take in the entirety of the Japanese classroom. Several children knelt at its centre, carefully placing lotus flowers into a large bowl of water above which the floating drowned girl hovered. She seemed smaller now, her hair more lank than wild, her eyes sad instead of filled with vengeful rage.

The kids sang a song whose lyrics Sitterson did not understand, but his skin prickled with the happiness of the tune, the love it conveyed, and any other time he might even had felt a lump at his throat.

But not now.

“This is just too fucking fucked up,” he said.

The floating drowned girl began to glow. For a moment her face dropped in fear, but then she smiled brightly as light enveloped her, spewing from her eyes and mouth where previously there had been only darkness. She waved her hands in the air as if swimming, and her hair drew back and hung across her shoulders, no longer obscuring her eyes.

The light grew brighter still, and then it faded away to a background glow that seemed to fill the whole classroom with sunlight. The girl faded away, as well.

A frog leapt from the bowl of water and flowers, sitting amongst the other girls and looking around.

They chanted something, and at the bottom of the screen a line of subtitles appeared. Sitterson wondered who in control was translating. He didn’t really care. He knew the gist of what it would say.

“Now Kiko’s spirit will live in the happy frog!”

The girls laughed and hugged. The picture flickered, went to static and then cut to black. Sitterson hoped that somewhere in Japan, heads would roll.

“Fuuhhhcck yooouuu!” Sitterson shouted.

“Not good,” Hadley said, shaking his head. “Not good.” Sitterson turned to his friend and colleague, a useless anger brewing, and then something buzzed and something else flashed and he had an incoming communication.