I’m itchy again. It’s as if the mold spores have jumped from the cabin and latched on to my skin.
“Seems like most people who do know it’s here just think of it as ruins,” Cooper continues. “But you clear out a few of these trees, and you put in some bone-hard work—new roof, new siding, new porch, new floors—it’d be an incredible property. Some people would probably raze it and start from scratch. Build a twenty-first-century cottage in its place. Give it gas fireplaces and central air. But not me. I would respect the house’s history.”
“Which is what?” I ask. I put my hands beneath my legs to keep from scratching.
“Well, for one thing, it was built in the 1800s. For a while, it stayed within this one family—the McEwans—who passed it down from generation to generation. But according to town records, the last time anyone lived here was in the seventies. Since then it’s been empty. Waiting for me to get my act together and love it into shape.”
My fingers twitch. Something about the house feels familiar.
“Did you take me here before?” I ask. “Me and Kyla? When we were kids?”
The front door used to be blue. It’s gray right now, but I would bet my life that it used to be blue. That when it swings open, it gives a discordant, three-noted creak.
“No,” Cooper says. “Not that I remember. But it’s familiar, isn’t it?”
I nod. “I think I’ve been here before.”
Cooper shrugs. “Maybe. But you probably saw it in Cutthroat Cabin 2.”
I rip my eyes from the house to squint at him. “Huh?”
“Cutthroat Cabin 2? The movie? They filmed the exterior shots here.”
“When?”
“I dunno. Early 2000s? You must’ve seen it. I’d pull up the poster on my phone, but—you know how the reception is here.”
The name of the movie doesn’t ring a bell, and I can’t imagine I saw it. I’ve always hated horror.
“It’s the one with the woman who just got divorced,” Cooper says, “so she goes to the cabin to get away from it all, and pretty soon the walls start bleeding. She was bald for some reason, remember? So every day she put on a different wig, until the last day, when the blood starts coming from her scalp. She tries to put on a wig to stop it, but it seeps through and starts pouring out, and she’s screaming and screaming and…”
I stop hearing him. I remember the movie now. A bleeding head is hard to forget.
I was in ninth grade at the time, and it must have been May because Ted’s semester had recently ended. He called me out of school that day, telling the principal’s secretary that I wouldn’t be in again “until you drop the Earth Science requirement in favor of something far more useful. Freud! Jung! Piaget! Asch!” I laughed as he shouted names into Mrs. Keller’s ear.
We ate leftover Chinese food for breakfast that morning, Ted educating me about all the psychologists that Cedar High was too much of a “spineless giraffe” to teach. Then we microwaved slices of bread, covered them with mayo, and called it lunch. Even as he quizzed me about the scientists he’d just taught me, telling me I was “a brilliant girl” with “an unprecedented mind” every time I answered correctly, I was afraid to speak above a whisper, to laugh louder than a chuckle. I thought that if I did, Ted would realize he was wasting his day by spending it in the kitchen with me, instead of with the books and papers in his office.
“I have a thrilling idea!” Ted said as we ate. “Let’s go to the movies!”
I nearly choked on my crust. Ted didn’t go to the movies. Ted thought the movies were “colorful excrement.” But I didn’t question him as he pushed open the screen door and headed to his car.
In the refrigerated darkness of the theater, Ted laughed at all the previews—the gorier they were, the harder he guffawed. Twenty minutes into the movie, my excitement over our impromptu outing drained from me like blood from a face. The cabin on the screen was veiled in a weblike fog. Its blue door opened with the creaky sound of a witch’s voice. When the walls welled with red, when the woman’s head did, too, I shook in my seat until I couldn’t take it anymore. I covered my eyes with my arm and waited through the woman’s screams and the