by JL Bryan
The shape ceased advancing toward the dock. It turned toward me instead, the strange branch-shapes atop its head towering well above me.
Typically, sacred music is there to ward off the more evil-intentioned sorts of spirits, driving them back from an attack, if not out of the area altogether. It's no guarantee, though, especially when I was missing this particular entity's culture by a couple thousand years.
“Ellie, look,” Stacey whispered, her glowing aura staring and pointing. She was seeing it, too, even without enhanced vision.
I lowered my heavy thermal goggles, letting them hang like a brick around my neck.
The apparition ceased its approach when I stopped mine. It was shadowy, looming over me.
I could see now that the branching shapes that seemed to grow like tree limbs from its head were actually deer antlers, arranged in a high crown and inlaid with beadwork.
The tall apparition wore elaborately arranged animal skins edged with fur and inset with more of the intricate beaded patterns. Woven, beaded skins like heavily decorated boots wrapped her from her knees down to her toes.
She was tall and strong—she'd have to be, to wear that heavy crown—her hair set in serpentine braids, her neck hung with necklaces, her wrists adorned with bangles.
She looked like nothing and no one I'd ever seen before.
Her eyes were solid darkness as she regarded us. Her face showed little expression. It was a difficult gaze to return, so I looked at the long-handled ax in her hands, its stone blade wide and sharp.
A flashlight beam struck us, nearly blinding me. I covered my eyes.
“What's going on?” a male voice asked, his footsteps dashing toward us from the dock. Not Nathan, but Josh. The father and son could easily be mistaken for each other from a distance.
By the time I blinked the glare out of my eyes, the apparition was gone, vanished like a wisp of smoke, like it had never been there at all. It was the kind of thing that could make you question your sanity when you were alone, leaving you wondering if the apparition had been real or in your mind.
“Did you see?” I pointed to where the antler-crowned apparition had been standing. “There was an apparition.”
“A ghost?” he asked.
“Yes. She vanished a second ago. I think she was sneaking up on you.”
“What did she look like?” Josh had either dropped his former skepticism or was doing an amazing job of pretending to believe me.
I described what I'd seen, with Stacey hopping in to add details. “Do you think it could be the Trailwalker? From the old camp legend?”
“I don't think the legends describe it as a woman.” Josh rubbed his chin; he hadn't shaved in a few days and his eyes had dark bags. “Just an old chief. Or warrior.”
“Hey, can't a woman be a warrior? Or chief?” Stacey asked.
“Do you know anybody who actually saw the Trailwalker?” I asked.
“It was just a campfire story,” he said. “Somebody was going to invent one like it sooner or later, right? I don't know if it was handed down from history or just made up. But I'd bet on the second.”
“So you never believed this campground was haunted?”
“I wouldn't say haunted, no. But there is something about this place...” His gaze drifted off, generally toward the lake, but maybe back in time, too. “Maybe there is magic in the old stone owl. We've tried to take care of it. Pulled the weeds, fixed the fence.”
Stacey and I shared a look. It was similar to what we'd heard from former campers, those we'd managed to track down.
“Do you mind if I ask what you were doing out here tonight, Josh?” I asked. Stacey cringed a little beside me.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said.
“We tracked a cold spot out here. It emerged back in Bobcat Cabin.”
“The Trailwalker did?”
“No. She came from that direction.” I pointed toward the Stony Owl hill.
Josh nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Is that why you were here?” I asked. “Did you see something unusual?”
“Me? No, no.” He looked toward the lake. “Just dredging up old memories, I guess. Allison's not exactly happy with me right now. I didn't completely fill her in on the history of the place. Well, I just left out one or two of the bad parts. But that stuff's hard for me to talk about.”
“Are you sure this place is going to be safe?” I asked. “There's been four drownings.”
“Three.”
“Before your friends, there was Gwendolyn Malloy. The counselor who drowned here nearly a hundred years ago under the same circumstances. She went paddling in a storm.”
“A hundred...well, they probably didn't even use life vests back then. Different times.”
“And what about the three boys who drowned when you were here?”
“They didn't wear them, either. They were supposed to, but like I said, they made the worst decisions,” he said. “Later on, in college, I had to read The Odyssey in this literature class. Those sailors who couldn't resist the siren song, did you read about that? That was Paul, Thomas, and Kyle.”
“What siren song?”
“We used to sneak out here to swim late at night,” he said. “Obviously, that was a bad idea, but we were young enough to be invulnerable. The hardest part was getting out of the cabin, sneaking out without the counselor catching you.” A dreamy smile slipped over his face. “Good times.”
I thought of the cluster of entities arising and making their way from Bobcat Cabin.
“What happened when you snuck out? What did y'all do?”
He gave a crooked smile. “We'd go swimming. Then there was the girl who started showing up. She wasn't even a camper, just a local girl who came swimming at night. Trespassing, I guess, not that we cared. We first met her out here one night—she was watching us from way out in the deep end. Spying on us boys while we wrestled and horsed around in the water. Wait, that's not right. First we heard her, then we saw her. She was laughing at us.
“Laughing?” I asked, getting a creepy-crawly feeling up my spine.
“The girl was out near the middle of the lake. She was maybe a couple years older than us, and prettier than any girl I'd ever seen. When you're fifteen, a girl like that can stop your heart. Your brain, too.
“She didn't talk much at first, just laughed and swam away, getting us to chase her out into the deep end. She wore long sleeves and a skirt, which was crazy, but it didn't slow her down. When Matt got close to her over by the Cold Hole, where it felt like winter all year, she went under and didn't come back up.
“We swam all around, looking for her. Kyle was sure she must have drowned. He kept diving down, thinking he'd find her body.
“Then we heard her laughing at us. We couldn't see her, but she was nearby. Probably hiding behind the bushes on the shore. We didn't see her again that night.
“We snuck out again the next night. She wasn't there at first, but she showed up after a few minutes. Same story. Laughing at us. Teasing us, coming closer, then slipping away underwater before anyone could catch her. She tagged Matt from behind once, scared him straight up out of the water. He yelled out.” Josh shook his head. “We snuck out a couple times. She wasn't always there. She kept us guessing.”
“What happened the final night?” I asked, trying to be as delicate as possible.
“It was raining,” Josh said, and all traces of a smile left his face. “She came to the window. Kyle heard her first. He was always quieter than us. Better at listening, I guess. So he hears tapping. Tap tap tap, like that. He was the first to walk over there. She was looking in at us, soaking wet—I mean, it was really coming down. A storm was brewing.
“Kyle opens the window, thinking she's going to come in, but he can't get the screen off. She just stands there smiling like she's got the best secret to tell.
“She wouldn't come in. Instead she challenged us to a race. She said the first boy to catch her would get a kiss.
“Well, the others ran for the door, and she laughed watching them scramble at her words. I was still in my bunk, though. Left in the room alone. She was watching me with a smile, and I was embarrassed because I was in my underwear, which was why I hadn't left my bunk yet. I didn't want to take my sheet off while she was watching.
“Then lightning flashed, a big sheet of lightning that turned night to day for about a second.
“For that second, she looked different to me. Maybe it was my imagination, or a trick of the light, or me being sleepy and half-dreaming, but when she was all lit up, she changed.
“She looked... scary. Like, did you ever see Swamp Thing? Or maybe Night of the Living Dead? She looked like a cross between those. Like something that crawled out of a wet grave. She was all covered in mud. Her face was distorted somehow. Discolored. I could have sworn mud was leaking from her nose and mouth. She looked like a dead person standing out there.
“Then the lightning faded and she was normal again, a pretty girl in the rain, but she wasn't smiling anymore. It was like she knew what I'd seen.
“I heard the guys yelling outside, and she was gone in an eyeblink. The same way she used to disappear underwater while we played. Nobody could ever catch her.
“I ran out after the guys. They had a big head start; they were already past the bathhouse, running toward the trail to the lake. I yelled after them to wait, but the rain was really pounding down. Wind, thunder. They couldn't hear me. Even if they could, I doubt they would have stopped.
“So I followed. By the time I caught up, they were already at the lake. The light in the boathouse was on. The guys came running out with a canoe.
“I asked where they were going, and they just pointed, because even up close we could barely hear each other in the storm.
“The lake looked like I'd never seen it, choppy like an ocean, waves crashing against the dock and the shore. I couldn't believe the guys were even thinking about going out there.
“I saw her in another flash of lightning. She was in a canoe of her own, already yards out from shore. She was standing up in it, gripping the top lip with her bare feet; the storm was whipping up the lake, rocking her boat side to side, but she smiled and waved like all was fine. Surfing the storm in an old wooden canoe. Her clothes were wet and sagging off her, and she looked more gorgeous than ever.
“The guys pretty much went crazy when they saw her, I mean they were like mindless dogs, and they charged out into the water. I didn't go with them, because of what I'd seen earlier. But I couldn't stop them. I didn't really know what to say. I didn't... I should have tried harder.” Josh swallowed hard. “They paddled out, and I never saw them again. I found a flashlight in the boathouse, and I saw their canoe overturned.
“I ran all the way back to our cabin and woke up our counselor. And that was the end of it.” Josh wasn't looking at us at all, but out at the lake where it had all happened. “By the time they pulled the guys out of the lake, it was all over. They didn't find the girl or her boat. I don't know what happened to her.”
I was filled with suspicions and ideas about the girl, but I wasn't sure where to start with them. “I'm sorry. That must have been terrible.”
“Yeah.” Finally he looked at me, his face hardening. “And that's why I don't like the idea of the guys playing a part in your ghost story.”
“But do you think there could be anything unusual happening here at the campground?” I asked. “Even if you're not willing to say it's haunted—”
“I wasn't wrong, was I?” His expression softened, becoming almost vulnerable, a glimpse of a scared person beneath his mask of salesman bravado. “What I saw in the flash of lightning. When she looked like a monster. Do you think that was real?”
“It sounds likely.”
“So what was she?” Josh shivered a little. “Was she a... you know.... was she something unnatural the whole time?”
“It's possible you were seeing an apparition of Gwendolyn Malloy, the girl who died here in the camp's first incarnation,” I said. “What you've described about her appearance and her clothing fit, too. Of course, we can't be sure—”
“Why would she want to kill us?” Josh asked.
“Maybe she wanted some friends to play with,” Stacey suggested. “We've seen that before. The dead can get lonely.”
“They do seem to come out of the cabin and travel the campground at night,” I said. “And we've heard laughter. High-pitched laughter.”
“She laughed a lot,” Josh said. “More than she talked, really. When she talked, she was usually daring us to do something.”
“Gwendolyn died the same way your friends did,” I said. “That could mean she was repeating her own death by drowning them. Or it could mean some underlying cause, something older, was behind all of these deaths.”
“The Trailwalker,” Josh said, his voice hushed. “Do you think... maybe they used to do human sacrifice or something out here?”
“Well, I hadn't thought of that—”
“That was another legend. More of a rumor, really. Probably as made up as the rest, though.”
“But we saw the Trailwalker,” Stacey said.
“Yet we don't really know anything about her,” I said. “Anything is possible. Josh, if your friends are still here, I don't think they are malevolent. I don't believe they would mean us harm. But they may be under the control of something more powerful.”
Josh was quiet, his eyes on the water. “I keep dreaming about them. All my life, really, but especially since we moved back here. I see them out in the water, waiting. There's an empty place in the group. The place where I belong.” He sighed. “Maybe I should drown myself in the lake. Allison's ready to kill me now that she knows.”
“You had to know she'd find out eventually,” Stacey said.
“Well, once it was up and running, and had passed every safety inspection...” Josh shook his head. “That's what I've been telling myself. That eventually it'll be fine. The past is the past. I just wanted to... feel the way I used to feel when I was a kid, I guess. Stupid now that I say it out loud.” He looked around the little village of freshly restored activity centers. “I guess it's over.”
I couldn't help feeling pity for him, watching him sag like that. He looked a decade older than he was, going gray at the edges. “Even if the campground doesn't open, you should let us continue until we resolve what's happening here. To free your friends and any other souls trapped here. To end the haunting, if we can.”
“Yeah. Of course. You really think the guys are still here, then?”
“I do,” I said. “Have you really not seen anything since moving here? No hint of a ghost?”
He shook his head. “I wish I had. I wish I'd seen the guys again. That's what I think about when I come down here to the dock. But all I see are my own memories.”
“That's what ghosts are, in a way,” I said. “Some are stronger and clearer than others. Pieces of broken souls that haven't fully moved on. Did you know your son's been coming down here alone at night, too?”
“Ephraim?”
“Nathan. He says he sometimes meets a local girl here.”
“Yeah, that would be Nate. What girl?”
“After what you've told me, I'm concerned it's the same one you saw,” I said. “Gwendolyn's ghost, luring him down here.”
“He hasn't said anything about this.”
“Nathan comes out later than you do,” I said. “I've warned him to stay away from the lake, but he's not listening to me. You should tell him. He might try again tonight.”
Josh nodded. “I'll do that. So what's next? Can you really change things around here?”
“I have some ideas.” That was an exaggeration—I had one idea. But I wanted to reassure him. “We'll stick around until we figure it out. In the meantime, keep your family members away from the lake. Especially alone, and especially at night.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“You've certainly had me diggi
ng into quite the basket of small-town dirty laundry, my dear,” Grant Patterson said, bright and very early the next morning.
Stacey and I had pretty much gone to ground for the rest of the previous night, hiding in our cabin with the doors and windows locked and latched, every window curtain drawn. We'd even traded off some sleeping time, not that it did me much good—my dreams had been full of dark things walking through the woods, of dead things crawling on the slimy mud floor of the lake.
Grant was now calling back with some information wrangled from the university's records.
“Do you mind if I put you on speaker so Stacey can hear?” I asked. Stacey yawned and gave me a thumbs up.
“Of course not. Who could resist the delightful sense of conversing from the bottom of an echoing well?”
“Great, thanks.” I grabbed my notepad. “Now let's unload that dirty laundry.”
“Terrance Baker,” Grant said. “After graduating, he went on to law school at the University of Tennessee and joined a small firm in Chattanooga. Later, in August of 1939, Mr. Baker was caught in an indelicate situation with the wife of a judge. This particular gentleman was known locally as 'Hangman' Harry O'Shannon and was quite the fan of firearms and, we might surmise, of summary vigilante justice as well as the death penalty for adultery, for he passed and carried out that very sentence upon Mr. Terrance Baker upon discovering him in the midst of the, well, scandalous behavior.
“Despite his moniker, Hangman O'Shannon performed the deed with a revolver, in his own bedroom, leaving his own sheets bloody and bullet-riddled while his straying wife screamed in the corner. The judge had no trouble convincing his friend and golf partner, the prosecutor, that he was acting in self-defense, believing he'd encountered an intruder in his home, and the case was buried as quickly as Terrance's corpse.”
“So Terrance was a total snake,” Stacey said. “He cheated on Gwendolyn with the preacher's wife when he was a camp counselor, then he had an affair with a judge's wife when he was a lawyer.”
“He does seem to have been quite the legless reptilian regarding intimate relationships,” Grant agreed.
