Work Text:
The lodge felt wrong when it was quiet. She felt stupid just thinking that – the same kind of stupid she felt when the urge to run filled her from the ankles up after flicking the lights off. But feeling stupid and being right weren’t mutually exclusive things.
Sam couldn’t remember when she’d set her head down, but as she sat up and rubbed at her eyes, the first thing that struck her was how dark the dining room had gotten. Not dark all the way, not with the windows letting in the cool blue snow-glow of the mountain, just dark enough that the shadows cast by the Washingtons’ antler chandelier no longer looked grim but downright gruesome. The quiet didn’t help.
No, the quiet didn’t help at all.
She stood from the high-backed chair with a grimace, the cold having settled into all the places that made bending possible, reminding her in no uncertain terms of all the hiking she’d been doing the past few days. If she was feeling like that, boy oh boy, she could only imagine how the others were holding up…but that probably went a good way towards explaining the silence, huh? That eerie, uncomfortable silence. They were all likely just as knocked out as she’d been a second ago, only tucked into nice warm beds with nice warm blankets and nice warm pillows where she’d been hunched over a stiffly knit placemat with her head in her hands and tears lukewarm on her cheeks.
“Dried out now, though,” she half-thought, half-muttered to herself, raising a hand to swipe beneath her eyes and check. “For now,” she added after a beat. “Fooor. Nooow.” Something about saying it almost helped; she cracked something that could’ve been mistaken for a smile in a past life and huffed a breath out her nose, the fingers that had patted her cheeks only a second ago sliding to rub the knot at the back of her neck.
There was a long moment where she stood at the door, poised but unwilling to push through it, her ear not quite pressed to the wood. She switched her weight from one leg to the other, each shift slow and deliberate, not wanting to make more noise than she had to. Even in her head it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, her standing there like that, waiting, waiting, waiting, but the lodge felt wrong when it was quiet, haunted almost, and so she froze, hoping she’d hear something – anything – to suggest life out there, no matter how distant or distraught.
But there was nothing. Not a peep. Not a creature was stirring, as the old story went, and even the storm outside had seemed to calm, the wind having tired itself out from all its earlier screaming.
Sam took a deep breath in, let a deeper breath out, and with one hand still kneading into the muscle between her shoulder and neck, nudged her way through the door with her hip.
The great room was blue and grey with snowlight. It lit every mote of dust, outlined each piece of furniture, made the shadows thick enough to reach out and touch. When there were people dozing on the couch or sitting cross-legged on the floor, it was a neat effect – now it made her shiver. A full-body shiver, too, the kind you were glad no one was around to see. She thought it might’ve been enough to jog loose another crying jag, but it didn’t come; she was just too cold, too tired, and crying in the middle of a dark, empty room felt like the perfect invitation for trouble.
And God help her, she’d had enough of that for a lifetime.
Her hands moved again, this time finding her arms to rub some warmth into them. The smart move, she knew, would’ve been to climb the stairs, to poke her head into room after room until she found one no one had claimed yet…but the thought of raising her knees that many times made her thighs cramp, so instead she shuffled her way across the polished hardwood, trying her best to ignore the silence and the heavy gazes of the framed school photos on the console table. That, Sam thought, was what was wrong with the lodge – when it was quiet, when it was still, it should’ve made you feel like you were alone. Problem was, between the photographs and the mounted animal heads, there were always dark, glassy eyes on you, following you, watching you, so you weren’t alone. Not really. Not when you thought about it.
So when she popped her head into the kitchen (a habit more than anything else, a deeply rooted muscle memory she was helpless to fight), there was actual, literal, palpable relief at what she saw. There was dread, too. Oh, there was plenty of that. Relief and dread in equal measure: Everything that was wrong with the lodge at night.
“I keep expecting the door to fly open, know what I mean?” It was something she might’ve said, had he not beaten her to it, and the shock of hearing him say it so freely had her wondering for a second whether she might’ve still been asleep back in the dining room, dreaming some strange dream as she breathed her own recycled air. “Just like…bam, thrown wide open, and there they’ll be. Cold and pissed off and…” Josh’s shoulders rose in an exhausted shrug as Sam pulled herself up beside him on the island, her legs dangling beside his until she tucked them under herself. “There.”
“For me, it’s knocking.” She’d thought about saying something else first – ‘Hi,’ maybe, or ‘Why are you still up?’ but that was stupid. Almost as stupid as that first surge of fear she’d felt, waking up to find the lodge silent around her. Sam sniffed, not in a teary way but a clogged sinus one, propping her hands to either side of her so she could better distribute her tired, syrupy weight. “I’ll just be sitting or eating or something and I’ll swear I hear someone knocking to be let in. Swear it.”
He nodded slowly, the movement only barely visible in her periphery, and then his hands went up just as hers went down, his fingers covering his face.
After the past couple days, she couldn’t really say why she did it – the only thing any of them had come to expect was Josh lashing out in increasingly desperate ways – but she leaned herself over until her arm laid against his, until her head settled onto his shoulder. He didn’t pull away, didn’t shrug her off, didn’t shove her back, didn’t do much of anything besides sit there, his whole body thrumming like a livewire, or maybe a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping.
“Don’t even get me started on like…what do you call them? Phantom texts? Been getting a lot of those. Lots and lots. I just keep pulling out my phone, but…” Sam let the rest of the thought trail off into silence. They both knew how it ended, anyway; she didn’t need to add insult to injury by saying it out loud.
Josh, like the lodge, felt wrong when he was quiet. He was the talker, the rambler really, the guy who usually had something to say about something and just couldn’t wait to tell you all about it. He was always quick with an easy grin or sleazy joke, to say nothing of the secretive little winks that somehow, inexplicably, never came across as anything other than sarcastic and salacious. When he was quiet, something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
But she’d already known that much, hadn’t she?
“Know the odds on finding a missing person after the first twenty-four hours?” he asked when he finally dropped his hands. “How about the first forty-eight?”
Sam knew better than to say what she was thinking – that they were already coming up on a week, the hours having long-since crept past the triple digits. “I don’t. And if it’s all the same, I really don’t want to either, okay? We’re going to find them, so the numbers don’t matter.” It was her turn to shrug, and she used the motion to adjust herself, tucking herself further against his side despite that warning thrum, the telltale shake making her think of a muscle about to give way. “We’ll go out there and try again tomorrow just like we tried today, and we’ll keep trying until – ”
“Yeah, except they’re dead.” He barely whispered it and even still it rang out through the kitchen (the empty, silent kitchen) like a thunderclap. Josh finally turned, not pulling away from her but craning his head back enough to meet her eye. She couldn’t say what the look on his face was – defiance or desperation. She couldn’t decide whether there was a difference. “You know that, right? That they’re dead?” He said it flatly, matter-of-factly, nodding a little with each syllable like he was only just coming to terms with it himself.
And because she did know it, because she’d been coming to terms with it since she’d laid her head down on the dining room table, Sam said the only thing she could: “We’re going to find them. No matter how long it takes.” Not agreement. Not denial. Avoidance at best and ignorance at worst, but the only way the lodge could’ve felt worse, the only way Josh could’ve felt worse, was if she’d said that single word out loud.
Yes.
Yes, I know the odds.
Yes, I know they’re dead.
Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know.
Still, Josh pulled in a breath like she’d said it anyway. It was a sharp sound, quick, like she’d taken a pin and jabbed him in the flesh between his index finger and thumb. His hands tightened to fists in his lap, his shoulder braced beneath her head, and all that tension she’d felt from the get-go coiled, tightened, wound in on and over and under and through itself until it seemed he might collapse. “That’s what I’m scared of, Sammy,” he said, voice wavering, going watery and weak, “I don’t wanna see them like that. I don’t…I don’t wanna find them. I don’t.”
Then the tension went in a wave, rushing out from him in a single dying surge, and Sam caught him before he could fall, pulled him in before he could slip. In a way, strange and bittersweet, maybe even a little selfish, she felt better when he buried his face in the collar of her sweater, when the kitchen filled with the muffled sound of mourning.
For everything else it meant, it was better than the quiet.
The lodge always felt wrong when it was quiet.