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The Lodge
It was our second night at the old hunter’s lodge that it happened. I’m not clear on who owned it at the time; but we had borrowed the keys from a friend of a friend who let people vacation there from time to time.
The only thing he told us was to stay out of the unfinished basement, as it hadn’t been used in years, and there was old hunter’s gear down there that could be dangerous. The door was locked and the key had been lost, regardless, so we didn’t even think about it as we unpacked and explored the place we’d be spending a relaxing week at.
I was in a very happy mood that second night, as my family and I sat around the bonfire eating hamburgers and telling scary stories. My younger sister had gone inside to change into warmer clothes and had been gone for a few minutes when I went inside to get another drink. Upon entering, I immediately saw the basement door sitting a good two inches ajar.
My thoughts jumped to the mundane dangers that I had been told about, and I knew I had to get my eight-year-old sister out of there. Opening the door wider, I stared down the tilted wooden steps, wondering what she was doing in the dark. I flipped the old dirt-encrusted light switch, but nothing happened.
“Hello?” I projected loudly down the stairs.
A strange sound of moving air came first in reply, as if a furnace pipe had sprung a leak… and then I heard her.
“Hey!” came my sister’s small, high voice. “Come down here!”
Perplexed and worried, I slowly stepped down the rotten wooden steps and onto the dirt floor. My feet crunched the glass of a broken light bulb… one mystery solved. The furnace breathed and pulsed like the lodge’s heart somewhere in the darkness, making it difficult for me to listen for my sister.
“Where are you?” I asked to my left, where I thought I had heard her.
“Over here,” she said, from my right. “I’m stuck!”
Now my heart pounded with fear for her safety. I slowly inched toward her, not wanting to injure myself on old hunting gear. As I moved, the deep breathing of the furnace grew louder, and I slowly became completely disoriented in the warm, flowing pitch black. For many long, terrible moments, I had no idea where I was. I only knew that I had to keep going forward and rescue my little sister.
“Right there!” she said, very close now. Could she see my silhouette against the dim light from the stairway? That surely must have been thirty or forty feet away by then, for as far as I’d crept and for how long it took. How big was the basement?
My face brushed against something metal, hanging on what seemed to be a wooden structural post. It was flat and round, and very rusty. It had given very slightly when my nose bumped it in the dark, and it was only the rust that had prevented it from moving further.
“That’s the latch!” she said loudly, trying to be heard over the heated air from the now-roaring furnace right next to us. What was she stuck in? I couldn’t understand.
“Press it!” she said, and I put my hand up to it, touching its ingrained patterns of rust.
I paused, trying to figure out what she might be stuck in that would have a latch on the wall. I figured she must know, so I began to press it.
“Hey, who’s down there?” came a voice from above the stairs… my sister’s.
My hand snapped back. My instincts had told me something was terribly wrong; now I knew.
“I’m stuck!” said the voice right next to me, also my sister’s. “Press it!”
I stumbled backward, scrambling in the dirt toward the stairs. A blast of warm, humid air followed me almost up the steps as I burst out, covered in cobwebs and dust. My sister stood there, confused and scared. I breathed heavily, but kept my story to myself until I found my father.
In the morning, we went downstairs to investigate. My father didn’t believe me at first, even as I found several details that chilled me to the bone. First, the furnace was in a back room on the first floor – not in the basement. What I’d mistaken for a furnace, with its massive breath and warm, moist air, I’ll never know. My father chalked this up to faulty ducts or my imagination.
Second, the basement was only about ten feet wide. Again, my father suggested that I had simply become disoriented in the dark and miscalculated how far I’d gone.
The third and final detail, however, silenced his arguments with grim impact. Hanging on a post was the object I’d touched first with my face, and then my hand. The voice had wanted me to press the center piece, and both my father and I could plainly see where I’d rubbed some of the dirt and rust off of it. The object hung there with grim menace, impossible and terrifying. I felt my face compulsively to reassure myself that I was actually alright. I’d touched a latch, as the voice had said, but it was not for what it had claimed.
It was the release for a bear trap, hanging where a hunter must have placed it many years ago, but inexplicably left loaded and ready to snap shut…