The Cabin in the Woods

by Tim Lebbon

  The Official Movie Novelization

  Also available from Titan Books:

  THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

  The Official Visual Companion

  The Official Movie Novelization

  TIM LEBBON

  BASED ON THE SCREENPLAY

  WRITTEN BY JOSS WHEDON & DREW GODDARD

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Cabin in the Woods

  The Official Movie Novelization

  Print edition ISBN: 9781848565265

  E-book edition ISBN: 9780857689702

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition April 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  The Cabin in the Woods © MMXI Lions Gate Films Inc.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in the United States.

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  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  About the Author

  The Official Movie Novelization

  ONE

  Never did understand the whole kid thing, Gary Sitterson thought. Mess your house up, drain your resources, and make you grow prematurely old.

  He held his mug beneath the coffee dispenser, setting on “strong.” He’d have used “nuclear” strength if it existed; it was going to be a long day, and he was tired. Beside him Steve Hadley sighed, and Sitterson smiled to himself.

  Besides, it’s obvious for all to see: women are mad.

  It had been brought to his attention more than once that this attitude made his job far easier.

  “It’s hormonal,” Hadley said, continuing the rant which, if anything, was more of an expression of bemusement. “I mean, I don’t usually fall back on, you know, ‘It’s women’s issues’...”

  “But child-proofed how?” Sitterson asked. Hadley, married and still childless, had been bemoaning the fact that his wife was preparing their home for the arrival of a child not yet conceived, though one for which they had been practicing for some time. “Gates and stuff?” “No, no, dude,” Hadley said. Bemusement was turning rapidly into exasperation. “She bought gates, they’re stacked up in the hallway. She did the drawers! We’re not even sure this fertility thing is gonna work and she screwed all these little jobbies where you can’t open the drawers.”

  “At all?” Sitterson asked, holding his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. What the fuck? There was mad, and there was plain crazy-batshit. He’d met Hadley’s wife briefly and, patently insane though she was, he’d not thought she was any higher on the scale than most women. But screwing all the kitchen drawers closed? What, to stop Hadley getting at the food so he’d go to bed and screw her instead?

  “They open, like, an inch,” Hadley said, illustrating with thumb and forefinger and shaking his head. His own coffee cup had overflowed once already, but he pressed the serve button again. Dude was definitely somewhere else today; that wasn’t good. “Then you gotta dig your fingers in and fiddle with this plastic thing, a catch, lock, like a sorta...” He shook his head and grabbed his cup, spilling half of it. “It’s a nightmare!”

  “Well, I guess sooner or later—”

  “Later!” Hadley spat. He shoved past Sitterson and started pumping dollar coins into the vending machine. Chocolate bars and bags of chips tumbled, and Sitterson thought, He really can’t get into his kitchen cabinets. “What I mean is—”

  “She did the upper cabinets as well, man! Kid won’t be able to reach those ’til he’s thirty! Assuming, you know: kid. Hell, she can’t even reach them—has to stand on a stool or call for me!” He looked into some depressing distance for a few seconds, then mused, “Wonder how the hell she got up there to drill.”

  “She chosen the kid’s college yet?”

  Hadley paused in tearing open a chip bag, staring at Sitterson as if, for a moment, he was going to rip open his own friend’s throat.

  “This isn’t a fucking joke, Gary,” he said.

  “I know,” Sitterson said, mock-stern. But he couldn’t keep a straight face, and as his lips twitched and his eyes started watering with restrained mirth, Hadley shoved the food into his pockets and hefted the bundle of files under one arm. Coffee cup gripped in the other hand—still spilling, though almost empty by now—he pushed past Sitterson and left the room.

  Still laughing, trying to calm himself, Sitterson picked up the white cooler box at his feet and went after him.

  “Hold up!” he called. Hadley had started along the plain concrete corridor, starkly painted white walls echoing his offended footsteps. “Hey, Steve.” Hadley paused and glanced back, a defeated smile softening his own features.

  “Shithead,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Sitterson took a swig of coffee. “It’s a talisman. It’s an offering.” “Don’t even—!” He shook his head. “Man, you have women’s issues.”

  “Please,” Sitterson said softly, feeling a little sad for his friend now. He knew how long Steve and his wife had been trying, and maybe he should try to empathize a little more. “You of all people—”

  “Me of no people. It’s a jinx! Guarantees we won’t get pregnant, and it takes me twenty minutes to get a fucking beer.”

  “Look out,” Sitterson whispered, spying movement along the corridor past Hadley. “Here comes trouble.” Trouble in this case was a tall, severe-looking woman in a white lab coat. Six feet tall even without the two-inch heels she wore, Wendy Lin was one of the few women ever to make Sitterson feel uncomfortable.

  No wonder he’d always wanted to get into her panties.

  She might have been beautiful if she wasn’t so tense, and she mightn’t have been so tense if she didn’t choose to tie her hair back so tightly. Sometimes Sitterson thought that Lin must employ the aid of some arcane preening device to pull her hair back so far each morning. And just to make him more firmly convinced of his generalizations, she was quite patently mad.

  “Stockholm went south,” Lin said. No greeting, no preamble. And with news like that, it was hardly a surprise.

  “Seriously?” Sitterson gasped. “I thought they were looking good.”

  “What cracked?” Hadley asked. “I haven’t seen the footage,” she replied. “Word’s just going around.” Sitterson felt a chill at the news, but it was mostly one of excitement. With Stockholm gone, it made them that much more important.

  “That scenario’s never been stable,” Hadley said. “You can’t trust... what do you call people from S
tockholm?”

  “Stockerholders?” Sitterson grinned at Lin, knowing how she hated flippancy. She was as serious as her hairdo, and probably twice as tight.

  “Ha!” Hadley coughed, making a gun with his fingers and shooting Sitterson for such a bad, sharp, quick joke.

  “That means there’s just Japan,” Lin said, pointedly ignoring them both. “Japan and us.”

  “Not the first time it’s come down to that,” Hadley said. He chewed on a Snickers to cover his nervousness, but Sitterson could see the way his friend’s eyes were shifting.

  He’s thinking about his kid that’s not yet conceived, he thought. And who can blame him?

  “Japan has a perfect record,” Sitterson said, stating what they all knew anyway. And he admitted to himself that, yeah, okay, he felt a little nervous at the news as well. Even well-oiled machines fell victim to gremlins on occasion.

  “And we’re number two, so we try harder,” Hadley said. He hated being beaten by anyone, but especially the Japs. If Sitterson was sexist—something he was aware of, and comfortable with—then Hadley’s main fault was his casual racism. Sitterson had never brought him up on it, because it was just too uncomfortable. Too damn serious. And the only way he got by was by ignoring anything serious unless he had no choice but to confront it.

  “It’s cutting it close,” Lin said.

  The three of them started walking, passing beneath steadily glaring fluorescents and moving along the featureless corridor. The floor was power-floated concrete sealed against dust, the walls were unadorned and unbroken, and the ceiling hid a network of pipes and wires above its suspended panels. There wasn’t a single nod to aesthetics. Identical doors were spaced at equal distances along one side, and behind the other wall was something else. Something that didn’t have doors.

  Their footsteps echoed dully, and around the corner sat three golf carts, their “charged” lights blinking green. The wider corridor before them was just as bare and featureless, its far end swallowed by perspective. Sitterson had walked it a few times. But why walk when there were wheels?

  As usual, Hadley took control of the cart, with Lin and Sitterson sitting in the back.

  “Yeah, cutting it close,” Hadley said, dropping his vending machine haul onto the seat beside him. “And that’s why it’s in the hands of professionals.”

  “They hired professionals?” Sitterson asked, grinning at Lin’s sour face. “What happens to us?”

  “You guys better not be messing around in there,” Lin said. “Does this mean you’re not in the betting pool this year?” he asked, raising an eyebrow and smiling. He liked to think that was his finest feature, a mischievous look that women found irresistible.

  Statistics had yet to prove him right.

  “I’m just saying that it’s a key scenario.” Damn, she really was the Ice Queen. Sitterson wondered idly whether her face would slide off her skull if he were to surreptitiously sever her hair band and relieve the pressure.

  “I know what you’re saying,” Hadley said, pushing the electronic ignition. The cart started to purr beneath them. “But remember ’98? That was the Chem department’s fault. And where do you work again, Lin? Wait, it’s coming back to me...” He accelerated away, and Sitterson half-stood to avoid spilling his coffee.

  “Gonna be a long weekend if everybody’s that puckered up,” Hadley continued, quietly. Then he seemed to liven up, weaving the cart back and forth across the corridor, narrowly avoiding striking both walls several times.

  “Damn it!” Sitterson said as he lost the battle and spilled coffee on his sharp-creased trousers. Wiping it with a napkin, he rolled his eyes at Lin, who regarded him coolly. He glanced down at the front of her lab coat. She always wore it large and loose, and he always wondered...

  But when he glanced up again, her expression forbore any wondering. He rolled his eyes again. She blinked slowly and looked away. Later, he thought. When all this is over and the celebrations are starting, maybe—

  “Hey, you want to come over Monday night?” Hadley called back to him. “I’m gonna pick up a couple of power drills and liberate my cabinets.” He laughed like a banshee, and barely slowed the cart to take the first ninety-degree corner.

  Sitterson gave up and tipped the rest of his coffee out of the cart.

  Monday, he thought. This’ll all be over by then.

  “Sure,” he said.

  •••

  Dana Polk loved to rock and roll. Most girls her age were into some of the softer, safer, middle-of-the-road rock music that the new millennium had brought. She could listen to Coldplay if she had to, but for her they lacked edge. She could put up with Nickelback, if they were forced on her. But her preference as a thoughtful—some would say sexy, though she still had trouble applying that word to herself—sophomore, was music with... well, balls.

  She loved to rock out, feeling the music driving her blood and increasing her heartbeat, and sometimes she thought that was part of the reason she stayed so fit. The best workouts she’d ever had—well, the second best—were in the mosh-pits at rock concerts.

  And so what better music to pack to than the Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl... now there was a man. Her friend Jules would issue an Ewww whenever Dana mentioned him. He’s too old for you by far, and too... hairy. But he was a guy with edge. He had, as Dana’s mother liked to say, “The Grrr Factor.” He was also happily married, but that never stopped Dana’s mind from wandering his way now and then.

  She bopped and skipped as she packed, shirt flapping around her bare thighs, swinging an invisible microphone stand in front of her and launching into a chorus just when a guitar solo burst in. Whoops, she thought, feeling a blush of embarrassment even though she was on her own. Perhaps for now she should concentrate just on filling her weekend bag.

  Dana glanced around her room, wondering what else she should take. She’d miss this place. The room was neat and restrained; books stacked mostly in alphabetical order, CDs stored in tidy piles. Unlike some students, she’d quickly imprinted her personality on the place, displayed most prominently in the several sketches and watercolors about which she’d been confident enough to frame and hang.

  Most of them were portraits, or pictures of imaginary people, but a few were more abstract landscapes which Jules said she sometimes found spooky. Forest scenes with ambiguous shapes suspended in high branches. Fields of corn with shadows where there should be none. Dana thought they were just offbeat, but she supposed someone who wasn’t living in her mind could justifiably see them as weird. She ran her fingers along the bookshelves and pulled out a few political science textbooks. No harm in taking some reading, in case things were quiet this weekend. She threw in some art supplies, as well—stuff she never traveled anywhere without, including pencils and charcoals. Picking up her sketchpad, she started flipping through the pages.

  Like any naturally artistic person she was eternally self-critical, but she could also remove herself to a distance and view the work objectively. And she knew that some of what she did wasn’t at all bad. Sure, she could find something to criticize in everything she sketched, but that was the curse of a true artist. She flipped the pages, musing more upon her passion for art than the pictures themselves, until—

  There he was. The son-of-a-bitch.

  Gorgeous. Longish hair, glasses... the very epitome of a college lecturer. Damn it, if only she hadn’t been so fucking stupid. But he was so handsome. Bastard.

  She sighed, thought about finding a pair of jeans, and—

  “What a piece of shit!”

  Dana gasped, letting out a little shriek. She hadn’t even heard Jules approaching.

  “I rushed it,” Dana said, recovering quickly and not taking her eyes from the picture.

  “You know what I mean.” Jules’s voice was low and sultry, a natural attribute which she put to great use. “Why haven’t you stuck that asshole’s picture on the dartboard yet?” “It’s not that simp—” Dana began, but as she turned around, shoc
k cut her off. For a second confusion overwhelmed her.

  “Oh my God, your hair!” she gasped.

  Jules struck a pose that would have made lesser men weep, and even strong men quake in their boots.

  “Very fabulous, no?”

  “I can’t believe you did it!” Her friend certainly did look very fabulous. She’d been talking about going blonde for months now, but Dana had never believed she’d actually go through with it. Brunette had served her well, but Jules was nothing if not experimental. She sometimes called Dana “rock chick,” but she was far from the stereotype that usually went with that term. Rock yes, chick no. Out of the two of them, it was Jules who wore that badge with pride.

  “But very fabulous, right?” she asked again, scowling a false frown. “Hurry up with the very fabulous, I’m getting insecure about it.”

  “Oh God, no,” Dana said, “it’s awesome! It looks really natural, and it’s great with your skin. I just didn’t think you were ever gonna—”

  “Impulse,” Jules said. “I woke up this morning and thought, I want to have more fun. Who is it that has more fun?” Still posing, she ruffled up her hair and pouted. “Marilyn, dahling.”

  “Manson?”

  “Monroe! Imbecile.”

  “Curt’s gonna lose it,” Dana laughed.

  “He’ll have more fun too,” Jules said. “And so will you... ” She snatched the sketch pad from Dana and stared at it, scowling at the image. “...while we are burning this picture.”

  Dana grabbed the pad back, her good humor slipping just a little. She understood that Jules was being protective of her, and angry at the man who’d hurt her. But really, it was only Dana who knew everything that had gone on.

  “I’m not ready to,” she said. “And seriously, this isn’t all his fault.”

  “What’s not his fault?” Jules asked. Her posing and pouting was over now, and she stalked Dana’s room like a cat looking for a mouse. “Being thirty-eight and married, fucking his student, or breaking up with her by email?”