by Joey Comeau
Once the camper was unconscious, it was easy to duct tape him to the chair, to put tape over his mouth. He cut some garbage bags down the side and opened them up to lay under Mitchell’s chair.
It was better than being in love, really.
Tony taped the garbage bags to the floor, so they wouldn’t slide or shift.
With love, there was always the possibility that your love was unrequited.
Mitchell groaned, and Tony slapped him on the cheek a couple times.
“You okay?” he said.
Mitchell opened his eyes and blinked confusedly.
“Knock, knock?” Tony said.
Mitchell struggled against his restraints, and his eyes went wide.
“Come on,” Tony said. “It’s no fun if you don’t play along. Okay let me help. I say ‘Knock, knock,’ then you say, ‘Who’s there?’”
Mitchell struggled harder, and the priest sighed.
“Okay,” Tony said. “Who’s there?”
The camper tried to holler, his cries coming out muffled and unintelligible.
Now it was Tony’s turn to look confused. “Murpmf baaaaarmurmf a mrmph who?”
Mitchell tried to holler again, and this time he struggled so hard that his chair fell over forward and he smashed his face on the floor. Blood poured suddenly from his nose onto the black garbage bag, and Tony let out a laugh.
“That’s pretty good, actually,” he said. “I’ve never heard that one.”
There was a knock on the office door, and then the sound of someone trying the handle.
“Sir?”
The door opened, and Quinn stuck his head into the room.
“Are you okay in here? I thought I heard a crash.”
On the floor, Mitchell let out a wet groan and started to sob.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Martin,
I can’t remember if I’ve written to you already. I wandered those haunted hotel hallways for what seems like days, looking for a woman named Julia. Actually, I think I looked for a woman named Julia for the first few days, and then I got confused and started knocking on doors and asking people if they had seen Linda Blair. Most people just shut their doors in my face, but one man tried to bite me. He had big spider mandibles instead of a mouth, Martin. What is wrong with this city? They don’t tell you about this Toronto, the real Toronto. It smells like garbage and all night long the CN Tower weeps.
I’ve had a terrible headache since finding my way back to the room. The ceiling is back where it’s supposed to be, but now there are two beds, and it looks like someone is asleep in the new one. God, the headache, Martin. I wish you were here to make me a cup of tea. But I figured out my own solution. I am intrepid! Do you tell your friends that? That your mother is intrepid? I hope you are making new friends at camp, and telling them right now about how intrepid your mother is.
I don’t understand when people call someone a mama’s boy like it’s a bad thing. I’ve never trusted a man who didn’t have a good relationship with his mother. I wish I could have known my own mother. I’m jealous when I hear my friends talk about their mother worrying or their mother chiding them about their life choices. Their mothers were the first and most important women in their lives. How do you trust a man who doesn’t treat his with respect? How will he treat you if that’s how he treats his mother?
What am I talking about? Oh, my headache. I found the cure for headaches, Martin. My brain felt like it was getting tighter and tighter until finally my eyeball popped out, dangling viscous purple gunk. God, what a relief! If I had known that this was the cure for headaches, I would have popped my own eyeball out years ago. It took me a half hour to get it back in my socket.
In fact I had just gotten the eyeball into its socket when there was another phone call. It was Robert, the director from earlier.
“Did you really tell that kid to go fuck himself?” Robert said.
“I did,” I told him. I wanted to explain, and to apologize. Not because I was wrong, but because all of a sudden I was certain that he was going to fire me. This is the big city, Martin. That bored and hateful little boy is more important than me, here. Because he is the face people see. But I wasn’t in trouble at all.
“I’ve been wanting to do that all day,” Robert said. “His mother’s going to call me back in a few minutes. If anyone asks, I called to reprimand you. And I was very stern, okay? That woman is the most cartoonish stage-mom I’ve ever met. She’ll be second guessing me all day every day on this movie. I don’t understand people like that. They don’t have any respect for horror movies, and they make sure to remind you constantly, but then they expect to be treated like royalty. Like we’re lucky to get a real actual actor in our little movie.”
“Let’s kill her,” I said. “I bet we could get away with it. Who’s going to notice one more dead body around the set?”
“We could probably dissolve her in acid right out there in front of the cameras!”
I think I am going to have a good time making this movie, if I can ever get out of this hotel. I am fourteen floors up, so jumping out the window isn’t an option. And when I opened the door to the hallways a few minutes ago, there was just a wall of human hair on the other side. Have you ever listened to human hair? It’s like a conch shell, sort of. You can hear quiet laughing when you put your ear to it. Quiet, far-away laughing. But you have to be careful, because a small cold hand could reach out for you at any moment.
Love, always,
Your Mother.
“I need your help,” Tony said to Quinn.
He had to keep a straight face, just for another few seconds. He didn’t think this would work, but it was worth a try. Quinn would see what was going on. Mitchell was duct-taped to a chair and bleeding out of his face in the centre of a bunch of garbage bags. There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room for interpretation, here. It was obvious that Tony was about to murder the camper. So why hadn’t Quinn gone screaming down the hallway? Was he just in shock?
“Hurry, I think he’s hurt,” Tony said.
“What happened?” Quinn still just stood there, staring at the camper on the floor, and he didn’t run. He didn’t come any closer either, though.
Tony was going to have to do this the hard way. He picked up the phone from where it sat on the garbage bags and crossed the distance to the door in a few short steps, letting out a bit of a giggle. There was no sense holding it in now. Quinn didn’t even look up to see the phone crashing down on his skull. He slumped forward, unconscious, into the room. Tony grabbed hold of him by the shirt and pulled him all the way in. Then he peeked out into the hall to make sure there was nobody else.
“Anybody out there?” he called. “Don’t be shy!”
He pictured more curious campers and counsellors showing up, one at a time, so he could club them with the telephone and add them to an ever-growing pile of bodies. It would be amazing. Like fish just jumping into the fisherman’s boat, one after another. But there was nobody there. The coast was clear, unfortunately.
“It’s probably better this way!” Tony said to Mitchell. “If all the fish jump into the boat, what do you need the fisherman for?”
The boy groaned into the bloody garbage bags again.
Tony nodded. “I know. You don’t have to tell me.”
He closed the door, then he lifted the phone up over his head again, and he brought it down harder, striking the back of Quinn’s skull with the sharp plastic corner. A bit of blood splashed him in the face, and Tony let out a laugh.
“There’s no way this is sanitary,” he said to Mitchell, and then he hit Quinn again.
On the floor, Mitchell was struggling to move, the whole chair rocking a bit. Tony looked over at the movement, but the boy was still securely taped in place. The most he was going to accomplish was falling over on his side. It would be kind of fun if Mitchell did get free, though. Tony could chase him do
wn the hallway, holding the bloody phone over his head and laughing maniacally.
“Nobody ever uses the word ‘maniac’ anymore,” Tony said. He stood up and walked back over to Mitchell. He put a foot on the back of the upturned chair and pushed it over on its side. Now Mitchell could see Quinn on the floor. “Everybody is a psychopath, or has some kind of pathological problem.”
Mitchell was quiet now, just staring at the bloodied and unconscious counsellor.
“What happened to calling people maniacs? It’s kind of a romantic word, I think.”
Tony went back over and struck Quinn in the head with the phone again, and then again and again until his arm was sore. The blood came quickly, bright against the counsellor’s blond hair and Tony’s hands, but soon there was so much that it was hard to tell what colour Quinn’s hair had originally been. Tony struck him again, and this time Quinn’s skull caved in a bit. At first it just felt like a small dent under the hair and blood, a little valley that the phone sank into, but after a few more blows, the dent had widened, and a big section of the bloodied skull now felt soft and pulpy.
“You know what the best part of all this is?” Tony said. He sat down in the blood, and left the phone sitting on Quinn’s head. His pants were soaked with blood now, and his white priest’s collar was smeared with red. “The best part of this is that you know I’m going to get caught.” He smiled at Mitchell. “I don’t know anything about how to get away with murder. My DNA is everywhere, I bet. No, I’m going to get caught for sure. I know it and you know it,” he said. “But knowing isn’t doing you much good, is it? I’m going to kill you, and there’s nobody to stop me. Then, in a week or two, the police will arrest me, and I’ll go to court or whatever, and probably be on TV, raving like a maniac about how nobody ever calls me a maniac, and you’ll still be dead.”
He nudged Quinn’s body with his foot, and laughed.
“You probably won’t care, though,” he said. “You’ll be up in heaven. It won’t bother you at all. You’ll be peaceful and warm. You won’t even care what this does to your father.”
Mitchell struggled against his restraints and tried to speak.
Tony just nodded. “If you think your dad’s soul is in trouble now,” he said, “just imagine what this is going to do to him. His only son gets murdered by a priest? He’s not going to be accepting Jesus into his heart anytime soon. Oh no. He’s going to blame the church. He’s going to be so full of hate. And when he dies, all that hate will just be like an anchor, pulling him down to hell.”
Tony stood up, and pulled his utility knife out of his pocket. He lifted Mitchell’s chair upright and sat him in the middle of the garbage bags again. There was blood all over Mitchell’s face, thicker around the nose.
“You can’t go through life full of hate,” Tony said. “Hate robs our lives of joy.” He opened the knife and took Mitchell’s hair in his fist. “A cheerful heart is good medicine,” he whispered in Mitchell’s ear.
He pushed the blade into the soft skin of the boy’s throat, holding tightly to his hair. It went into the flesh easily at first, but then it caught on something. Cartilage? Tony had to push hard to cut through it, and then through the windpipe. Mitchell shook a bit, and struggled, but not as much as Tony expected. The blood loss made him weaker. He made one last quiet gurgling sound from the opening the knife had made in his throat, and then the blood slowed down, pouring out slower and slower. It wasn’t Mitchell anymore. It was just a thing now. A smile spread slowly across Tony’s lips.
“I don’t have any hate at all anymore,” Tony confided to the boy’s body. “Or fear or regret. I don’t know what’s happening to me, but it feels good, Mitchell. It feels like I’m alive for the first time, you know?” He searched for the right words. “God has brought me laughter,” he said. “And everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.”
Martin woke in the dark, terrified that there was a man in the room with him. The blankets felt wrong around his body, and the window was in the wrong place. What was going on? Where was his mother?
It took him a minute to remember he was at summer camp, and even then he couldn’t shake the panic. It was darker here than in his room at home. He breathed in and out and counted to ten as quietly as he could. He felt certain that there was a man in the dark there, about to whisper his name. Already smiling.
Martin counted to ten again, and then backwards from ten. He wasn’t going to scream. He could control himself. He pulled the blanket tighter and listened. Nothing. There was nothing. Nobody there in the dark.
Would Ricky be able to help him if something happened? Or Chip? Chip was supposed to be right in the next room, but was he back from his meeting with Cindy? Would he be able to help anyway? What could they do? Nobody would help him. He was certain. He might as well be alone. Martin squeezed his eyes closed and it didn’t make any difference. The dark was there, too. And in the dark, the man. He tried to breathe in and out calmly.
When he was almost asleep again, there was a crack against the glass of the window beside his head, and Martin bit his lip. Outside someone was peeking in. He could see the blurred shadow of their head on the floor now.
“I can’t see him,” a girl’s voice whispered. “Martin? Martin, wake up.”
It was Melissa, standing outside his window. Martin let go of the blankets and forced himself to sit up.
“Wait, there he is,” Melissa whispered.
He went to the window and looked out. Melissa and Courtney and Joan were standing in the dirt beside his window, each of them wearing all black and holding a small carrying case.
“Can you sneak out?” Melissa whispered.
Martin nodded and held his finger to his lips. Nobody else had heard them. Ricky was silent on his bunk, and Martin couldn’t hear anything from the rest of the cabin, either. He took a slow step toward where he’d laid out his clothes for the morning. The wood floor here was creaky, but if he moved slow enough it would be okay.
The pants he had put out for tomorrow were black, which was good. But he couldn’t wear the blue button-up shirt. It was the colour of the sky on a sunny day. Not exactly good for sneaking around in the dead of night. But he didn’t have any black button-up shirts. He did have a black t-shirt, hidden in the bottom of his suitcase, though. It was his mother’s crew t-shirt from Undead Hungry Grandmother Birthday Party. He had brought it with him in case he missed her. He had stolen it while she worked on that movie, and it smelled like her, all chemical and thick.
He found the shirt in the bottom of the suitcase and pulled it on. The smells were fainter now, but they still brought back memories of his mother coming home from work and scooping him up in her arms. Spinning him around and laughing about how gross the movie was that day. It was a black t-shirt with black writing printed on the front, over a black old lady skull with a baby arm hanging out of the mouth. He really liked that it was black on black, but it was too big for him to wear usually. It hung baggy off his shoulders, and made him look smaller than he already felt. But it would be okay for tonight. It was dark, and that was what mattered.
He creaked again, sneaking to the door to the main room, where Chip’s bunk was. The counsellor was still gone. Martin relaxed. He still didn’t want to wake the other campers, but none of them could stop him from seeing Joan and the others. All they could do was report him later. He opened the front door to his cabin quietly and slipped out into the night.
Joan showed him how to adjust the dials on her telescope, and how to look through it properly. She put her hand on his back while he looked up at the stars.
“There’s a comet coming,” Joan said. “This week. You can sort of see it there now, but it’s going to get bigger and brighter. It was the first comet I ever saw, two years ago. My grandfather showed me. It comes every year at the same time.”
Martin smiled, imagining Joan looking up at the sky with her grandfather. “Maybe he’s looking up
at it now, too!” Martin said.
“No,” Joan said. “No, he isn’t. They won’t let him use his telescope anymore. One of the nurses told me that he doesn’t ask about it, but I think they probably don’t let him. He lives in a home for old people, and the nurses all secretly hate him.”
Martin didn’t say anything. He looked through the telescope again, searching for the comet she was talking about, but all the stars looked the same to him. They were different sizes, but he didn’t know what that meant.
Joan’s hand was still on his back, and he was glad it was so dark out in the field. He was blushing again. There was no moon tonight. He could see the shape of the white house up at the top of the hill by the road, and he could sort of see the line of archery targets, but everything was blurry. He knew they were archery targets only because he and his mother had passed them when they drove in.
“What does your mom do?” Martin said.
He stood back from the telescope to let Joan look through again, but she didn’t. She still had her hand on Martin’s back, and they were standing even closer than before. She was looking at him intently. This was the part in the movie where the guy leans in to kiss the girl, Martin realized. And his stomach felt cold all of a sudden. He didn’t know what to do. He had never kissed a girl before. What if she could tell?
But he didn’t have to do anything. Joan pulled him to her, and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were cool against his skin, and when she pulled back to look at him, she was smiling. She leaned in again and kissed him on the mouth this time. Martin kissed back. It was very quiet in the field now and he realized that Melissa and Courtney were probably staring at them, but he didn’t care. He put his arms around Joan and hugged her while they kissed again. Her glasses pressed into his nose, and he realized that he was smiling, too.
Then they were done, and Joan was holding his hand. She kept holding his hand while she leaned over the telescope and looked through again. Martin could see Melissa and Courtney standing by their telescopes, just looking at them in shock. He was glad that they couldn’t see how bright his face was. Even Courtney had nothing to say at first. But that didn’t last long.