Dawn came and they were still alive. All except for Marcie. Only at the end, they supposed she hadn't really been Marcie anymore.
Horror novelette, written by Ian Rogers, edited by Ellen Datlow, and published in January 2021 on the Tor.com website.
We're all aware of the "cabin in the woods" horror subgenre, right? A group of young people, usually college students or high school students, go on a weekend trip to an isolated, dilapidated rural cabin located in a large forest so they can party, drink, abuse substances, and screw. And once the sun sets, all hell breaks loose. You've seen this movie and its variants so many times -- in "The Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead 2," in "Cabin Fever" and "Friday the 13th," in "Wrong Turn" and "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil," in "The Cabin" and, yes, "The Cabin in the Woods."
We know from the beginning of the story how this turns out -- or at least how it appears to have turned out. In a standard "cabin in the woods" story, a group of young people go into the cabin and only one emerges at dawn -- but in this case, five kids went in, and only one died. But that all happens in the first quarter of the story. So what has gone unseen?
So let's fill out a bit more of our tale. Five college pals -- old friends from childhood, two couples, one single -- Chad and Annabelle, Mark and Donna, and Marcie -- go out for a weekend to a cabin they got through a fairly mysterious Airbnb listing. Chad and Mark are fairly typical bros, maybe a bit less irritating than the usual. Annabelle and Donna are a bit ill-defined themselves. Only Marcie comes with plenty of characterization -- she's tall and strong, nicknamed the Steamroller by her rugby team. She's got courage, but it's a bit of foolish courage -- she rushes in where she should certainly fear to tread.
So early on in their visit to the cabin, Marcie trips over a ringbolt in a trapdoor in the floor. She later opens the door, goes down for a few minutes, and emerges with an antique gramophone record player. It's got an unlabeled record on it and a chunk of jagged black glass, like a shard, in place of the record needle.
They play the record, and it mostly makes a godawful racket, loud enough to rattle the whole cabin, loud enough to break Marcie's neck with the first blast of sound, loud enough to lift her back up a few inches above the floor and spin her around to face her friends, loud enough to give her the shard to use as a weapon.
And her friends kill her, or at least kill her again, this time dismembering her, later telling the police it was the only way to stop her. The police accept that this was done in self-defense. The grief counselors later agree that the violence of the attack and counter-attacks make sense from a psychological viewpoint. Everyone accepts that it's a terrible tragedy, the police close the case, everyone goes home.
But post-traumatic stress comes in many forms, some of them supernatural. Donna feels cold, icy cold, even during the summer, even with the thermostat cranked up, even wearing her winter coats in front of a raging fire. Chad finds himself unable to bear silence, even for a few moments. He loses himself in loud music, but even that is much too quiet. Mark is utterly unable to sleep, no matter how exhausted he gets, no matter what drugs he takes. His boredom with being constantly awake eventually sends him to looking for unlocked doors around town, just to go inside and look around other people's houses. Annabelle can't stop thinking about that night and can't stop feeling paranoid, and the only way she can escape these thoughts is to move as fast as she can, and eventually to spin as fast as she can, spinning from one room to another, spinning as she walks, spinning all the time, spinning, spinning, spinning.
And all roads lead back to the cabin. And the cabin leads straight back into Hell.
I love this story for many reasons -- it does a great job of recreating a good "cabin in the woods" story while also subverting and twisting it in interesting ways. The way we're introduced to Marcie makes her seem very much like she'd be the Final Girl of this movie, the one who's able to power through the Evil Dead and drag herself back out into the sunlight when the final credits roll. She's the independent fifth wheel with the two couples in the story, and she has the strength to battle her way out of proper hordes of demons.
But she also seems designed to be the final boss of the movie -- the indestructible tank, the Steamroller, the kind of person who, once zombified, could punch her way through a wall, up from the basement, up from her grave, and give potential Final Girls Annabelle or Donna a serious challenge.
But it just doesn't work out that way. Marcie dies -- and we know it'll happen from the opening paragraph. She dies first, and once turned into a deadite, she doesn't even manage to kill anyone else.
Of course, most of the story takes place after that terrible night at the cabin, and we get to see what we rarely get to see after the final credits of these movies -- namely, survivors of horrific events suffer lasting trauma -- just with a little more supernatural flair.
Donna shivers uncontrollably, likely from shock and fear, but that ends up becoming a feeling of merciless cold. Chad is traumatized by the loud noise of the record and ends up wanting more and more noise because the human mind is perverse, and he feels like silence makes it too easy to think of that night in the cabin. Mark suffers traumatic insomnia, which is converted into a supernatural inability to sleep. And Annabelle's attraction to spinning comes from the fact that so many events from that night were related to things spinning -- the record spun, Marcie spun, a bottle wouldn't stop spinning -- and much later, the cylinder of a revolver spins for much longer than it should have. And unfortunately, neither therapy nor medication are helpful in recovery -- but then, there are many traumas in life that cannot be survived...
A big chunk of the fun of this story is trying to figure the why behind all of this. Why is a jagged glass shard the key to all this evil? Why an antique record player? Why a record full of bizarre, bone-breaking noise? Why was Marcie the initial target? Why did her friends have to dismember Marcie after they killed her? Why didn't the bottle stop spinning? Why those specific traumas visited on those specific survivors? Mystery piles atop mystery atop mystery. What was the power behind this? What was its goal? How did it manage to put a haunted death-cabin on Airbnb? But the mysteries help make the story work so well, partly because life is full of mysteries that can never be solved, and partly because great horror is often built around the unknowable and unexplainable.
It's not a slam-bang gorefest like "Evil Dead" -- though it certainly doesn't skimp on the blood and gore when it's needed -- but this story is still wonderfully and subtly terrifying. It's a story that wears its love of horror's classic past on its bloody sleeve while working its way into new and disturbing corners of readers' brains.
Wanna read it? Yes, of course you do. It's available for free on the Reactor website.
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