I never believed in the supernatural. Ghosts, demons, haunted houses—it all seemed like nonsense to me. That is, until that fateful night when my friends and I decided to explore the infamous cabin in the woods. Troy, my best friend, was always the one to get us into these misadventures. When I signed his yearbook senior year, I had inscribed “Most Likely to Get Me Killed” on the back page. Below it, a little caricature I liked to draw of Troy with his mischievous little smile. Mila was a year younger, but she was the glue that kept the friendship alive. This time, it was actually Mila who discovered the legend of the cabin in the woods and set in motion a series of events that would change all of our realities forever.
As we trudged through the dense foliage that night, I could feel an unsettling chill in the air. The moon’s pale light barely pierced through the canopy, casting eerie shadows on the forest floor. I laughed out loud, hearing my thoughts and just how lame they sounded. I mean really, come on. The cabin in the woods? Despite my lack of seriousness, we pressed on, determined to prove that the stories were nothing more than figments of imagination. Mila was leading the way, repeating what seemed to be a Mantra: “Where is this Blair Witch fuckery?” The three of us laughed and made joking references to inane horror movies we had watched.
It seemed that the cabin suddenly materialized before us, its dilapidated facade exuding a sense of malevolence. Haha, JK. This place was a dump. We stepped inside, led by Mila and her “Where the fuck is this Blair Witch bullshit” bravado. Troy seemed unsettled, which was unusual for him. He had been the one who stopped us and pointed out that we had passed the cabin and it was now somehow behind us. It didn’t make any sense because we had just trudged over that patch of forest, some of us grumbling that we should have done something else tonight. Troy pointed out that our tracks through the underbrush somehow led directly from the wall of the cabin. Despite this incongruity, we turned and went back, circling until we found the door to the cabin askew on its hinges.
Mila, her enthusiasm growing, fired the door open. A shower of dust and debris greeted us as we passed over the threshold. Though Troy seemed very much disinterested, we explored the tiny structure. It consisted of one main room with two tiny bedrooms. There was not much to see. What seemed to have been a kitchen area had collapsed from years of wood rot. Old furniture that had evaporated into dust long ago, leaving rusty spring bed frames and a husk of what might have been an armchair. Nothing like you would find in a horror movie. No bones. No warnings scrawled in blood on the walls.
Mila couldn’t contain her excitement as she uncovered a trap door in the corner of the main room, buried under a pile of rotting wood. “Blair Witch Basement, motherfuckers!” she screamed, pumping her fist in a little victory dance. Troy, conversely, had a look of discomfort. It opened with surprising ease, a rickety ladder proving to somehow be able to hold our weight, Mila testing it jubilantly.
As we descended into the darkness, our flashlights struggled to pierce the gloom. The air grew heavy, suffocating, as though some ancient presence enveloped us. The flickering lights cast distorted shadows on the walls, revealing symbols etched into the stone. Troy was the last down the ladder, looking around in dismay. “The smell down here…” he trailed off as the thick air choked his lungs and he doubled over, coughing.
Terror gripped me like a vice, freezing my limbs. The chamber pulsed with an otherworldly energy, and the shadows began to writhe and twist. I put my arm around Troy and asked him if he was alright. “Let’s go back up, Troy” I spoke into his ear so he could hear me over his choking gasps. We turned together, but the ladder was gone.
We screamed, our voices echoing through the chamber, but escape seemed impossible. The room shifted and morphed, trapping us within the nightmare’s grip. Madness clawed at the edges of my mind, threatening to consume my sanity.
Time was losing all meaning as we looked around desperately for the way out. Both of our flashlights suddenly stopped working, but the room was not plunged into complete blackness. Mila’s flashlight was still on, and she was standing very still. The beam of her flashlight was pointed directly at one of the strange symbols carved into the stone wall. I moved towards her and as I got closer, she turned to look at me. In the light reflecting off the wall, I could see her eyes were filled with tears. “What the fuck, Sam?” Unable to respond, I got closer and I could not comprehend what I saw. The symbol that had been carved into the wall was shockingly familiar. It took my mind a second to realize what it was. There, in that filthy, rotting place, carved into the timeworn wall, was an image that I myself had created. The caricature of Troy, which I had created at the age of 13, and doodled a thousand times from the gas station bathroom wall to Troy’s yearbook, was somehow here. The carving in the stone was not new, and the wall itself looked like it was a hundred years old.
I stared at this impossibility for what seemed like an eternity, until my attention was finally wrested away by Mila’s voice shouting my name. “Sam! Sam! Look at me!” I turned and looked into her face, the panic I saw there snapped me back to the present moment. “Where’s Troy?”
She aimed her flashlight back in the direction where Troy had been. For a moment we caught a glimpse of the layer of ice that was beginning to build up on the walls all around us. A second later, the flashlight beam flickered, and stopped. For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw Troy, enveloped in ice, his face literally frozen in a terrified scream.
Mila took my hand, pulling me in the direction of the spot where our friend had been. The ice was all around us now, and the air was changing from thick and musty to piercingly cold. We collapsed in the centre of the room as the air became so frigid that neither of us could breathe. Together we tried to crawl across the now iced over dirt floor, until Mila collapsed. Unable to take a breath, the frigid darkness took my mind as well.
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The events that followed are still a blur to me. I awoke to find Mila in the same spot next to me where we had both collapsed. We were no longer in the cabin, but instead we lay on the forest floor. There was no sign of the cabin, and what was worse, no sign of Troy. As dawn began to break, I was able to rouse Mila from unconsciousness. Both of our phone batteries were dead, as were the flashlights. We spent what seemed like hours in a state of panic, screaming our missing friends name and circling the area in search of any sign of him or the cabin. Finally, exhausted, we found our way in the early morning light back to where we had parked.
When the police arrived we recounted our story to incredulous looks. There is no cabin in these woods, we were told. There was a search for a missing child here once, and the officer had helped lead the search parties. There was no cabin, she said. “Let’s get you home and you can get some rest.” Her partner told us “We’ll find your friend.”
Troy was never found. No sign of him or any indication of what happened to my best friend was ever discovered. He was officially listed as missing and for many years his smiling face was all over town on missing persons posters. I came home for the funeral Troy’s parents eventually held for him many years later. None of his family would look me in the eye. I’m sure many of them suspected that Mila and I had committed some unspeakable crime that night in the woods.
There was never cause for any of this suspicion. There was literally zero evidence. No blood, no body, nothing. The two of us were always there for every search party, and assisted the police with their investigation. We cooperated with every step of the process, from being interviewed by everyone from the local police, to the FBI, to the reporters and private investigators. We recounted the events of that evening hundreds of times. We both took polygraph tests. We even accompanied a priest who came to town and wanted to perform an exorcism on the spot in the woods. Nothing ever changed, but there was one fact we kept from everyone. Mila and I remain the only two people in the world to know about the scars that appeared on our bodies after that night. Our tattoos, as we refer to them. We discovered our matching tattoo later that day, while the police searched the forest for Troy.
They are the reason Mila and I are both still single after all this time, the reason we both live solitary lives. The tattoo that appeared on both of our chests, right above the heart, of my hand drawn caricature of Troy.