The Cabin by Gary Cottle

A Ghost Story for Christmas 2025

The Purchase

It was perfect for me.  About an hour outside of town, and directly off a two-lane country highway.  I could get to it easily after work on Friday, and get back to my condo on Sunday afternoon in time to do laundry.  Friends and family could visit without much risk of getting lost.  It sat in the middle of a four-acre wooded lot with a winding driveway, so you couldn’t see it from the main road.  And there was a lake nearby, and lots of hiking trails.  An ordinary cabin, and not very big.  No architecture magazine would want to feature it.  But it had electricity, indoor plumbing, and a big stone fireplace in the living room.  There were two bedrooms on the main floor, and two more attic rooms that could be used as bedrooms.  So I could invite my parents, my brother, and my sister-in-law and their two sons to stay with me from time to time.  I could invite friends, ordinary and special.  And at 33, I could finally afford it, so it came on the market at the right time.

Bradley helped me move in and clean the place up.  At the time, he was a 25-year-old twunk, a tall and lean construction worker who wore tight pants that showed off the curve of his backside and his prodigious boy bump.  He was a special friend who was always glad to help if I needed extra muscle.  His pickup could come in handy, too.  And the only thing he expected in return was for me to thank him on my knees.  I was always ready to thank him.  Surely he knew.

We finally got to the second attic room at the end of the day.  And after dusting, vacuuming, and putting new sheets on the bed, I told Bradley how I came to own the cabin.

Carl Scott, the man who built it, died of a heart attack earlier in the year, and Mrs. Scott decided to sell.  By her own admission, she never cared much for the cabin and had only been there a couple of times in the previous fifteen years.  I called Mrs. Scott immediately after hearing she wanted it off her hands.

“You’ve been talking about wanting a cabin that’s not too far away for a couple of years, but why were you so sure about this one?  You hadn’t even seen the place, had you?”

“Oh, but I had seen it.  I stayed here one weekend right before graduating high school.  Do you remember the Scott’s son, Mark?”

“Um, not really.  Mr. Scott was a contractor, as you probably know, so I knew him.  I worked for him a couple of times, and I vaguely knew he had a son, but I didn’t know anything about him.”

“Well, we were friends, and we were in the same class.”  After hesitating a couple of seconds, I added, “Mark deflowed me in this very room.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nope.  Right here.  His parents were asleep downstairs, so we had to be quiet.”

A wicked grin spread over Bradley’s face, and he said, “Hot damn.  Take your clothes off.”

“What?”

“Shut up and do it.  You’re about to be ‘deflowered’ for the second time in this room.”

We had a few beers on the deck that evening.  That’s when Bradley asked, “So what’s Mark up to now?”

“I don’t know.  No one does.  He left town after graduation and never came back, not even for a visit.  I asked Mrs. Scott if she had heard from him.  I thought surely he would have called her by now.  I thought maybe he might have come home for his father’s funeral, but she says she hasn’t heard from him in all this time.”

“Wow!  That’s pretty cold.  He must have hated his parents.”

“He didn’t get along with his dad, and he was terrified of him finding out he was gay.  But he loved his mom.”

“She must be hurt by how he cut her out of his life.”

“Yeah.  For a few years, I was hurt, too.  After that weekend here, I thought we were boyfriends.  But then he left without saying goodbye or anything.  I was hurt and angry.  But eventually, I decided he must have had his reasons, and one weekend isn’t exactly a lifetime commitment.  Mrs. Scott seems to have made her peace with it as well.  She thinks something happened to him.  Maybe he was in a car accident, or had terminal cancer, and no one knew how to contact his family.  She’s sure he’s dead.”

That night, Bradley and I slept in the bedroom at the end of the house on the main floor.  It had windows all around, so I looked forward to waking up to spectacular views of the woods.  Bradley spooned me from behind.  I could feel him poking me in the butt, so it’s no surprise that I had an erotic dream that involved him, but Mark was in the dream, too.  The three of us were playing cards at the table, and there was a fire going in the fireplace.  The scene was cozy, and I felt relaxed and at peace with the whole world.  Mark, who still looked just as he had in high school, turned to Bradley and asked, “Ever spit roast a brother?  You take his backside, and I’ll take his front.”

I awoke the next morning in a state of bliss.  One of the windows was open, and the crisp air carried the scent of pine.  I was delighted the cabin now belonged to me.  I was where I was supposed to be, and although Bradley had shifted in the night, one of his arms was still over me.  I whispered so as not to disturb my friend, “Good morning, Mark.”

After breakfast, I told Bradley we needed to check out the basement.  I didn’t know what I’d do with the space other than maybe install a washer and dryer at some point, but I wanted to make sure there weren’t any problems.  Mark and I played ping pong down there once.  It was just a big open space with cinderblock walls and a concrete floor.

I found the key and unlocked the door to the stairs.  Then I reached in and flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights.  Bradley and I walked down together, and we were surprised by what we saw.  The long, mostly empty basement room that I remembered was now full of junk.  Boxes were on top of boxes, and discarded furniture was everywhere.

Bradley grunted and said, “Did the Scotts ever throw anything away?”

“I guess not.  It wasn’t like this when I was down here the last time.”  When I scanned the room, I noticed the old ping pong table was still there.  It was folded up and pushed against a wall.  Bradley and I took a moment to admire the impressive amount of stuff that had been stored in the basement, and I said, “I’m mostly concerned about water damage and structural issues.”

Bradley turned in a circle, looking at the mudsill, and said, “I don’t see anything, but you won’t be able to get a good look until this place is cleared out.”

For Bradley’s sake as well as my own, I didn’t want the first weekend at the cabin to be all about work, so I suggested putting off the basement until later.  “How about we hike around the lake and maybe go for a swim?”

The next morning, we drove back to town, and I paid Mrs. Scott a visit.  I told her the cabin looked great, and I was pleased that she let me have it.  And I told her about the basement.  I thought she might not know, or maybe she had forgotten about all the things that were down there.  Even though the contents of the basement now belonged to me, I offered to let her have anything she wanted back.  I even offered her Bradley’s services and his pickup.  But she explained Mr. Scott had become obsessed with keeping everything in recent years, and she had no use for what he squirreled away at the cabin.

“Most of it isn’t trash.  There are some quality things down there.  I suggested we give it all to Goodwill, but Carl became weird about letting anything go.  He wasn’t always like that.”

I called Bradley that night and told him the contents of the basement might have some value, and if he helped me clean it out, he could have the stuff and sell it.  He agreed to go back to the cabin with me the following weekend.

Bradley’s parents had a garage they let him use, and the two of us must have made a dozen trips between the cabin and their home in town before the basement was empty.  We then thoroughly inspected the floor, walls, and joists and determined the cabin was sound and didn’t need any costly repairs.  I was relieved.  At one end of the basement, Mr. Scott had built shelves that might be useful.  They were solid and deep, but basic.  Apparently, Mr. Scott never intended the basement to be a finished room.

After a hard day’s work, I properly thanked Bradley.  Then I made him dinner and thanked him again.

The Secret Door

The cabin became part of my life.  I was up there nearly every weekend.  My family often stayed with me on holidays, and once or twice during the summer, I had a party for the queer guys in town.  I encouraged them to bring tents and camp by the cabin so they wouldn’t have to worry about drinking and driving.  Bradley and other special friends sometimes stayed with me.  But I also spent a lot of time alone at the cabin.  It was my refuge.  And nearly every night I spent there, Mark would visit me in my dreams.  If I had a guest in my bed, he was usually involved in Mark’s and my recreational activities.

I never tried to analyze my nighttime experiences with Mark.  I assumed my dream lover was a product of my subconscious.  But then something happened that made me wonder.  A fellow accountant, a quiet and gentle man, spent a night with me at the cabin, and the next morning, over breakfast, he informed me that he had dreamed a young man had joined us.  I held him in my arms while the stranger went down on him.  I had dreamed the same thing.

I didn’t go down to the basement often.  About the only thing I kept there were a few Christmas decorations.  But seven years after buying the cabin, I took a big stack of board games I had gotten at a yard sale to the basement.  When I put them on one of Mr. Scott’s shelves, I noticed there was a small gap between one of the sections.  Then I noticed what looked like a couple of hinges.  After standing there perplexed for a couple of minutes, I decided to pull on that section of the shelving, and much to my amazement, it swung back.  Behind it was a steel door.  I tried the handle, but it was locked.  Then I got the keys Mrs. Scott had given me, but none of them worked.  Finally, I got a measuring tape and, after comparing the length of the cabin with that of the basement room, I determined there must be a room about ten feet deep behind the door.

Was it a panic room?  A bomb shelter?  A tornado safe room?  Maybe Mr. Scott hid a massive collection of p*** behind that door.  I thought about asking Bradley if he knew of a way to get the door open without causing too much damage, but then I decided I didn’t want to know.  Maybe some mysteries are best left unsolved.

The Secret Behind the Door

Twenty years passed, and I turned sixty.  Many of my friends had married or had significant others, but Bradley and I were still single.  Bradley had gradually transformed into a hot daddy bear, and he still turned the heads of many in town, including the young guys.  He also became a successful contractor.  I had not aged as well.  My father died, and Mom went to a nursing home.  My nephews grew up and moved away, so my brother and sister-in-law often visited one of them on holidays.  They only came to the cabin once or twice a year.

More of my friends admitted to having sexy dreams at the cabin involving a mysterious young man.  One of my nephews claimed that a strange man came into the room on a cold winter night when he was still a little boy and put an extra blanket over him and his brother.  My brother said that one night when he went downstairs to pee, he saw someone going into my room.  The young man smiled and winked, and put his finger up to his lips as if to ask him not to speak.  He had assumed I had snuck a date into the cabin after our parents had gone to sleep.  But I never did that.  However, my dreams of Mark never abated.  They became as much a part of my life as the cabin itself.

Mrs. Scott died on Thanksgiving Day.  She was eighty-four.  I invited Bradley and a few friends to the cabin, and I asked Bradley to help me cook.  We were talking about Mrs. Scott when Bradley pulled out a drawer looking for a knife.  That’s when something dropped.  We heard the metallic ping.  Two pings, actually.  It was a key.  It first hit one of Bradley’s work boots, bounced, and landed on the kitchen’s hardwood floor.  Ding, ding.  When Bradley bent over to pick it up, he found a strip of duct tape on the bottom of the drawer that had come loose.

“Is this for your safe deposit box?”

“No.  I didn’t put that there.”

“You mean it’s been there for thirty years?”

“I guess so.”

“Any idea what it’s for?”

I thought for a moment and said, “Yes, I think I do.  But let's leave it until tomorrow when we’re alone.”

Somehow, I did know, and a great sadness fell over me.  A part of me didn’t want to take Bradley down to the basement the next morning, but I did.  It was time.  I showed him the secret door, and the key slipped right in.  Inside was a makeshift bier made of a couple of sawhorses and a long sheet of plywood.  Lying on top was what appeared to be a body wrapped in a sheet and several layers of thick plastic.

I buried my face in Bradley’s muscular chest and sobbed.  I said, “It’s Mark.  I’m sure it’s Mark.”

We found a letter addressed to Mrs. Scott beside the body.  It read:

My dear, if you’re reading this, I am probably gone, and you now know your son didn’t willingly abandon you.  But I hope you’ll remember me as a coward and not a monster.  His death was an accident, I promise.  But I knew the law might not see it that way, and I couldn’t bear it if you thought I was responsible.  So I constructed a private mausoleum for our Mark, and I made up that story about him leaving town.  That week, when you went to visit your sister in June after Mark graduated, he and I tried to keep our distance, but one day we had a serious argument out on the patio.  I had heard the noises he and that awful boy made at the cabin one night earlier in May, and I confronted him.  I told him he would have broken your heart if you had heard.  But he claimed you already knew he was queer, or gay, or whatever, and that enraged me.  I just couldn’t stand that our son was that way, and that you were aware and had kept it from me.  So I pushed him.  I didn’t mean to harm him, but he lost his balance.  He was always clumsy.  And he hit his head on the framing of the lounge chair, and then again on one of the flagstones.  I knew when I heard that double thump, a terrible thing had happened.  I sat there for over an hour looking at Mark’s lifeless body.  I wanted him to get up and storm off to his room as he had done a thousand times when I told him what I thought of him.  Finally, I put his body in the truck, gathered a few of his things, and took him to the cabin.  I expected you or someone to challenge me about the lies I told about him running away, but you and everyone else took me at my word.  You made it easy, so don’t hate me now.

Mrs. Scott’s sister was still alive, and she was the executor of her estate.  When she heard about Mark and what happened to him, and the identity of his body had been verified, she elected not to lay her sister to rest beside her late husband.  Instead, she bought two new plots on the other side of the cemetery in town, and she held a double funeral.  A lot of people showed up, including Bradley, me, and several of our friends.  Mark and Mrs. Scott were then buried beside one another.

For a day or two, I seriously thought about selling the cabin.  And I feared Mark would no longer visit me in my dreams.  I went up there by myself on Christmas Eve, half expecting to wake up the next morning feeling alone, old, and abandoned.

Luckily, that didn’t happen.  When I drifted off, a young man came to my room, got into bed with me, kissed me passionately, and lifted my legs over his shoulders.  I awoke on Christmas morning feeling satisfied and cared for as I always did at the cabin.  I whispered, “Good morning, Mark.  I'm sorry about what happened to you.  I love you.  I always have, but you know that.”