Chapter 5
THE CABIN LIES IN THE place between reality and fiction.
He’s the only one who knows about it. Well, he supposes they know about it too, but can they tell anyone about it? No. They can’t even utter a pathetic apology anymore nor a promise to do better. They can’t tell. They can’t make it real. It doesn’t exist.
His hidden cabin is something conjured from a nightmare, truly unable to even call itself a dwelling.
It’s just boards and nails and rancid iniquity, forgotten and maybe never even known.
It’s been there for as long as he has and for who knows how long before that.
Maybe it was divinely placed there for him, a decree that he alone is to cleanse the filth from his little corner of the world.
He stumbled upon it as a kid, probably around age twelve.
He’d been hunting with his father. The old man didn’t even see it, just like he didn’t see a lot of things that interested Philip.
At that particular moment, his father had been focused on a massive stag that loomed off in the distance, completely unaware of them.
It was eating something, masticating with its immense jaws, demonstrating the primal way it could devour him.
Philip was terrified of it. It was enormous and powerful.
He was so sure that it just couldn’t be real, couldn’t be God’s creation.
It was so much like the creatures of folklore, creatures said to guard places like this, keeping evil safe in its domain.
Its size was formidable, but its eyes were what frightened Philip the most. They were two cloudy orbs bulging from its head.
They looked like swirling crystal balls, holding the darkest secrets of his future, ready to burden him with its knowledge if he dared to step closer.
They were forcing themselves from their sockets, barely remaining in the stag’s skull.
It was blind. That much was clear. Blind in practice, but somehow Philip knew it saw more than he could ever hope to escape from.
Tearing his gaze from the creature’s ominous eyes, Philip allowed his own to take in the rest of what was in front of him.
The stag’s antlers were thick and large, but they were broken.
They looked jagged and menacing, jutting out at unnatural angles and appearing sheared off in places.
He wondered how it had happened. What did that?
What other creature could possibly be fierce enough to disfigure a warden of Abaddon?
“Dad,” he said softly, trying to keep his eyes trained on the monster in the forest.
His father shushed him, clicking off the safety on his rifle and holding it steady.
“Dad, do you see that cabin?”
“Philip, wait,” his father growled, almost too low for him to hear.
Philip quieted his questions, looking back and forth between his father’s raised gun and the hellish guardian in the distance.
Everything seemed to go quiet. The world around them muffled, and the stag’s ears twitched, but he kept eating, seemingly oblivious to the executioner in the grass.
His father let out a slow breath and squeezed the trigger.
The shot blasted through the silence, hurting Philip’s ears and making his heart race.
He watched as the stag’s head snapped to attention at the very last second.
He saw the bullet hit the animal dead between its swirling eyes.
A cascade of blood sprayed from the wound, and the blow sent the stag’s head reeling backward. It was a perfect shot.
Then the creature ran off.
His father straightened his posture, swiping the hat from his head and staring at the thicket where the stag had fled. “Did you see that, Philip? I hit it dead to rights!” He was incredulous.
“I saw it.” Philip could barely respond, watching in disbelief himself.
“Let’s go, son!”
Suddenly they were running together. Father and son chasing an indestructible beast through dense thicket and branches. They could see where it had cut through the brush just off the overgrown path. Somehow the stag was still running. It hadn’t stopped, not even for a second.
As they came to a clearing, they burst forth like a rogue wave. Panting and breathless, they both heaved with their hands on their knees.
When Philip looked up, his only reaction was to slap his hands over his mouth, his eyes wide with fear.
“Dad,” he said, his words muffled and broken.
His father looked up. Philip watched as the blood drained from his face. Even his lips went pale.
Together they looked at the stag. The same stag with the broken, jagged antlers and the cloudy eyes. It was standing in the clearing, staring at them without seeing. It was somehow taller and grander than he’d imagined—and it was also uninjured.
Philip searched for the wound, for any evidence of what he had just seen, of the bullet that his father had shot into its skull. There was nothing. No red blood staining its fur, no hole. It was clean. It was impossible.
“Philip, we should go,” his father said. His voice lacked the strength it usually carried.
“Dad, that’s the same stag. His antlers are—”
“Let’s go, son.” He grabbed the back of Philip’s shirt and twisted it, spinning him around and leading him back the way they had come.
They walked for a while in silence. His father held on to him like he was a precious sack of diamonds. After his father finally released him, Philip dared to speak.
“Dad, I saw the bullet hit its head.”
“Me too, Philip.”
“I saw the blood. I saw a lot of blood. There was so much blood … How could it have been standing there?”
His father sighed a weary breath that sounded like it held the weight of the world. “Philip, I think we just saw something we shouldn’t have seen. I think we just crossed paths with a harbinger of evil.”
Philip’s mind reeled. Images of demons and omens and devils flashed before his eyes.
The terrifying stories of evil that he’d been told in church were suddenly coming alive.
As they emerged from the woods, they crossed back into the field next to the cabin.
He looked at it, again feeling its suffocating darkness.
Something ancient radiated from that place, seeping into everything and corrupting the world around it.
The landscape seemed altered. It was as if the land itself had come too close to despair and now possessed a profound melancholy too thick to quell.
“Are we going to be okay?” Philip asked, his gaze fixed on the cabin.
His father hesitated, and Philip finally looked up at him. Sweat dripped from his father’s brow, and his face was flushed. He had never seen his father so scared, so unequivocally disturbed.
“We’ll be okay,” he said after what felt like an eternity. Philip didn’t believe him. He watched his father’s mouth twitch into an uncertain, hardened line.
“I saw this cabin before. I think it might be bad, Dad. I think it might be where the thing came from.” Philip’s eyes couldn’t stay away from it.
There was an undeniable pull that made it impossible for him to look anywhere else.
He felt like he was staring into creation itself, but something about it felt so sinister, not at all like the divine beauty that had been described to him.
His father shook his head without sparing a glance in the direction of the old cabin. “We just chased the real evil, Philip. We chased something beyond our understanding. Something from the bowels of hell.”
The words slapped into Philip hard. Sure, he was scared, terrified even.
But he was also excited. He felt like everything he had ever been taught had been confirmed and dispelled all at once.
It was all real, and it was darker than he knew.
It was at that moment that he knew two things: He would spend the rest of his life trying to run from the rot, trying to stay on the side of the light, and eventually it would consume him.
For years, he thought about it, dreamed of that day in the woods with his father when everything changed.
The cabin wouldn’t let go of him. It pulled him from its location up in the hills, beckoning him to return, to make it a place of importance.
When he was about sixteen, he returned to the cabin alone.
The pull was too much to resist, an intoxicating mix of magic and the divine.
He discovered things about himself there.
It was a way for him to reconcile the darker parts of himself, to commune with nature and find the spiritual solace that he desperately craved.
Out in the forest surrounding that cabin, the immortal stag was everywhere.
It never left that place, and just like when he was twelve, it frightened him and enchanted him in equal measure.
Now, as he steps up into the clearing, carrying a bag and a lantern to light his way, the cabin welcomes him with a comfortable silence.
A loyal friend is hard to find in this world, but Philip could always count on those brittle boards to keep all his secrets.
Creatures of the night move all around him, rustling through the brush and breaking twigs with their strides.
Crickets drone on, lending their music to his passage and muffling the deeply unsettling groans of bullfrogs.
He climbs the ancient steps, and they make cracking sounds that echo off the trees.
The tranquility remains despite the inorganic interruption.
Something moves in the bushes, and he holds the lantern up, wondering if it’s his stag or a creature he’s never met.
As the lantern light shines over the dead grass and dirt, he spots the slightest movement in the tree line.
The lantern light warps and bounces, casting an eerie yellow glow.
He waits a moment, looking for a pair of broken antlers, but nothing steps forward.
After a second, the rustling stills. He abandons his search and unlocks the thick wooden door to the cabin.