The Sealed Exit

Short Story — Horror / Psychological

Content warning: Graphic depictions of bodily dismemberment and mutilation, suicide, and gun violence.

Joel Hartwin was forty-five, a widower with no children and few living family members to speak of. He hoped to be dead before the next sunrise.

The forest he traveled through closed in around him but soon he came to a clearing and saw his destination. A solitary cabin, left by one of his extended relatives, rested on the other side of the way near a tree line. Joel traveled alone and he’d left his car many miles behind him, the keys still in the ignition with a note on the dashboard. Some lucky soul would find themselves the owner of a new car, if they happened upon it.

Giving up his car didn’t matter to Joel since he’d be dead in the next forty-eight hours. If he survived somehow, that would be worth just about everything he had in the world. Under his left arm he carried a burlap sack with something heavy inside. Over his shoulders he wore a traveling backpack, stuffed with an assortment of ominous items.

It was late afternoon, mid-September, somewhere between Athens and Marietta in southeast Ohio. “Hill Country,” as the locals called it. Joel hadn’t seen another person all day and no one knew where he was going. He hoped that it would stay that way.

He saw a pair of deer lingering by the tree line near the cabin. They both turned their heads, looked at him, and then suddenly took off in a sprint. This wasn’t a new experience for Joel—animals of any kind had never been comfortable around him. They always tried to run in terror and would growl, snarl, or wail whenever he tried to reach out and touch them.

Earlier, as Joel had approached the forest on foot, any birds roosting in the trees took flight and scattered in a panicked frenzy like a routing army. On the forest floor all varieties of smaller animals fled into the distance as he traveled on.

He crossed the clearing, walked over the cabin’s front porch, and stepped onto the front door. Producing a key, he stuck it in the lock, turned it, pushed, and the door swung open with little effort.

As Joel understood it, the families of some of his great uncles used the cabin from time to time. He stepped inside to find one large living area with a fireplace. To the left was a small kitchen that could barely hold more than two people at a time. On the other side of the cabin, he saw a doorway that led to a single bedroom which held only a few cots lined up against the wall.

Joel set his bags down and began the business he had come there to do. Going through his backpack, he removed a bowie knife. He unsheathed it and studied the large blade for a moment, holding it at such an angle that he saw his own eyes reflected in the metal. They were green and looked both sorrowful and exhausted.

In spite of himself, his mind recalled the first incident and the first time he had experienced… IT. That was all he could think to call the phenomenon. It was too abnormal for any conventional logic to categorize.

He slumped into the cabin’s lone chair in front of the fireplace and let out a long breath of exhaustion. He’d come a long way to get there and in the last week would have been shocked if he’d gotten more than eight hours of sleep total.

He held out his left arm with the palm of his hand facing up toward the ceiling. He seized the bowie knife in his right hand, raised it high over his head, then violently plunged it down, aiming to bury it in his left arm and draw a fatal wound.

The blade stopped all of a sixteenth of an inch from his skin.

Joel tried with all his might to drive the blade down but his arm refused to go any further under its own power. He tried to raise his left arm into the blade but that proved just as futile. He relented and slouched back into his chair in defeat.

Then, with a sudden burst of energy, he seized the knife in both hands and tried to drive it straight into his throat.

His movement stopped within the smallest possible distance of the knife breaking his skin. His arms snapped back from him as if by some alien force and the knife went sailing through the air, embedding itself in the wall of the cabin with a resounding thud.

Joel hissed with frustration. He’d hoped to accomplish the task efficiently, quickly, and be done with it. But this supernatural resistance wasn’t a surprise—this hadn’t been the first time he’d tried to take his own life. A few different attempts, in fact, with the results being the same.

With all the energy he’d just exerted, his body betrayed him and gave into the exhaustion it could no longer deny. His head slumped into his chest and he fell asleep in an instant.

“Just don’t scuff up the floors. Getting out there to clean that place can be a real pain in the neck.”

Joel snapped out of his sleep. His uncle’s lecture about using the cabin was an odd thing to hear echoing in his mind. Feeling mildly disoriented at first, then panicked, he looked down at himself to see if anything had changed.

The sunlight outside was fading fast. The night would soon engulf the forest, and there was no electricity in the cabin. Its interior dimmed by the minute.

IT always had greater power at night.

He dreaded spending even a single evening in such a wilderness at the mercy of the dark.

He could swear that when he woke in the morning lately, he felt less of himself—his body becoming more foreign. Slowly, methodically… changed… into what, he didn’t know.

While being alone out there at night wasn’t what he hoped it would come to, Joel came prepared. He pulled out a small LED flashlight from his shirt pocket and clicked it on.

Rummaging through his backpack, he produced an electric lantern and set it on a table. He walked out of the cabin’s back door to see an impressive stack of firewood resting along the exterior wall. It stood a full head taller than him and stretched several yards long.

Some kindling lay in a nearby bucket. Joel gathered what he needed and used matches to start a fire in the cabin’s fireplace. It might not have been practical, almost crazy given he might be dead soon, but a sixth sense told him it was better to have a fire going and not need it.

The warmth was comforting. He watched the flames dance as shadows crept along the walls.

He lit gas lanterns and candles from the shed, illuminating every corner. Darkness consumed him with dread—he knew something waited in it.

He stared into the fire as memories surfaced.

IT had come during his freshman year at an all-boys school in Lancaster, Ohio…

*

(Section break)

This had to be the worst forest fire Sheriff Dean Burbank had ever seen…

Gregg Woodbury lay dead on the ground completely split in half. Joel Hartwin’s body still lay on the exam table looking unchanged, peaceful, and faintly smiling—contented in death.