by E. A. House
“Uh, Maddison, what are you”—Chris scrambled to his feet, sending his potato chips flying—“doing? The park service doesn’t like it when people go off the trail or the marked picnic areas,” he added when he caught up to her, studying the woods with a calculating expression.
“We’re planning to sneak into the ruins of an old mission church,” Maddison said, still looking thoughtful. “Let me see that napkin?”
“What do you need my potato chip napkin for?”
“I’m going to find out,” Maddison explained, stepping carefully among the grasses and scattered leaves and up to the tree itself, “if this really is blood.”
If there really is an Annie Six-Fingers she is going to be very upset that someone messed up her nice, scary handprint of blood, Chris thought a little hysterically, as Maddison folded the napkin up a dozen times and drew the cleanest side directly across one of the edges of the bloody handprint. Then she hopscotched back over to Chris and Carrie, napkin in hand, grinning.
“Not Annie,” she said, handing the napkin to Chris. “Or at least, not unless Annie likes leaving corn syrup and food coloring handprints on everything.”
“Corn syrup?” Carrie asked. Chris sniffed the napkin gingerly and confirmed that it did smell sweet, and not at all like blood. “Like, corn syrup and red food coloring, the traditional fake blood for low-budget horror movies?”
“Apparently.”
“So, someone really is trying to scare us away,” Carrie said, and all the relief Chris had been feeling from discovering that Annie Six-Fingers was most likely a hoax evaporated. The thick tree cover looked menacing again, and edging back to the picnic table suddenly seemed like a good idea.
“We have two options,” Carrie said when they were seated again, finishing off the last of their sandwiches and watching the tree line nervously. “Head back, which would be the smart and safe thing to do, so we’ll just assume that Chris is opposed—”
“Hey!”
“Or, well, continue, with the almost certain knowledge that somebody doesn’t want us out here.”
“Or hope that Annie Six-Fingers is actually real,” Chris suggested. “If Maddison brought her EMF meter, we could prove that Annie exists.”
“I . . . did bring my EMF meter,” Maddison agreed. She was rummaging through her backpack and being discreet about it; Chris wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. He had never actually seen a Maddison plan in action before but he had a sneaking suspicion that she was planning something.
“Uh-huh,” Carrie sighed. “Did you also bring your video camera, so we can leave a record of our tragic and ghost-related demise behind when we disappear in the wilderness?”
“We are not going to disappear into the wilderness,” Chris protested, “and I’m sorry I made you watch that movie with me. I didn’t even know it was going to be fake-documentary style!”
Carrie growled at him. She really didn’t like violent horror movies.
“Actually, I left my video camera at home,” Maddison said. “I try to only ever bring one expensive thing on a camping trip in case I fall in a pond or something. But”—she pulled a trail map out of her bag—“I might have a suggestion?”
The map was fresh but old, as though it hadn’t seen much use but had been printed several years ago, and when Maddison folded it down Chris could see that it was out of date.
“So,” Maddison said, chewing on her bottom lip, “Mrs. Kinney gave me this map along with a really stern lecture about how you should never, ever, ever go off the path in a state park, ever, because if you do they might not be able to find you if you get hurt, plus you could harm fragile ecosystems. But this one right here is an old trail they’re talking about opening back up so it’s been hiked recently, so if we really needed to take a detour . . . ” She trailed off, tracing a trail on the map.
At some point between 1999 and 2017 the Pine Bow hiking trail had been diverted around a clump of trees and merged with a longer trail that headed deeper into the heart of the woodsy part of the island. That meant that there was an abandoned trail that branched off from the Pine Bow path. This path left the Pine Bow path about a mile before the picnic area, crisscrossed the equestrian trail a couple of times, and eventually approached the ruins of what, on the map, was labeled “old cottage, still unidentified age and provenance.”
“The only other person who knows about this trail is my dad,” Maddison said, tracing a finger along the line of the trail. “But he knows we might take this route, so if we wanted to, say, act like we were heading back to the trailhead and then switch onto this trail, it might buy us a little breathing room?”
“How on earth did you get this out of a park ranger?” Carrie asked. “And won’t she lose her job or something if we make a wrong turn and have to be rescued?”
“Technically, this map was in my parent’s map collection,” Maddison said. “I actually found it folded into a bigger map of the Florida State Parks and thought I could use it on this trip, but then I noticed the differences so I called Mrs. Kinney and asked about it. She said she’d rather give me safe alternatives than see me get hurt, and that she doesn’t want to know what we’re doing. If anybody asks, though, I did not ask a park ranger about the safety of using an out-of-date trail map.”
In the end, they decided to go with Maddison’s plan, primarily because Maddison was the only one who had come up with an actual plan. Although Chris personally thought that they should have brought a video camera so that if everything went belly-up they could at least leave a confusing and only partly coherent film behind as a record. Carrie proved to be of the opinion that she’d rather die unmourned and unremembered than be memorialized in shaky camera footage. They would probably have ended up arguing about the appropriateness of so-called found-footage horror movies in general, except Maddison interrupted to point out that unless Annie Six-Fingers was especially creative with special effects they weren’t actually dealing with a ghost, and then it abruptly wasn’t a fun argument any more. Chris had never expected to wish a gruesome ghost story was real, but he had the weird feeling that their adventure would be much less scary if they were actually being stalked by a ghost.
“Well, at least we would know who it was in that case,” Maddison pointed out as they cleared the picnic area of any and all of their trash, filled their water bottles at the water fountains, and repacked their backpacks, then had a loud and badly acted argument about going onward or turning back that Carrie “won.” And then they did turn back, right up until they found the old trail.
They had walked right past the abandoned trail on their way to the picnic area and hardly noticed it, though it was still surprisingly visible. The dirt and gravel path was overgrown and it had no sturdy brown signpost like the active trails, but the “trail closed” sign hanging from the chain strung across the mouth of the path was a bright yellow.
It was also only at waist height and easily stepped over, and then they were breaking about six different safety rules at once. The trail branched off from the Pine Bow trail in the midst of a tangle of tall pine trees. It was overgrown, too, with ferns creeping across the packed dirt path, and branches meeting overhead and trying to block out the light. You could miss the spot completely if you weren’t careful. Which was more or less what Maddison was hoping for.
They were quiet for much of the rest of the day; this path was rougher than the one they’d been on and it was a bad idea to chat while sneaking, and on top of that they’d spent much more time at lunch discussing secret stalkers than Carrie had factored into her schedule. It was pushing five o’clock in the evening and they were more than halfway to the campsite before Maddison dropped back to where Chris was taking up the rear and scanning the trees for handprints and asked if he really wanted to be on a ghost-hunting show that badly.
“Oh!” Chris said. “No, I have a friend who likes horror movies and I asked Carrie to go to the movies with us—wow, it was all the way back in April—and I forgot that she do
esn’t like horror movies.”
From her position several steps ahead, Carrie groaned.
“You invited me to a movie about Nazis in space,” Maddison pointed out. “I’m surprised she trusted you to pick it out at all.”
“It was a good movie!” Chris protested. Maddison hopped over a log that had fallen across the path and gave him an unimpressed look when she landed.
“Was it the one about possessed turkeys?” she asked. “Because I don’t care what my mom tries to tell people, there’s creative and then there’s weird. And the movie about possessed turkeys and an eighteenth-century Thanksgiving gone horribly wrong is weird, not creative.”
“It wasn’t the one about possessed turkeys,” Chris said, trying to remember ever hearing about such a movie and coming up blank. It sounded . . . interesting? Where on Earth had Maddison’s mom found such a movie, and could he borrow it? “It was about a bunch of teenagers who go into the supposedly haunted woods to try to film the local ghost.”
“It was terrible.” Carrie had been farther ahead but the undergrowth was thicker and the light wasn’t as strong, so she was taking more time to poke suspiciously for snakes hiding on the path and they’d caught up to her. “Nobody ever stopped screaming and the camera was so shaky you never even saw a ghost.”
“I think that was the point?”
“If you’re going to make a movie about a ghost there should at least be a ghost at the end of the movie,” Carrie said. Chris was still not sure if Carrie believed in ghosts but he should have expected her to be irritated by a ghost story that didn’t at least mention the ghost. Carrie was contrary that way.
“I thought you didn’t mind ghost hunting,” Maddison said, ducking under a tree branch.
“Oh, I don’t mind ghost hunting,” Carrie said, edging carefully past some poison oak that was reaching across the trail to a cyprus. “I just don’t like it when expensively produced movies don’t bother to CGI in a decent ghost! Anyway, there’s a difference between ghost-hunting television shows and ghost-hunting movies and ghost-hunting documentaries and I only like—ow.”
“You okay?” Chris edged around the poisonous shrubs with more haste than care and hoped he didn’t spend the rest of the trip itching. Maddison followed a little less carelessly. Carrie was leaning against a pine tree, standing on one leg.
“Yeah,” Carrie said. “It’s just my foot. I didn’t twist it or anything,” she added when Chris must have looked alarmed, “but I think I landed funny. It’s kind of twinging.”
“Twinging like you aren’t going to be able to walk?” Chris asked.
“Twinging like I should rest it for a sec,” Carrie said. “Really guys, I’m fine,” she insisted, starting to turn red. Chris realized that she was getting embarrassed by the fuss and was inching toward hostile so before someone got into an argument he changed the subject. Which he did by fetching the trail map from where it had been folded in his back pocket and checking their location.
“We’re only about twenty minutes out from the campground,” he announced, and was rather proud of how desperate he didn’t sound. Carrie sighed and got carefully to her feet.
“You guys go, I’ll be right behind you,” she said, testing her weight. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t”—something shrieked in the distance, just like it had been doing all morning. They must have been in a valley because the sound echoed and Chris couldn’t pinpoint a location.
“Don’t find any ghosts in the bushes?” Chris finished for his cousin.
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you,” Carrie said. “I was going to tell you not to let your imagination run away with you.”
“Well, you’ll notice that I haven’t run away myself, yet,” Maddison said. “So I think you’re good on that front.” But she plunged ahead anyway, and even though Chris was starting to think it might be a good idea to head back he gritted his teeth and followed her, Carrie bringing up the rear. So that in the event of attacking ghosts she could turn and run more easily.
“How likely are we to find a ghost in these woods?” Chris still asked Maddison in what he hoped was a low voice. “Because you said you brought your EMF meter . . . ”
Arguably it was lucky that Carrie was still a few feet behind them, because it kept her from noticing what they were doing—which prevented her from giving Chris a long-suffering and disappointed look.
In answer, Maddison swung her bag around and fished the EMF meter out so she could show Chris that it wasn’t picking anything up at all.
And then several things happened in rapid succession: someone or something shrieked again, this time directly in front of them. A bright light flared up, so Chris momentarily lost his depth perception and his footing. And a section of the trail turned out not to be as wide as previously supposed and made an unexpectedly sharp right turn, so a startled Chris knocked Maddison over the edge and then followed her down into what proved to be a short tumble down a steep hill.
AS IT TURNED OUT, MADDISON THOUGHT WITH A calmness she had not realized she possessed, there was a third explanation for the suspicious ghostly noises in the woods, and it was “the travel-adventure-investigation show whose main camera man you and Chris just literally landed on.”
Or possibly another member of the crew. Production team. Actually, Maddison thought to herself as a shell-shocked woman in jeans and a “Robin Redd, Treasure Hunter!” T-shirt offered her a hand up, I have no idea what the terminology is for this. Help.
On a more positive, or at least a less actively disastrous note, it seemed as if teenagers randomly falling from the sky was enough to bring your average film crew up short too. There were about ten people clustered and scattered around a more-or-less natural clearing that was also housing a miniature tent village and a lot of camera equipment. All of them were staring at Maddison and Chris in some combination of shock and alarm. Several of them were dressed completely wrong for hiking, as though they had half an idea—but the wrong half. Of the group, maybe two people were dressed sensibly.
And one person right in the middle was dressed so distinctly that there was no mistaking the neon feather in the hatband of his hat, his shark-tooth earring, or his flowing ponytail. Or his blinding grin, although it was a bit forced. And what sort of person responded to unexpected falling teenagers by grinning like they were about to have their picture taken?
In person, Robin Redd of Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter was surprisingly tall. Maddison had always suspected creative camera angling, but the man really was that imposing, although the effect was ruined by the look of complete and utter confusion that swiftly replaced his grin, and also by the fact that there was a balding man with glasses in the background, shrieking and throwing a sheaf of paper in the air.
“Oh,” Chris said, popping up to join Maddison. He’d managed to avoid landing on someone in favor of landing on a defenseless bush, had scrambled to his feet on his own power, and was now staring at the paper-throwing man with dawning comprehension. “That’s where the screaming was coming from.”
“Oh, don’t mind Harry,” Robin Redd said, striding forward and offering his hand to Chris in a transparent bid to stop the frozen staring. “He’s just a little stressed.”
The woman who’d helped Maddison up gave a pained laugh at that.
“Really, Bethy,” Redd said over his shoulder, teasing a name out of Chris and Maddison before Maddison really knew what was happening, all while pumping first Chris’s and then Maddison’s arms up and down with more vigor than tact, although he didn’t try that squeeze-to-establish-dominance thing some guys did. “It’s just a rough week. He’ll find Wi-Fi somewhere and have a long argument with the network and be fine. And anyway,” he added, turning another movie-star grin on Chris and Maddison, “we have more important things to deal with. Like asking these fine folks where they came from!”
“Yeah, talking with the network will cheer him up,” the woman who was apparently Bethy grumbled under her breath. She had a mechanical
pencil shoved through her bun and the frazzled expression of someone who had to do all the worrying for everyone else. “Perry, are you all right?”
“Yeah!” the guy Maddison had flattened said. “Camera’s fine!”
“Yes, and you?”
“Oh, I’m good. I think I sat on a thorn bush, but I’m good.”
“Hikers!” the man who had been shrieking in the background said, though it was more of a shriek, and with a lot of arm waving to the sky. He stormed over in a swirl of tossed papers and stopped directly in front of Chris, scowling. “Hikers! What do you idiot kids think you’re doing?”
“What—” Chris started.
Maddison, who was out of the line of fire because she’d been standing closer to Bethy than to Redd, decided it might be a good idea to edge behind her. That Bethy let her do so with a sympathetic expression didn’t say good things about Chris’s future.
“What sort of idiots ignore the ‘Keep Out’ signs?” Harry demanded, stabbing a finger in the direction of Chris’s nose.
Uh-oh. This was going to be tricky to explain, and to a man who was already furious about something, and also, Maddison had just realized that she and Chris had lost Carrie somewhere.
“We had this park closed off!” Harry continued. “Nobody is supposed to be on these trails! Does anyone respect the filming process anymore?”
Wait. Maddison blinked. They had been on an unmarked trail, true, but there hadn’t been anything about the whole park being closed.
“There wasn’t any ‘Keep Out’ sign,” Chris said, which was true, and although there had been a trail-closed sign instead there was no need to mention it to this very angry person.
Harry was taking an enormous breath in preparation for what was going to be a magnificent amount of yelling when Bethy interrupted him by throwing herself between the furious producer and Chris, fat black binder in one hand.
“Harry,” she said gently, “I know you probably didn’t register it at the time but I did tell you about this already, we couldn’t convince the park service that they needed to cut off park access for everyone in the state so that we could film. And since we kind of need the park service on our good side or they might cut off our access to any and all Florida state parks, we told them that that was totally fine, and then you signed off on it. Remember?” She opened the binder and offered him a stack of papers clipped together.
