It sits on a hill. Pine and fir trees surround it, cast upon it their needles and cones which gather atop its tin roof, corrugated and spotted with rust. From the valley the stanchions of the porch appear twisted and tilt. The porch itself seems to hover over the earth, a dark gap visible at its base, a darkness which the cabin entire seems to rest upon. For as long as I can remember, the night has brought with it a faint lilac glow that illuminates the cabin’s windows and pierces through the tears in its ratty drapes.
The Almanac predicts a season of drought, but so far there is no evidence of it in our valley. The furrows cutting through my family’s field are rich and brown, and the soil is ready to be seeded.
Emy tugs at the back of my shirt, her head almost as high as my chest now.
—Supper’s about ready, she says. You and dad ought to get cleaned up.
—I’ll be in in a bit. Dad’s a little further down. Why don’t you run and tell him?
She frowns and says, No you won’t. You’ll keep us waiting til the food’s all cold again.
—You can start without me. I won’t be too long. Just gonna think a while.
—You’ve had all day to think.
Her figure grows small as she runs toward Dad. She becomes the size I can’t help feeling is natural to her form.
I lean against the fencepost at the edge of the field as the silhouette of evergreen on the ridge eclipses the setting sun. The cabin’s windows are still dark, and in the dusky light, something moves along the corrugated roof. It slips in the mouldering pine needles piled darkly to the gutter. Whatever it is pulls itself up and climbs hunched to the peak. The shape of a person bent over, supporting itself on all fours, straddles the peak to the edge of the cabin where it perches atop the chimney like a predatory bird, chin lifted to the sky. A loose brick tumbles away from the crown, and the figure loses its balance. As its leg falls along with the brick, its arms comb over the top of the chimney searching for something to catch hold of, its legs running against the brickwork to slow its inevitable journey to the ground. I shout towards the cabin as another brick comes loose and the figure plummets to its back and does not rise again.
Something keeps me from running up that hill. I haven’t ventured that way since before I was Emy’s age, the cabin strange and isolate even then. I call out and wait for an answer that never comes. When I can’t bear the guilt any longer, I jump the fence and sprint toward the cabin, out of breath by the time I near the porch. I call out breathlessly as I round the corner, but the grass at the chimney’s base is bare, and there’s no sign of the figure that dropped from the rooftop. No one around the back of the cabin either.
I half-shout a probing, Hey.
The air is motionless. Everything still.
The porch’s floorboards whine beneath me. The stanchions are loose to the touch. I shout again, knock on the door. It jostles in its frame with each tap.
—You alive in there?
Still nothing.
—I saw somebody on the roof and wanted to make sure everything was alright.
The windows are covered in a grimy film that smudges as I wipe at them. Inside the house is dim and formless, and the light of day has almost failed completely now. Maybe a chair and table are visible through a hole in the drapes, but there is an uncertainty to their shape which veils them.
Something rustles in the grass around the side of the cabin. As I lean over the railing to catch a glimpse of it, the railing collapses, tossing me over the porch’s edge, and I catch myself hard on my elbows. The rustling continues in the gap beneath the cabin. The sound of movement without image. Something crawling to the center of the structure where it stops and is briefly illuminated by lambent light from above. The sound of wood thudding against wood and the light and figure are gone.
The windows are still dark. But the lilac light will come with the night. I can plot out everything that could happen in the valley just about. I exist in a world devoid of change. I can’t see that being anyone’s fault but my own.
—Why you ignoring me?
I hop back onto the porch and lift the door’s latch, but it won’t open. I throw myself against the door, and it gives only as much as before.
—I’m coming in there, I say to whoever’s listening.
In the gap between the cabin and the earth, I crawl toward a point I remember the light having shone from. Tacky breaths of cobweb catch at my hair and across my face. The dirt is cool on my palms. I can’t make out anything in the darkness beneath the house and I glance back to the dark blue of twilight visible beyond the structure’s limits, the grass gray-green beside the chimney. Try to judge the distance back to open air. At a certain point I prop up on an elbow and grope along the underside of the cabin, brace beams running crosswise, nails dulled by time breaching their sides, and a framed section that seems to be shoulder-width squared. I find the latch and test the weight of the section. It rises above me into a room without windows.
A thin strip of lilac light fills the crack between the baseboard and a door leading toward the back of the house.
It leads to a kitchen dark but for what is barely illumined by a window over the sink—pots and pans rippled with moss, sharp parallelogram of gray window light tossed across tile floor. Pewter jugs are cluttering a table, dust-heavy web strung jug to jug. The purplish light swells and wanes from a corridor on the far side of the kitchen, vanishes completely by the time I can walk the length of the room. I nearly twist my ankle in the hall, tripping over books that litter its floor. Vestiges of piles line the walls, spill into the walkway, and I grip wax-covered sconces that protrude from the wall to balance myself. A door waits where the hall terminates. I kick the books away from the base and crack the door enough to slip through.
—Anybody in here?
Curtains hang across the windows overlooking the front porch. Sheets drape the furniture. On a semi-circular table abutting the wall, a spheric object is limned beneath fabric, a lilac glow faintly suffusing the threads. It draws me to it and I lift the sheet, tossing it away.
An orb sits cradled on thin gray animal bones stacked like cabin logs, raised at four points by the curving capitulum of bone-joint. The orb shines so fiercely pink, I have to squint and turn away. It fades to a dusky purple and further still until it is black as ebony and possessing unsearchable depth. The light from the orb is replaced by an amber glow behind me and the pop and crackle of old wood follows. The dancing flame of the fireplace reveals the room to be in as much a state of disuse as the previous. The mantel is bare and the floor is stained with wax and dark indents where embers have smoldered and vanished. Books are stacked on the edge of the hearth and beyond them are stairs leading to the second floor. Having pulled the curtains away from the windows and finding murky glass, I lift the plank which bars the front door to get a look at my valley.
The farmland stretches before me, the horse hovel across our pasture and the home. A warm glow pours from the dining room where Dad and Emy undoubtedly sit as Mama attempts to serve them stewed greens while breastfeeding the baby. The fields are empty but for the geometrical patterns that separate crop from crop.
Will you ever leave here?
As I turn to close the cabin door, a metallic clunk reverberates in the ceiling, and an object rolls along the floor upstairs and ceases. The floorboards creak, and I look into the pitch of the orb, drawn to it and my arcing figure reflected in it. I almost expect it to reveal something to me, but it doesn’t. I lift the orb from its cradle of bones, heft it in my palm to grip its underside. Walking backward to the foot of the stairs, I gaze through the balusters into the second floor’s darkness then mount the stairs careful and slow. I hesitate at the top where there is a final door, cracked a sliver. I press steadily against it and it hinges into the room. The door swings open to a window opposite.
Hazy and amorphous, a silhouette raises from the floor, stealing my breath and sending me jolting back. A quavering sibilance seeps from the figure, and myriad shadowy appendages snake through the air. I cock my arm to fling the orb at the thing, but when I release the orb at the culmination of my pitch, it drops directly to the floor beneath my hand. It does not bounce. It does not roll. It erupts again with lilac light and burrows into the floorboards, wood blackening around it as its light exposes the vacant countenance of the eldritch colubrine. Uncountable eyes hold me in place, windows through which I gaze upon the illimitable courses of life. Paralyzed with possibility.
In one, I am rushing down the stairs where I trip over another stack of books, scatter them across the hearth as my body thuds against the floor. The wood in the fireplace hisses and snaps. I raise myself from the floor, scramble out the door and down the hill.
My hands rest against the doorframe of my parents’ home and I turn to look back at the cabin on the hill. The glow of the light in the second story window is matched only by the leap of flames snaking from the front door and consuming the drapes on the first floor. Dad rushes out, pushing past me.
—What the hell is going on up there? he says.
He looks to his son for an explanation. Receiving none he makes to run towards the cabin, but I grab him by the arm, hold it firmly. He looks to me again, and I shake my head and release him. He slumps to the ground, back against the door frame, and I watch us watch the flames overtake the cabin. I watch us watching it climb to the roof, red glow of tin burning in the night. We watch until the structure collapses to the ground where it smolders and vanishes.