Chapter 9
The Cabin in the Woods
ATTENTION, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: KYLIE Kahl has been trapped in this shitty little cabin in the woods for six years, three months, and two days.
She is definitely not dead. But there are more days than not when she wishes she was.
#cabinssuck
Lying flat on her back on the dirty, bare wood floor, Kylie raises her arms up over her head and extends her limbs as far as she can.
Her first few months here, she didn’t bother to exercise at all.
What for? She was either going to be rescued or killed.
She didn’t realize back then there was actually a third option:
That he would keep her here forever.
Fuck. She’d have preferred what was behind door number one or two, thanks.
There is no TV, no radio, just one stuffed bookshelf stacked with classic board games, puzzles, and well-worn paperbacks.
There’s also a stack of old leather journals that she’s read a bunch of times, presumably written by her captor.
And there are shoeboxes filled with hundreds of old Polaroids, featuring people who didn’t even seem to know their picture was being taken.
No names or dates on any of them, but judging from the clothing and hairstyles, many of the photos were taken years ago.
She points her toes, flexes her feet, and repeats the move ten times.
Maybe if she’d gone to more yoga classes, she’d be able to remember some of the really good deep stretches that make her spine crack and her muscles feel like Jell-O.
She’s always been more of a spin-cycle girl—was even in the running to be a Peloton instructor at one point—but there’s no exercise equipment here in this shitty little cabin in the woods, so she makes do with push-ups, planks, lunges, squats, all things she can do in a wood-walled shack that’s no bigger than five hundred square feet.
Her closet back home in Toronto is bigger than this, assuming Freddie hasn’t filled it with some other chick’s stuff.
Freddie. Kylie can’t think about him too much. It just upsets her, and when she’s upset, the days get longer, and the nights get worse.
The workouts are okay, but it’s the stretching she craves.
She needs someone to pull her arms back until her chest opens all the way up, like Ingrid used to do for her before she was dragged away.
Her body feels condensed, as if all the time she’s spent in this cabin in the middle of bumfuck nowhere has somehow eliminated the spaces between her bones and squished them closer together.
It would be better not to know how long she’s been here. She doesn’t like to think about all the life she’s missing on the outside. But he counts. And then he tells her. Every fucking morning.
He’s fastidious like that. Routines are important to him, and their routine never deviates.
Once a month, he brings her a box of L’Oréal Excellence in shade two, a soft black, because he doesn’t like it when her natural light brown hair grows in more than half an inch.
And then he sits and watches her apply it.
#creeper
And every morning, when he comes in to cook her food—like yesterday, for instance—he says, “Good morning, Kylie. It’s Tuesday. You’ve been here for six years, three months, and two days.”
And every morning, she says to him, “Fuck you.”
Sometimes she mixes it up. Sometimes she says “Go to hell” or “Suck my dick” just to amuse herself, to see if she can get a rise out of him, to see if she can get anything out of him.
But if her words have any effect, there’s no way to tell.
His body language doesn’t change, and his face is always covered with a cheap paper mask, the kind you can get at the dollar store that’s just a thin piece of cardboard with two elastic strings for the ears.
The first one he ever wore was a Dr. Seuss character called Thing One.
Waking up in a strange cabin to huge round eyeballs and wild blue hair staring at you is actually pretty fucking terrifying.
Yesterday he was the bunny from the kids’ movie The Secret Life of Pets.
Kylie doesn’t care for the bunny. The bunny has big teeth compared to the size of his furry face, and those teeth are too white and too long, and they are angry teeth, threatening teeth, and it freaks her out every time he wears it.
But sometimes he’s Han Solo, otherwise known as a very young and very handsome Harrison Ford. She doesn’t mind Harrison at all, at any age.
#zaddy
Wait. Do the kids even say zaddy anymore? Or has that word been replaced with something else that means “sexy daddy”?
Remaining on her back, Kylie moves her arms down by her sides and begins scissoring her legs.
Her leg movements cause the chain cuffed to her ankle to scrape and drag against the wood floor.
There was a time when she really hated that sound.
She’d spent weeks trying to scissor her legs without allowing the chain make that sound.
But now she’s used to it. She’s used to all the sounds, like the birds she can hear in the daytime, and the wolf howls in the nighttime, and the gurgling sound of what must be a creek nearby.
She’s used to the squeak of the cabin door opening each morning and the shuffling sound of his feet as he cooks her food at the tiny stove.
The chain scraping on the floor is just one of the many songs on the album she likes to call Kept in the Cabin: A selection of greatest hits from the idiot TikToker who posted where she was going to her ten million followers and got fucking kidnapped.
And Freddie, that motherfucker. Her husband has a billion dollars and he can’t find her? Did he even try? Or is he on his yacht with that exgirlfriend who started following him on socials only after he got rich?
Maybe you never forget your first love. But you should also never forget your first wife, asshole, which is what she is to Freddie Tan, even though it started as a marriage of opportunity for them both.
Sure, they love each other, but they’re not in love, at least not in the way a husband and wife are supposed to be.
But they’re best friends, for fuck’s sake.
Their relationship is legit, based on kindness, founded on mutual admiration and respect.
They genuinely like each other, and once she started filming Trophy Wives, she realized just how healthy her marriage was compared to the rest of them.
Take Cecily Monaco, who had sex with a guy half her age who was trimming the bushes outside her mansion. Yikes, right? Cheating is one thing. Fucking the landscaper in order to humiliate your husband into finally signing the divorce papers is another.
Then there’s Brianna Ryan’s husband, who threatened to divorce her if she didn’t snap back to her original pre-baby body within three months of giving birth. She had twins, dude. And to her credit, she did snap back, but her asshole husband still calls her chubby when the cameras aren’t rolling.
Sofia Maxwell’s husband is just mentally checked out. He’s not a bad guy, but he never even looks at his wife, despite all the plastic surgery she’s had to carve out every sign of aging from what used to be a naturally gorgeous face.
And Cole Lennox? Woo, baby. In her opinion, Cole Lennox’s marriage may be the most toxic one of all.
Never has Kylie been around two people who resent each other as deeply as they do, but who pretend to love each other when the cameras are on.
Cecily may have won all those Emmys, but it’s Cole who deserves the acting awards.
Jordan Lennox is not a good guy. Kylie clocked it the minute they were introduced and he held her hand too long, his finger tickling the inside of her palm as he told her how much he enjoyed her TikToks.
Is Cole still married to him? It’s not the kind of thing Kylie can ask her captor to google, not that he’d google anything for her anyway.
Her abs are on fire from the scissoring, but it’s a good burn.
She’s always been athletic, and she’s naturally fast. Hell, she set a regional record in high school back in Wisconsin for running the eight hundred, and she can still remember the feel of the wind on her face when she crossed the finish line first as her ultraconservative parents cheered and her little sister Kaycie tackled her in a hug.
You won, Ky-Ky! You won! I love you so much.
I love you, too, Kay-Kay. So much.
#trackstar
#imissmyfamily
#ijustwanttogohome
She knows she could outrun him, if she could ever figure out a way out of this chain and out of this cabin. She could run all fucking day if she had to.
But there’s only one way out of the chain.
Kylie rolls back onto the damp futon mattress she spends most of her day on and stares at the axe hanging on the back wall near the fridge, just out of reach, always out of reach.
Then she looks at the blood that seeped into the unvarnished floor, the stain huge and round and dark, left behind by the other young woman whose foot was hacked with that axe when she refused him.
Kylie will never forget how that foot looked, dangling from Ingrid’s leg at an unnatural angle, attached only by a ligament or two, and the sound it made as it dragged across the floor.
Oh, Ingrid.
You can never refuse him.
He doesn’t mind what you say. He only minds what you do. And on the days when he comes in and tells her to take a bath in that rusty tub in the corner where the water never gets warm, she knows what it means. And she knows what comes next.
And there is no point in fighting.
Kylie wonders about Ingrid for the hundredth time that week as she settles into the moldy-smelling futon and pulls the thin, scratchy blanket over her body. Did she survive somehow? Maybe he dumped her somewhere, still alive, still wrapped in that bandage, for someone to find, for someone to save.
Or maybe she bled to death, somewhere in the woods, without the chance to say goodbye to any of the people who loved her.
Kylie will never ask him, because she already knows the answer. He may be fastidious, he may be polite, he may be routine. But make no mistake.
He is a monster.
The lock turns and the cabin door opens.
Instantly her body tenses, and she throws a hand up over her face before the sudden streak of sunshine shooting in can blind her.
He shuts the door behind him but doesn’t approach, and she slowly moves her hand away.
Even from across the cabin, his tall frame seems to loom, blocking her escape and trapping her here, forever.
“Good morning, Kylie,” he says pleasantly, because he is always pleasant. She has never heard him raise his voice. He walks over to the stove and lights it. “You have been here six years, three months, and three days.”
“Asshole,” she replies.
He’s wearing an Incredible Hulk mask today. Or is it Frankenstein? It’s hard to tell just yet, but either way, it’s a relief. She doesn’t know if Ingrid meant to rip off the mask he was wearing when they were struggling, but she does know that the mask snapped off, and now Ingrid is gone.
The day he doesn’t wear one—the day she sees his face—is the day he’ll kill her.
He cracks a couple of eggs into a frying pan, and she hears the sizzle. Then he glances back toward her, and under the cardboard mask, she senses he’s smiling.
“Why don’t you take a bath?”