"Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.)"
Bang, bang, bang!
The knocking on the door of Sabine's forest cabin startled her so much that the copy of Ink and Bone by Lisa Unger flew out of her hands and onto the floor across the room. After snapping out of the trance the horror book had her in and taking a few breaths, she instinctively got up and walked over to greet the guest at the door.
Sabine had grown up in a small town where everybody knew everybody. Crime was so rare that nobody bothered to lock their doors before bed or check who knocked on the door before opening it.
As she gripped the door handle, Sabine realized she wasn't in her small town home. She was in her family's cabin in a dense forest in rural Washington and the clock on the cabin wall read 9:17 pm. No one should be knocking on her door. There was no civilization for miles. She didn't know what to do. She was alone in the middle of nowhere and still spooked from her book.
Bang, bang, bang!
"Hello? Is anybody here?" said a man's voice from the other side of the door as he knocked again.
Sabine responded hesitantly, "Who is it?"
"I was," he paused for an unusual amount of time, "hiking in these woods and got lost. Can I come in and use your telegraph?"
Telegraph? This perplexed her, but she assumed he had just misspoken and meant telephone. Still, though, something about the whole situation was weird and unsettling.
"Uhm? I don't think I'm comfortable with that." She tried to mask her nervousness as she continued, "I can give you directions to the road and the nearest gas station, though, if you'd like."
"No, no, no, no." His voice began to get louder, and he sounded frantic. "No! You need to let me in! You need to let me in!" He started pounding on the door and kept repeating that exact phrase repeatedly.
Terrified now, Sabine quickly locked the door and started to go around, ensuring all the windows were closed and shutting the curtains while shouting, "Go away! I'm calling the police!"
However, this didn't seem to phase him as he continued pounding on the door. She found out why when she picked up the landline, and heard nothing but static. She tried her cell phone in vain but knew there was no cell service for miles.
"YOU NEED TO LET ME IN! YOU NEED TO LET ME IN!" The raving and pounding were getting louder and more violent. Sabine didn't know what to do. She was trapped in the cabin with no way to get help. Her father insisted she'd take one of his handguns in case a situation like this happened, but she refused as holding a gun frightened her, but now she was regretting that decision. All she could do was grab the fireplace poker and sit in the corner of the cabin, hoping the intruder couldn't break through the locks.
Sabine screamed in terror as she watched the man's fist go straight through the door and unlock it from the inside. The man that walked through the doorway was skinny and reminded her of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. He looked like he maybe could have been hiking, as he was wearing cargo shorts, an athletic tank top, and an outdoorsman's bucket hat, but he was also wearing sandals which would be hell to hike in, and it had been pouring rain all day, but his clothes weren't even damp. The main thing she noticed, though, was his eyes. They were pitch black, with no pupils or irises, just two black marbles in his eye sockets.
She continued to scream as the man walked toward her, cowering in the corner. With the way he was screaming and pounding on her door, Sabine subconsciously expected to see anger or fury on the visitor's face. Instead, he wore a plain emotionless expression. She tried to swing the poker at him, but he caught it with his right hand and yanked it out of her grasp. His other hand, bleeding from going through the thick wooden door, Grabbed her by the neck, lifted her off the ground, and started choking her. She tried with all her strength to break free from his grasp but to no avail. As her breath and energy dissipated, Sabine gave up and just looked straight into the infinite voids that were his eyes. She became so entranced that she barely felt the fireplace poker plunge into her stomach. The man dropped her on the ground, with blood flowing out of her stomach into a pool and staining the woolen white sweater she was wearing. Still maintaining the same emotionless expression on his face, the man turned around and walked out the door into the forest.
