The Cabin at the End of the World

by Paul Tremblay

“No. We’re not.”

  “No way.”

  The man named Redmond, the one who sounds like he’s enjoying this, he shouts, “Yo! Hey!”

  Andrew and Eric stop talking.

  Redmond says, “Just do as Leonard says. Open the goddamn door. We’re coming in either way.”

  Andrew yells over Wen’s head, “The fuck you are! I have a gun!”

  Her dads drop Wen from the group hug. She stumbles and almost falls to the hardwood. They were holding her so tightly between them, they lifted her off the floor. Neither of them noticed.

  Andrew

  Eric says, “What are you doing?”

  Andrew ignores him and shouts, “I’m not just talking shit!”

  Andrew’s father used to say anyone who says they’re not talking shit has a mouthful. Clay Meriwether (never “Daddy,” only later in life did “Hey, Dad” have an honest ring of affection) was a mechanic/handyman from central Vermont. One morning there was a woman named Donna waiting outside the garage affixed to Clay’s parents’ old farmhouse. She lived on a commune in the microtown of Jamaica and she had a beat-up Datsun (that wasn’t hers) the color of a banana bruise. Clay worked on the car for two weeks and for free, and they got married four months later. A true odd couple: Donna, a vegetarian since her early twenties, keeps a small garden at the house and sells some (but never enough) of what she grows, and she used to read palms and auras and now is practicing holistic healing as her gig (her word); Clay, despite being in his early seventies, is still a full-time handyman and an avid hunter on most weekends, and while he’s softened his political stances in some ways (and hardened in others) he’s generally as conservative as Donna is not. Both Donna and Clay have always been voracious readers, and their shared favorite authors include Tom Robbins, Daphne du Maurier, and Walter Mosley. Donna and Clay always got along and they never left Vermont. Although nostalgia has dulled the edges of growing up in near isolation at the family farmhouse, Andrew couldn’t leave Vermont fast enough, and he managed to do so at age eighteen.

  Eric pulls Andrew away from the front door, more urgently this time, grabbing and pulling his right arm, and he says, “No, don’t. Stop, wait a—”

  Andrew doesn’t stop. He’s so scared and angry, and though he’s never pointed a gun at a person in the almost thirty years he’s been on-and-off-and-then-on-again handling and shooting firearms, he imagines opening the door and pointing the little, unblinking black eye of the barrel at the forehead of the mostly formless shapes of Leonard or Redmond or whoever shows first. No, it’s Redmond he imagines as the target. In the glimpse out of the window Andrew saw Redmond in his obnoxious red shirt, his squat, stocky build, his linebacker stance dripping macho bravura, that always-burning fuel of violence and calamity. In his head, Andrew points the gun at him, the guy who looks and sounds like so many of the hate-filled, ignorant cavemen he’s had to deal with his whole life. Whenever Andrew is in a public place he is aware of their eyes and ears. That he is made to feel like he needs to make accommodations or adjustments to how he acts, to who he is in order to be left alone, to be safe, fills him with shame, guilt, fear, and anger. This Redmond might as well be a cipher, a stand-in, a representative for all of them: good ole boys, frat boys, card-carrying members of the old boys’ network, hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner God-fearin’ boys; they’re all of the same species. When Redmond speaks, he sounds so familiar; even if they haven’t met before, they have. Andrew would have no trouble pointing the gun at Redmond and he may even delight in watching the fear glaze over his dumb, animal eyes. If only Andrew actually had the gun on him.

  He says, “Taurus snub-nosed .38 special. If you try to break in here, you’re going to have some problems.” Andrew gives his voice as much of an edge as he can muster, which maybe sounds like the-schoolteacher-is-upset, but in his own ears, he sounds too much like a stereotype of a comic book nerd. His voice isn’t Eric’s slow, calm baritone of reason and authority. Andrew heard Eric before he first saw him. They met at a mutual friend’s BBQ, fifty people crammed into a comically small, square-shaped, postage-stamp backyard. The partygoers’ excuse mes and pardon mes were the jokes that never got old. Andrew was part of a small ring of friends and coworkers, laughing at something, he no longer remembers at what, but he remembers laughing, and he remembers it as a pleasantly drunk, slightly unhinged, completely happy laugh. Then he heard Eric talking, no, orating behind him about some European soccer team and their outlandishly expensive player transfers. That voice of his vibrated at some golden frequency, rising above the giddy and tipsy chatter of the blissful summer revelers. Andrew couldn’t have cared less about soccer, but he thought, Who is that?

  Leonard says, “Please. Don’t do—”

  Redmond interrupts. “Show us what you got. Put it in the window, dude.” His inflection on “dude” is both dismissive and threatening.

  “You’ll see it when I point it at you.”

  Eric sidles next to Andrew and whispers in his ear, “Did you actually bring it? Do you have it?”

  In their apartment, Andrew keeps the gun locked in a notebook-sized safe on a shelf in their closet. The safe is new. He bought it eight months ago. Battery powered, he can open it with a touchpad combination or the new biometric palm-print reader, and if the battery dies, there’s a safety key.

  Andrew grew up with guns. His father used to take him out hunting all the time, whether Andrew wanted to or not. When he was ten, his father gave him a .22 Huntington rifle. Andrew didn’t enjoy hunting or shooting animals (though he shot two deer and more than his fair share of squirrels), but he liked target shooting, and he spent a good chunk of his early teen years shooting at a withered gray tree stump about one thousand paces behind the farmhouse. When Andrew moved to Boston, he renounced all things Vermont, including guns. After the attack in that bar near the Boston Garden thirteen years ago, Andrew took self-defense and boxing classes, which helped him to feel more empowered and the nightmares stopped occurring as frequently and his general anxiety decreased to near normal levels (whatever those were), but it wasn’t enough. Within a year of the attack Andrew got his Massachusetts gun license/firearm identification and joined a shooting range. Eric strongly resisted having a gun in their apartment initially and they’d had the gun talk a second and third time before and after adopting Wen. Andrew insisted he wasn’t reacting or giving in to fear. He’d explained to Eric that the attack left him feeling unmoored; the beer bottle smashing into the back of his head broke off some part of himself that had yet to return. Shooting a gun was a part of who Andrew was as a child and teen and maybe if he could reclaim that small bit of who he once was, he’d feel more whole. Andrew knew he wasn’t explaining himself very well, but he also knew it sounded better than admitting his squeezing the trigger once a month at the range while imagining the silhouette on the paper target as his attacker felt so damned good and right.

  Andrew says, “Yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The safe is in the side panel storage compartment, in the SUV.” Andrew bringing the gun was an impulse decision made only minutes before leaving for the cabin. Eric and Wen were down the street getting coffee and donuts for the ride and Andrew took a last walk through the condo, making sure they weren’t forgetting anything important. It suddenly occurred to Andrew the gun was important. During their week on the lake Eric would worry about bears and wild animals, and Andrew would worry about being in the sticks of not-so-socially-liberal New Hampshire. Andrew briefly imagined a pair of don’t-tread-on-me types seeing him, Eric, and Wen buying food at a supermarket and then following them out to the parking lot spewing epithets and threats, or maybe the fucking rednecks would follow them out to their remote cabin to actualize their homophobia and hatred in more than words. Andrew chastised himself for imagining and dwelling on worst-case scenarios (but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t or couldn’t happen; he knew this from experience) and he hummed “Dueling Banjos” in an attempt to make himself feel silly
for wanting to bring the gun. It didn’t work and he stashed the safe in the side panel. Andrew didn’t tell Eric he was bringing the gun, and he knew he wasn’t being fair, but he didn’t want to have to deal with that conversation. Eric has been as understanding as he possibly can about Andrew’s gun ownership. Still, he would not have been happy at all about the gun coming with them on vacation. Even though they already had a long family talk about the gun and safe being off-limits to Wen, it would’ve made Eric even more neurotic about her playing unsupervised in the cabin and he would’ve obsessed over scenarios in which she finds the safe and somehow opens it.

  Redmond says, “Hey, come on, now. We all like show-and-tell out here. No? Nothing? That’s what I thought. Lying through his teeth. He doesn’t—”

  Leonard shouts, “That’s enough!” his voice deep, percussive, slightly unhinged, as shocking as an explosion of dog barks from a once-presumed empty house. Wen whimpers and slaps her hands over her ears. Andrew is reminded that as threatening and Cro-Magnon as Redmond sounds and looks, this guy Leonard standing a foot or two away on the other side of that door is a big fucking boy.

  Leonard says, “I’m sorry for yelling, and I’m not yelling at you or your family. That was directed at Redmond.” There’s a beat of silence that is almost as terrifying as anything that’s been said to this point. “There’s no need for a gun, Andrew. We are not here to—to harm any of you. We just need to talk face-to-face. I think I’ve said all that I can say while we’re out here. So I’m coming in now, okay?”

  The doorknob twists and the bolted door rattles in the frame. Andrew, Eric, and Wen watch and say nothing and do nothing as though Leonard’s abrupt segue into attempted entry is the chess equivalent of saying “checkmate.”

  Andrew breaks through their collective stupor and yells, “No, not okay!”

  Eric throws his body against the door. He says into the darkly stained wood, “We’ve been very understanding and we’ve asked you nicely to leave us alone. Go away.” He adds, running out of breath, although he instantly regrets saying it, “You’re scaring Wen.” Then he turns to Andrew and says quickly through gritted teeth, “What do we do? What do we do?”

  Leonard says, “Please, just open the door.”

  “Fuck off! Go away!” Andrew pulls his green hat tighter onto his head and spins himself in circles. He doesn’t know what to do.

  Wen is sitting on the floor, leaning against the back of the couch. She covers her eyes and screams “Go away, Leonard! You are not my friend!” repeatedly.

  The woman in the black button-down shirt peers into the window to the left of the front door. She sees Andrew and raps on the screen with the wooden end of her tool like a child tapping on the glass of an aquarium. She disappears and says something to the rest of the group. There’s a quick and hushed discussion outside, and a red shape blurs past the window on the other side of the door. Andrew thinks he can hear Redmond’s plodding steps tracing the exterior of the cabin, heading toward the back deck.

  Leonard is still talking. Since shouting at Redmond, his voice hasn’t again raised or changed pitch; he might as well be a recording. His evenness and manners are proof of their collective madness. “We are not here to hurt you. We need your help to make things right, to save what must be saved. Only you can help us. You can start by opening the door . . .”

  Andrew sprints to the front windows and pulls the threadbare, see-through curtains closed. He then vaults into the kitchen and pulls the dark blue curtain, as thick as a winter blanket, across the glass slider, eclipsing most of the sunlight. The space below the slider frame and above the curtain rod glows radioactive light as does the window above the kitchen sink. The rest of the cabin darkens.

  Wen carefully turns on the small lamp with the buttercup-yellow lampshade on the end table. She stands trapped in its spotlight, holding her closed fists, with her thumbs curled up safely inside, against her mouth.

  Andrew goes over to Wen and hugs her. She doesn’t hug back. He reaches behind him, to the wall between the kitchen and bathroom, and he flicks on the wagon wheel ceiling light. Only four of the six bulbs work. He anticipates Wen asking him if everything will be okay, and if she does, he’ll do what any good parent would do; he’ll lie to her.

  Wen says, “I’m scared.”

  “We can be scared together, all right?”

  She nods. “They’re coming in?”

  “They might try.”

  He kisses the top of Wen’s head. His lips and mouth are dry. He takes off his hat and places it on her head. It’s too big for her but she doesn’t take it off. She pulls the brim over her eyes and tucks as much of her hair as she can fit under the hat.

  Eric says, “Andrew,” and wanders into the common room. Leonard has stopped talking and stopped trying to open the front door. “Did they go away?”

  Andrew knows it’s a rhetorical, an I-have-to-say-something-or-scream kind of question. Of course they haven’t gone away, not yet, and a part of him believes they will spend days, years, the rest of their lives trapped in this cabin, under siege. Andrew would rather hold on to that hellish image and dare not hope the others left because right now hope would be an intoxicant, a mind-duller; hope would be dangerous. Andrew plays along because Wen is listening and he plays along because he must. He says, “I think they’re just trying to scare us, right? Too goddamn cowardly to actually—”

  Heavy footsteps pound up the stairs that climb to the deck platform. Eric and Andrew eye the couch at the same time and Eric runs to the far end. Andrew momentarily considers telling Wen to hide in the bathroom and lock the door and don’t come out no matter what. Instead he clears a path to the back slider, pushing the dinner table, the chairs, and love seat away from the couch, the legs scraping and rumbling across the hardwood floor before sliding onto the kitchen linoleum. Wen helps, too, moving the end table and lamp toward the bathroom.

  “Good job, Wen.”

  Andrew and Eric lift the couch. It’s an old sleeper sofa as heavy and unwieldy as a tank. Andrew shuffles to the slider, but Eric abruptly lowers his end, pitching Andrew back toward the common room. Eric says, “Wait, turn it around. We have to spin it around so the back goes against the glass.”

  Andrew wants to say, Does it fucking matter? If the others break the glass slider, what way the couch faces won’t really stop them. He doesn’t say anything even as it feels like a mistake, a panic move, a waste of precious time, and the two of them stutter-walk, grunt, and groan through a quick semicircle and drop the couch in front of the back slider. The guts of springs and metal framing crash and clang discordantly.

  Andrew ducks into the kitchen and closes and latches the window above the sink. Are all the other windows closed? The ones in the bedrooms are big enough for someone to climb through. He opens drawers looking for knives, the biggest ones they have. They’ll need knives, right? They’ll need something. He says, “Make sure the bedroom windows are closed and covered.”

  “Oh, shit, hey—”

  “What?”

  “The basement stairs. What do we do about those?” That open rectangular hole in the floor and its stairs that circle and drain down below . . .

  Leonard shouts from somewhere outside, no longer at the front door, but toward the bathroom/kitchen side. “Come on, guys, you can open the doors! Please don’t do this! We’re not trying to scare you! We’re not here to harm you!”

  “Cops are on the way, and if you set one foot in here, I’ll shoot!” Andrew leaves the kitchen without taking anything with him. Eric stands in the middle of the room transfixed by the basement stairs.

  Andrew jogs over and grabs Eric’s arm. He whispers, “Is the basement door locked?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. Wen and I opened the door earlier, and we both went outside, and I—I don’t remember if we locked it after. I don’t think we did. The door might even be wide open.”

  “Should we go down and check?”

  They gravitate to the emptied center o
f the common room. They listen. There might be the sound of someone walking lightly in the basement and there might not.

  “Maybe.” Eric looks around the cabin. “Or maybe we clog up the top, so even if they come in through the basement they can’t come all the way up the stairs.”

  They carry the love seat over and Andrew already knows it’s too light to be any kind of barrier. Maybe it’s enough to slow a couple of them down if they were to come up through the basement and it would give him, Eric, and Wen enough time to flee the cabin through the front door and get to the SUV. They could fight off one or two of them on the way, too, he thinks, but not all four. The closer Andrew gets to the mouth of the stairs, the more anxiety hot-wires his system and he envisions hands shooting up out of the darkness and clutching their ankles to pull them down, down, down.

  Eric says, “Here, tilt it toward me a little. We can wedge the feet inside the railing and the fence.”

  Andrew fears the love seat is too small and will tumble down the stairs, but it jams up against the railing a foot or so below the plane of the main room floor like Eric said it would. It’s in there tight, too. Andrew runs back and grabs the kitchen table to add to the stopped-up staircase. Of course now he’s thinking maybe they shouldn’t block off a possible escape route. Plus there’s all kinds of stuff in the basement they could use as weapons or barricades and now they can’t get to any of it. Up here there isn’t much with which to defend themselves, certainly not anything with the reach and menace of what the strangers are carrying.

  Andrew places the table on top of the love seat. Two of the legs fit in the empty space between the wall, floor, and wrought-iron rail, and the other two legs are propped awkwardly on the love seat. He pushes down on the table hard enough that the middle of the table cracks and bends inward.

  Eric goes to the hearth and the woodburning stove and plucks the pewter metal poker and tongs from the basket. He says, “Take this,” and gives Andrew the poker.