The House in the Pines
Ana Reyes
For Bonk, Mom, Dad, Bubba, Brian, and Hilda
PROLOGUE
Deep in these woods, there is a house that’s easy to miss.
Most people, in fact, would take one look and insist it’s not there. And they wouldn’t be wrong, not completely. What they would see are a house’s remains, a crumbling foundation crawling with weeds. A house long since abandoned. But look closely at the ground here, at this concrete scarred by sun and ice. This is where the fireplace goes. If you look deeply enough, a spark will ignite. And if you blow on it, that spark will bloom into a blaze, a warm light in this cold dark forest.
If you come closer, out of the cold, the fire gets stronger, blows smoke in your eyes, tumbling smoke with a burning-pine smell that sweetens to the smell of perfume, then softens to the smell of your mother’s coat. She’s murmuring in the next room. Turn around and here come the walls, shyly, like deer emerging from the trees. Frozen concrete becomes an area rug. Take off your shoes, stay a while. Outside the wind is rising, and there comes a clacking, a close, rapid chatter. It must be the windows in their sashes. A light snow sifts from the sky, blanketing this cozy home. Tucking it in for the night. “Goodnight little house, and goodnight mouse.” Remember? For once, there is no reason to get up, no one to chase or run away from. From the kitchen comes the smell of home, the sounds of a sauté. This is how the world was once, before the first colic, the first scald, the first getting lost. And this is why you do it. “Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush. And goodnight to the old lady whispering ‘hush.’?”
Get a good night’s sleep, because when you wake, this house will be gone.
ONE
Maya didn’t know it yet, but the video had already begun to circulate on social media. A grainy six-minute stretch of security footage that was strange and unsettling enough to garner several thousand views the day it went up, but not quite lurid enough to go viral, not ghastly enough to inspire repeat viewings. Not for most people, anyway. But for Maya, its existence would upend all that she’d been building for herself these past few years, this sometimes sloppy but mostly solid life that she shared with Dan, who snored quietly beside her in bed.
She hadn’t yet seen the video because she was avoiding all screens, not wanting their blue light to keep her awake. She had tried everything to sleep: Benadryl, melatonin, counting backward from a hundred down to one. She had turned the clock around, taken a bath and some cough syrup, but none of it helped. This was her third sleepless night in a row. She had moved in with Dan earlier this month and could easily draw from memory the shape of every water stain on the ceiling. The branching lines of every crack.
Turning onto her side, Maya reminded herself to get curtains. The space heater at the foot of the bed clicked on, a white noise she usually liked, but now the rattle of its metal grille grated on her. Kicking off the covers, she got out of bed and pulled on a flannel shirt over her underwear. The apartment was cold, the central heat only partially effective, but her skin was damp with sweat.
The chilled wooden floor felt good on her feet as she made her way down the dark hall, passing the second bedroom, empty now except for the exercise bike that she and Dan had bought off Craigslist. She’d never done much to decorate any of the apartments she’d shared with the various roommates she’d had since college—no posters, no pictures in frames, not so much as a throw pillow—but lately she’d begun popping over to T.J. Maxx after leaving work at Kelly’s Garden Center just across the parking lot and heading straight for the home décor section. Buying end tables, area rugs, and other things she couldn’t really afford.
Maya had plans for this place. She was determined for it to feel like home.
It was just before dawn, a gray, wintery light settling over other recent purchases in the living room: The coffee table to replace the one Dan’s roommate had taken when he left. New shelves for the many books she had brought, added to all of Dan’s. A new-to-them couch, dark green velvet. And hanging on the wall above it, the one decorative item she’d brought with her, the only art she’d held on to for the past seven years.
A Mayan weaving about the size of a bath towel. A tapestry of red, yellow, green, and blue, threaded into interlocking rows of symbols resembling flowers and snakes. This was more than a decoration to Maya. She didn’t know what the symbols stood for exactly, but she knew that somewhere in the mountains of Guatemala lived people who could read them. She passed by the tapestry in the dark on her way to the kitchen.
The sink held the night’s dirty dishes, plates splattered with Bolognese. She loved cooking with Dan in their new kitchen, and the food had been fragrant with garlic and fresh tomatoes, but it hadn’t tasted right. Or maybe she just wasn’t hungry.
Or maybe her stomach had been clenched like a fist. Dan had asked if anything was wrong, she had told him she was fine, but she wasn’t. Opening a cabinet, she pushed aside a few coffee mugs, tumblers, and wineglasses until she found what she was looking for. A shot glass, a single ounce. That’s all she would have, she told herself, and the photo strip magneted to the freezer reminded her why.
The photos were from last Halloween, taken in a photo booth at the bar where they’d spent the night dancing with friends. Maya had gone as “Fairy Witch,” a character she’d invented while scouring Goodwill for a costume at the last minute. She wore a glittery pair of wings, a pointy black hat, a blue dress with sequins on the collar, and somehow this had landed her second place in the costume contest.