Chapter 37
The Cabin in the Woods
ATTENTION, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: THING One has not been around for two days, and Kylie Kahl ain’t mad about it.
Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he tripped on those long legs of his somewhere in the woods and broke his ankle and got ripped apart by a bear.
#agirlcanhope
Kylie is looking through the box of Polaroids once again, entertaining herself by inventing stories about the people in them.
She’s pretty good at it, thanks to her parents restricting TV and books.
All Kylie had growing up was her own imagination; it’s how she got through Sunday service all those years. She daydreamed.
There’s one particular teenage girl who keeps appearing in the Polaroids, and something about her seems different from the other subjects.
In many of them, she’s glaring right at the camera, which means she knew her picture was being taken and suggests she knew the person behind the camera.
Based on what Kylie’s read in all those old leather journals, her name might be Lorelei.
Her physical description in the journals—blond, blue-eyed, bitchy—matches the photos.
And if it is Lorelei, then Lorelei is dead.
Kylie reaches for the leather Moleskine sitting at the top of the stack. The last passage of the last entry is chilling.
She hated me, and so I can’t decide if she deserved it or not. But what’s done is done. Nothing will bring her back. Maybe I should feel sad about it. But I don’t. I don’t feel anything at all.
#psychopath
She hears a sigh and looks over to where Sydney is curled up on the mattress.
Her cabinmate still sleeps most of the day, and maybe that will change at some point, but for now, it seems to be the only way Sydney can manage.
She did not wake up to eat this morning, but that was also because Thing One didn’t cook for them this morning.
Some other asshole brought their groceries today, leaving them a bag of food just inside the door without saying anything.
Ritz crackers, Wonder bread, Cheez Whiz, pepperoni sticks, pudding—all processed food that will last a while.
This other person has only come by once before. And same as the last time, he never said a word, never came inside; he just stuck the bag inside the door and left. But whoever he is, his arms seem shorter, his hands a bit smaller.
Just like in the books, Thing One has a Thing Two.
It makes sense that Thing One has help. Why kidnap a woman alone when you can do it with a friend?
Ingrid had told Kylie that when she was taken, there was a second person nearby on the trail who seemed to be keeping an eye out.
She didn’t get a good look, but she was certain that the other person wasn’t anywhere near as tall he was.
Unfortunately, given that Thing One is part-giant, that described most people.
“Kylie?” a voice says from across the cabin, cutting into her thoughts.
She turns away from the photos she’s laid out across the table in rows. Ten horizontally and ten vertically, which takes up the entire table but isn’t even a third of the photos in the box. She feels like she’s searching for something, but as always, she doesn’t really know what.
“Hey, Syd,” Kylie says. “You hungry? There’s a new box of crackers here, and some Cheez Whiz.”
Sydney climbs off the mattress and pads over to the toilet in the corner, her chain dragging across the floor behind her.
Pulling the privacy curtain closed, she pees, flushes, washes her hands, and is back out, taking a seat across from Kylie at the table.
Even though she’s been sleeping for almost fifteen hours, she looks exhausted.
Her eyes are puffy, her hair a matted mess from sleeping with it wet the last time she washed it, which was three days ago.
At least he hasn’t made her dye it; Sydney’s hair is naturally black.
She looks at the grid of Polaroids. “What are you looking for?”
“Answers, I guess,” Kylie says with a sigh. “The problem is, I don’t know what the questions are. What year were these taken, do you think?” She pushes one of the Polaroids over. “1999, maybe earlier?”
Sydney studies it. The blond girl in the photo is a young teenager, and in this picture, she’s wearing a T-shirt with the silhouettes of three women on it. Across the top is the word bootylicious.
“Can’t be 1999,” Sydney says. “The shirt is classic Destiny’s Child. ‘Bootylicious’ came out in 2001.”
Kylie frowns and takes the picture back. “You would have been a toddler in 2001. How do you know for sure?”
Sydney finally reaches for the box of Ritz. She tears it open and pops a cracker into her mouth. “For my senior thesis, I wrote about Beyoncé and the cultural impact she’s had on the world of dance,” she says, her mouth full. “I majored in dance in college.”
“Right,” Kylie says, impressed. “You were a showgirl.”
“Yeah, and I look like one now, don’t I.” Sydney runs her fingers through her tangled hair and grimaces. “God, I need a bath—” She stops.
A painful silence falls between them.
In this cabin, baths are a bad thing. Being clean is a bad thing. Being dirty means you’re safe. At least for now.
Sydney opens the jar of Cheez Whiz and uses a plastic fork to spread it as best she can over a slice of Wonder bread.
She eats it quickly and makes herself another.
It’s a good sign that she has an appetite; it means her energy is coming back, and maybe between the two of them they can figure a way out of here. Get creative. Overpower him somehow.
It hadn’t worked with Ingrid, though. Their plan that fateful morning was for Ingrid to lie there, let him do it, and at the right moment, Kylie would find a way get her chain wrapped around his neck.
But Ingrid had panicked. She’d fought him off.
And so, instead of beating her like he usually did, he decided to chop off her foot.
After she finishes eating, Sydney wanders over to the shelf to find a book to read. At least she has the ability to choose something she hasn’t read before, and she seems to gravitate toward the science fiction and fantasy novels that Kylie doesn’t care for.
“This one is nice and fat,” Sydney says, holding a beat-up copy of Lord of the Rings. She flips through a few of the pages. “I read this in seventh grade. This will kill some serious time.”
“You read it in middle school?” Kylie had never read Tolkien until she got to the cabin, and even then, that book was last on her list. “You’re a better woman than me.”
“Who’s Marty?” Sydney asks, sitting back down at the table. “His name is in most of these books. Is he our . . .”
“No idea,” Kylie says. “Thing One has never told me his name.”
“So what do you call him, then?”
“Asshole. Fuck Face. Loser Limp Dick is a personal favorite.”
“Marty . . . Kieswetter.” Sydney runs her finger across the page where his name is written in small, compact cursive. “That has to be his real name.”
“I did ask him once. He told me to stop asking questions.”
Sydney starts reading. Kylie continues to busy herself with the photos, arranging and rearranging.
The girl with the blond hair is not just in the high school photos; she’s also in a house—a kitchen, a living room, and, in a few of them, a bedroom, her blond hair splayed out over the pillow as she sleeps.
In many of the photos where’s she awake, she’s giving the camera her middle finger.
Sydney looks over. “Who is she?”
“I think her name was Lorelei,” Kylie says. “She was murdered when she was fifteen. He was obsessed with her.”
Sydney sets the book in her lap and looks directly at Kylie. “Be straight with me. He killed the one before me, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re thinking he might have killed the girl in these photos?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to end up in a true crime documentary, aren’t we?”
“Yes, and it will do massive streaming numbers because we’re both former reality stars who used to be hot,” Kylie deadpans.
Sydney’s mouth opens as if she’s about to laugh, but instead, all that comes out is a wail. It comes from deep inside her, and it’s a sound of horror, despair, and grief, in equal amounts.
Kylie understands what Sydney is feeling.
Of all the ways her active imagination has pictured her own death—car crash, plane crash, terminal illness, accidental drowning, house fire, exotic incurable virus she picked up from a tropical country she vacationed in—murdered by a serial killer was not on her fucking bingo card.
“Shhhh,” Kylie says. “Easy now.”
“We have to get out of here,” Sydney gasps. “This can’t be how it ends. It just can’t. We have to kill him.”
“He’s too big,” Kylie says. “Trust me, I’ve thought about it. A lot. He’s too tall. And he’s strong. Once, when I tried to fight him off, he picked me up by my neck. My arms couldn’t even reach him. When Ingrid was here, we tried to . . .” She stops and closes her eyes. “It didn’t work.”
“We have to think of something. The next time he’s here, when he’s .
. . with one of us, the other could jump him.
Maybe I could make a shiv out of the plastic fork somehow.
Inmates do that in prison, right? Why can’t we figure out a way to do that here?
” Sydney is talking fast, and it’s clear her mind is working overtime. “There are two of us. We have to try.”
A thought occurs to Kylie then. Sydney’s right. There are two of them, and they have to try, especially since they have an opportunity that never presented itself when Ingrid was here: He’s not around right now. Someone else is bringing them food and supplies. Someone smaller than he is.
“Please tell me you’re with me on this,” Sydney says, the desperation in her voice increasing again. “When Thing One comes back, we have to kill him.”
“Not Thing One,” Kylie says, looking at her cabinmate. “Thing Two.”