Deidre grabbed Becky and pulled her back inside before she could leave. Becky struggled against her friend, but Deidre found some unknown source of strength and wrestled Becky to the floor.

“Let me go,” Becky yelled.

“Becky, Becky, please, please, please—try to calm yourself,” Deidre said. She was sobbing now, distraught over Becky’s distress and sorry that she’d had to restrain her.

Becky slumped against Deidre, drained of all her strength. “Why did he leave?”

“I don’t know. But we have to stay here. Maybe he’ll come back.”

“He took the axe,” Becky said.

“There’s another one,” said Deidre. “A small one hanging on the wall.”

Becky turned and looked at the wall. She spotted the axe, which was held in place by a couple of nails. “That wasn’t there last night.”

“Are you sure?”

“I swear it wasn’t there last night.”

Deidre got up and took down the axe.

The door burst open, and Deidre spun around and hurled the axe toward it. The axe embedded itself in the door frame, inches from where Eddie stood in the open doorway.

“Oh my god, I could’ve killed you!” Deidre said.

“It’s okay,” Eddie said. “I’m okay.” He pulled the axe loose and shut the door. Then he handed the hatchet back to Deidre.

“What’s out there?” Becky asked.

“Nothing. Everything looks perfectly normal. No weird shadows, no homicidal vines, nothing.”

“What’s that tapping sound?” Deidre asked as the windows began to rattle. It sounded like buckshot was hammering against the cabin.

“Sleet, freezing rain, hail,” Eddie said.

“It sounds like the mother of all ice storms,” Becky said.

“There’s something about this cabin, isn’t there?” Deidre asked as she stared at the wall and then looked at the axe in her hand. Eddie nodded as he looked at the axe clasped in his own grip.

“Maybe there’s something to that old man’s ravings,” Becky said. “Maybe there’s an answer here in the cabin.”

They glanced around the cabin as if they were searching for something, but they didn’t know what.

“What about those news clippings and obituaries?” Becky asked.

Eddie shrugged and went to the wooden table where they’d found the newspaper articles and death notices. He opened a drawer and found the clippings and then rummaged through the drawer to see what else he could find.

“Well, look at this,” he said after he was finished with the drawer.

“What did you find?” Becky asked.

He held up an old manifest. “I found a couple of books too.”

He took the discoveries to the table where they had eaten the night before and spread out the material. They sat down, and Eddie examined the old manifest, while Becky checked the news clippings and Deidre thumbed through the books.

“Didn’t you say those clippings referred to the Atherton Airline deaths?” Eddie asked.

Becky nodded.

“Well, you aren’t going to believe this, but this manifest is a record of lodge visitors. Some of the names are highlighted, including a Loth, a Tulgrin, and a Sully. Any of those match any of the clippings?”

Becky shuffled through the clippings and then looked at Eddie. “There are obits here for all three.”

They searched the cabin and found a couple of cardboard boxes filled with more newspaper clippings. They spread the clippings on the floor, and Eddie continued to scrutinize the manifest. He counted 666 names that were highlighted. Of those 666 names, Becky found obituaries for 665 of them.

“Who are we missing?” Becky asked.

“Graybeard,” Eddie said, pointing to a circled name on the last page of the manifest. “He isn’t listed as a guest, yet his name was written in on the back page, highlighted, and circled. I think he was a local.”

“I think he was the groundskeeper,” Deidre said, as she pulled an old picture from between the pages of a tattered paperback novel. “Look.”

She set a photograph on the table, and Eddie and Becky looked at it.

“The groundskeeper and the old blind guy, Lou Graybeard, are one and the same,” Eddie said.

“No, that doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t make any sense,” Deidre said. “We saw that ghost on the lake, and even the groundskeeper talked about him, saying it was his brother.”

“No, he didn’t call him his brother, he said he was his twin, the good part of him,” Becky said.

“I think they tried their experiments on him, maybe even drove him mad, but he was onto them, so they snuffed him out,” Deidre said.

Becky stared into the mirror that hung on the wall above the dresser as Eddie and Deidre continued to talk. Fear had overcome her so profoundly that she felt paralyzed. Suddenly, her chair flew backward and clattered to the floor as she leaped up, a horrified look on her face.

“Becky, what’s wrong?” Deidre said.

Becky pointed at the mirror. In the glass was the reflected image of Lou Graybeard, the quirky old groundskeeper. The image showed him standing next to them, gazing at them.

Eddie spun around to look at the spot where Graybeard should have been standing, but he wasn’t in the room. Eddie looked back at the mirror. Lou Graybeard was pointing at a dusty hearth rug in the corner of the room. Eddie walked to the rug and moved it aside. There were hairline cracks in the wooden floor. He pulled up a loose floorboard and saw the old diary that was hidden there. When they looked in the mirror again, the image of Graybeard was gone.

They took turns reading from the diary, learning the dark secrets of the lodge and its original master. According to the notes and entries of the man known as Lou Graybeard, that original master—the man in the portrait above the lodge’s hearth—was a psychiatrist, and the lodge had once been his private mental hospital. Most of his patients were prisoners from local prisons or juvenile delinquents from local reform schools. The doctor claimed he could rehabilitate them all, through his own unique treatment method, a combination of ancient folk traditions—what some people might call black magic—and prefrontal lobotomy. When the medical board and state inspected the facility after deaths were reported, they shut him down. The doctor’s family turned the hospital into a resort, and the doctor disappeared shortly after.

When they were finally finished reading the diary, it was past midnight. They’d been so rapt by their discoveries that they’d forgotten to eat, but now hunger was insistently gnawing at them. As Deidre closed the diary and set it on the table, Becky got up and stoked the fire. She found some canned goods to heat for a quick meal, and before long the cabin was filled with the aroma of Vienna sausages simmering in a pot of baked beans.

“Do you believe any of this?” Deidre asked as they ate their meal.

“I believe all of it,” Eddie replied. “With what we’ve been through, it makes perfect sense.”

“Wait a minute,” Becky said. “Are you saying that the doctor’s family is continuing his horrible experiments on people, and we’re simply their latest test subjects?”

“Yes,” Eddie replied. “His family is as crazy as he was, and I believe they continue to find subjects to participate in his bizarre experiments. That’s why those names were highlighted on the lodge’s guest manifest.”

“I’m confused,” Deidre said. “If what you’re saying is true, then is what we’ve been through just a bunch of hallucinations?”

“Graybeard wrote about ghosts and mental trips in his diary,” Eddie said. “His writings eventually become so irrational that I can’t tell if we’re dealing with dead spirits or a bad acid trip, but either way, we’re in real danger. We’ve already lost Brian and most likely Artie.”

“I still don’t get it,” Becky said. “Graybeard’s notes say the axes were blessed by a medicine man, and he used them to protect this cabin. Then he mentions something about the signs keeping out evil. Doesn’t that suggest that we’re dealing with the paranormal rather than drug-induced hallucinations? Or was Graybeard just nuts?”

“Or, like Eddie said, maybe he was driven nuts by the experiments,” Deidre said.

“I don’t care if it’s evil spirits, or we’re all tripping, but this ends tomorrow,” Eddie said. “One way or the other, these axes act as some sort of protection, and I intend to use mine to get us out of here, even if I have to kill that whole sick family.”

“But it makes a difference,” Becky said. “We should know what we’re up against.”

“I tend to think it’s all a hallucination, and somehow these weapons break the veil of illusion enough to protect whoever is having the hallucination,” Eddie said. “That old man was onto it and meant to put a stop to it. That’s when they must have drowned him. I intend to finish his job and put an end to this family’s sick crimes.”

“There are still too many questions,” Becky said. “If this is a big experiment and we’re not being chased by ghosts, how did they inject the drugs?”

“The food,” Deidre said. “It had to be the food.”

“We’ve got enough information to put an end to this,” Eddie said. “Let’s get a few hours of sleep, and I’ll head back to the lodge in the morning and stop all of this.”

“You’ll head back?” Becky said.

“It’s going to be dangerous, and there’s no sense in all of us going. You two will be safe here, we already know that.”

The two women eventually agreed to Eddie’s plan, and they soon found the comfort of sleep.

“Now, remember, stay together, and no matter what, don’t leave this cabin,” Eddie said. “I’ll be back before nightfall.”

Eddie hugged Deidre and then embraced Becky for a long moment. “Don’t answer this door for anyone but me,” he told them. He hugged Becky one last time and then left the cabin.

Eddie pushed the door closed and slapped it lightly as if to say goodbye. He glanced around, looking for any signs of life. He pulled the heavy Army jacket that he had found in the cabin tight around him and started up the hill, his head bent toward the ground to protect his eyes from the icy rain.

The trail seemed to go on for miles, but Eddie knew it was a hallucination, a mere mirage that had been induced by the drugs he had secretly been given. He was convinced that he and his friends had become the unfortunate subjects of a sick experiment performed by a group of twisted and sadistic would-be mad scientists.

Hallucination or not, Eddie was tired and needed to stop for a rest. He found a spot of dry ground under the branches of a tree and sat down, leaning back against the tree. The forest canopy was so thick there that not a drop of rain had seeped through. Eddie scooped up some dead leaves into a pile next to the tree and sat back down in it. The leaves crunched and crackled and felt almost warm, almost inviting. Eddie closed his eyes and listened. All he could hear was the sound of rain. He stretched his legs out in front of him and opened his eyes. He thought he saw something in his peripheral vision and turned toward it. He picked up his axe and stood up. He looked around and then walked cautiously toward what appeared to be a makeshift grave marker. He bent down to look at it.

Lou Graybeard 1940–

Eddie was confused. Graybeard was dead, yet the year of his death was missing from the marker. “I’m hallucinating,” Eddie murmured to himself.

He gritted his teeth and headed back to the trail, determined to get to the lodge and put an end to the crimes and craziness. When he looked up to get his bearings, he realized that he was once again at the bottom of the path. He looked around. The tree he’d been resting beneath was gone. He looked back. He was standing next to the lake. Shadows flickered under the surface, and Eddie raised his axe. The shadows disappeared.

“Hallucinations upon hallucinations,” he muttered. He didn’t know if he was really standing by the lake. He turned and peered into the woods, looking for the old cabin. It was gone. He smiled in spite of himself and wondered how it was possible to control someone else’s hallucinations from a distance. He sighed and headed back into the woods, still set on reaching the top of the hill before nightfall.

But nightfall came on suddenly, only minutes after he began his trek. He clenched his jaws and pressed on through the darkness. The sun rose in a pink sky and raced overhead. It set in a blaze of red, and night came again. Eddie kept walking. Dawn broke, and a bright sun illuminated the forest, which turned dark again as the sun dropped below the horizon and a half moon appeared. Another sunrise, another day, another night, and the moon was bigger now, but then it was gone, and then it was there, but Eddie couldn’t remember if another day had passed. But it must have because the moon was full now, but then it was gone again, and the sun was up, and then it was dark again, and the moon was a thin crescent speeding across the night sky.

Eddie dropped to his knees and squeezed his eyes closed. He wanted to scream. His breaths were coming in ragged rasps, and he felt a sob poised to burst out of him. He focused on his breathing, took deep regular breaths, until he felt calm again. He opened his eyes. He saw the uppermost part of the lodge. And there, in the middle distance, was the edge of a clearing. He was tired and hungry, ravenous even, as if he’d neither slept nor eaten during the accelerated time that had passed—or seemed to pass—in a lightning round of diurnal madness. He felt so exhausted that he could barely hold on to his axe.

He knew it was all in his head, everything, the rapidly flashing days and nights, even his hunger and fatigue. He forced himself to get up. He stumbled toward the clearing. He cast his gaze upward—the lodge was still there but no closer. He reached the clearing and saw an oversized pipe emerging from the ground and leading down toward the lake. He walked to the middle of the clearing and heard a hollow sound under his feet. Suddenly, the ground gave way, and he fell through the rusted cover of a cistern.

It wasn’t deep, and the softened bottom broke his fall, but he had landed in a foot of freezing water. He shivered and then remembered his axe. He plunged his hands into the water and began searching, but all he found was mud. He stood up, panic beginning to seize hold. The axe was his only protection against the horror, and now it was gone. He gazed up at the opening. The light faded, and darkness came, and he saw the moon appear for a moment as it sped across the night sky. He felt something touch his shoulders, and he jumped and spun around. He was surrounded by dozens of children crowding in against him. The touch on his shoulders became a hard shove as the spirits forced him down to his knees. Eddie heard himself scream, heard the wind outside howl. He screamed again, but the scream faded to a strangled breath. The last thing Eddie thought before he died was that he was no longer hallucinating.

“What was that?” Becky said, startled by a noise that sounded like a distant scream or a howl. They were sitting at the table, absently reading the old paperbacks they’d found the day before.

“Coyote maybe?” Deidre said.

“Eddie should’ve been back by now. I’m getting worried.”

“No, it’s too soon to worry. He needs time. He figures we’re safe, so he might try to get some help before he comes back for us.”

Becky nodded and stood up from the table. “I’ll fix us some lunch.”

She went to the cupboard and scanned the shelves, which held cans of soup, baked beans, vegetables, Spam, sardines, tuna, and corned beef along with boxes of noodles and cereal and bags of rice. There were even a few cans of bread among the delicacies.

“What would you like to eat?” Becky asked after surveying the provisions.

“Surprise me.”

Becky heated a couple of cans of chicken noodle soup and added a cup of dry noodles to create a hearty and filling lunch. She opened a can of brown bread and cut a few slices to serve with the soup.

As they sat down at the small table to eat their meal, the cabin walls began to whisper. They set down their spoons and listened. An insistent knocking sound on the door startled them, and they got up from the table and stared at it. The knocking stopped and then resumed, but now it was coming from all around the house, as if twenty people were outside rapping on the walls.

Something fell down the chimney and into the fireplace, nearly putting out the fire. The floor seemed to shift under them, as if an earthquake were rumbling through. Deidre and Becky stared in horror as a hand reached down into the fireplace. It clutched at the stones that formed an arch at the top of the fireplace, as if someone was trying to pull himself down.

“It’s coming in!” Becky screamed. Deidre ran to the fireplace and swung her hatchet, burying the blade into the scrabbling hand. An unearthly scream echoed from the chimney, and the fire went out, scattering ashes around the room. Deidre pulled the axe away, and the hand disappeared back up the chimney.

The knocking on the door and walls intensified, and they heard the sound of heavy footsteps walking back and forth on the porch. The walls continued to whisper and seemed to be moving in and out, as if they were breathing.

“We’re trapped,” Becky cried.

Something thudded against the door, and they turned toward it. The window next to the door rattled, and they heard a long moan, like a strong gust of wind howling around a corner. Deidre saw a skull in the window and screamed. The candles blew out, and she saw shadows flow past another window. They looked like the shadows of children. The sounds were everywhere now, thudding, rapping, knocking, rattling, moaning, and howling. Shadows and wraiths were flickering like a strobe light. Something banged down on the roof, once, twice, three times.

Becky and Deidre huddled together in the middle of the room. Deidre kept a firm grip on the axe. They expected the windows to shatter and the door to burst open, but they held, despite the banging and pounding.

“We’ll be all right,” Deidre whispered. “Eddie will make it back. We have the axe, and we have food. If they could get in, they’d be in by now.”

Becky nodded, but she was trembling. Deidre realized that she was trembling as well.

The noises eventually subsided and ceased. Silence fell, except for the sound of snow falling.

Deidre went to the fireplace and put on another log. She peered through the windows for signs of Eddie—or floating skulls or ghostly children—but all she could see was snow piling higher outside the cabin.

Weeks passed, and Eddie never returned. It was just the two of them now, two lone women stranded in a cabin somewhere in the middle of Hell. Deidre wondered how much longer they could survive. There was still some food left, and an endless supply of well water to pump, but the pile of logs for the fireplace was dwindling. They might have to venture outside and search for more, probably have to use the small axe to cut some branches from fallen trees.

Deidre lost track of the days. She awoke early one morning, when it was still dark, hunger pangs reminding her of their plight. She heard Becky’s deep breathing nearby and decided to try to fall back to sleep. It was no use, but she stayed where she was until the first rays of the early morning sun peeped through the forest.

Deidre got up and went to the cupboard. She was starving now, ready to wolf down a can of baked beans or a can of peas without bothering to heat it. As the morning sunlight penetrated the cabin windows, she opened the cupboard door and was jolted by what she saw there. Stacks of wide-mouth canning jars, which had held peaches, pears, and tomatoes, were filled with a reddish, jelly-like substance swarming with maggots. Deidre staggered backwards and then twisted away from the horror and bent over in a fit of dry heaves.

Becky woke up and stared at her.

“Water,” Deidre whispered.

Becky went to the sink and began to pump some well water. A viscous sludge the color of blood poured from the tap. Becky screamed and stepped back and nearly collided with Deidre.

They stood in the middle of the cabin, trembling with fear and disgust. That’s when they heard the knocking.

“They’re back,” Becky said.

The walls were whispering again, and once more seemed to bulge slightly and then draw back, as if they were breathing. The rapping sounds came, but this time a new sound accompanied the rapping and whispering.

“It sounds like someone is outside scratching at the walls,” Becky said.

Deidre hefted her small axe, ready to fight. “Why don’t they come in?”

“I don’t know,” Becky said. “Maybe they can’t. Maybe this cabin really is safe from them.”

Deidre stared at her. “I don’t feel safe.”

“What do we do?”

“All we can do is wait.”

They waited. The scratching, the breathing, the whispering, and the knocking continued, with no letup. The day faded to dusk, and still the noise continued. Only when the sun set did the noise finally fade.

“Is it over?” Becky asked.

Deidre opened her mouth to reply, but she saw something out of the corner of her eye. The grain patterns on the wooden planks that formed the walls were moving. They began to swirl and then rise out of the wood, like streamers of smoke rising from a campfire. The air in the cabin seemed to shimmer, and the whirling grain patterns resolved into three-dimensional portraits of children. The two women gasped, and the eerie images of the ghost children opened their eyes at the same time and grinned at them.

The front door burst open, and a blast of wind howled into the room. The shadows flinched, and the smiles left their faces.

“Get out,” a voice whispered.

Deidre and Becky headed for the open door and ran outside. Apparitions filled the cabin and shrieked at the fleeing women. The shadows inside the cabin raced toward the door, but it slammed shut on them. The last thing Deidre and Becky heard from the cabin was the sound of tiny hands beating against the door and walls from the inside.