The First Choice

The cabin down the line is lit.

He sees it from the director’s quarters, through the window over the basin. The camp is dark, the cabins black around him. This one burns. A low yellow lamp behind a door that hangs open, a room that should be dark. It left him the chance to run and the lit door, and he went in, and now there is another door.

The lamp does not move. He waits a beat, nothing comes out of the cabin.

He goes. He has stood long enough. He comes down off the porch onto the open ground. The ground is hard under his feet and cold. He crosses the open stretch with his eyes up, and the treeline is a black edge that does not change, and there is no wind in the pines. He half-looks for the shape at the edge of his sight. There is never one. He walks past the mess hall with the door standing wide and does not look in at the boards, past the staff cabins, to the one where the door has hung open on a black room. The lamp behind it is new.

The porch rises a few boards off the packed ground. He stops at the bottom step. The door is ajar. The lamp is on a table just inside, and the light lies low across the floor, and the room is arranged.

The body is on the floor. One of the staff. He keeps his eyes off the face and takes in the making of it. The limbs are set at angles somebody chose. The hands rest at the sides, palms up. The face is toward the door, toward him, and the eyes are shut. The dust is tracked in a deliberate pattern.

The smell gets into him. It is sweet, and under it the other one, the wet and the copper, and the closed room has held it in. He keeps his breathing shallow and his eyes on the floor.

The axe is beside the lamp, laid across the wood, the head toward him. The taped handle. The blade worn into a curve from a lot of sharpening. It is the axe from the drawer in the quarters, the one Whitfield never locked.

It watches him. He has waited a week for the thing in the dark to come for him. It did not come. It went through the ones who could fight and the one who led and the one who knew the ground, and it did not take him, and it left him this room. What it wants is to know what he will do to keep being looked at, to keep being worth watching.

He stands at the bottom of the light and the fine shake is back in his hands. It shows at his fingertips. He could put the axe back on the table and walk out and keep going — down the bank, to the water, to the boathouse, anywhere the light is not set for him. That is a choice too. It sits there with the other one.

The axe is in his hand. He does not remember reaching for it. The tape is worn where the handle meets his palm, and the curve of the blade sits in the low yellow, and it fits him. He closes his fingers on it and he stands his ground. The lamp is behind him.

Something is close. Past the light, a breath in and a hold, the length of a man waiting.

“You can’t stand not being the center of attention.”

Here it is. The room is a dead camp. The audience is the thing that killed every person in it, and there is no one else left who can look away. He is the center of attention.

He does not know where the line is. It wants him to cross it, and he would have crossed it on his own.

The shape is one step back, at the edge of the light, waiting for his cut.