Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

  “More strange things happened. One day they came back from horseback riding and found four dolls made out of burlap sacks, nestled in their sleeping bags, each one with X’s where the eyes should have been. After that, none of them left the cabin, none of them slept.

  “And then, one of them was killed.

  “Her name was Lori, and they found her body pinned to the archery target, an arrow straight through her heart. After that, the remaining three girls in Cabin 2 all went stark raving mad. They had to be carted out on stretchers, and last I heard, all but one remains in institutional care. Camp ended early that year.”

  “THAT’S TRUE,” Shea said. “A GIRL DID GET KILLED AROUND HERE A FEW YEARS AGO. I SAW IT ON THE NEWS.”

  Corinne gave her a baffled stare. “You knew this happened, and you decided to come here anyway?”

  Shea shrugged. “I DIDN’T KNOW IT HAPPENED HERE. THE REPORTER NEVER SAID THE NAME OF THE CAMP OR ANYTHING. BESIDES, I HEARD IT WAS AN ARCHERY ACCIDENT. THEY NEVER SAID ANYTHING ABOUT AN INSANE MURDERER RUNNING AROUND.”

  “Did Abigail do it?” asked Becca.

  “It’s hard to say,” Oscar said, shrugging. “There’s always more going on around here than I can keep track of. Maybe Abigail killed her, or maybe Lori was just a girl who made some mighty vengeful enemies. I can’t say as I know which is the more reasonable explanation. What I do know is that Abigail is still out there.”

  Becca twisted the ends of her hair nervously. “So you’ve seen her?”

  “Of course not. Abigail’s a shy girl. Keeps mainly to herself. But I’ve heard her rustling around in the bushes from time to time. In fact, sometimes when I’m out here in the meadow, I’ll sit real still and quiet until the only thing I can hear is the wind blowing through the grass, and over by the road, I’ll hear the crack of a twig or the sound of a girl crying, and I’ll know it’s Abigail.”

  He finished talking. The sun peeked from behind the clouds and the shadows lifted off of his face, and he smiled at them and sat up straight on his mower.

  “Well, I should probably get back to work, but it was sure nice talking to you girls!”

  He revved up the engine on the riding lawn mower, tipped the brim of his baseball cap to them, and rode off across the meadow. The girls from Cabin 2 stared after him, their mouths hanging open.

  Shea broke the silence. “WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT?”

  Annoyance flashed across Corinne’s face. “Just a creepy old man trying to scare us. I’m going to report him when we get back.”

  “WE PROBABLY SHOULD GO BACK. IT’S STARTING TO GET DARK.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” Becca said. “I want to go home.”

  “DON’T BE SUCH A BABY,” Shea said, though not unkindly. She grinned at Becca as she spoke.

  “I don’t want to go back, either,” said Hennie.

  “How can we sleep in that cabin, knowing that the girls who had our cots all went insane?” Becca said.

  “WE CAN SEE IF CABIN 5 WANTS TO TRADE CABINS WITH US. THEY’RE CLOSEST TO THE LATRINE, SO THEY MIGHT GO FOR IT.”

  Corinne sneered. “I’m not sleeping downwind from the toilets just because a couple of you are too naive to know when you’re being messed with.”

  “But some of the things Oscar said were true,” Hennie said.

  “Which things? A girl got killed in an archery accident. We know that. But did the news say that she was murdered? Did it say that a girl disappeared in a cave? Did it say that a bunch of campers went insane and they had to close down the camp?” Corinne counted off each point on her fingers like she was amassing a pile of evidence.

  “Don’t you think the news would have mentioned something like that if it had actually happened?” she finished.

  “I guess so,” Hennie admitted.

  “Then there’s nothing to be afraid of,” Corinne said.

  “But Oscar said the camp director tried to hush everything up so no one would panic,” Becca said, refusing to give up.

  “Well, that probably went right out the window once somebody got murdered on an archery target,” Wallis muttered. Nevertheless, what Corinne said made sense.

  “I still want to go home,” Becca said.

  Shea put an arm around her shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  “Come on, let’s go back,” Corinne said.

  As they walked back to the road, Wallis thought about asking Shea whether she lived nearby. She must if the camper’s death had been covered in the local news. That would be a good icebreaker for a conversation. But Wallis’s tongue sat like a lump of clay in her mouth. She put her head down and trailed behind the rest of the girls.

  Only Becca still seemed upset by what Oscar had said. Corinne’s logic had calmed the rest of them down, and no one said anything about Abigail or Lori or even Oscar. Still, when they passed a trailhead that led into the woods and Hennie whispered, “That’s the path to the cave,” a chill ran through every one of them.

  When they got back, two rows of tea candles illuminated the path to Cabin 2. This must have been what Megan was doing while they were gone. She’d also left a trail of Hershey’s kisses between the flickering candles and hung a small disco ball from the door frame.

  A Note from the Narrator: Megan had planned to do more to the cabin. She’d brought a roll of streamers and a pack of glow-in-the-dark stars and planets and meant to hang those as well, but the girls didn’t know this, and they never would.

  Shea giggled. “THAT LOOKS SO CUTE!”

  As the rest of her cabinmates went up the steps, Wallis bent down and put three of the kisses in the front pocket of her overall shorts. She was about to reach for a fourth when she heard the screams.

  Wallis ran up the steps and into the cabin. Inside, their flashlights had been duct-taped to the four corner posts, all trained on a spot in the middle of the cabin where their counselor’s body hung upside down from a beam. Megan’s ankles had been tied with a cord and X’s drawn over her eyes in black marker. The end of her ponytail grazed the floorboards as the body swung back and forth like a pendulum.

  Shea and Hennie screamed. Corinne shook. Becca collapsed into a ball and began to weep. Wallis pointed up at the unfinished wood panels that slanted up to form the roof of the cabin.

  “Look,” she said, her voice trembling.

  Scrawled in blood were the words:

  ABIGAIL LIVES.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

  THE GIRL WITH BEADS IN HER HAIR

  THE GIRL IN THE ORANGE HOODIE

  THE STICKLIKE GOTH GIRL

  THE GIRL WITH THE UPTURNED NOSE

  THE GIRL WITH THOUSANDS OF FRECKLES

  CABIN 3

  THE HERO’S QUEST

  [SCENE: Interior, Cabin 3]

  Cabin 2 was still out in the meadow talking to Oscar when the girls from Cabin 3 discovered that something had also been written in their rafters. The five of them circled up beneath it and took turns reading the verse aloud:

  In evil times when darkness threatens day,

  One soul among you must hold it at bay.

  First you must slay the beast outside its lair

  And then set free the one imprisoned there;

  But know the path you walk is thick with traps

  All custom-made to hasten your collapse.

  Beware! The Knave who only speaks in lies!

  Beware! The Knight who plots out your demise!

  Beware! For you will lose before it’s done!

  First five, then four, then three, then two, then one.

  This quest is not a summer’s game,

  It is not safe, it is not tame.

  Consider this before you pack—

  Some of you may not come back.

  It was never a question of whether they would go.

  They were, all of them, readers of Arthurian legends and Greek myths and every volume in the Isis Archimedes series that had been published so far. They were Girl Scouts who blew on dandelions and looked for suspicious cracks in walls
that looked like they might lead to magical worlds, and between the five of them had spent exactly 1,362 hours, 42 minutes, and 13 seconds daydreaming about receiving a call to action just like this one.

  Of course they would answer it. The question was where they would start.

  “There was a cave on the map,” said the girl with beads in her hair.

  “I saw it, too,” said the girl in the orange hoodie.

  “It’s near the pony trail,” said the sticklike goth girl.

  “What about our counselor?” asked the girl with the upturned nose. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “We’ll leave her a note so she won’t worry,” said the girl with thousands of freckles. While she found a pencil and jotted a few lines, the rest of them packed. They filled their water bottles, hooked axes and Swiss army knives to their belt loops, and stuffed flashlights, headlamps, and first aid kits into their backpacks.

  “Shouldn’t we think about this? Shouldn’t we have a plan?” asked the girl in the orange hoodie.

  “I’ve been planning for this my whole life,” said the girl with beads in her hair.

  To Our Counselor,

  By the time you read this, we’ll be gone.

  Unfortunately, we can’t tell you why, only that Camp So-and-So is in terrible peril and we have been called upon to save it.

  The road ahead is liable to be long and dangerous. We cannot say when, or if, we will return.

  We are sorry that we did not get to know you better, and are sure that you are a very good counselor.

  Respectfully,

  Cabin 3

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

  VERITY

  AMBER, ALIX, ANNIKA, and ADDISON

  PAM, their counselor

  CABIN 4

  SOUL MATES

  [SCENE: Behind Cabin 4 on a trail that, until a few moments ago, did not exist]

  Amber and Alix and Annika and Addison had been best friends since the fourth grade, and now they had all come to summer camp together.

  But each cabin held five girls, and so the last bunk went to Verity.

  They were nice enough people, Verity supposed. They were very silly and giggled at everything, but there was nothing mean about them, and Verity reminded herself as she unpacked that if they were excluding her, at least it probably wasn’t on purpose.

  Still, she couldn’t settle down. She’d spent the past four months in a state of anxiety, ever since she’d sent in the application for her one-week session at Camp So-and-So. Her parents had looked so hopeful when they showed Verity the brochure, so happy when Verity didn’t immediately push it away.

  It was summer camp. It was a rite of passage, a formative experience. You could come back from something like that a whole different person. The idea appealed so much to Verity that she found herself nodding her head and buying flip-flops to wear in the shower.

  Now, she realized it had been a mistake. She had no idea how she would make it through an entire week if she kept worrying like this.

  It wasn’t like it showed. It wasn’t like these girls were paying attention to anything she did anyway. And even if they noticed, they probably wouldn’t care. In her head, Verity knew that you could say you were gay and most people would be okay with it. But knowing something like that wasn’t the same as announcing it to the world.

  It wasn’t like you had to tell people when you decided you were straight. People should have to do that, Verity decided. It should be required. It would be less lonely that way.

  It seemed like Verity’s friends back home never stopped talking about the boys they liked, the boys who looked at them, the boys who didn’t look at them, and when they weren’t talking about boys, they were asking each other for advice about how to act around boys and what to say to boys and how to feel about boys. Meanwhile, Verity couldn’t even give herself permission to look at a girl long enough to know whether she was looking back or not, and she didn’t know of anyone she could ask for advice about that.

  A Note from the Narrator: You might wonder, how could I possibly know all of these things about people I’ve never met? Before the campers arrive, I do my homework. I study all their files. I am a keen observer of human behavior. I make good guesses. But I strive for accuracy in my storytelling, so when I find a camper who keeps a journal, I feel that I really owe it to the story to get my hands on that journal.

  At some point, she’d tell people, and then they’d all alter their opinions of her accordingly. They’d think about all the years that they had known her, and they would make certain moments stand out in relief, and they would say, “Oh, of course you like girls. How could we not have known all along?”

  Verity didn’t want other people trying to make sense of her. Not when she hadn’t quite made sense of it all herself.

  A Note from the Narrator: You might also be thinking that it was wrong of me to read Verity’s journal and trample around through her innermost, secret thoughts just so I can tell you this story. I would respond to that by saying that I have not stolen Verity’s journal. I am only borrowing it, and there’s plenty in here I’m not telling you, no matter how juicy it is.

  After dinner, their counselor, Pam, laid out their plans for the rest of the evening. First they would unpack, then they would make up their bunks, then they would go introduce themselves to the girls in the other cabins and invite them to an evening of icebreakers and games. Pam barked out these instructions in a way that made them suspect that in another life, she had been either a drill sergeant or a guard in a women’s prison.

  “You will split up into two groups. First group takes Cabins 1 and 2; second group takes Cabins 3 and 5. The evening’s entertainment will begin at 1900 hours sharp. Trail mix and s’mores will be served, and it will be a nice time. Are there any questions, Cabin 4?”

  “No,” they said in unison.

  “Very good,” she said, checking her watch. “Reconvene here in thirty minutes. That is all.”

  Pam set off in the direction of the mess hall, presumably to collect supplies for her icebreakers and s’mores, and leaving the girls to carry out her instructions. This proved a nearly impossible task for Amber, Alix, Annika, and Addison, who were loath to be parted. After some deliberation, it was decided that Alix and Annika would go with Verity, and they left one another with tearful embraces.

  Verity knocked on the doorpost of Cabin 1, but the only person inside was Sharon, the counselor. She had headphones on, her face buried in a gaming console. She didn’t even look up at the girls from Cabin 4, and Verity correctly supposed she would not want to join them for icebreaker games.

  Megan, the counselor of Cabin 2, was hanging a glittery disco ball from the cabin doorway when they approached.

  “Fun!” she squealed when they told her Pam’s plans. “I’ll tell the girls as soon as they get back.”

  She hadn’t actually said they would attend, but that was the closest thing to a yes that Verity, Annika, and Alix would get.

  Cabin 3 wasn’t technically their responsibility, but when they walked past, Verity couldn’t help but notice that something seemed to be amiss. There was no sign of campers or a counselor, or anyone except for Robin, the counselor-in-training who’d checked them in and assigned them to their cabin earlier that afternoon. She was standing in the center of the cabin and reading a letter, which struck Verity as odd, and possibly a little shady. Did she have any business being there? Was that letter even addressed to her?

  “Hey,” Verity waved and smiled, and tried to keep these suspicions hidden from her face. “Have you seen the others?”

  Robin shook her head. “They seem to have lit out for the territories,” she said.

  “Is that allowed?” Alix asked.

  “Sure,” Robin said. “You can pretty much do what you want to at Camp So-and-So. Set your agenda. Follow your bliss.”

  “Really?” Verity asked, thinking about the series of orders Pam had barked at them. “I had not gotten that impression.”

  R
obin folded the letter she’d been reading into thirds and laid it on the cot closest to the door.

  “Oh, wait,” she said. “You’re in Pam’s cabin, aren’t you?”

  Verity, Annika, and Alix nodded ruefully.

  Robin rolled down the vinyl flap over the door and stepped out onto the cinder block steps.

  “Well, then I guess you’ll have to be a little sneakier about it,” she said, winking at them before she jumped down the steps, landing with a puff of dust and pine needles.

  When they returned to their bunks, there was no sign of Addison or Amber. Thinking they were still chatting with the campers next door, the three of them went over to Cabin 5, introduced themselves, and learned that Addison and Amber had never so much as waved hello to these girls, much less invited them over for s’mores.

  “I wonder where they went,” Annika said with a note of annoyance.

  Alix shrugged and turned back toward the girls from Cabin 5.

  “Anyhow, you’ll come over at 1900 hours, whenever that is?” she asked.

  “Seven,” Verity muttered. “1900 hours means seven o’clock.”

  “Then why didn’t Pam just say ‘seven o’clock’?” Alix asked.

  “Sure,” said one of the girls from Cabin 5. “We’ll probably come over after we finish unpacking.”

  “Cool,” said Verity, Annika, and Alix.

  “We’ll see,” said the girl from Cabin 5.

  They were halfway back to their own cabin when Amber and Addison came running toward them. Their eyes were bright and fevered, and their voices even more frantic and giddy than usual.

  “Youguysyouguysyouguys!” Amber shrieked.

  “You’ll never guess what we found in the woods!” Addison said with a reckless grin. She pointed back in the direction they’d come from, a dim and uninviting patch of forest carpeted with enough wild undergrowth to discourage casual exploration.