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There are no other houses nearby, and if not for the distant town it overlooks, a visitor to this cabin might get the impression that she was entirely cut off from the world.
Carrot was cognizant of everything going on around her. And that is what made her so frightening.
There is a brief moment at night when the brain is neither awake nor asleep, but somewhere in between. In that moment, I sometimes hear things – distant voices or odd sounds.
There was definitely something strange up here on the mountain.
I learned from them that Carrot never spoke again.
Her ghostly appearance and the fear in her voice frightened me. “I heard someone outside,” she continued. “Someone calling for help.”
“You know when you’re a kid and you see a shadow on your wall at night, and it looks like a monster? Or when you see animals in the clouds? That’s pareidolia. And it happens with sound, too. The wind blows through a cave or something just right, and people think they hear a voice. Your brain even makes words out of it, in the language you know best.”
I believed that someone was wandering around out here last night. Someone who had no business being out here in the freezing dark.
“Son of a bitch is casing the house,” I whispered back, “trying to figure out how to get in.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel crazy. I’m just not ready to accept that we’re being stalked on a mountain six miles away from the nearest town. In a blizzard.
Faye has an undiagnosed sleep disorder. She regularly talks in her sleep – usually funny things like sassing her coworkers – and sometimes sleepwalks. She even suffers from sporadic bouts of night terrors, which are a bit like nightmares, except the monsters and killers don’t disappear when she opens her eyes.
This was the first moment at the cabin that I felt we were truly in danger. My senses sharpened into razors. My brain shut down all complex tasks and diverted full power to a primal survival mode. I grabbed Faye and dragged her down to the floor.
“When do we go insiiiide? When do we go insiiiide?”
As I hit the switch for the back porch, the distinct silhouette of a person glowed through the window curtain. It looked like a woman. She pressed herself against the glass with her hands cupped around her face, trying to peer inside.
“He’s still out there,” Faye said from the kitchen. “He’s just standing there.”
squinted through the gloom and made out a figure sitting atop the roof of the car.
“Jennifer and Tom were dealing with the death of their child, sweetheart. Of course weird things happened to them. It’s a traumatic experience. It can drive you crazy.
Them clothes were all over the ground, some on the bed. Like somebody was smellin’ ‘em, or maybe even tryin’ ‘em on. “We also found some big black stains on the carpet, in both the living room and bedroom. Smelled ungodly. Still can’t figure out how they got in.”
Faye’s dreams were often complex and metaphorical. Even when neither of us could understand them, I always got the sense that her dreams – even her nightmares – carried a deeper meaning.
What if the phrase “When do we go insiiiiiiide?” didn’t refer to the cabin at all? Perhaps instead, it referred to Faye herself.
She was crawling around on the floor, laughing and smiling with her eyes rolled back in her head.
Faye, fast asleep beside me. Someone else was sitting on the bed.
the Natives of Canada are sometimes called ‘First People.’
“Something about that room feels really off. I think that’s where she lets him in.”
You could call these creatures the hollow ones. They’re jealous of living things, and the joy of this world. Jealous of its sunlight. They have none of it.”
“The legend says they try to coax children and gullible people into the dark with them. Take them away. I don’t know much more than that.”
“Don’t listen to it. Don’t talk to it. And don’t leave her alone with it. I’m sorry, Felix. I wish I knew how to help.”
As I had suspected, her engagement ring was nowhere to be found.
Faye rolled toward me so that our noses touched. Her eyes were open and rolled far back in her head. She smiled and ran a fingernail across my cheek, pretending to carve ribbons of flesh. She reminded me of a butcher delicately assessing a filet. “They’re gonna kill you,” she whispered – then licked my face.
some backwoods creep stalking my partner after spotting her at the cabin, or a demonic entity from some distant dimension preying upon her soul.
couldn’t trust my own reason anymore.
Find the ring. Get the ring.
If I could get the ring back, maybe I could get my fiancée back too.
“That cabin...” she said, taking a deep breath, “Faye’s been there before. Only once. It’s where her night terrors started. Something happened up there, Felix.”
“She was just a little girl,” Lynn whispered, new tears rolling down her face. “She was only five years old.”
If it wasn’t for Lynn and Greg’s horrible negligence, none of this would have happened.
“You’ll die up here. There’s no hope for Faye.”
I somehow managed to drift into a fitful sleep, but was awoken a little before midnight by a new sound. Someone tapped on the window in the living room.
What if the nude woman on my car was the real Faye, and she’d been out in the forest all along? What if she had died out there weeks ago, and the woman sleepwalking around my house was some wicked simulacrum?
“This creature is one of the first beings, is what he means,”
“My people gave him the name At’an-A’anotogkua,” he said quietly. “The term refers to water, and how it is formless until it fills a vessel. Angela wasn’t wrong when she called him the ‘hollow one,’ because there is no direct translation, really. Maybe it is more accurate to call him ‘the Impostor,’ because this being fills himself with the life force of his prey.”
Legend says they wanted the wolves to eat the meat on their legs, so that the Pozi could never make the journey back to their homeland – even in death.”
“But once, many of our people thought that the Impostors snuck into our world from time to time, looking for things they coveted. We believed that they are sometimes drawn to the sites of terrible suffering – like here on Pale Peak.
“Shortly after the Pozi slaughter, the Ineho suffered a tragedy of their own. Every child in one of their villages disappeared.
“But my people told a different story. They believed the At’an-A’anotogkua had come to the mountain, and called out to the children in the night. He killed a few of them and stole their skin and hair, and hung them up in the trees for the villagers to find. Then, posing as a child, he led the rest deep down into the mines. They were never seen again, but their voices still echo on the mountain.”
dreamcatchers were made for protection and balance. This one was made using symbols of death.”
He was listening to us all the time, crouching beneath the windows and memorizing how we spoke.
It looked like a man, except all the limbs were slightly elongated.
He wanted entry not only to our home, but to Faye’s soul – and yet he seemed to need her permission.
‘They’re gonna kill me tonight.’”
