After the Cabin

by Amy Cross

  “So you've seen it?”

  “Well...” She pauses again, and to be honest she looks a little like a rabbit caught in the headlights. “I mean, my brother and his friends were watching part of it, and... Don't hate me, it was just curiosity and...” Again, she visibly shudders. “Oh God, you must think I'm a total bitch!”

  “It's fine,” I mutter, even though I hate the idea of this girl and her brother sitting down to watch that footage. There's no point getting angry, though, and I have to keep my emotions under control. “Free world, right?”

  “We mainly saw the bits that weren't torture,” she continues. “You know, like, it was the extended edition so...”

  Her voice trails off, and she seems close to tears.

  “I'm a bad, bad person,” she adds finally.

  “Don't worry about it,” I reply, turning and heading to the door. By the time I'm outside, however, I feel as if I'm going to throw up, and I run around the corner with a heavy churning sensation in my gut. Sure enough, just as I get to the flower border, I lean over and vomit, while inwardly cursing myself for being so weak. Why does it matter if some girl saw part of the video? I already knew it was out there.

  Wiping my lips, I hurry away from the hotel. When I pass an elderly couple, however, I can't help wondering whether they've seen the video as well. In fact, by the time I get to the town square, I'm convinced that everyone has seen the goddamn thing. A cold sweat clings to my body and although I try to walk normally along the street, I feel as if I'm about to scream. Finally I duck down an alley, then down another, until there's no-one around and I lean back, taking a series of slow deep breaths. I think I might just have had a panic attack, but I can't shake the feeling that everyone I meet must have seen the video.

  Looking up, I see a CCTV camera mounted on a nearby wall, and suddenly all my fear and panic drains away. The cameras are my friends. As long as one of them is watching me, I don't need to worry about what's real and what's in my head. I can always rewind and check.

  ***

  “Yeah, I think I remember her,” the woman in the cafe says as she takes my phone and looks at the photo of Karen. “We get a lot of customers, but she came in a few times. Haven't seen her in a while, though.”

  “She's missing,” I reply, grabbing the phone and bringing up an image of Daniel from a news report about the incident at the cabin. “What about him?”

  She frowns. “I don't think so.”

  “My friend Karen used to come in here,” I continue, “and I think sometimes she was with a guy.”

  She pauses. “Oh, yeah... Yeah, I think she was. You're right.”

  “Was it him?” I ask, holding the phone closer to her.

  She takes another look. “It's really hard to tell,” she says finally. “He never came up to order, it was always her. I remember thinking that was kind of strange, actually. And he always wore a hat. Yeah, that I remember very clearly, he had this baseball cap and it was always pretty hard to see his eyes. You get people like that, though.”

  “Do you remember what was on the hat? Was there any kind of logo?”

  “Maybe, but...” She shrugs. “Sorry, I don't remember.”

  “Do you have cameras inside?”

  “Cameras? Like security cameras? No, nothing like that.”

  “Have the police been in to ask you about any of this?”

  “No. Why, should they have been?”

  “I guess Bryson didn't take me very seriously,” I mutter, feeling a flash of frustration. “Thanks for your time.”

  Once I'm outside, I lean back against the cafe's white-painted wall and try to work out what I should do next. After a moment I glance at the camera high up on the side of the supermarket, and I still can't help wondering whether there might be someone watching me right now. After a moment, filled with frustration, I reach into my bag and take out a piece of paper, and then I hurry across the busy street and stop right in front of the camera. After writing a few words on the paper, I hold it up so the camera has a full view of my message:

  I'll find you.

  I wait for a moment, staring up at the lens, imagining someone watching me. There's probably no-one, but I figure it's worth a shot. A few seconds later, however, I realize that I'm getting weird looks from some of the nearby shoppers, so I crumple the piece of paper up, toss it into a nearby bin, and hurry away.

  ***

  “We mainly saw the bits that weren't torture. You know, like, it was the extended edition so...”

  As I push the front door open, I hear the receptionist's words echoing through my thoughts yet again. My mind keeps replaying that conversation, but I have no idea why. It was just some dumb girl going on and on about how she'd watched the video, and about how it hadn't been her fault. Her brother and his friends had been watching it, she'd just happened to catch it.

  Screw her.

  “Just in time!” Mum calls through. “It's toad in the hole for dinner, is that alright?”

  “Great,” I reply, hanging my coat on the hook and then heading through to the kitchen. I have to act normal around Mum.

  “We mainly saw the bits that weren't torture,” the receptionist's voice echoes in my head. “You know, like, it was the extended edition so...”

  “What have you been up to today, then?” Mum asks, turning to me as I head over to the counter and flick the kettle on. “Nothing too strenuous, I hope.”

  “Of course not,” I reply, but for some reason that girl's words are still ringing through my thoughts. It's almost as if my subconscious mind is trying to prod me, to make me notice something.

  “We mainly saw the bits that weren't torture. You know, like, it was the extended edition so...”

  “The extended edition,” I mutter, leaning against the sideboard as the kettle starts to boil.

  “What's that?” Mum asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “You don't want to push yourself too hard again, Anna.”

  “I'm not.” I pause, staring at the window and watching as dappled evening light catches the glass. “The extended edition...”

  “What's the extended edition?” she asks.

  I turn to her, before heading through to the hallway. “Back in a minute,” I mutter, but I don't wait to check that she heard me. There's a sliver of concern in the back of my mind as I hurry upstairs, and when I get to my room I immediately open my laptop and bring up the file I downloaded last week, the one showing my torture at the cabin. I scroll right to the very end, and I watch the final few seconds of footage again, shot by Cole as he burned the bodies. The video ends and I sit back, but after a moment I realize that I need to double-check something. I bring up a browser and head to the site where I found the file, and then I start searching again, limiting the results to anything uploaded in the past couple of days.

  The first result is a virus.

  And the second.

  And the third, fourth, fifth, and all the way through to the twentieth.

  The twenty-first, however, is a video file.

  A large video file.

  Eleven hours. That's almost twice as long as the version I downloaded the other day.

  “The extended edition,” I whisper.

  Once I've downloaded the entire thing, I start to play it through. I figure that somehow someone must have added extra footage from the cabin, maybe a few sections that were cut out, but when I start skipping through the time-line I find that the first hour, at least, seems to be identical to the version I originally downloaded. I drag the slider further, checking occasionally to see my progress, and when I get to the six-hour mark I find myself once again watching the footage that was shot by Cole. The original version ended here, but there's still five hours left on this file, so I let the original footage's last few seconds play out, waiting to see what the 'extended' version is all about.

  My blood starts to run cold when I see what comes next.

  I sit in horrified silence, watching hand-held footage taken from a
distance, showing me wandering naked and bloodied around the remains of the ruined cabin. Morning sunlight is streaming across the scene, and when I lean closer I see that I seem to be dragging a burned corpse across the grass, but...

  Who was filming this?

  Everyone was dead by the time the sun came out, I was alone, yet now it's clear that someone was able to keep recording me. I stare at the image as the hidden cameraman moves behind some trees, keeping the lens trained on me. I'm about a hundred meters away, stumbling past the edge of the cabin's smoking ruins. Just as I lean toward the screen to get a better look, the camera zooms in, and I watch myself dragging a charred dead body toward the treeline until, suddenly, I stop and let the corpse slump to the ground. I don't remember any of this, but I can't deny what's happening on the screen as I watch myself dropping to my knees and punching the dead body.

  Jennifer.

  That must be her.

  Apparently I spent a few minutes pummeling her body. The camera remains partially hidden behind some old trees, but finally I see that part of my dream the other night was true. Apparently I really did pummel Jennifer's dead body with enough force to sever her head.

  “Everyone thinks you're so innocent,” I remember her voice whispering to me all those times. “What if they knew what you did after the cabin burned down?”

  I keep watching. The video shows me picking up Jennifer's head and then dragging her body into the forest. Once I'm out of sight beyond the trees at the far end of the clearing, the camera hurries forward, and I can hear the sound of someone breathing heavily on the soundtrack. Whoever it is, they head past the burning cabin and toward the trees on the other side. There's a sudden cut, and when the film resumes the camera is now hurrying through the forest. The image is too shaky and jerky for me to be able to see properly, but suddenly the person stops and trains the camera on the glistening lake in the distance. When the picture zooms in again, I see my naked figure silhouetted against the water.

  I remember that moment.

  I was thinking about just walking into the depths. I was fantasizing about how it would feel to drift away, except...

  The video shows me tossing Jennifer's corpse into the lake, along with her head.

  I don't remember that, but now it's clear that I must have suffered some kind of selective amnesia.

  Suddenly I see myself turning and heading back into the forest, and the person holding the camera ducks out of the way, desperate to not be seen. The view stays static for a moment, partially covered by the tree behind which the person is hiding, and a moment later my footsteps can be heard coming closer. I'm shocked to see that I traipsed almost straight past the camera's hiding place, just a few meters away, but clearly I had no idea I was still being filmed. The camera turns to keep tracking me as I wander between the trees, and for the next few minutes the shot remains fairly steady, watching as I disappear into the distance. Everything seems so calm and peaceful, almost as if -

  Abruptly, the image changes to the long, barren road that I eventually found. Zooming in, the camera wobbles as it films a truck stopping next to me. Whoever was watching me, they must have followed for hours while I was just stumbling along the road. I watch as I see someone getting out of the truck, and I remember that moment so well. A man from a nearby town happened to be driving past, and he wrapped a blanket around me and drove me to hospital. That was when the nightmare really ended, or at least when I thought it ended. Now, as I watch myself being helped into the truck, I realize that someone must have survived from the cabin, someone who kept filming me. A moment later the truck drives away, leaving the cameraman all alone on the deserted road. There's a pause, with the only sound now being the whirr of the camera, and then suddenly the image tilts down toward the road and then goes black for a few seconds.

  Who the hell was -

  Suddenly the image blinks back into life. Again, the camera seems to be hiding, this time behind a pillar. It takes a moment before I spot two figures emerging from a door, and I realize that I'm watching myself leaving the hospital with my mother. Whoever was filming me, they followed me all the way back to England and then waited three years while I was being treated. The camera remains trained on me as my mother heads back into the building. Zooming in, the image frames me as I sit in the car, staring straight ahead. I remember that moment, but in the film I look so ashen, almost ghostly. I can hear someone breathing on the soundtrack again, and the scene continues until my mother returns and we drive away. There's a brief cut, and then the screen is filled with a loud scene of drunken people in town at night. I can guess what I'm about to see even before it appears, and sure enough I see myself hurrying toward the club with Karen. Whoever's behind this, it's clear they were filming me almost continuously from the moment I was released from hospital.

  For the next few hours, I sit and watch the rest of the extended edition. I see myself inside the club, with Karen and Matt, and I see myself running out a little later; I see myself walking alone along the path next to the train station, but the camera holds too far back for me to be able to see what's happening up on the walkway. This shot lingers for a few minutes, before I see the two figures heading down. Suddenly there's another cut, which leads to a shot of me sitting in my mother's kitchen at night, and after a moment I'm even shown looking directly at the camera before the figure turns and hurries out of the garden. I guess I was right, then; there really was someone out there that night, filming me through the window. I watch in horror as the scene cuts to me walking toward my psychiatrist's office, and I start to realize that this psychopath seems to have been determined to capture as much as possible of my life on video.

  A little later, there's a shot of me walking toward the hotel with Karen, only this time the camera actually seems to linger more on her face than on mine. She's laughing and joking with me, and I feel a jolt of sorrow in my heart as I realize that just being my friend was enough to drag her into all of this. The film continues for another couple of hours, and as the slider gets close to the end I start wondering just how recent the final scene will be. Finally I get to a shot of myself running frantically along a dark street, and I realize that it's the night when I thought I was being chased by a headless woman. I watch intently for any sign that the woman was real but, as the video shows me hiding behind a car, I see with a sigh of relief that there's no headless woman anywhere. I already knew she wasn't real, but it's still good to have that fact confirmed, although I can't help feeling shocked as I watch myself reacting frantically to something that I thought I could see. I guess she was my mind's way of forcing myself to remember what I did to Jennifer's body. The camera manages to follow me all the way to the moment when I ran into the police car, but then the person holds back, obviously not wanting to be spotted.

  The next shot shows the hospital again from the outside, with the camera focused on one particular window high up, and then the film ends. Whoever was behind the recording, at least they couldn't get into the hospital to film me. Either that, or they didn't dare try.

  Closing my laptop, I sit in stunned silence for a moment, trying to process everything I just saw. Someone is still following me, still watching my every move, but suddenly I realize that I might be able to find out who. I need access to the archives from the surveillance cameras all around town, so I grab my bag and hurry downstairs, ignoring my mother as she calls through to ask where I'm going. All I can think about is the surveillance cameras, and the possibility of finally seeing who's doing this to me. And the police, I have to call the police. Reaching into my bag, I pull out my phone as I open the front door. I need to -

  “Anna,” Detective Bryson says, as I bump into him. “Going somewhere important?”

  Fourteen

  “He can't be,” I stammer. “Not Matt as well...”

  “He didn't turn up for work,” Bryson explains as he drives us along the dark street, “and no-one has heard from him since yesterday morning. His mobile phone is switched off, and he hasn
't accessed his email or used his bank card. Given the circumstances, we're taking his apparent disappearance very seriously.”

  “It's because of me,” I whisper, watching the lights of the busy road ahead. “First Karen, then Matt...”

  “We can't be sure there's a link,” he replies. “We're just taking all necessary precautions.”

  “If you don't believe me about the video,” I continue, “you can -”

  “I believe you,” he adds, interrupting me. “That was the other reason I came to find you, we became aware of the extended cut that was uploaded to file-sharing sites. That's why I'm taking you to a safe location, somewhere this person can't get to you. Until we figure out exactly what's going on, we need to exercise caution.”

  “But I don't know whether -” Stopping suddenly, I stare at him. I was about to point out that I don't know who to trust, but now I'm starting to realize that I can't even trust him. Looking down at my trembling hands, I start wondering whether I should open the car door and jump out. The handle is right next to me and I don't think its locked, but at the same time I don't want to accept that I'm in so much danger.

  “It's not me,” he says after a moment.

  I turn to him. “What's not you?”

  “I know what you're thinking,” he continues, “and you're right not to trust anyone. Just hold tight and I promise, we'll get you to a secure location.” He takes the next left turn. “We found Karen's boyfriend, by the way. That Daniel guy? Except his name's not Daniel, it's David.”

  “She told me he's called Daniel.”

  “Are you sure you didn't mishear?”

  I open my mouth to reply, but deep down I know it's more than possible. I can't even trust myself.

  “He's a real piece of work,” Bryson continues, “not a nice guy at all, but he's definitely not the same person who was at the cabin. Believe me, with his record, we can trace this David guy all the way back to the age of fourteen. He's got a nasty history of punching his girlfriends, but we've got nothing to link him to Karen's disappearance.”