12-10-2025, 03:26 PM
Quote:The little girl had quit pounding at the door. It wasn't doing any good.
She couldn't even hear them outside anymore.
The cabin smelled of earth and old decaying wood heavy in the damp still air. It was nearing dark. The light through the cracks in the windowless walls grew dimmer and dimmer.
They'd wedged something into the door frame, a piece of wood or something, and she couldn't budge it. She sat huddled against the sweating, slimy wall, smelling wet clay soil and the rich musky smell of her own tears and thought, nobody will find me.
She imagined them out there in the swamp water somewhere, maybe half a mile away by now—it was possible—slogging through shallow black water and mud that could suck your galoshes off, stabbing at frogs with their two-pronged metal spears. Jimmy would have a few by now dead or dying in his bucket. Billy was not as quick as Jimmy and might have come up empty.
You gotta see this, they'd said. This's cool.
The old log hunter's cabin lay out there in the middle of nowhere, what her daddy called a misbegotten construction that for years had been slowly sinking into the bog. Nobody used it for hunting now.
Liddy was only seven.
She hadn't wanted to go inside.
The boys, Jimmy and Billy, were nine and ten. So why should she have to go in first?
Why was it always her?
She was thinking that but stepping through the open door anyway because they were boys and she couldn't let them know she was scared, when Jimmy pushed her in and hooted with laughter and one of them held the door closed while the other wedged something between the door and its frame and trapped her.
She pounded. Screamed. Cried.
She heard them out there laughing at her and then heard them sloshing through the water.
Then she heard nothing at all. Not for a long time.
She sat huddled by the door, staring down at the earthen floor and wondered if snakes came out at night and if they did would they want to get in here.
She bet it was supper time.