by JL Bryan
Shadows charged at me from the fog.
I gasped and tried to push myself to my feet before they arrived, but there was no time.
The first shadow grabbed me.
“Ellie? Are you hurt?” It was Stacey, putting her arms around me.
Ephraim and Nathan emerged from the fog next. Their mother was yelling after them to come back, but apparently they'd been curious enough to follow Stacey. Josh appeared soon after, also yelling at the boys, carrying Shiloh in his arms.
I shivered, trying to catch my breath, too frightened to speak.
The Trailwalker was gone, though, along with the others who'd accompanied her.
“Bury it,” I said, gesturing toward the pit. “Bury it deep. And never dig it back up.”
Stacey helped me to my feet and led me off the owl, as the guys began shoveling the rocks back into place, burying the Trailwalker for good.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The rest of the day went a bit easier.
Stacey and I stopped by the dining hall and fortified ourselves with cold cereal and bottles of orange juice. We sat surrounded by rows of long, empty tables.
“Is it just me, or does the place feel different now?” Stacey asked. “The walk back wasn't the same as the walk up. And not just because of the fog lifting.”
“I wish the fog would lift from my brain.” I yawned, trying to crack a particularly stubborn frosted mini-wheat with the edge of my spoon. “It's been a long day and it's not even noon.”
“Do you really think we settled all the hauntings by pacifying the Trailwalker?” Stacey asked. “And do you think I can find boots like hers somewhere?”
“Doubtful on the second question. And I don't know about the first. We'll keep monitoring for activity for the next couple of nights, have Jacob check the place over if he comes up this weekend. In the meantime, we'll keep looking through our data and see if we missed anything.”
“And what will we do with Reverend Carmody's ghost?” Stacey asked. “Bury him?”
“Maybe.” I yawned. “I definitely want to get back to the cabin soon. Let's make sure we're all set up for tonight.”
We had some stops to make before we rested, like the lodge attic to make sure our gear was ready to catch any return of the boys, or of Reverend Carmody. We believed Carmody's ghost to be in our trap, but perhaps we were wrong. Other entities had been active up there.
At Bobcat Cabin, we boosted the amount of recording gear; if the boys and Gwendolyn emerged again, we certainly wanted evidence of it.
Maybe it was my imagination, but the campground did have a different feeling. Less dark and heavy, more sunny and open. It felt like we'd made real progress.
Exhausted, we treated ourselves to a trip to the bathhouse—well, I'm not sure that a brick-walled shower with a concrete drainhole floor could ever be considered a real treat, but it was getting familiar, and sort of weirdly pleasant despite the rustic conditions.
“Maybe we should try the girls' bathhouse next time,” Stacey suggested as we showered. I agreed.
We slept in the afternoon.
By evening, rain pattered on the roof, waking me gently. I took a deep breath, lying comfortable in my bunk in my frayed checkerboard-pattern cotton pajamas.
Feeling unhurried, I stood and stretched. The world outside the window was purple with twilight, the trees looking lush and bright in the rainfall. Water coursed off the other cabins and in little streams throughout the campground, as though baptizing the whole place, clearing out the spiritual debris. Or maybe I was reading too much into all that.
I turned to Stacey in her bunk, thinking of waking her, but didn't. She was resting peacefully, her long blonde bangs curled across her face, making her look almost childlike and innocent, at least at this particular moment, though she was only four years younger than me.
Then she sucked some of her hair up her nostril and began coughing and hacking like a heavy smoker with lungworms, ruining that momentarily cute image.
She turned over and went back to sleep. I couldn't help feeling some warmth as I looked at her. I'd initially resisted when my boss Calvin hired her, but he'd wanted to move on, to retire, and he didn't want me hunting ghosts alone.
I was glad to have Stacey in my life. I didn't have a lot of friends, but she had definitely turned into one.
In the other bedroom, I looked at the multiple feeds from Bobcat Cabin. Despite our increased monitoring, we were getting nothing at the moment. No signs of activity yet, but the night was young.
Eventually, I grew restless and pulled up the previous night's recording from the lodge attic. A cold spot had approached the trap, vanishing when the trap snapped closed. It looked like we had snagged the preacher's ghost, but I still wasn't eager to go check in person, considering how my last encounter in the attic had gone.
The rain poured down heavier and thicker, falling in sheets and curtains outside the cabin. I resolved to stay in rather than go back up to the lodge and check those recordings like I'd planned. Not until the weather calmed down. Probably not until morning. There was no rush.
“Hey, did I miss anything?” Stacey wandered drowsily into the room, her hair in blonde clumps. At least it was out of her nose.
“Not at all,” I said. “I watched a whole lot of nothing happen on the live feed. I think we really altered the situation here.”
“Oh, good.” She stretched and yawned. “So is it leaning toward case closed?”
“Too early to tell, but it's possible. I hope so. I'm ready to get back to my apartment, in my own bed with my own cat. Every day I'm gone is a bigger cat-sitting bill.”
“Yeah, when I get home, I'm picking up an iced latte from Sentient Bean and hanging out at the park. Soaking up the everyday sights of being home. These out-of-town jobs really take it out of you—”
A shriek pierced the air, crackling over a speaker.
“What was that?” Stacey looked at the monitors with me, peering into the different rooms of Bobcat Cabin.
The signal rippled and crackled on every monitor. More shrieks sounded from the speakers; not voices, but electrical interference.
One by one, the monitors went dark, and the speakers went silent.
“Stacey?”
“I can't fix this!” She tapped at her laptop in frustration. “They shut down remotely. Like something slurped the batteries dry. Again.”
“This is really bad.” I looked at one monitor that was still up. It showed the feed from a night vision camera that stood in the common room of our cabin, looking out through a window at Bobcat Cabin.
The front door of Bobcat Cabin swung open as though blown by a wind from inside the cabin. It commenced banging against the outside of the cabin, as it had done incessantly on previous nights.
“It's happening again, isn't it?” Stacey whispered.
“Tonight's different. No horsing around. No giggling.”
I grabbed a flashlight and walked out the front door, stopping under the shallow shelter of the overhang. Rain poured in a solid waterfall off the roof, just inches from my face.
A chain of lightning added extra visibility for a moment, but even with that dash of heavenly help, there wasn't much to see but rainwater gushing from the cabins' downspouts.
“So what do we do, captain?” Stacey asked. “Sail into the storm? Hoist the cannons? Shiver the timbers? I'm running out of nautical terms, but it's wet out here, that's what I'm saying. Too bad I didn't bring a kayak, because I could just about surf that mud flow over to Bobcat Cabin—”
“Maybe we should go to the lake,” I said. “Gwendolyn drowned in a storm, and so did Josh's three friends—”
Searing light filled the whole area, and I recoiled against the cabin door, thinking the lightning had come fatally close.
“I think those are headlights,” Stacey said calmly, making me look bad.
“Headlights? There's no road nearby, why would there be—”
But there were indeed highlights, high beams, proje
cted by a vehicle that had gone completely off-road, sliding through mud, nearly plowing into Falcon Cabin before swerving at the last second. There was no road in the cabin area at all, just footpaths.
Allison's SUV came sliding to a halt not far from us, spraying a great wave of mud that soaked me from head to toe.
“Allison?” I stepped forward on the cabin's little front stoop for a closer look.
More lightning popped and crackled as the driver-side window lowered. Allison drove. Nobody was in the shotgun seat. The side of the car was badly scraped, the windows cracked. Allison had driven through a few trees on her way here.
“It came back,” Allison said. “It came back to our house, Ellie. And it took my child.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We were pretty much in five-alarm mode after that.
“We have to get to the lake!” I shouted at Allison through the roaring wind and hammering rain.
“Josh and Ephraim are on their way there!” she shouted back.
I nodded. “Give us five seconds!”
“Hurry!” she shouted as Stacey and I ran back into the cabin.
There was no time to spare, so I grabbed my backpack and a couple of things, including my boots, which I did not have time to actually put on. I didn't even grab socks.
Back outside, Stacey and I climbed into the back seat of the SUV with Shiloh; either one of us running around to the front passenger door would have wasted precious seconds.
Shiloh stopped crying when she saw me beside her—probably not comforted, but maybe distracted for half a second.
“Your feet are muddy,” she said.
I looked down, and indeed they were, soaking what would likely be permanent footprints into the carpet.
“Sorry,” I said.
Allison punched the accelerator before Stacey could even close the door. We slalomed wildly through rain and mud, past the rest of the cabins, miraculously crashing into none of them before plunging ahead through a trail that was definitely not wide enough for the vehicle.
A low limb smashed against the passenger side of the windshield; it puckered inward, spider-webbing, and I was glad Stacey and I were in the back.
“What exactly happened at your house?” I asked Allison.
“It came in again. The tall one with the antlers. I saw it—her—more clearly than ever. She was in my room, staring at me. She shattered my bedroom window, that's how I woke up.
“Then she walked toward the kids' rooms. I screamed at Josh to wake up and then I went after her.
“I saw her go into Nathan's room. When I followed her in, she was gone, but Nate was gone, too. His window was open and the screen was broken off. The rain was pouring in all over the carpet.”
“Maybe it was Gwendolyn's ghost,” I said. “She might have come to his window.”
“Like in Josh's story,” Stacey said.
At Josh's name, Allison's shoulders hunched, her hands like fists on the wheel.
Branches and undergrowth scraped and scratched at every side of the car, and Shiloh started crying again.
“It's, uh, going to be fine,” I said, in a clearly unconvincing way, as tree limbs like giant claws raked the window beside the upset little girl.
The SUV slid sideways through the mud and smacked hard against a massive old beech tree. Allison pressed the accelerator, but the tires spun uselessly.
“We're stuck,” I said. “We have to get out and run.”
Shiloh unbuckled from her car seat and scrambled up to the front to her mother, crying. Allison held her.
The beech tree blocked the back door on Stacey's side, so I crawled over the car seat and out into the storm. Stacey was right behind me.
“I'm running ahead,” I told Stacey. “You stay with Allison and Shiloh.”
Stacey nodded; the buddy system was important, but not as important as protecting the clients.
I clomped through the mud, barely able to see through the downpour even with my flashlight and the lightning popping overhead, dangerously close. The storm was only growing worse.
Slipping and sliding, and falling more than once, I made my way through the little activity village, toward the boathouse and the dock.
The light inside the boathouse was on, glowing bright and yellow through the open door like a beacon in the storm.
I staggered inside, dripping mud from my soggy pajamas, their checkerboard pattern now completely brown.
Josh and Ephraim were scrambling to grab a canoe from the wall.
“I'm here,” I gasped, as if they'd been waiting for me. “Have you seen Nathan?”
“He's out on the water,” Josh said. His face was pale white. “Went right into the storm. Didn't even listen when I yelled at him. It was just like... before.” His hands shook badly as he heaved the canoe. “I've been telling him and telling him to stay away from the lake.”
“We'll come with you.” I grabbed life vests and oars and followed them into the rain.
Stacey arrived with Allison, who carried Shiloh but struggled to keep her grip on the drenched, panicked girl. Allison set her down in the shelter of the boathouse doorway.
“Nate's out on the water.” I gave Stacey an oar and a vest. To Allison and Shiloh, I said, “You two stay inside the boathouse. Keep every light on, inside and out.”
Allison nodded. “Be careful.”
Stacey and I hurried to the shore with Josh and Ephraim. Stacey was far more experienced than me with this kind of boating, but I wasn't going to send her out there into the center of the danger without me. I didn't like leaving Allison and Shiloh unprotected, though. Every option felt wrong.
Josh and Ephraim climbed into the canoe while Stacey and I strapped on our vests.
While I'd been caught out in my checkerboard pajamas after falsely expecting a quieter, cozier kind of rainy night, Stacey was more ridiculously clad in her snoring-Garfield boxer shorts and matching orange top. She was muddy from her feet to her knees; she wasn't wearing shoes, which seemed wise, so I kicked off my boots. If we ended up swimming, she was much luckier in her choice of sleepwear. My jammies would only slurp up water and drag me down.
We waded out and climbed into the canoe. Three of us started rowing right away, with practiced ease. I was the fourth. The others kept yelling instructions to correct my attempts at rowing, but it was hard to hear over the wind and thunder. At some point, it was determined that I should hold my flashlight to illuminate the way forward rather than try to help with the canoeing.
The water was choppy, with large swells that reminded me of the ocean, too large for such a small lake.
“Lake level's rising!” Josh yelled. “It hasn't been this high all year!” Behind us, the dock looked like a wooden sidewalk, the lake leaking up through the floorboards.
Lightning struck much too close, hitting a tree out along the shoreline with a sound like a cracking whip, reminding me that we were breaking all basic safety precautions and basic common sense about what to do in a thunderstorm.
In that moment, we spotted Nate near the center of the lake, unaware of us because of the noise and power of the storm, or too absorbed in his own purpose to care.
“That's the Cold Hole!” Josh said. “Faster! Nathan, come back!”
The choppy water worked against us, high swells shoving the canoe back, as if the lake had a mind of its own and wanted to stop us from catching up to Nathan.
Ahead, a second canoe appeared, chunky and wooden instead of colorful and polyethylene like Nate's and our own. A figure stood atop it, tall, her face in shadow under the brim of a campaign hat, a cocky smile on her lips, her wet, blonde hair trailing out behind her in the wind.
She wore a long skirt over bare feet, her toes gripping the upper rim of her canoe as it bobbed and rocked in the storm. Everything about her was unnaturally pale, as if lifted from a black and white movie, from the hat down to the canoe.
“Is that her?” I asked Josh.
He gaped at the figure ahead, the o
ne now beckoning to his son.
Nathan stood up in his own canoe, as if to greet her and also show that he wasn't afraid. As if she'd been daring him to stand in his boat in the storm. He struggled to stay upright as the canoe rose and fell in storm-tossed water.
The figure's campaign hat blew off her head, revealing a pretty face. Her clothes were as Josh had described in his story, plastered against her, unbuttoned here and sagging there, a powerful lure to an impulsive boy.
Nate tried to paddle closer to her while standing and maintaining his balance in the storm.
His canoe overturned and he plunged into the lake.
The girl's canoe sank silently into the water beside him; she rode it down almost like an elevator, her eyes fixed on Nate as he spluttered in the water.
She reached out toward him.
“Leave him alone!” Josh shouted while I centered my light on the apparition. She hissed and faded, sinking chin-deep into the water, but unfortunately did not go away.
“Gwendolyn Malloy, get away from him!” I snapped. My use of her name drew her attention for a moment, but she wasn't taking any orders from me.
Nathan struggled and went under. He burst out, gasping for air for a second, then got pulled under again.
Gwen's face remained out of the water, her blonde hair floating around her in pale streams. Her eyes glared at us.
“Let him go!” Josh shouted. “Take me if you have to take someone.”
“You?” Gwen giggled, the sound of the invisible giggler I'd been hearing all along. “But you're too old, Joshy-Josh. This one here is just right. He'll fit in with the other boys. Maybe he'll even be my favorite, for a while.”
Nathan surfaced, gasping again. She clapped a pale hand over his face and shoved him back down underwater.
“Stop!” Josh paddled harder, giving our canoe an extra burst of speed.
“Are you jealous, Joshy?” Gwen said. “Do you miss your friends? They don't miss you. You left them here. You let them die out here.”
Three pairs of pale, bloated, waterlogged hands reached over the edge of the canoe.
“What is that?” Ephraim smacked his oar at one bloated hand. The hand ruptured and leaked dark lake water into our boat, but it didn't let go.
