The Cabin at the End of the World

by Paul Tremblay

  Sabrina and Adriane untie Andrew’s legs first. Andrew makes a joke about needing more than his feet to go to the bathroom. Sabrina says she will help and, “I’m a nurse and I’ve seen it all.” Standing up from the chair is difficult and his nearly forty-year-old legs are practically numb; a painful rush of pins and needles swarms his lower extremities. Eric has the same experience when he first stands, and he has to move slower as the act of standing fuzzes his head with light and heat. Both men, their hands tied behind their backs, have a turn at shuffling feebly into the bathroom. The door remains open with Adriane standing in the doorway as a guard. They are positioned in front of the toilet and suffer the indignity of Sabrina loosening their shorts and underwear to allow them to urinate.

  Leonard keeps a one-sided dialogue going about him and Wen having a nice visit together on the couch. He asks her questions. He pretends she answers him to continue the conversation.

  Both men, at certain points during their odyssey to and from the bathroom, consider running and/or bashing themselves into Sabrina and/or kicking Adriane. Both men decide this isn’t the time, not while the others are at their most vigilant. They do not want to believe Leonard would hurt Wen despite his clearly being more than capable of extreme violence. They rationalize an escape attempt will make more sense the next time they are allowed to use the bathroom. Having coordinated this successful, uneventful maiden trip, the three others can’t help but slacken their guard just a little bit the next time, or the time after that.

  After they are returned and retied to their chairs, they notice the ropes wound around their hands and wrists have slackened, or perhaps that’s wishful thinking. No, their bodies’ change of position and leverage, their movement, their walking across the cabin and reshaping themselves into the tighter space of the bathroom alongside Sabrina has to have loosened the ropes. They can feel it.

  Leonard clumsily washes and preps the boneless chicken breasts before Adriane takes over. She forgoes the deck floodlighting (insisting she doesn’t need it, yelling at Leonard until he shuts the exterior lights off) and works in the near total dark. She says the grill sucks and she can’t be judged by what such an inferior product produces. The smell is simply exquisite, and Sabrina says so with a smile on her face as she prepares a large bowl of garden salad. Leonard sets the kitchen table: four plates, four forks, and four plastic cups. Adriane ducks through the broken sliders with a platter of steaming, grilled meat, warning the room with, “Watch out. Hot stuff,” and she barks at Leonard to shut the screen door behind her before they let in every moth and mosquito in New Hampshire. There is already a gaggle of winged insects swarming the wagon wheel light fixture, their bodies relentlessly pinging against the bulbs. Eric spies two thick, black flies (wondering if they are the same ones he saw earlier) and when they smack into a bulb, Eric is convinced the wagon wheel sways with the impact. Their buzzing is a low hum, like a chant.

  Leonard takes Wen’s hand, and with a small, gentle tug, she stands and follows him to the kitchen table. She sits on the far side, next to Leonard and facing her parents. Sabrina made her a cup of chocolate milk with chocolate kisses she melted in the microwave. On Wen’s plate are a small pile of bite-sized pieces of chicken and a minisalad composed of lettuce, two cherry tomatoes, and three cucumber wheels. Wen holds one cucumber slice up and looks at Andrew and Eric. The rind was peeled off, the way she likes it.

  Andrew says, “Go ahead. You can eat.”

  She eats everything on her plate, grim and determined to complete the task. She will later leave the table with a faint chocolate milk mustache coloring her lip.

  The three others are seated at the table. Leonard and Sabrina praise Adriane for how moist the chicken is. Single-word delicious declaratives and I didn’t think I was hungry are passed around the table along with the pepper, BBQ sauce, and raspberry balsamic dressing. Busy knives and forks clink and scrape on the plates.

  Andrew seethes, boiling with incredulity and despair. How can the others simply engage in go-through-the-dinner-motions as though nothing is wrong? How do they so easily ignore the horror of what has happened and the expanding horror of what is happening and what will happen?

  Adriane mumbles about how a beer would hit the spot and then laughs. No one else laughs with her.

  Andrew says, “Hey, go ahead, help yourselves to the twelve-pack in the bottom drawer of the fridge. Make sure to recycle after.”

  Adriane says, “Really?” and looks at Sabrina and Leonard for a reaction. “Nah, that’s all right.” She raises her glass of water. “Maybe some other time.” She takes a big sip and wipes her face with both hands.

  Eric notices that none of the others said grace or a prayer before the meal. He anticipated and hoped they would. If they said grace he might’ve learned about what god they believe is the source of their visions and is ultimately the motivation behind them being here. Maybe Eric would’ve been able to use that information to better engage them in a conversation about their faith and possibly persuade them into letting his family go. He was so sure that grace was going to happen, Eric thinks he might’ve zoned out and missed it, or the prayer happened and he witnessed it and promptly forgot it because of his concussion. That he hasn’t even spied one of the others performing a quick, furtive sign of the cross, doesn’t make sense to him.

  After they finish eating, Leonard asks Wen to help with dinner for her dads. He says it’s a superimportant job. “I don’t think they’ll eat without you.”

  Wen wordlessly agrees to help. She stands in front of Eric with a fork in her hand. Leonard carries over a plate of cut-up chicken and a leaf-pile of salad. Sabrina patiently details a set of instructions for all to follow. Wen spears a piece of chicken on a plastic fork and holds it in front of Eric’s face. He opens his mouth only wide enough to let the chicken pass through. It’s lukewarm. He doesn’t linger, doesn’t allow himself the luxury of taste, and chews and swallows quickly. Wen doesn’t talk, doesn’t ask if he wants chicken again next or a cherry tomato. She doesn’t look at his eyes, only his mouth. She doesn’t stop feeding him until Eric says, “That’s enough for me, sweetie. Thank you.” She puts the fork on the plate and then holds up a cup of water.

  Andrew wants to tell the others to fuck off, that he doesn’t want anything from them. He imagines accepting the first bite and spitting it into one of their faces. But when his daughter stands in front of him, so intently doing her job, he loses his resolve and eats everything that is offered.

  Postdinner there’s cleanup and more cartoons on the television. Sabrina plays game after game of solitaire at the kitchen table. Adriane disinterestedly flips through the book Eric brought and goes out onto the front stoop to smoke cigarettes. She asks if anyone has a jigsaw puzzle. She says that’s what her mom always used to do when they went on vacation.

  Leonard asks Wen questions about what she’s watching. If it’s a yes or no question, she answers (“Do you like this show?” Yes “Have you seen this one before?” No). Any question inviting a more detailed response yields a shrug or a thousand-yard stare.

  Eric is exhausted and has a difficult time keeping his eyes open. He attempts to get the others talking about the visions (avoiding explicit references to God and the Bible because of his own growing unease), the why of the apocalyptic choice, the why of the whole thing, but none of them bite. Sabrina says, “We’ll talk about it tomorrow after you and your family have slept on it.”

  Andrew tries a different tact, periodically asking to be untied, successive requests becoming more elaborate and ridiculous: “How about you untie me so I can fix the kitchen table leg? I notice the playing cards sliding off the edge there, and really, the table shouldn’t be propped up on magical realists. You know, there’s a lumberyard not too far away and I can go pick up some wood, whittle it into a new leg in no time. I guess I’d have to stop somewhere and get some white paint, but that’s not a big deal. I don’t mind. I’d already be out.” Andrew figures if they take him less seri
ously because of his barrage of increasingly untenable requests, all the better for when he makes the serious attempt at breaking free, and then to the SUV and his gun.

  Leonard announces, “It’s getting late. We could all use the rest. And we’ll be up with the sun.” He gathers the towels and curtain off the floor. Then the three others drag the mattresses out of the bedrooms. There’s enough space for the queen-size to be sandwiched between two singles from the bunk beds. With the television turned off and Wen already changed into pajamas and having washed up and brushed her teeth, Andrew and Eric are again taken to the bathroom separately. Wen sits with Leonard on the couch next to the sledgehammer weapon.

  Adriane repositions Andrew’s and Eric’s chairs to either side of the front door. Their shoulders brush against the wall as their arms are slipped behind the chair backs. Sabrina and Adriane tie the men’s legs to the chair legs and Sabrina apologizes, saying they can’t trust that the two of them will sleep on the mattresses and remain tied. She says they’ll try to make sleeping while sitting up as comfortable as possible.

  It’s going to be a cold night in the cabin. The temperature has already dropped into the high fifties. Adriane builds a fire in the woodburning stove but the heat rapidly dissipates through the porous screen slider. Thin blankets are pulled over Andrew’s and Eric’s chests and tucked between their shoulders and the wall, pillows stuffed behind their heads and necks.

  Andrew doesn’t say anything and is confident he’ll be able to break free from the ropes after the others are asleep. Eric is spent and the warm, soft pillow enveloping his head is a potent soporific. He’s in a half-awake, half-asleep state before the lights are turned out.

  Andrew and Eric are allowed a good-night kiss with Wen. They smile and repeatedly say her name with every known inflection, attempting to let her know they will still protect her and keep her safe despite all evidence to the contrary. They tell her she is brave and doing so well and they love her more than anything in the world. She has seen so much and heard so much and done so much; they do not dare imagine reliving the events of this day through the prism of Wen. She is nonresponsive, an automaton following a basic program of breathing, blinks, and sluggish limb movements. Wen is funneled to the queen-sized mattress without struggle or fuss. She lies down, burrowing into the blankets, taking up as little space as possible, adrift on the sea of foam. Leonard proffers her stuffed-animal pig (Corey, her favorite) and she pulls it into her chest with all the enthusiasm of a student accepting a math test from her teacher.

  Sabrina and Adriane crawl onto the smaller bunk mattresses. Leonard stretches out on the couch.

  No one moves or adjusts their resting positions for hours, seemingly. Andrew remains awake and quietly struggles to loosen the ropes on his hands and wrists, which have gone numb from being pinned behind his back for so long. It’s cold, still, and quiet in the cabin but for the occasional crackle and hiss from the woodburning stove. The bathroom light is the only light on and the door is shut so there is only a weak yellow glow tracing its outline. Outside, a cloudless night sky and a bright crescent moon lord over the lake. Andrew can now see Redmond’s covered body on the deck just fine. He can’t help but wonder if he stays up all night will he see a wild animal (are there any other kind?) crawl up the deck stairs and investigate what’s underneath the blanket.

  Unable to make any progress with the ropes, he whispers, “Eric. Hey, are you awake? Eric? Hey—”

  Adriane says, “There are people trying to sleep.”

  “Keep trying, and you fuckers aren’t people. I’m going to talk to my husband,” Andrew says in a stern talking voice that might as well be a shout in the nocturnal silence and calm.

  Eric says, “I’m awake now.”

  Eric and Andrew share a rapid-fire whispered conversation. Eric is murky with sleep and doubt. Andrew is manic and self-aware that his desperation is apparent, as audible as a creaking door in an empty house.

  “Are you okay, Eric? Are you feeling any better?”

  “Yeah, a little better, I think. My brain doesn’t feel three sizes too small for my skull anymore. Maybe one size.”

  “I know you’re not feeling great, and I wanted to make sure you noticed the first earthquake, the one up near Alaska, happened four hours before they turned on the TV.”

  “Was it that long?”

  “Yes, that’s what they said on the news. Remember? Hawaii had all that lead time to evacuate. Remember the empty resort?”

  “Okay, I guess, yeah, that sounds right.”

  “It is right. Trust me on that. And did you see how often Leonard checked his watch?”

  “Maybe. I can’t really remember. I think so.”

  “He checked it like one thousand times. I saw some of the others checking the time, too. Which means the time was important to them. They didn’t start any of it until the time was right. Leonard even said something about the time being right. He did. He definitely did.”

  “Yeah, okay, I think I remember that. You know they can hear us even though we’re whispering, right?”

  Sabrina says, “Yeah, um, we can hear you and—”

  “I know and I don’t care. I’m not talking to any of you. So, they knew about the first earthquake and Hawaii tsunami before they came out to the cabin. Think about it. They didn’t get any visions or prophecies; they knew about the Alaska quake and of the imminent tsunami before they got here. They had that shit in their pockets with them when they came out here.”

  “Sure. Makes sense. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I know you and I don’t want you to be—to be spooked by them lying about getting visions and predicting the earthquake and the apocalypse.”

  Leonard says, “That’s enough, guys. Please—”

  Andrew and Eric continue as though no one else is speaking, no one else is there.

  “You really think I believe them?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just wanted to make sure, with your bad fall and everything, that you could see what they were doing, how they targeted us and how they’re trying to break us down and manipulate us. How they knew about the earthquake before they came to the cabin, and how that second earthquake was just a coincidence, set off by the first one, right? And how all the Goonies bullshit was bullshit. And you saw how they reacted when the second earthquake hit, like they won the fucking lottery and—”

  “Oh my God, you do think I might believe them. Are you serious with this?”

  There’s a hesitation, an empty space filled with silent words. “No, I don’t think that. I’m sorry, don’t get mad. I’m not trying to make you mad. Please, I’m sorry. I’m just scared, and I wanted to make sure that, you know . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. Don’t worry about me. I don’t believe them.”

  “I know you don’t. I know you don’t.”

  “I don’t.”

  Sabrina says, “That’s enough. Please. We all need to sleep.”

  “Hey, Eric?”

  “Still here.”

  “I’m sorry, and I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  There’s another beat of silence that both men want to fill but don’t know how they possibly could. Then Andrew says, “Hey, can you guys untie me? I want to keep the fire in the stove going all night. Don’t worry, I won’t fall asleep on the job. I promise. And I’ll go outside and gather more wood—”

  Adriane says, “Shut up or we’ll shut you up. Put, like, gags over your mouth or something.”

  Leonard says, “Easy, Adriane. It’s okay. Everyone is good, everyone is fine. We can all go back to sleep now.” Leonard prattles on in a low voice and Sabrina joins in with empty we-won’t-hurt-you avowals.

  Eric is stung by Andrew thinking that he might, even in the smallest of ways, believe the others are telling some version of the truth. It stings because Andrew would be more than a little correct in thinking that. Eric’s fear gives way temporarily to shame and anger, and it leaks out as he says, “I
f any of you attempt to put something over my mouth, I’ll bite your fingers off.” Then he silently prays for God to help them.

  Wen

  In Wen’s bedroom back home there’s a night-light plugged into the wall across from her bed. It has a simple white bulb that isn’t shaped like a cartoon character or a comic book hero or an animal or the moon or anything in particular. She likes it that way; she doesn’t want any funny shapes because funny shapes make scary shadows. In addition to the night-light, she insists the hallway light stay on as well, and the bathroom light, too, with the door open. Her parents have tried to wean her off sleeping with lights on, explaining her still-growing brain needs the dark for proper rest. Wen once told them she doesn’t want her brain growing too fast for her head, anyway. Sometimes, after she falls asleep, one of her parents shuts off the bathroom light, the hall light, or (gasp!) both. She thinks it must be Daddy Eric because he always complains about her and Daddy Andrew leaving lights on everywhere in the condo, wasting electricity, but she has yet to catch him in the act. Shutting off the bathroom light is a grievous betrayal and it once angered her enough to announce at the breakfast table that she will have a terrible day. When her parents asked why, she dramatically pouted and said, “You know why,” and then couldn’t hide her snarky smirk in the brightness of the kitchen.

  Wen is sitting up on the mattress without the memory of waking. She looks around, moving only her eyes at first; she doesn’t move her head until she’s convinced everyone else is asleep. It’s dark, but less dark than it should be with almost no lights on in the cabin. The bathroom light doesn’t count as being on because the door is shut.