by JL Bryan
The dead thing's grip loosened. I kicked out and shoved my way up. The ghost wasn't solid enough for me to hit back—a huge advantage on the ghost's part—but the music seemed to have some effect. Maybe the holy music would help the dead reverend recall his life a bit, distract him with memories, even speak to his better nature, if he had one.
I regained my feet and pushed loose, wet hair from my face. I doubted I'd ever get the stink out of my shirt, or my skin.
My flashlight filled the room with searing white light. The apparition was gone.
The door flew open and Stacey staggered in. I caught her before she could slip on the flooded floor and take her own sour lake-water bath.
“Oh.” She hugged me close, perhaps completely misunderstanding my intention. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine. Sorry about the smell.” I backed off of her.
“Huh? I guess it is kinda musty.” She shone her light around. “The shadow guy gave you the old slipperoo again, huh?”
“He tried to drown me.” I pointed to the tub.
It held a couple of cardboard boxes, partly crushed from my close encounter with them, and lots of dust.
Looking down, I found dust all over my jacket. I could taste it on my tongue, where only moments before there had been rank water.
“I'm completely dry,” I said.
“Okay. Uh, guess the new antiperspirant's working?” Stacey drew back from me.
“No, I was just drowning...” I stared at the tub. It looked like no water had touched it in years. “They wore one of the old camp uniforms. Maybe it was Reverend Carmody. It looked like a drowning victim.”
“Could be one of the boys, then. No, wait. The uniforms were phased out. What about the counselor guy Terrance? Gwendolyn's boyfriend?”
“Possibly, or Gwendolyn herself, or Carmody's wife, Laurie Ann, or any soul from that era still attached to this place might appear in the camp uniform. But Reverend Carmody is the one who died right here.”
We looked at the bath tub again, then hurried downstairs and out the back door. It was definitely time to get out of the lodge.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Outside, we hurried away from the shadow of the lodge, out to the large fire ring behind it.
“We'd better stop here.” I sat on one of the tree-trunk benches at the fire pit, and Stacey took another. We couldn't travel too far from the lodge and its satellite dish until we'd returned some calls.
We both faced the lodge. Neither of us wanted to turn our backs on its dark windows.
My first callback was a guy named Trevor Knowles of Baldwin, Georgia, who'd been at the camp in its final year. He was two years younger than Josh. I knew nothing about him other than some details in his folder. He liked arts and crafts and had won a yellow ribbon on the ropes course.
“My mom told me you'd called asking about the old camp,” he said, once we'd started talking. “It's funny, I've been having a lot of dreams about it here lately. Getting back into painting, like when I was a kid. Painting and whittling.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Just memories, mostly. Being a kid, running around, splashing in the lake. Those were good times. I only went there two summers, but I remember it a lot. Kids these days don't have summer camps like that, probably. Something special about that place.”
“Did you know the three boys who drowned?”
“Well, they were Bobcats,” he said. “I was a Wolf. I was twelve, which put me in the younger room at Wolf Cabin. The Bobcats that died were fourteen or fifteen. That was a big age difference to us back then, you might remember from your own teenage years. So I saw them around, but didn't have a lot of activities with them.”
“What do you remember about them?”
“The four of them pretty much acted like they ruled the place. Older guys, like I said.”
“I thought there were three?”
“Three that died, but four in their gang.”
“Who was the fourth?”
“Uh...” He blew a raspberry sound. “Give me a minute.”
“We have Thomas, Paul, and Kyle.”
“Oh, yes. And the fourth one was called John. Joe? Jim... no. Josh. Josh, that's it.”
“Josh.”
“Pretty sure. Jeb? No, back up one. Josh.”
“Josh Conner?”
“Maybe. But he didn't die with the others, anyway.”
“Do you know if he was with them that night?” I asked.
“It would be strange if he wasn't. They were a pack.”
“Can you think of any reason Josh wouldn't have gone out in the boat with the others?”
“Like I said, I didn't know those older Bobcats that well. I guess Josh was just smarter than the others. There was a storm that night, you know. And it's kind of like that thing your momma probably asked you growing up—if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you? And he was the one who wouldn't. The one who didn't jump, that's Josh.”
“Did you see Josh afterward? Speak to him, maybe?”
“Not after the storm and the boys went missing. Camp closed down and never opened again. I wasn't happy about it. It's like when you wake up from a good dream into a bad morning. Or walk out of a good movie and back into a bad reality. I guess I understand it now, though. Nobody wants to send their kids to some camp where kids died. Only dumb characters in horror movies do that. And people who hate their kids, maybe. Could be a market for it, come to think.”
“Have you heard the camp is reopening?”
“Is it really now?” He sounded almost jubilant. Then his tone flattened out, as though remembering he was much too old for summer camp. “Good for them. A little late for me.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me about those four boys?” I asked. “Do you have any idea why they would have gone out in that storm?”
“No. Sorry.” He let out a sigh. “Camp Stony Owl. I can almost hear the old campfire song. 'Old Stony Owl... stand watchful, noble, and true—'”
He went on a bit, but that was about it for useful information.
“Stacey, guess what I just learned?” I said when I finally got off the phone. Stacey had done one or two more calls herself while I was listening to Trevor talk and sing. And sing.
“That you actually do love camping?” Stacey guessed, and she was way off.
“No. Josh was in Bobcat Cabin. And he was—”
“Best pals with the boys who drowned?”
“Sounds like you've heard it from a second source.”
“A third. I guess everyone who was there knew.”
“But Josh certainly hasn't mentioned it,” I said. “Though he did take it personally when we brought up those three.”
“They were his pals. His buds. People said they were a pack. Though bobcats don't form packs, do they?” She frowned. “Prides? That's lions. Bobs? Mobs? That would be cute. A mob of bobcats.”
“Still, the guy I talked to had happy memories of camp.”
“The lady I talked to said she dreams about it,” Stacey said. “Especially as it gets closer to summer.”
“Interesting.” I stretched and yawned.
One of my voicemails had been from Allison, wanting to set up a time to meet and catch up with us away from her kids. I called back, but she didn't answer. I left a message for her to come by our cabin after nine p.m. if she wanted.
“We'd better catch some sleep while there's daylight left,” I told Stacey.
We hiked back to our cabin, where I stretched out on my bunk and closed my eyes.
Not surprisingly, twisted visions of what I'd experienced in the lodge immediately rose, a bloated dead thing holding me under water that had turned out to be an illusion, perhaps a kind of time slip. I felt again the fingers over my face, how they gripped my mouth and jaw.
Sleep was necessary but rough. My phone alarm came as a relief.
Allison arrived at the cabin's front door with a couple of paper plates covered in aluminum foil. �
�We had some leftovers,” she said. “Just chicken and beans and cole slaw and pie.”
“Sounds amazing, thanks!” I set the plates down on the coffee table where Stacey was setting up her laptop. She turned it to face Allison, who sat down on the patched-up thrift-store couch opposite our own.
“Oh, wow.” Stacey peeled back the foil, releasing a rich barbecue smell. “This looks so good.”
“Maybe we could catch up our client first,” I said.
“Go ahead and eat,” Allison said. “But what do y'all think about what's going on here?”
“We collected a lot of data from our observation,” I said. “I'm sure Josh told you.”
“He didn't mention that, no.” She was smiling, but her voice had gone tight and tense, like she would have started tearing into Josh if he'd been there and we hadn't. “What did you see?”
“Stacey?”
“Mmm,” Stacey replied, her mouth full of baked beans. She put down the plastic fork Allison had provided and tapped at her computer.
“I also had a close encounter in the lodge,” I told Allison while Stacey queued things up. “We were up in the attic today and something manifested. It attacked me.” I explained as best I could.
“So there really was no water?” Allison asked. “I don't understand.”
“If it was Reverend Carmody, it might have been putting some of its memory into me when it touched me,” I said. “Replaying the sensations of his death.”
“Reverend Carmody, the man who started the camp? How did he die?”
“He drowned. In the bathtub upstairs.”
Allison took in a sharp breath. “In the lodge? Carmody's... ghost is stomping around up there?”
“And should be considered dangerous. We think there may be other entities as well, a cluster of them, that sometimes pass through the lodge. They seem mostly interested in the sporting equipment upstairs. We've also observed this cluster out at Bobcat Cabin.”
“Really? Josh keeps putting off the restoration of Bobcat. It's his old cabin. I keep telling him we need to get the cabins finished up, too.”
Stacey played the clips from Bobcat Cabin—the bunks moving, the peals of invisible laughter.
“That's so disturbing.” Allison stared at the screen, her arms wrapped tight around herself. “Why wouldn't Josh have told me this?”
“I can't say for sure, but I'd guess he's very sensitive about the boys who died.”
“What?” Her eyes widened in alarm. “What boys?”
“Surely Josh mentioned...” I said, then trailed off.
“Tell me children did not die at this camp,” Allison said. “Tell me that.”
Stacey cringed. I felt like cringing, too.
“We've identified a total of six known deaths on this property,” I said. “Three of them were boys who died while your husband was here.”
Allison paled, her mouth open.
“Only because they snuck out,” Stacey said. “And went canoeing in a storm. They were taking a lot of risks, and they drowned.”
“Three?” She slowly turned her head, looked away out the window, and whispered, “Josh.”
“I'm getting the idea you didn't know about any of this.” I forced a smile, but my guts were coiling up. I'd suspected Josh might have held the darker parts of the campground's history from her, just as he had from us, but I'd hoped I was wrong.
“I don't know what to think. Are you sure Josh knows about this?” Allison looked like somebody had sucker-punched her, and then sucker-punched her again while she was recovering from that first sucker punch.
“Josh was in the same cabin as the three who died. Apparently he knew them well.”
Allison glowered, her green eyes smoldering. In the days I'd known her, I'd never seen her quite like that. “Tell me everything.”
We did, filling her in on the history we'd uncovered as well as our own observations. It was all clearly uncomfortable for Allison, so it was uncomfortable for us, too.
After we finished, she sat in silence for a while, staring blankly at the darkness beyond the window.
“We put everything into this place,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And it's a death trap. We're ruined.”
I felt awful. “I don't know. Maybe we can find the root of all this.”
“Yeah, we'll fix it!” Stacey said, putting on a chipper tone. “Probably. Right, Ellie?”
“We'll see what we dig up,” I said, without much certainty. “Everyone we spoke to said this camp was a very positive part of their lives. Except for the, uh, obvious tragic occurrences.”
“You really think you can help?” Allison asked me, her eyes pleading.
“We'll do everything we can.”
We walked Allison back to the lodge where her SUV was parked, because we were not comfortable letting her go near the lodge alone. She drove away down the gravel road toward her house.
Watching her taillights vanish into the woods, I felt heavy, and not just from the baked beans and the wedge of pecan pie, though I'm sure those contributed. Stacey had a pained look on her face.
“She seemed pretty horrified,” Stacey said.
“She should be,” I replied, and started back down the trail.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Later, I sat alone in the dark common room of Bobcat Cabin, my eyes adjusting to the gloom of moonlight through the windows. It was time to get up close and personal with the ghosts of Camp Stony Owl.
It was quiet. I could hear my breath, my heartbeat, the occasional owl outside.
I was on edge, waiting for disembodied laughter or heavy, thudding footsteps.
Stacey wasn't far away; she was outside on the front steps of our cabin, listening in via our usual headset arrangement in case anything decided to kill me or whatnot. The Bobcat Boys hadn't shown signs of threatening us before, but they were clearly capable of shoving a bunk bed at me if they wanted.
Minutes crept by. I triple-checked our cameras and microphones, the ones in the common room with me as well as the ones in the bedrooms. I quadruple-checked them. Things stayed quiet.
I thought about Gwendolyn Malloy, the girl who'd allegedly drowned herself going out in a canoe during a storm with her pockets full of rocks. Supposedly an act of grief after finding her fiance and the preacher's wife together.
I still wondered if there was more to the story. For instance, I couldn't rule out the possibility that Gwendolyn had been murdered and someone had made it look like suicide. It was hard to discern a motive—who would have wanted her dead? Why? That train of thought certainly went down a dark tunnel, but without more information it was a dead-end one for now.
Minutes became hours. Midnight slipped by. Then one a.m.
Then the spirits began to stir.
I heard the high-pitched laugh first, then a scraping. Footsteps, like energetic kids running.
“Ellie, I'm hearing things,” Stacey said. I tapped my microphone in reply.
As the noises continued, I drew on my thermal goggles.
I felt the wave of cold a moment after I saw the sprawling fog of a cold spot emerge from the hallway.
The entities fell silent, maybe responding to my presence. The coldness moved beyond me and vanished near the door. If my guess was right, these were the Bobcat boys, Josh's old roommates.
Stepping outside, I was able to discern the blue cold front rolling through the cabin area, skirting the fire ring. A half-second of laughter bubbled on the wind.
Stacey's orange and yellow form stepped down from the cabin. She joined me silently, a warm, orange, living apparition walking beside me on the cool, leafy ground.
We tracked the dead boys in silence.
The lake was their destination, like last time.
At the shore, the fog vanished. Splashes sounded in the water. Maybe it was a creature out on the lake, or maybe the ghosts had gone for a dip in the old-time drowning hole.
Moving closer, I looked out over the vast cool blue of
the lake, but couldn't make out any suspicious cold spots.
Stacey tugged my sleeve to grab my attention, then pointed with her glowing yellow fingertip.
A warm, living shape stood in the distance, out on the dock. It looked like Nathan was back for more. If he was calling out any words across the water tonight, they were too distant or low for me to hear.
“He's at it again,” I murmured. I scanned back over the lake, looking for any sign of movement, whether a supernatural cold spot or the warm glow of a living person rowing over to meet Nate. Nobody was there, living or dead.
When I looked back at the dock, though, I saw something that made me grab Stacey's arm.
“What?”
“Cold spot. Stay behind me.” I began to advance.
This cold spot was qualitatively different from the ones we'd been following. Darker. Denser. Taller. Much taller.
I flashed back to things Allison and Ephraim had mentioned about a tall, strange apparition in their home.
Here it was. It had to be. The thing was treelike in shape, eight or nine feet in height, with strange branching projections at the top.
The shape moved quickly. It was coming from the direction of Stony Owl, rushing toward the boathouse and dock, its strides inhumanly long and barely touching the ground at all. It was like a hunter closing in on its prey: the person on the dock.
As it moved, it raised an abnormally long arm that ended in a squarish shape, not like a hand at all.
More like the head of an ax, which it lifted as it rushed toward the dock where Nathan stood.
Breaking into a run, I slapped the iPod on my belt. I'd downloaded an assortment of Cherokee music in case of a Trailwalker encounter. The Cherokee had lived in the area many centuries after the lost society that had built Stony Owl, but perhaps there would be some echo of the earlier people. It was the best I had to work with, anyway.
A blast of flutes, rattles, drums, and singing voices filled the air.
I kept running toward the tall shape, flashlight in my hand, ready to strike it with a few thousand lumens.
