Chapter Two

Up ahead, there on the left side of all of the trees up ahead, hidden withing the canvas of foliage with a swarth of painted snowfall that was coming down softly upon the forested floor, was the cabin. A beautiful guardian angel, sitting alone within an ocean of frosted trees, plants, miscellaneous foliage and freshly fallen snow. It was a breathtaking sight in and of itself, or so one would have thought coming upon it anew.

Ansel stood there in the snow for a longtime, watching the cabin stare blankly back at him. No one had besmirched this place, at least, he hoped no one had done so. It would have done themselves and this place a disservice. This wooden cabin, with all of the time that had occurred to it, was as beautiful as it was before, when he had last seen it. Breathless and perfect. In every possible way. Beautiful, in each and every sense of the word that he and for that matter, anyone else, could have possibly bestowed upon this magical place.

Ansel swallowed and mushed onwards through the fluffy snowdrift that was starting to, again, add upon the ground in growing droves that impeded each continuing footfall. Marching to the front of the building he began to notice little things about the cabin. Aspects that could not have been seen from the distance he had been at before when he was last there. The porch had holes in it. Holes that fell straight through to the rocky foundations beneath the structure.
He watched out for each of his steps and hobbled more carefully so towards the front door. Wiping his face first, he then knocked shakily at the door. It too looked far worse for wear than he’d realized, though it remained a sturdy protector of the world inside of the wooden structure. Ansel felt that his knocking had echoed throughout the small building enough for someone to have heard it. Someone had to have heard it, if they were there. They would have heard it, if there was really anyone there. These thoughts flashed and repeated in his mind, so much so that he began to murmur them beneath his breathe. And without being aware that he was doing so.

He knocked again, firmer than before, and now with a little more forcefully of an intention this time. The result was the same. He expected something different to have occurred. Given the shadow he had seen before. Perhaps, he thought aloud, it was really in his head after all.

“Frank?” Ansel gulped in a poor attempt to swallow at the nervousness that began to rise from within his throat. “What should I do here, buddy? Should I try the door? I don’t want to be rude…might spook someone, if I did that. I know, I know, Frank! It really is cold out here!” He shivered out these statements and questions to the radio. And added as an afterthought, “And I don’t want either of us to freeze, let alone to death…”

Ansel shivered there on the doorstep for another few minutes, muttering to himself his dilemma and debate between each icy breath. “Fine, Frank. You’re right! You’re always right lately! About everything it seems.”

The door handle gave away under little to next to no pressure; the hinges creaked aloud a broken greeting that Ansel took as a welcoming sign. He could feel his fortunes shifting towards the better side of things.

“Hello? Is anyone…there’s no one here…” Ansel marveled the door was left unlocked. “Who on earth would leave this place unlocked, Frank? That’s just crazy, just insane! Hello?” He was quiet again, shutting the door softly behind him as he walked inside and out of the cold. “I thought I heard someone…Hello? Must have just been the snow falling off of the roof or something, Frank? Just losing my mind again. That’s all it ever is. Loosing what little is left of the useless old thing.”

Ansel whistled as he looked around; the room was fully furnished, with what he considered to have been all the fixings of a beautiful room. (What was left of it at least.) There was a couch against the far side wall, with a blanket draped along and over its back. Curtains were drawn open on either side of the large bay windows, casting muted and muffled shadows across the inner layout of the room. These shadows seemed to dance around and along with the flowing rhythm of the room. The timing of the snowflakes outside the frosted over windows amazed Ansel to no end.

Unlit logs were resting poorly, or were rather sitting in the fireplace, and definitely without care. Though after years of isolation and neglect, all of these things were very much rotted, moth eaten, and more than quite falling apart and into tattered shreds. The logs in the fireplace had grown brittle with age, even at a cursory glance Ansel knew they would make more smoke than any real heat. And the blanket on the back of the couch had been left in no better state than the curtains on the walls had been. The two rugs that he could see on the floor were about the same as everything else. Rotted away to a pitiful state.

All of these observations aside, Ansel was elated. From the moment he had stepped inside this aged and forgotten stack of walls and roof, he hadn’t been able to stop smiling. Nothing about this cabin was depressing or neglected in his eyes, just waiting instead to be loved and cleaned up a little. Much in the same regard as anything else Ansel had lucked into finding. Everything was just there, waiting for him to find them.

“Isn’t this place just the best?” Ansel wolf whistled. “There’s even a basket holding, what is that? Folded blankets? They’re even folded into triangles, Frank! I didn’t even know you could do that. This is amazing! They did a good job, no. A great job here!”

He beamed with unbridled excitement that moved as static would through a line of electricity upon metal. Walking through the few rooms of the cabin that excitement was left unchallenged. Though small, the building was also compact, with only three rooms in total to its worth. The main entry section was the den, that had the couch and fireplace, as well as two windows on either side of the room. Next was a modest bedroom that Ansel peeked into briefly. It had a broken bed in the center of the room, with the boards having fallen and rotted away long ago. Against the far wall there was a dresser, with several of its drawers open and laid bare. Otherwise the room had remained empty and long since void of anyone having lived in it. Being ever so concerned with the feelings of others however, Ansel didn’t want to impede on someone else’s living spaces any more than what was necessary to have done so. It was, after all, not his room. Nor was it a room that he had been told he could enter when no one was obviously home. And as such, he quickly and quietly closed the door to the bedroom, and never opened it again.

The last room was a wide kitchen area. With the descriptor or being wide used in a generous capacity. With a simple arraignment of cabinets and a sink, as well as a small table that could possibly seat four people at its utter upmost, warrantying everyone had been able to take as little space as one person possibly could. Ansel scrounged, eagerly exploring the cupboards, most were empty, with only scraps of paper and a layer of dusty cobwebs for their inventories inside of them.

“I don’t think they left anything behind, Frank. I think-”, Ansel stopped mid-thought, letting the sentence fall as his jaw did much of the same thing. The third opened cabinet surprised him and had left him completely breathless. Three whole containers were left behind. A small jar of unopened peanut butter, a half-filled box of cereal that had gone stale, yet miraculously had not rotted away, and there was a can of beans. “Frank? I’m going to cry. If I do, will you think less of me?” there was no answer, though Ansel had expected one. “Frank? Frank? Oh, I forgot to turn you back on. You need to see all of this. This place is wonderful! Wait a second, Frank! Hold on now, Jesus…”

Ansel set the backpack down on the table, disrupting the gentle layer of dust and debris, and took the radio out and set it down with care. Ansel switched the dial towards the on position, flooding the little cabin with the gift of sound and ambiance of an all-night jazz station. He fought the urge to change it to a station with more talking, but this station felt right. The jazz seemed to compliment the small rooms, the cracked sections of the walls, and the overall space of this forgotten place that Ansel was sure had once been filled to overflowing with love. Jazz felt more than perfect to capture the majesty of the leftover memories that were made into this cabin, and the memories that still haunted it, making it a beautiful castle amidst the outside oceans of fluffy falling flakes of frosted snowfall that drenched everything in the frosted paleness of whiteness that was the seasonal delights known humbly as, winter.

“Frank, you beautiful bastard. You always know just what needs to be said,” Ansel smiled brightly and without realizing it until it was too late, and he was several steps in, had begun to dance around the room. Roughly in and a little out of time, with the improvised music the radio played for the rooms. “Ba da, da dum…Ba da, da dum…” he hummed along with the jazz music. “All jazz is ever missing is someone singing. That’s all I ever really disliked about it, Frank. The silence of it all. The brass wailing out and into the world, all energy that fizzes out with a loud, ‘boom!’ But, that being said. That soft swing is something else. I normally hate it,” he explained all of this to the radio, and no one else in particular, after all the radio understood, and the radio had a tendency to listen to him, “But, this feels right. Thank you, Frank. I needed this. More than I realized I did. Okay, okay. Enough of that now. Let’s see what else is on. I can only take so much dancing around to it before it still grates on my nerve endings.”

Ansel rolled through the stations, letting snippets leak in and out of focus with the smooth rotated turnings of the dials and the needle along the channels in the display.

“….at the top of the hour…”

A burst of what Ansel assumed to have been Spanish followed after that. He had never been able to learn the language, no matter how often he’d tried to strike up a conversation. No one was ever able or even to be willing to teach him. If he had learned it then he was sure things would have been easier, “Those men wouldn’t have stolen my things. I’d have been able to understand them and run away before they kicked me. I would have gotten…”

“…up next…John Denver’s, Country roads…”

Ansel groaned, “That’s not the name of the damn song. And you know it! It’s ‘Take me home, country roads’. How can you possibly mess that up? It’s on the record when you press play. It’s on the damned record!”

“I’m telling you Jess, this weather is simply getting worse and worse. I’ve already reached out to my loved ones and warned them to stay indoors. With the weather warning going into effect…”, static followed close behind the statement, hiding the punchline where no one could have possibly heard it.

“With what?” Ansel shouted at the broken signal. It irritated him, he needed to know what they had to tell him. It felt important to know, “What with the warning going into effect?” Ansel rubbed his hands together and stood in place. He’d even stopped pacing to better hear the radio once the signal came back through and into focus.

“…expecting eight to twelve feet of continuous snowfall in the following areas…”, the small radio listed off the nearby communities. Ansel listened intently and let out a long drawn out breath once they listed the closest town that he knew the name of. It was something with a ‘C’ in the middle of it. If he heard it again he could have repeated it. Important part for Ansel had not been the name, but that the town was a good thirty miles or so, give or take, away from where he thought he was.

“…if you are in any of these listed counties, seek immediate shelter. It’s going to be a long couple of days. Stay inside, stay warm, and good luck…”

The station turned to a mess of static noises that fell out and onto the walls and floors.

“Frank…you may have just saved my life. No, seriously! Without you, telling me what I needed to hear, I wouldn’t have come back to this cabin. I’d probably have gone and lost more than just my fingers and toes if I didn’t come here. Holy cow! Holy cow! Holy cow! Holy cow…I’d have died. Frank, that’s wild…Frank? Say something, please. Anything?” He hit the top of the radio with a controlled slap.

The radio continued playing on with its jumbled compilation of static spaghetti sounds that fell out onto the floor where no one could reach them.

“Fine…I’ll try again, later. The snow must be getting in the way of any signal to come in through. Nice and clean-like. Without any of the ghostly whisperings of the static that is getting in the way. Once it starts passing past us a little more I’m sure you’ll come in clearer, Frank. It’s alright, we’ll talk later then. Okay Frank?” Ansel switched the dial back off and walked into the living room. He eyed the fireplace, and decided to try and light it. “No one would mind if I make a fire,” he rationed aloud. “They’d be happy that I did it too, actually. Yeah! I’m sure they would be thrilled even. No one wants to find me frozen up to a crisp out in here. No one wants to find that. I know for a certifiable fact that I wouldn’t like that. No, sir. Not one bit.” The image ran a shudder though him, involuntarily against his own control; despite the chill he knew the very idea of being frozen is what did it. It was after all his greatest fear lately.

Ansel grabbed the broken firestarter, broken but still usable and good. It was the one that he had pulled out of a Walmart dumpster. There had been a crack in it, and as such was typical of people, they had thrown it away. But he found it! It after all had some life left in it, he just knew it. Ansel had faith in the broken and fragmented bits that he found and rescued from the trash. And this belief had rewarded that faith with consistency.

Just this last week that had passed on by, it had even started a small bonfire in the woods for him. Lighting it was at first a hassle, naturally so for the chipped and ‘broken’ thing. The ordeal went on so long that it took nearly twenty to twenty-five minutes until success struck firm and resolute. Then he had to speedily smother the embers out when he heard someone yell out to him from nearby, “Hello?”

Ansel put out the still fresh and smoky embers and ran off with his few things. He hadn’t known anything about the people calling out to him. But every instinct he had screamed that it felt safer to simply leave. It always was safer to do that. Even if they wanted to just say, ‘hello’, they’d usually ended up wanting something from him. ‘Where was he going? Where had he been? Had he known some person that he had never heard of?’

“Better off alone,” Ansel told himself, “Get more done that way. Less problems. Less getting hurt, less-”

A gust of wind slammed the outside of the cabin, it blew a violent wave of snow against the windows, rattling and covering them and the rooms inside the cabin in stark muffled darkness. Against the outside of the cabin, the walls continued rattling and seeping a cool chill between unseen cracks. Ansel shivered and rubbed his hands together; they were beginning to have that feeling stiff feeling again. He crouched near the fireplace; his head nearly inside of it with how far he was leaning over the old logs. His hands, shaking, as if in prayer with the firestarter between them as a rosary would be to a priest.

“Better hurry and make a fire going soon. We both need the heat.” Ansel felt his teeth chatter against his skull. He was worried that if he kept talking that he’d end up biting his tongue. But the sound of not being alone was more important. “Come on little guy. You haven’t let me down yet. Come on. I believe in you! Come on now.”

Ansel struck at the firestarter, sending a small spark into the rotting log. It briefly flared up, before quickly fizzling itself out. “Good, good. It’s starting. Haha. It’s starting! Shouldn’t be too long now. Not until I have a roaring fire cooking itself up. May even heat up some of that food we’ve saved up too. That’ll be good. Nice and warm and good. Warm beans sounds perfect with this cold weather after all. Only thing better than that would be…I’ don’t know much that would be much better than that right about now abouts.” Ansel wiped at his eyes and put the firestarter down next to the fireplace so he could easily find it again. Safer to be safe than be a sorry person, that was one of his mottos. He extended his hands out towards the unlit logs, feeling the warmth radiate itself along and into his cold hands. “Shouldn’t be long now. Not long at all. It’ll cook itself right up. Just you wait and see, Frank. Just you wait and see.”

Another gust of wind buffeted the cabin, over and over again and again rattling the walls with such force that Ansel was beginning to worry the roof or walls may give up the ghost and fall down soon enough.

Ansel heard a slam and saw that the last squall had blown the front door wide open, littering the room with shoveled in piles of packed and flaking chunks of snow that billowed themselves inside.

Ansel rushed to his feet and to the door. He fought best as he could against the howling winds, and through some considerable force of strength, was able to shut the door by slamming his body against it repeatedly. The wood of the door continued rattling and flexing against his back as he slumped to the floor. The door knob rattled uselessly in his hand as he tried to close it the last few inches and lock it shut. The catch, he realized, had broken apart when he had opened the door earlier. It had fallen apart the moment he’d came inside the cabin; pieces of broken metal littered the ground next to him.

Looking around he saw a loose floorboard near him, the edges of had flexed upwards and was in the process of separating from the floor altogether. Ansel dug his foot against it and pushed up with a sharp kick. Then harder, and again harder with another kick. The board groaned and ultimately yielded. Sharp nails were hanging from it, bent and jagged away in different direction as broken teeth. Ansel cautiously picked up the board and laughed at his luck, the two by four of wood was the perfect length to wedge in the doorway. Perfect to keeping it shut, and Ansel did just that.

“Ha-ha”, Ansel laughed, still not believing in his luck as he tried to catch his breath the best that he could. He couldn’t help himself but to grin. “Take that! Ha. Keep out you pesky cold! Frosted winter, trying to grab out and, and to kill me. You won’t get me. No! No, you won’t! Of that you can be most-”, the living room beside him was illuminated in a soft flickering light, “-assured?”

The scene took itself from a page out of a book. Some such a story that Ansel knew he should have heeded in his long past and distant youth. It took his mind and heart away from him, nonetheless appearing magical and disturbing in a way that was ineffable to see with his own two eyes.

Ansel knew he should have been worried. That he should even have been panicking and fleeing right out that door, the very same door that he had just then finished closing and had pried shut with a broken part of the floor mere moments before. But, he wasn’t scared. And he didn’t know why that was such an okay thing. His feet ignored his pressing concerned thoughts, instead pushing them to the wayside, unheeded, and led they him towards the fireplace instead.

There was a young man squatting there, turning over a roasting log in the fireplace with a fire poker. The log had a flame that burned brightly and danced dark shadows behind it. Marching rows of soft red lines coursed over the rougher sections of bark that appeared to be remaining on it. All coursing vibrantly alive as it continually burned. The young man, grunted at Ansel, like a monkey seeking attention. Like something a child would do for a simple gaff.

“Fire…” he grunted to Ansel. “Me, make fire…good,” he then grinned. A tooth was missing from the grin, one of the front ones. Leaving a checkered grin behind that de-aged the young man more than his childish impression ever could have done. “Ansel? Are you going to stand there gawking at me, or are you going to sit down and enjoy the fire with me?”

Ansel felt himself nod, before sitting down beside the man.

Chapter Two

0 Comments