The Cabin That Hears Your Scream
When the road vanished behind you and the trees pressed close as if listening for a secret you carried, you found the cabin. It stood there like an old memory, weather-beaten, the kind of place you only notice after you’ve passed through it once and never forgot the way the air tasted metallic. They call it a place for the restless—but the restless aren’t always the ones who need a rest.
Inside, the air was thick with resin and a damp fear that clung to your skin. The walls wore the sorrow of a thousand winters, and the clock on the wall seemed to count down not seconds but breaths. Every shutdown of a door released a new whisper, every creak felt less like wood splitting and more like a voice clearing its throat to speak your name. You tried to tell yourself you were just tired, but the room was listening, patient as a hunter.
“The cabin doesn’t care for your secrets. It keeps them for itself, folding sound into something heavier than fear.”
As night pooled in the corners, you began to notice patterns—signals the cabin sent you to confirm you were praying to the right god or the right goddamn weather. The door hummed when you spoke too loudly; a chair slid an inch if you asked it to stay still; the fireplace warmed only when your heartbeat rose in a particular rhythm. You kept a journal, but the pages filled with doodles of echoes, not words.
- The porch boards click in time with your breath, as if the floor was listening to your chest.
- The windows reflect a version of you that doesn’t exist outside the wood—eyes too bright, smile too empty.
- The attic hatch trembles when the wind dies—like something upstairs deciding whether your scream will be worth the listening.
- Every time you scream inside, the cabin records it somewhere you cannot see, a archive of fear that grows the longer you remain.
When the first scream escaped you, it wasn’t a choice. The cabin had waited for it, a predator with a polite voice. You felt the walls lean closer as if they were listening to a confession you never intended to reveal. By dawn, you understood a brutal grammar: the cabin doesn’t capture your fear to help you survive; it consumes the fear to become stronger, louder, hungrier than the woods themselves.
Now, if you listen at the lock, you can hear the echo of a future you have yet to enter—the scream you will someday release, reverberating back to you from a wooden throat that knows your name.