Shards

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  Dawn came and they were still alive. All except for Marcie. Only at the end, they supposed she hadn’t really been Marcie anymore.

  She was the only one who didn’t come to the cabin as part of a couple. Later on, the others—Chad and Annabelle, Mark and Donna—would all privately wonder if Marcie had been targeted the moment she walked through the door. If she’d been singled out for being single.

  It seemed such an absurd notion, but after the night they spent at the cabin, their lives seemed to exist in a series of absurd notions, one following directly after another. The grief counsellors and psychiatrists told them this was a perfectly normal response to the trauma they had endured. That this was the way the human mind functioned when confronted with such terrifying and inexplicable events. The only way to move on was to accept the things that didn’t make any sense.

  Which, to Chad and Annabelle and Mark and Donna, seemed like the most absurd notion of all.

  * * *

  They drove up on a Friday afternoon after classes ended. They went in Chad’s new Expedition, an early graduation present from his parents. Annabelle sat next to him, playing navigator with Google Maps; Mark and Donna were in the back seat holding hands and staring at their smartphones; and Marcie was sprawled in the rear compartment with their luggage and groceries.

  Chad glanced in the rear-view mirror and told her not to eat all their food before they reached the cabin, which earned him double fuck-you fingers from Marcie, who stood six one and weighed a solid two fifty, none of it fat. On the rugby field they called her the Steamroller.

  The others ragged her about her size, but there was never any cruelty in their remarks. No more than the jibes they made about Chad’s thinning hair or Donna’s lazy eye. It was the way they’d always spoken to each other, ever since they were kids. The jokes and taunts that others used to hurt and humiliate, they turned into shields to protect themselves.

  They’d learned early on that even though there was no perfection in the human body, there was plenty to be found in friendship. It was a strange friendship, to be sure. Their families and schoolmates didn’t understand it; they didn’t even understand it themselves. But they didn’t need to. It worked—they worked—and that was all that mattered.

  Looking back, it made a strange kind of sense—an absurd kind of sense, one could say—that they should be the ones who ended up killing Marcie. They would have died for her if the situation had been reversed.

  If you looked at it like that, killing Marcie was really the least they could do.

  * * *

  Still, there were some unanswered questions.

  Like why did they dismember Marcie’s body after they killed her?

  None of them had an answer for that. A fact that—strangely, absurdly—provided even more support for their collective story.

  The grief counsellors and psychiatrists would later say the survivors mutilated their friend’s body because it was the only way they could externalize what they’d done to someone they’d known and loved since early childhood. Decapitating her and severing her limbs was their way of negating that relationship, of turning Marcie into a stranger, which, in a way, is what she had become to them during the course of the event.

  The mutilation may have been vicious and violent, but it was also—strangely, absurdly—healthy.

  * * *

  It was Marcie who found the trap door. She tripped over the ringbolt while they were bringing their stuff into the cabin.

  “The fuck?” she shouted, stumbling forward a few steps and almost dropping the two bags of groceries she was carrying.

  “What’s the matter, Marce?” Annabelle said, dragging her suitcase through the doorway on its small plastic wheels.

  “Damn thing almost killed me.” Marcie went over and nudged the ringbolt with the toe of her shoe. “They should’ve covered it with a rug or something.”

  “They who?” Chad said, stepping around Annabelle with a large cooler. Mark and Donna came in behind him, still holding hands, still on their phones.

  “Whoever you rented this piece-of-shit cabin from.”

  “Hey,” Chad said. “It’s got four walls and a roof. What else do we need?”

  Marcie glared distrustfully at the trap door. “What the hell do you think is down there?”

  Donna shrugged. “Probably the ghost of a demonic entity that will slaughter us all while we sleep.”

  She was wrong, but not entirely.

  * * *

  After they unpacked their bags and put away the groceries, they made a fire in the stone-lined pit out back and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. They washed them down with beer, then moved on to vodka. They finished the bottle—the first bottle—and Mark stuck it between his legs and chased the girls around the yard, thrusting his hips and crying out, Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah!

  Marcie grabbed the bottle and looked at it skeptically. “We’ve all seen your dick, Mark, and this is way too generous. Maybe we could find you one of those little wee bottles you get on airplanes.”

  Mark dropped to his knees, head slumped. “Why you gotta wound me with the truth like that?”

  Donna hugged him. “It’s okay, babe. It’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it.”

  Mark perked up. “I gotta pee.”

  Donna backed away. “You can do that on your own.”

  Mark rose shakily to his feet. “I’m not sure I can.”

  The others watched him stumble off to the edge of the woods. Annabelle intoned in a narrator voice: “The police found his body the following morning. They thought his penis was missing, but it turned out they just had to look really, really hard to see it.”

  They all laughed while Mark peed against an oak tree. He let go of himself to flick double fuck-you fingers over his shoulders, then cursed and brought his hands back around.

  “Don’t get any on ya!” Chad called, and they all laughed again.

  “Too late!” Mark called back. After he was finished he shuffled back to the circle, buttoning his jeans. “What’s the matter, Chad, you couldn’t spring for a place with an outhouse?”

  “The cabin has a bathroom, numbnuts. You’re the one who decided to piss in the woods.”

  “That’s part of the cabin experience,” Mark said solemnly.

  “I’ll be sure to tell that to the owners,” Chad said.

  “Who are the owners?” Marcie asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Chad said. “I found it on Airbnb. Which reminds me…” He gave them his smooth lazy grin, the one that always preceded a bad joke. “After I graduate, I’ve already got an idea for my first entrepreneurial venture. It’s similar to Airbnb, only mine will be aimed at the Spring Break crowd. You know
: beach, booze, and babes. I’m gonna call it AirTnA.”

  The others groaned in unison. Annabelle threw a marshmallow at him. “Pig,” she said, but she was smiling.

  “Seriously,” Marcie said. She gestured at the cabin with the hot dog skewered on her stick. “Who owns this dump?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Chad said. “I checked the listings for a cabin in the woods, someplace within driving distance of the city, and this one looked good.”

  “And by ‘good’ you mean ‘bad,’” Annabelle said.

  “Didn’t you talk to someone?” Marcie asked.

  “No,” Chad said. “I emailed. They quoted a price, I paid it, and here we are. What’s the big deal?”

  An awkward silence descended, threatening the pleasant mood of the evening. Since Marcie was the cause of this particular bring-down, she knew it was her responsibility to provide the requisite counterweight to bring it up again.

  “Whatever they charged,” she said, “it was too much. Just like your mom.”

  They all looked at her for a short beat, then burst out laughing.

  Tragedy averted, Marcie thought.

  And it was.

  For the moment.

  * * *

  They went inside when the temperature began to drop.

  Chad started another fire, this one in the big fieldstone hearth, while Annabelle made a round of drinks. Donna was checking her phone and marvelling at the excellent coverage they got way out here in the sticks. Mark was still outside, putting out the old fire and gathering up their trash.

  Marcie was in the main room, staring at the trap door.

  “If you’re just going to stand there,” Chad said, kneeling in front of the fire, “could you at least be useful and hand me some more kindling?” He pointed at the pile of cut wood next to the rack of fireplace tools.

  Marcie picked up a piece and handed it to him without taking her eyes off the trap door.

  She couldn’t stop looking at it. When she was outside, sitting with the others around the fire, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. It was like when she tripped over the ringbolt something had dislodged in her brain, and now it was rattling around in there like the only penny in a piggy bank.

  What was down there? she wondered. Anything was the answer. Including nothing.

  But she didn’t believe there was nothing. No, there was definitely something down there. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Something … or someone?

  No. There was no one down there. She was sure of that, not because of any particular reason but rather a feeling that was telling her—insisting to her—that there was something down there. Something other than dust and dirt.

  But what?

  She didn’t know, and while a part of her was okay with not knowing, a bigger part was not okay, because the not-knowing side was motivated by fear. She was afraid of opening the trap door and going into the cellar. She was afraid of what she might find. And she couldn’t accept that.

  She took a deep breath, then blew it out. She needed to keep herself together. Her coach said fear was the forerunner of failure. Pretty words, Marcie thought, but they didn’t mean squat on the rugby field. She was the Steamroller, for god’s sake. Was she really going to be stopped in her tracks by a trap door that didn’t even look strong enough to take her full weight standing on top of it?

  “Fuck no,” she muttered.

  “Fuck what?” Chad said, jabbing at the burning kindling with a brass poker.

  When he didn’t get a reply, he looked over his shoulder.

  Marcie was gone and the trap door was open.

  * * *

  Annabelle was handing out drinks. When she was done she had an extra one. “Where’s Marce?” she asked.

  Chad jerked his thumb at the trap door. “Down in the cellar.”

  Donna snickered. “We’ll probably never see her again.”

  “You’re one cold bitch,” Chad said.

  “The coldest,” Donna said, her eyes glued to her phone.

  Annabelle carried her drink (gin and tonic) and Marcie’s (rum and coke) over to the opening in the floor and peered inside. She couldn’t see anything beyond the first few steps of the wooden stairs descending into darkness below.

  “Marcie!” she called down. “What are you doing?”

  There was no reply.

  Annabelle crouched, balancing the drinks on her knees, and tilted her head at a listening angle.

  She couldn’t hear a thing from the cellar, which seemed strange to her. If Marcie was down there, she should’ve been able to hear her moving around. Marcie was a lot of things, Annabelle thought, but light on her feet wasn’t one of them.

  “Come on, Marce.” Her mouth had gone dry and she swallowed with an audible click. “If you’re joking around, it isn’t funny.”

  Mark came in the back door carrying a half-full garbage bag. “Shut the trap door and lock her in there,” he said. “Now that would be funny.”

  Annabelle frowned at him, then turned back to the square-shaped hole in the floor. Locking Marcie in the cellar wouldn’t be funny, but it would teach her a lesson. Teach her not to scare her friends like this.

  Annabelle stood up and was actually extending her foot to push the door closed when she heard something from below.

  It was a low scratching sound, almost like radio static, but gone so quickly she wasn’t sure if she’d only imagined it.

  She crouched back down and leaned forward, keeping the glasses in her hands upright so they wouldn’t spill. She tilted her head to the side again, like a satellite dish trying to pick up a stray signal.

  She reached the tipping point and was trembling on the balls of her feet when Marcie’s face appeared out of the darkness and said, “Boo!”

  Annabelle squealed and fell over backwards. The glasses flew out of her hands and spilled their contents across the plank floor. The others turned in unison, their startled faces turning to puzzlement as they watched Marcie climb out of the cellar.

  She was carrying a record player.

  * * *

  It was a very old device—a gramophone, according to Donna, the music major—with a hand-crank on the side and a big brass horn that looked like a metallic flower in full bloom. Instead of a needle at the end of the tone arm, there was a curved hook of smoky black glass.

  Marcie put it on the coffee table and they all gathered around it.

  “It was just sitting there on the dirt floor,” she said.

  “Sweet,” Donna said. “We need some tunes.”

  Annabelle reached for the hook at the end of the tone arm.

  “Careful,” Marcie said. “It’s sharp.” She showed a cut on the pad of her index finger, still weeping a bit of blood.

  There was a record on the turntable, a plain black disc with no label.

  “What do you think it is?” Chad wondered.

  “Nicki Minaj?” Donna said.

  The others laughed, then a deep silence fell over the room as they examined the gramophone.

  Donna ran her hands along its smooth wooden sides.

  Chad tipped his head toward the brass horn.

  Marcie put her finger on the record and rotated it slowly around.

  Annabelle reached out for the hand-crank.

  Something might have happened in that moment, but the silence was broken by the plastic rustling sound of Mark digging around in the garbage bag. Snapped out of their collective trance, the others turned to face him.

  Mark was holding the empty vodka bottle. He grinned mischievously as he waggled it back and forth in his hand.

  “Wanna play a game?”

  * * *

  They lost interest in the gramophone after that. All except for Marcie.

  She was still kneeling on the floor in front of it, spinning the record around and around.

  The others were on the far side of the room, sitting in a circle around the bottle.

  Annabelle said she didn’t want to
play. Chad told her not to be a prude, and she accused him of only wanting to play so he could kiss Donna. Chad said his real plan was to see her and Donna kiss. Donna said she wanted to see Chad and Mark kiss. Annabelle shook her head and proclaimed them all childish. Donna said they’d be graduating soon and this would be their last chance to be childish, so they should enjoy it. Annabelle said fine, as long they didn’t enjoy it too much, and shot a pointed look at Chad.

  Mark put his hand on the bottle. “I’ll start.”

  He gave it a spin.

  Across the room, Marcie turned the hand-crank on the gramophone.

  The record began to spin, too.

  * * *

  When the turntable was going at a good, steady speed, Marcie lifted the tone arm and placed the needle on the spinning record.

  No, she thought. Not the needle. The Shard.

  She wondered where that thought had come from, but only for a second, then she inclined her head toward the brass horn.

  There was nothing at first except the hollow sound of dead air and the low, expectant scratch of the needle.

  The Shard.

  Marcie leaned closer, wondering if it no longer worked, if a record could die like an old battery.

  She heard only faint scratching, and was about to pull her head back when she realized the scratching wasn’t random: it had a pattern to it. It wasn’t scratching at all. It was a voice, a very low voice, and it was speaking to her, whispering to her. Asking her a question.

  Wanna play a game?

  * * *

  A blast of sound exploded from the gramophone. A fusillade of horns so loud it knocked Marcie onto her back.

  The squall rose to an ear-splitting level, then tripped back down the scale in a stuttering staccato that made everyone in the room feel as if icy fingers were tickling along their spines.

  Their heads were all turned toward Marcie and the sounds coming from the gramophone—oblivious to the bottle in the center of their circle that continued to spin and spin.