by D. Melhoff
“So what?” Lance sneered. “We’re just gonna wait around while this freak keeps picking us off like flies?”
“He can’t get inside.”
“Sure. Sure, there hasn’t been a safe place yet, and the way you run security around this hellhole, I wouldn’t be surprised if you left a key for him under the front mat. Or what happens when he shows up with a knife to our friends’ throats and tells us to let him in? We’re supposed to make that call? No. Fuck no.”
“I know you’re angry—”
“Angry ain’t a strong enough word.”
“I know,” Charlotte stressed. “Roddy and Nikki worked here for two summers—I knew Dominique almost as long, and Chase for a lot longer. But we have to be careful.”
Lance didn’t reply. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, fuming.
“All right,” Charlotte continued, “as I was saying, we’ll set out buckets and take turns on lookout for the rest of the night. If something suspicious happens, tell someone about it or call for help. There’s nothing else we can do until Friday.”
“Yes,” Scott said, “there is.”
He felt the weight of the room’s attention shift back to him. Even Brynn—who hadn’t taken her eyes off the window since entering the office—averted her gaze in the glass’s mirror-like reflection and studied him without blinking. He threaded his fingers behind his back to steady his shaking hands.
“He’s not finished. No matter how much we want him to disappear, he won’t, at least not until he’s done what he set out to do.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Denisha asked, shivering.
Scott avoided her question a second time and looked at Charlotte. “Did Bruce have any say in the hiring process?”
“Of course not.”
“Then he couldn’t have known who was going to be here. None of us has any history with him, as far as I know.” He paused, waiting for somebody to object, but no one did. “So he couldn’t have planned out every detail beforehand. He must be flying by the seat of his pants a little. I think he’s watching us and waiting to see which fairy tale suits each person.”
“And which endings to reenact,” Brynn added.
“What are you saying?” Denisha asked, wrapping her arms around Lance. “You want us to scare the kids with this fairy-tale murder bullshit you’ve been spewing? Why should we believe it?”
“First of all,” Scott said, “stop swearing. Don’t do anything that might draw his attention—nothing your favorite prince or princess wouldn’t do.”
“Hold on. You think he’s inside the fort? Spying on us?”
“I—no.” At least I fucking hope not. “We checked every room.”
Charlotte confirmed: “And there’s no way in except the front entrance.”
“Regardless,” Scott said, “he’s a resourceful creep. If he’s trying to test us, maybe we can pass.”
Lance sniggered. “And if he’s just hearing little voices whispering ‘Off with their heads,’ then what?”
“He’s not insane. At least, not in the criminal sense. He’s too methodical.”
“But w-why…” Denisha stuttered. “Why does he want to kill us?” She burrowed her face against Lance’s shoulder and let out a long, retching moan.
No one responded. They sat there listening to Denisha cry for what seemed like eternity before Charlotte looked up—straight at Scott, as though she had been hesitating to mention something this whole time—and said, “I was hoping you might be able to speak to that, Mr. Mamer.” She dipped her hand into her cloak and retrieved a folded piece of paper with “Scott + Company” Sharpied across the front in thick, black letters. “I found it slipped under the wicket door. After roll call.”
Scott frowned. He reached out, taking the paper as though it were laced with anthrax, and opened the fold.
Five words were scrawled across the page.
“What’s it say?” Denisha asked. Her voice was a distorted echo coming from miles away, and it took Scott a moment to process the question. Finally, he cleared his throat and spoke the words on the paper.
“Are you learning your lessons?”
Silence gripped the office.
“Why’s my name on this?” he asked, flabbergasted.
“You tell us,” Charlotte said.
“What? You think I’m involved somehow? I’ve got nothing to do with it. I’ve never met this freak-show before, let alone pissed him off.”
“So why are you the only one he mentions by name? And what does he mean, ‘learning your lessons’?”
“I…I don’t know.”
Denisha stopped crying. She exchanged a suspicious look with Lance, while Brynn turned from her view of the clearing and fixed her cold stare directly on Scott.
“Guys,” he said. “Guys. I don’t know what this”—he shook the paper—“is talking about. I’m not some part of this maniac’s murder plot.”
Charlotte eyed him like a hawk, tugging back and forth on the chain around her neck while seemingly measuring every pore of his body—every throb of his pulse—like a human polygraph. A splatter of rain hit the outside window. Brynn startled. Another splat struck the glass, then another.
“Go,” Charlotte said. “Quick. Bring the fireworks inside and put out the mop buckets. After that, head to the ballroom and start making up beds. If you see anything suspicious—anything at all—come straight to me.”
Lance slung his arm around Denisha and guided her to the door, and then Brynn shuffled after them. Scott crumpled the letter in his hands, considered keeping it, and then threw it into the garbage can. When it struck the bottom, there was a flash of lightning and the immediate boom of thunder.
No one screamed, but everybody jumped.
19
The nightmare was back that night—and worse than ever.
Scott awoke, drenched in sweat, writhing over the patchwork of stale bedsheets that the campers had laid down to transform the ballroom into their coed sleeping area. He looked around in the dark, expecting to see the children blinking back at him, but everyone’s eyes were shut. That’s surprising. He assumed most of the kids wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep after the day’s horrific events, but it seemed as though Mr. Sandman had managed to creep up on them after all. That’s how Scott pictured the Sandman too: not a smiley, Hanna-Barbera-style granddaddy in blue pajamas and a flannel nightcap curved into a crescent moon, but a greasy, long-haired pervert like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang who slipped through your window after midnight and disturbed your subconscious with itching dust and gunpowder.
Scott sat up, wiping his forehead. The chugging train pistons and the screech of the steam whistle were still in his ears. So was—
No. He pinched the top of his nose and grunted. Get up. Go get some air, go.
____
The hallway outside the ballroom flickered with familiar pools of torchlight. Scott stepped through the door and closed it behind him, careful not to make a sound.
He stopped, cocked his head.
Raindrops were falling outside, pattering the stone walls. He took in a breath of cool air, and the knots in his chest loosened. Not a lot, but enough to ease some of the discomfort.
Clack—a noise clattered above.
Charlotte in her office, he thought. Or maybe it’s nothing. The place is so quiet even Lou Ferrigno could hear a mouse fart at the other end of the building.
He moved through the corridor, in and out of the torchlight, and entered the main vestibule. Wandering over to the exit, he reached out and gave the door a tug—the iron clanked reassuringly. He ambled to the staircase next and started toward the second floor.
As he scaled the steps, Scott’s mind strayed to the missing counselors. Mai, Roddy, Cynthia, Nikki. I almost slept with Nikki, he thought, remembering how her lips had grazed his stubble, and the way her hands (those firm hands) had massaged his scalp and shoulders. Maybe she wasn’t his soul mate—maybe not anybody’
s soul mate—but she wasn’t butcher’s meat, for Christ’s sake.
“Ow!” a voice yelped in the dark.
Scott stumbled backward, nearly losing his balance.
He looked down to see Tyrell clutching his feet in the shadows. The kid’s sneakers were lying on the step below him, socks stuffed inside, with a sour odor wafting out of their raggedy mouths. The malt-vinegar smell filled the stairwell and overpowered the fort’s dankness.
“Sorry, Ty,” Scott whispered. “Don’t mean to keep running into you like this.”
Tyrell didn’t respond. He turned to the wall, avoiding eye contact, and continued kneading his toes.
He’s crying, Scott realized. Shit. I must have stubbed him hard.
“You, uh, you’re not hurt, are you? Ty?”
“Go away,” Tyrell snapped, his voice cracking. “And stop calling me ‘Ty.’”
Scott surveyed the boy—who was trembling worse than before—and didn’t say a word. He had no idea what to say. Just leave him, he thought, and he shook his head and put a foot on the next step up.
“That’s what Grandma calls me,” Tyrell added, half-whispering.
Scott stopped. Grandma. He recalled Chase telling him something about Tyrell’s family a few days ago: “He lives with his grandma. Mean bitch, too. I’ve seen his bruises when we’ve gone swimming.”
“Your grandma’s not a very nice person, is she?”
Tyrell sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his pudgy hand. “She pinches.”
“Hmm?”
“She used to—to make me stand on the scale after baths and pinch me if the number was bigger than before. Told me I’ll die if I don’t get skinny.”
Jesus Christ. What are you supposed to say to that?
“I’m really sorry, Ty—” Scott caught himself. “Tyrell. Trust me. Not all grown-ups are like that.”
“I know.” He sniffed again. “That’s why I like camp. You get seconds at lunchtime and a new T-shirt every year. Grandma doesn’t buy me clothes. Says I should fit the old ones. I just wish we got new shoes, too.”
Scott looked closer at the eight-year-old’s feet and noticed a pair of tender, bright red bunions protruding from the sides of his big toes, along with a full set of ingrown toenails. The dots connected: That’s why he’s been limping.
“I never thought I’d miss Grandma,” Tyrell said, glancing up with his milk-white eyes. “But I’m scared. Is someone comin’ to kill us?”
“Hey. We’re going to be fine,” Scott said, swallowing a hunk of spit. “And if you make it out of this,” he added, “you can make it out of fucking anything. Say it: ‘I can make it out of fucking anything.’”
“I can…”
“What?”
“I can make it out of fucking anything.”
“Good. Now keep telling yourself that until you believe it.”
Tyrell gave a closed-mouth smile—one of the few Scott had seen him produce—and nodded back.
Clack.
There was that noise again, coming from above them.
“C’mon.” Scott took Tyrell’s hand and helped him up. “Bring your kicks.”
Together, the two of them made their way upstairs and reached the second floor of the fort, entering a corridor with access to Charlotte’s office, the nursing bay, and a pair of adjacent storage closets. A door at the end of the corridor—the playroom—was cracked open an inch, and a thread of light shone through the fissure. Something rustled inside. The closer Scott got, the tighter he could feel his teeth and ass cheeks clenching. There’s nothing to be afraid of, he assured himself. We checked the whole fort. But that didn’t stop his imagination from running wild. Sounds had a way of haunting him: he remembered the bony clack of Dominique’s knuckles hitting the dungeon floor; the screech of the steam whistle from his nightmare; and the robins—the baby robins—squealing for their absent mother moments before being murdered in their nest.
A voice broke through the imagined noises: “You should be sleeping, you know.”
Scott startled, and then his anus relaxed. “We got our five minutes,” he said, pushing the door open. “You?”
Brynn was sitting on the floor of the playroom, legs crossed, with the leather-bound edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Fifty Others open in her lap. “About two,” she said, stifling a yawn. Stacks of folders, notepads, and newspaper clippings were fanned out like blackjack cards around her.
“What’s this?” Scott asked, approaching the papers. He took a seat as Tyrell wandered to the edge of the room and curled up on the tattered carpet.
“Receipts, tax forms, job applications. Articles on the camp.”
“I can see that.”
“Crownheart’s been around since the sixties,” Brynn said. “I can’t find any trace of Bruce, but maybe he’s just a middleman? If the camp pissed off anyone in the last fifty years, they’ve gotta be here somewhere.”
Not a terrible theory, Scott thought. “Charlotte give you this?”
“Found most of it in the cabinets. There’s more in the drawers, too.”
Brynn’s voice sounded as flat as it had been six hours ago. Her cheeks were red and her hair was disheveled—such a stark difference from the gleaming, perfectly pulled-back tresses that Scott had fantasized about running his hands through when he first saw her. He spied the book in her lap, knowing the real reason she was here had nothing to do with tax forms and job applications. “Find anything yet?”
She lowered her head and didn’t reply.
“If there’s something I can help with,” he continued, “reading or sorting or whatever, just say the word. I know I’m not your usual researcher type, but hey, I’m full of surprises, and sometimes—”
“The bears impaled her.”
Scott closed his mouth.
Heavy, all-consuming silence enveloped the playroom. He glanced at Tyrell in the corner, whose eyes were shut, and hoped that the boy had already fallen asleep.
A teardrop rolled down Brynn’s cheek and plopped into her lap. She turned the book around with shaky hands and pushed it across the floor. “Before Goldilocks was the main character of ‘The Three Bears,’” she said, “it was an old woman. The bears found her in their house and impaled her on the steeple of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Pinocchio kills a talking cricket who warns him about being disobedient. Cinderella’s stepsisters chop off parts of their feet in order to fit the glass slipper, and then their eyes are pecked out by a pair of doves.”
Scott stared at the book, which was open to “Cinderella.” Sure enough, the illustration showed a crowd of peasants pointing at the sky as two doves flew away with eyeballs clutched in their beaks. In the background, the stepsisters were covering their faces as blood streamed through their fingers.
“I’ve been trying to figure out which stories he might try to…to depict next.” She paused, wiping her cheeks. “Scott. Most of them don’t end happily ever after.”
Scott eyed the storybook with trepidation. Choosing his words carefully, he said, “They’re cautionary. I know. These aren’t the Mickey Mouse versions everybody’s used to. My grandma had a few Grimm’s originals tucked under her rumpus room coffee table when I was little, but hell, that doesn’t mean—”
“Scott.” Brynn shook her head. “Look.”
She was glaring at the book again. He reached forward—reluctant, as if handling a Satanist’s bible—and pulled the tome closer, paging through its images with morbid curiosity. After every flip, his eyes cranked wider and wider.
Little Red taking off her clothes and getting into bed with a wolf.
An emaciated boy, his skin hanging off his bones like rags.
A pit of snakes.
A dead body being dumped off a bridge.
A pair of severed hands.
The drawings didn’t stop. Stories Scott thought he recognized—others he knew he didn’t—fanned past in a bloody spattering of the most imaginative torture tableaus conceivable. Decapitations, women hung o
n hooks, corpses swaying from gallows. An old man being beaten with an iron rod. The titles barely registered: “Fitcher’s Bird,” “The Girl Without Hands,” “Sweetheart Roland,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Shockheaded Peter,” “The Pied Piper.”
The note from the killer seared to the front of Scott’ thoughts, taunting him, seizing him with a paralyzing grip.
“Are you learning your lessons?”
What lessons? He reeled. Why did you mention me? WHY ME?
“What if he’s not hearing voices?” Brynn murmured. “What if the monster enjoys this—gets a perverted rush every time we discover one of his depraved scenes? Or what if the thrill comes earlier? When he’s stringing his vision together and he’s still got them alive, pleading, screaming…”
Fresh tears streaked down Brynn’s face.
“We can’t think like that,” Scott said. He closed the book and pushed it out of reach. “Forget about fairy tales. If this is premeditated, what’s his MO? The camp’s dealt with troubled kids for decades, right, and maybe there’s a fallen robin”—he winced at the phrase—“somewhere along the line. This place makes a mint too. Could be a cash thing. Or maybe a family vendetta. What have you dug up so far?”
Brynn dabbed her eyes with the collar of her shirt. “Dug up? Lots. Learned? Shit all.” She touched a stack of records, seemingly trying to pull herself together. Scott was glad to see her pushing her emotions aside.
“Harvey Combwell,” she said, holding up a newspaper, “started the camp in 1968. Sounds like he was a simple man with a modest vision; he wanted to give his granddaughter and her friends a place where they could go to escape the city for a couple weeks every summer. He was already sixty-eight when he started, but he built most of the buildings by hand—a lot of which are still standing.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
“Town fundraisers, the odd donation. For the most part, it was his own elbow grease.” Brynn slumped. She massaged her temples and considered the heaps of records and news clippings around her. “That’s it. Helpful, huh?”
“Which piles have you covered?”