My Uncle Chose His New Favorite Niece — I Will Burn This Family Down To Save Her
Part 2
I dropped the note on the hardwood floor.
My hands were shaking so hard I could barely dial the phone.
I leaned against the kitchen counter to keep from falling.
I called every former favorite I could find in old family photos.
I scrolled through my contacts with trembling fingers.
The first one hung up the second she heard why I was calling.
The line went dead immediately.
The second one blocked my number before I could finish a single sentence.
She told me to never contact her again.
I finally reached Sarah.
She was the favorite right before me.
She had not attended a family reunion in fifteen years.
She picked up on the sixth ring.
Her voice sounded dry and hollow.
She sounded like she had not spoken in months.
Sarah, please.
I need to know where the cabin is.
My daughter is there right now.
He took her.
She was quiet for so long.
I heard her breathing on the other end of the line.
I thought she had hung up.
I almost screamed into the phone.
Then she whispered an address.
It was a set of coordinates deep in the Appalachian mountains.
Her voice cracked.
What you find will be worse than anything you remember.
Do not go alone.
I could barely see the road through my tears.
The headlights illuminated nothing but endless pines.
My gas tank was almost empty.
I did not care.
I would walk the rest of the way if I had to.
I kept hearing Sarah’s voice in my head.
Her broken, raspy warning echoed over and over.
She had survived her two weeks, but she had never really left.
None of us ever really left.
We just carried the silence with us forever.
When I finally saw the turnoff, I almost missed it.
It was marked only by a dead oak tree.
I killed the headlights.
I navigated by the pale moonlight filtering through the canopy.
The engine sputtered as I parked in the brush.
I grabbed a heavy flashlight from the glove compartment.
I did not turn it on.
I relied on the shadows to hide me.
The cabin looked smaller than I remembered.
It looked older.
The wood was rotting in places.
The roof sagged heavily in the middle.
But the overwhelming sense of dread was exactly the same.
It radiated from the walls like heat from an oven.
I circled the perimeter twice before finding the loose window.
My hands were covered in dirt and scratched by thorns.
I hoisted myself up.
I fell onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen.
It smelled like bleach and old copper.
I drove through the night for nine straight hours.
The highway gave way to winding mountain passes.
The paved roads turned to jagged gravel.
The gravel turned to thick, muddy dirt.
The cabin was at the end of a path that did not show up on any GPS.
The trees grew thick overhead, blocking out the moonlight.
I parked in the trees a mile down the road.
I crept toward the wooden structure in the dark.
I avoided the dry leaves on the ground.
I found a loose window near the back porch.
I broke in through the kitchen.
The house was completely dark and entirely silent.
I found a heavy oak door I had never seen before.
I pushed it open slowly.
Notebooks lined every single wall from floor to ceiling.
They were organized by decade.
They went back to 1952.
The handwriting changed as the notebooks got older.
Craig’s father had written some of the volumes.
His grandfather had written the oldest ones.
This had been happening for almost a century.
I pulled down my great aunt’s notebook from 1962.
The pages were yellowed and brittle.
I flipped to the last page.
A single date was written under the word end.
It was November 14, 1987.
My great aunt died in 1987 in a mysterious house fire.
I grabbed Sarah’s notebook on the shelf.
The last page said three days from now.
I found my own notebook.
I opened it to the last page with shaking hands.
The date under the word end was fourteen months from now.
I heard Heather’s voice somewhere deeper in the cabin.
She was asking for me.
I ran down the hallway toward the sound.
But what was Craig doing to her right now?
