Why do the window shutters close themselves at sunset? What's buried beneath the floorboards that keeps scratching upward? Which previous tenants carved warnings into the cellar walls? And why does the fireplace burn cold flames that cast no light but plenty of shadows?
Follow Cthulhu Architect on BlueSky!
“It is good to know that out there, in a forest in the world, there is a cabin where something is possible…”
― Sylvain Tesson, Dans les forêts de Sibérie
The cabin stood like a wound in the forest’s flesh, its weathered boards drinking in the perpetual twilight that filtered through the canopy above. Sarah had found it marked on her grandfather’s survey maps, a small square of ink that seemed to pulse with significance among the sprawling wilderness. The inheritance papers mentioned it only in passing---a “hunting lodge of modest construction”---but something in the way the lawyer’s eyes had darted away when she asked about it made her stomach clench with anticipation.
The path to the cabin had been overgrown, brambles catching at her clothes like desperate fingers. Wild roses, their blooms an unnaturally deep crimson, formed a thorny corridor that seemed to guide her forward. The air grew thicker as she walked, heavy with the scent of rich earth and something else---something that reminded her of the meat locker in her uncle’s butcher shop, sweet and metallic.
Inside, the cabin was smaller than she’d expected, dominated by a stone fireplace that yawned like a hungry mouth. The walls were lined with photographs, faces she didn’t recognize staring out with eyes that seemed to follow her movements. Her grandfather appeared in several, always standing slightly apart from the others, his expression unreadable. In the corner, a leather-bound journal lay open on a rough wooden table.
The entries began mundanely enough---weather observations, hunting notes, philosophical musings about solitude. But as she turned the pages, the handwriting became more erratic, the content increasingly bizarre. Her grandfather wrote of sounds in the forest, of trees that whispered secrets in languages that predated human speech. He described finding clearings where the earth was bare and warm, even in winter, and of dreams that felt more real than his waking hours.
The final entry, dated just three months before his death, consisted of a single line repeated dozens of times: “The forest remembers everything.” Below it, in fresh ink that couldn’t have been more than days old, someone had written: “Welcome home, Sarah.”
That night, she understood what he meant. The cabin’s walls seemed to breathe around her, expanding and contracting with a rhythm that matched her heartbeat. Through the windows, she could see figures moving between the trees---tall, impossibly thin shapes that glided rather than walked. They were gathering, forming a circle around the cabin, their presence patient and expectant.
When she finally slept, she dreamed of roots growing through the floorboards, wrapping around her limbs with gentle insistence. She dreamed of joining the photographs on the wall, of becoming another face to watch over future visitors. In her dreams, she could taste the forest’s ancient hunger, and she found herself welcoming it like an old friend.
Morning came, but Sarah did not leave. The cabin had claimed another keeper, another guardian of its secrets. Soon, the lawyer would mark her as missing, and the cycle would begin again. The forest, after all, remembers everything---and it never forgets to feed.
