by JL Bryan
He spotted me and jumped back. The space alien pilot look of my night vision goggles probably didn't help.
“Hey, there,” I said, as though the two of us running into each other in the driveway at four in the morning was a completely normal, everyday occurrence. I raised my goggles to reduce my alien invader look a bit. “What's up?”
“What...” He looked from me to the van. “What's going on?”
This was a perfectly reasonable question on his part, one I was forbidden by his parents to answer truthfully. And if you can't tell the truth and you can't stay silent, then you don't have much choice left but to come up with a lie. Fast.
“Um, this is embarrassing,” I began, which bought me a few extra seconds. No lies so far. But then I continued, “We were hoping to get some sunrise footage of the owl.”
“The owl?”
“Yeah, the way its eyes change with the position of the sun. I think it might have been an intentional feature by the original creators.”
“Okay.” He sounded instantly bored by this. “Where's Stacey?”
“Back in the van.”
“You missed a trailhead back there. The hill has a couple. That one's pretty overgrown, though. The one behind our house is longer but easier. The wild animals use it.”
“There's a trail in the woods behind your house? By your parents' room?”
“Kind of a deer path, yeah. Sometimes you see a rabbit or fox there.” He yawned. Now that my eyes had adjusted from night vision to moonlight, I could see how tired he looked. “I have to get inside before my parents wake up. But yeah, I'll take you up that way. And maybe don't tell my parents I was out here.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Were you doing something exciting and fun?”
“Sometimes I just want to go for a walk.” His tone was irritated, but to be fair, my question had been nosy. “Get away from everyone. Get out and admire, you know, nature. The natureness of it all.” That last part didn't sound remotely sincere to me. I didn't see Nate wandering out in the wee hours of the morning to write sonnets about stars and moonlight. Ephraim, maybe. Or maybe I didn't know these kids as well as I thought. “But my mom will freak out. Like where am I going to go? A party? We're in the middle of nowhere. I couldn't get into trouble if I wanted to. Which I don't, because colleges look at that.”
“Maybe she's worried about you getting hurt. They think a black bear or another large animal did some damage around the camp. The cabin. The lodge, before you moved in.”
“Black bears are the smallest and weakest of all bears. And we've never even seen one, so if there is one, then it's avoiding people.”
“What about mountain lions?” I said.
“This isn't Where the Red Fern Grows. Which was a lame movie, I'm never watching that again. These woods are tame. They're modern. There's nothing I can't handle out here. But still, don't tell my parents. All right? My dad wouldn't care, but my mom's always freaking out lately. And Ephraim's a perma-freak, but that's a whole 'nother problem in my life. We cool?”
“I guess I can agree to that, for now, if you promise to be careful.” I thought of the boys who'd drowned. “And stay away from the lake. Don't ever go there alone.”
“Yeah, yeah, standard buddy system stuff. I've got the Lifesaving merit badge.” He yawned and stretched, looking uphill toward the van. “Tell Stacey I said what's up.”
“Sure. Good night, Nathan.”
“Just Nate.” He trudged back to the front door and let himself inside, treading lightly, disturbing none of the porch floorboards, as if he were no stranger to sneaking in and out at night.
“That was super odd,” Stacey said over the headset. “What do you think he was doing?”
“Maybe he's telling the truth.” I started back up the road to rejoin Stacey.
“Or maybe he doesn't like being inside that house at night,” Stacey said. “Maybe he saw something.”
“You work on talking to him. He likes you.” I turned off the headset and climbed into the van with her.
“Are you sure we shouldn't tell his parents we saw him out late?”
“I'm not sure, no. But if he's holding something back from us, then ratting him out to his parents is not the quickest way to gain his trust so he opens up. And he has a point—there's a limit to how much trouble a kid can get in around here. He's literally a Boy Scout. I told him to stay away from the lake. He wasn't wet, so he wasn't swimming.”
“He could have been out paddling. Alone.”
“Let's hope not,” I said. “He seemed to understand the buddy system.”
A little while later, after a complicated process of turning the van around on the dirt road without shining my headlights into the house, I drove us back to the lodge.
We hiked down the trail together, keeping close, our flashlight beams carving away some of the darkness ahead. Owls screeched above.
“What's that sound?” Stacey asked as we finally approached the boys' cabin circle where our borrowed bunks awaited. I was so tired that the simple shelter with its bunk beds was going to feel as luxurious as a Four Seasons suite.
I stopped. Something thudded in the distance. Again. And again, banging at regular intervals.
“It's that door to Bobcat Cabin,” I said.
“I thought we secured that.”
“We did. And we have all that equipment inside.”
Stacey's eyes widened; we were both thinking of the damage done by the alleged invisible black bear, which was very possibly not a bear at all but the invisible laughing entity that had taunted me in there. The entity had knocked around Josh's tools, and our cameras were not cheap.
We both ran the rest of the way down the trail to the cabins.
Chapter Fifteen
The door to Bobcat Cabin repeatedly banged against the outer wall of the cabin, slammed by the wind. Each time the door opened, it would creak shut again, perhaps pulled by the force of gravity and guided by the warp of the doorframe. Then the wind would pick up and blow the door open once more.
“We'd better have a look inside,” I said, though I felt apprehensive. I was already worn down and didn't feel like chasing the invisible giggler again. “Let's make it quick. Keep your ears open.”
We stepped inside, and I wasn't shy about jabbing the beam of my flashlight into dark corners.
No giggling arose as we walked into the first bedroom. The place was as quiet as it was dark.
The bunks had moved around, though, pushed out from the walls at odd angles to each other. Whatever had moved the bunks had also moved—
“The camera!” Stacey ran toward the knocked-over tripod and hurriedly inspected the night vision camera. “The lens is fine. Battery's drained, though.”
“Hopefully it recorded whatever knocked it over.”
The audio recorder with its delicate microphone was drained, too. We collected that along with the camera. I kept an eye on the closet, on guard for anything to emerge from among the broken shelves and the gaping hole in the back wall.
We eventually made our way to the other bedroom. Nothing had changed there, as far as we could tell. Our thermal camera remained perched atop its tripod, though its battery was drained, too.
“The giggler must have been hungry,” I murmured. “I hate when they feed on our electricity.”
As we trudged back to Wolf Cabin, our home base, I had every intention of powering up the gear and finding any secrets we might have collected. Once we got there, the first thing we did was set the batteries to recharge.
Recharging would take a while, though. When my boots were off, stretching out on the bunk seemed like a great idea. The reassurance of sunlight would come before long.
I slept uneasily, with flickering dreams where strange laughter echoed and shadowy children chased me among a maze of cabins and bonfires.
Pushing open a rickety, creaking door, I found my way outside. A campfire blazed nearby, filling the air with the smell of fire, a smell I hated.
I staggered forward
, up along a steep, narrow trail through the woods.
Glancing back, I saw the strange maze I'd emerged from had been reduced to a single crumbling, skeletal cabin, overgrown and nearly consumed by the foggy woods around it. All the light and heat of the fire was gone.
Softly, as though from a distance, I could hear laughter through the cabin's open doorway. The shadow children, the ones who'd been chasing me.
The door to the cabin, clinging by two of its three hinges, slammed shut with a rusty squeal and locked itself from within, cutting off their voices.
I turned to look uphill. The path was steep and incredibly long, making me think of Machu Picchu or the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia—long, stone stairways to heaven connecting humans below to the gods above. The symbolism was always clear, across continents and centuries, with hardly a word needing to be said to explain it.
Up there, I know, was the great stone owl, and a presence that waited. A presence that had silenced the laughing children. A presence that knew I was here.
I shivered. The fear twisted my stomach into knots. Whatever was up there, I didn't want to face it.
Something grabbed me—a claw-like tree branch, reaching out from the forest, seizing my arm, trapping me.
It began to shake me. A knothole in the tree opened and said my name.
I awoke on my bunk. The grip on my arm was still there. Slender but strong fingers, digging at me, shaking me.
“Ellie?” Stacey leaned over me. Her face had replaced the knothole. “Are you up?”
“Huh?” I took a moment to sort out where I was—in the cabin, with daylight gushing in through the window.
“Looked like you were having a bad dream,” she said. “Lots of grunting and twisting and turning.”
“Yeah.” I sat up and stretched. “Just your basic Children of the Corn nightmare scenario. Shadow children chasing me toward He Who Walks Behind the Campfire. How'd you sleep?”
“Bad dreams, too. Look at this.” She pressed a tablet into my hands. A video clip was set up, currently paused.
The sight of it jolted me awake like a shot of espresso. Well, maybe not quite that well, but it snapped me out of my dreamy state. “That's from inside the cabin?”
“Yep. The last few seconds before it went dead.” Stacey reached over and touched the play triangle.
The bunk beds and closet appeared in night vision green. At first, everything was still in the quiet, empty room.
Then one set of bunk beds slid several inches across the floor, as if someone had pushed one corner of it. It stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
“Did you see it?” Stacey asked.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Now look.” As she pointed, the other bunk bed moved several inches from the wall, too, shoved by an invisible force. This knocked over the camera tripod, and the video ended.
“Wow. Good job, Stacey.” I rubbed my eyes. “Did you correlate it with—”
“Yep.” She played another video clip, this one from the thermal in the cabin's other bedroom, which I'd pointed right at the wrecked closet.
A cold spot emerged from the closet, then grew. And grew. And grew. It was like a cold fog, expanding to fill the room.
“Where have we seen that before?” I asked, fairly rhetorically.
“Upstairs in the lodge. It looks like the same entity.”
“It could be a cluster of them,” I said.
“The three boys?”
“Maybe. But we've only scratched the surface of this place's history. Did you also check the—”
“Of course I checked the audio, and yes, we caught something.” She tapped a button on her laptop.
A high-pitched shrieking laugh filled the room, climbing in volume for a couple of seconds before ending abruptly.
“The invisible giggler,” I muttered.
“So the huge cold spot is also the giggler,” Stacey said. “Assuming it's the same huge cold spot from the lodge and not a different huge cold spot. And that just leaves the tall guy who walks around with heavy footsteps.”
“Which was also seen in two locations. So we could be dealing with up to four distinct entities. Or entity clusters. Three people dying together could stick together in death, forming a cluster. Especially if they shared any kind of bond in life.”
“Cool. I'll be sure to think about that while using their old shower.” Stacey grabbed her backpack, and I reluctantly grabbed my own and went with her to the bathhouse, not far from the haunted Bobcat Cabin. As we stood in the shadowy brick-walled showers, I tried not to let the memory of that invisible laughter play again and again inside my head.
Chapter Sixteen
After the bathhouse, we headed up to the lodge. I texted Allison that I hoped Josh could meet us there, alone.
When he showed up, he looked freshly blow-dried, wearing his usual wide smile and shaking our hands.
“Allison tells me you want to hear more about the camp,” he said.
“It would help with our investigation, and we could record it to use for your website. That's probably the bigger value to you,” I said.
“The museum area would make a good background,” Stacey said.
“Fantastic idea. I like it.” Josh double-finger-gunned her before trotting over to the museum. He hadn't asked about our overnight observation, so I held back on mentioning the strange events in the cabin. There was no telling how he might react, and I wanted him relaxed and chatty.
Stacey took over, posing him in front of the display about the Stony Owl effigy. It included an aerial photo, quartzite stones taken from the mound and arranged in a miniature imitation of the original, and a number of excavated tools, weapons, and pottery shards.
“You want to turn about three-quarters of the way toward me,” Stacey said. She'd set up a couple of portable lights from the van for a better video. “Yep, that's it. Looks good. Let me know when you're ready.”
“So, where do I begin?” Josh suddenly looked nervous, his smile slipping.
“Imagine someone's never heard of this place,” I said. “How would you tell them about the owl?”
He thought it over and nodded. “Okay. I'm ready. Action!”
“Hey, I say 'action,'” Stacey told him. “Action!”
Josh began. He did little more than read the little signs in the display, but he did so with great zeal, pointing out the arrowheads and beads, the obsidian knife and ax head, the plate of copper with the owl etching. “They say Stony Owl could be thousands of years old,” he said after a while. “No one knows for sure. What we know is that, to the people who lived way, way back then, it was a place of great importance. And we are proud to carry on that tradition today, maintaining the site as a valuable cultural resource for our campers. The great old Stony Owl teaches us to back up and take the long view, the big picture, and really consider what's important in life. What's really going to last, and what will matter in the long run.”
“Oh, that's great!” Stacey said. “Can you tell us what we do know about its history?”
“We don't know much about who built the owl, or why. Our modern understanding begins with Charles Tennyford.” He pointed to the 1896 photograph of a bearded man in a straw hat. “Kind of a Renaissance man and treasure hunter. Farmer, amateur chemist, inventor, though not of anything that really caught on. He led the excavation of the site. Trees had to be felled and undergrowth hacked through. The forest had grown thick over the centuries.
“They dug a trench through the owl.” He indicated another photograph. A small digging crew had gouged a long furrow into the owl's side, like a deep stab wound all the way to its heart. “They moved more than a ton of rocks, one shovel at a time, to unearth the artifacts you see here.”
“And he found human remains?” I asked.
“Yeah...” Josh looked at the photograph tucked down in a bottom corner, showing the bearded Tennyford in his straw hat holding up the skull and beads. “We should probably take that picture out. I don't t
hink I have the key.” He patted his pocket and shook his head. “Probably in the office.”
“Were the bones returned to the grave?” I asked.
“I would think so. They're not here. This shouldn't go into the promotional video. I'm taking that picture out, okay? It seems insensitive, you know, by today's standards.”
“Did Tennyford leave any records we can look at? Notes?” I asked.
Josh shrugged. “It wouldn't be here. The camp wasn't built until decades later. I think he published an article about it somewhere. I know he thought the old walls lining the trails might have been the ruins of some ancient military defense, and maybe there was a battle here a long time ago.”
“Did he find any evidence of that?”
“Not that I know of. I don't know much about him beyond what's here.” He gestured at the museum display. “This is where I learned about him.”
He shifted over to the plant and wildlife display, which would make good website fodder and seemed to genuinely interest Stacey. I ignored them, staring at the old artifacts instead, wondering if an old native burial site was really the best place for a kids' summer camp.
In the main room, Stacey had Josh stand at the wall of photographs. He seemed on firmer footing, grinning wide and gesturing expansively, like he was about to explain the timeshare condo deal of a lifetime.
“Camp Stony Owl was first opened in 1920 by Reverend Roger Carmody and his wife Laurie Ann.” Josh pointed to the black and white picture of the founders. Carmody had a sharp nose and a serious, somber look. Where he was tall and burly, and had the rigid bearing of a military man, his wife Laurie Ann was short and plump with a cheerful smile, her arms draped affectionately around two college-aged counselors, one male and one female.
They stood before a campfire, flanked by campers, everyone in matching uniforms and wide-brimmed campaign hats. “The camp grew year by year, with campers coming from all around. It closed during the Great Depression but eventually reopened in the 1970s. Generations of children have been happy to call Camp Stony Owl their summer home, a place where they come for adventure and leave with a lifetime of treasured memories.” He paused and remained completely still, like he was expecting her to say cut.
