by Val Crowe
Anyway, the Airstream barely made it back the road and then I pulled into a grassy clearing. The grass hadn’t been mowed in a long time, so it was more like a field than a clearing. I could see a row of cabins. Behind the cabins, the forest filled in again. There was a sign, but it wasn’t readable anymore. All the paint had flecked off over time.
Rylan was already there. I saw her car parked next to one of the cabins. She was standing with another woman, who had curly hair, and they had their heads together, looking down at some sheet of paper. But when the Airstream pulled in, Rylan looked up and waved at me.
I rolled down the window. “Anyplace special I should park?” I called out to her.
She looked around, flipping her braid over her shoulder. Then she pointed across the lane from the cabins on the left hand side. “There?”
“Sure,” I said. “Looks good.”
I parked and got everything settled. Then I went over to see if Rylan needed any help.
She was carrying blankets into a cabin, and she instructed me to bring in anything from the trunk of the car.
I picked up a duffel bag and a gallon jug of water and followed her inside. The cabins were your typical church-camp style. They were a bit up off the ground, meaning I needed to walk up a few steps to the get the small front porch. Inside, falling-apart metal-framed bunks lined the walls. Rylan had moved them out of the way to make up a bed area for herself, though. She wasn’t going to sleep on those bunks, which was probably smart. They didn’t have mattresses or anything and they looked about ready to fall apart.
She had two air mattresses, one of which was already pumped up. The other was in the process of being inflated.
“This is Deacon,” Rylan said to the woman with curly hair. “Deacon, this is Rosamund Tuck. She owns this place.”
Rosamund, who couldn’t have been much older than I was, offered me her hand. “Call me Mundy. You’re the guy who’s sensitive to ghosts? Rylan’s told me all about you.”
I shook hands with her. “Nice to meet you. Did you buy this place?” Maybe that had come out rude. From my tone, it probably sounded like I couldn’t figure why anyone would lay out money for this campground, but that was because I couldn’t.
“No, I inherited it,” said Mundy. “Can’t sell it. No one’s interested. Then I ran into Rylan here.” Mundy winked at her. “We made a scheme together, and then we decided that if I could get eyes on this place, maybe some crazy person would buy it and turn it into a haunted bed and breakfast.”
“People do that?” I said, raising my eyebrows.
Rylan nodded. “Oh, yeah, people do that all the time.” She headed back out to the car for another load.
I went after her.
She took out another two gallons of water. “That’s it. Can you shut the trunk?”
I shut it. “Hey, are you just blowing smoke at this Mundy chick? Manipulating her for the chance to film here?”
“No,” said Rylan. “I like her.” She stopped moving. “Hey, um, did you see how she winked at me?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think that was, like, a hey-I’m-gay-too-and-I-think-you’re-cute wink? Or was she just doing a super platonic friendly thing?”
“Uh…” I really had no clue.
“Do you think you could hit on her, just to see if she says she’s into girls?”
I grabbed one of the gallon jugs of water from her. “No way.”
“Oh, come on, Deacon. You owe me a favor.”
I headed for the steps to the cabin. “I don’t know how to hit on women.”
“Well, that’s probably why you failed to seal the deal when you were trying to pass on the barnacle.”
I glared at her. “You know what I mean. It’s different at bars, when people are drunk.”
“When their judgment is incapacitated, you mean? My God, are you hearing yourself?”
I handed her back the jug of water. “Take this in yourself.”
“Jackass,” said Rylan.
At which point, Mundy appeared in the doorway. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Rylan gave me a nasty smile. “Deacon wants to ask you out.”
My lips parted in disbelief. I could not believe she had just done that. I couldn’t very well say that I didn’t want that, not without sounding like a dick. I gave Rylan a pointedly disgusted look and then turned to Mundy. I tried to think of something to say. No. I had nothing.
“Oh, that’s sweet,” said Mundy. “But, um, I’m…” She laughed a little, embarrassed. She looked at Rylan. “That is, I mean, I thought that you and I…” She lowered her voice. “Aren’t you gay too?”
Rylan brightened. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
“When you suggested we bunk together here, I just assumed you meant…” Mundy blushed. Then she seemed to remember me. “I’m sure you’re very nice, though, Deacon. I really—”
“It’s fine,” I snapped. I jammed my hands into my pockets. “When’s Dominique getting here?”
“Uh… I have no idea,” said Rylan. She beamed at Mundy, and the two of them disappeared into the cabin together. They shut the door.
* * *
About an hour later, two more cars pulled into the campground, but neither of them contained Dominique. Instead, one car contained Rylan’s camera guy, Jonah, and his girlfriend Kenelly Farr.
The other car was being driven by Alice Mistry, who introduced herself to me as having written about this place for her honors thesis in American folk horror and ghost stories. She had brought along her best friend Cat Parks and Cat’s boyfriend Scout Oates. When their car pulled up and they opened up the doors, marijuana smoke didn’t pour out, but it might as well have. They all reeked, and there was paraphernalia lying out on the dashboard. Marijuana was not legal in Virginia or anything, so they were being pretty brazen. On the other hand, we were out in the middle of nowhere.
I found some of them familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d met them. I supposed if they hung out in Thornford, maybe I’d simply seen them around town. I had spent my high school years there, after all, and I came back from time to time to see Wade.
The five of them seemed in great spirits, and they were excited to see Rylan. There was lots of whooping and hugging and boisterous laughter.
Which was when I realized that Rylan had sold them all on this idea as basically a big partying camping trip in the woods. This was driven home to me by the copious amounts of beer and liquor that came out of the back of their cars.
Don’t get me wrong. I like a beer or two in the evening to unwind. I drink a fair amount. But we had come to a place that was purportedly haunted, and I was there, and I didn’t think this was going to be a fun time. I wondered if I should have a talk with them.
No, maybe I should have Rylan have a talk with them.
Yeah, I would definitely do that.
For now, though, I wouldn’t rock the boat. I helped everyone unload their stuff and into cabins. Jonah and Kenelly were taking one of the cabins. Scout and Cat were in another.
Alice was taking another alone.
Dominique still wasn’t there. I asked Rylan about her again, wondering if we should call her. Calling her would be a bit of an ordeal, of course, since there was no cell service up here. We’d have to go back across the bridge for service.
But Rylan said, “Oh, I got a text from her before we went over the bridge. She’s on her way, but she’s running late. She was picking up some supplies and asking if we needed anything. I told her more ice.” She grinned. “This is going to be so cool. Have you seen any ghosts yet?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Nothing.” And then I started to get a sinking sensation that maybe there weren’t any ghosts here at all. Rylan had a history of going places to film where nothing actually happened. What if this was just a big bust, and there was nothing here at all? Would I still be able to get information from Dominique?
“Hey,” called Jonah. “Deacon, right?”
/> I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Can you give me a hand with this?” He nodded down at something in the back of his truck.
I trotted over, and that was when I realized he had a fucking keg in the back of the truck. Okay, seriously, I was going to have to have a talk with Rylan immediately.
“It’s not full,” said Jonah. “You’re friends with Wade, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, not really sure how my connection to Wade connected to the keg not being full.
“Well, Wade knows that I work part time for this catering company?” said Jonah. “Anyway, this was leftover at an event, and they told me I could take it. I figured it was just going to waste, right? It’s a decent IPA.” He grinned at me. “You like beer?”
Were there people who didn’t like beer? “Yeah, cool,” I muttered.
He was still grinning. “Okay, let’s get this beast out. We can put it over there.” He pointed. “I think that’s where we’re going to set up the campfire.”
Campfire? Seriously? This was not a party in the woods. It was a supernatural investigation. I was getting annoyed.
But I helped him get the keg set up. And then he offered me a cup of the beer in it, and I took it, just to be polite. It was actually pretty good, I had to grudgingly admit.
“Man, this is so crazy,” said Jonah, sipping at some beer himself. “I haven’t done anything like this in years. Not since Emmy was born.”
“Emmy?” I said.
He dug out his phone and started showing me pictures of a little toddler girl with brown pigtails. “That’s my daughter,” he said, grinning. “She’s two.”
“She’s cute,” I said.
“Yeah.” He grinned at the phone. “She’s so smart. She talks in complete sentences already, you know? She sounds smarter than me. She’s amazing.” He flipped through the pictures some more. “Look, there she is on the tricycle I got her. She can’t really do the pedals yet, so she just wants me to push her around in it. She’s like, ‘Daddy, make it go.’ It’s adorable.”
I had to admit that I was no good at making small talk about other people’s kids. Kids were cool and all. I mean, the little girl was cute. But what do you say? I had no frame of reference for that kind of thing. I just nodded.
“Anyway, I never get away. Her mom and I, we were just a drunken hookup, so we’re not together. We’ve never been together. We don’t have a custody agreement or anything, but it usually works out that I have Emmy any spare time I have off. I took Emmy camping once, and it was exhausting. She was younger then. She just wanted to run off every time I turned my back on her. I swear, it should be okay to put kids on leashes, you know what I mean?”
“Uh…?” No. No, I did not know what he meant. I took a drink of beer.
“Jonah, are you showing off pictures of your kid again?” said Kenelly, who had appeared next to the keg, and was pumping it. “Didn’t I tell you that’s not an icebreaker?”
Jonah laughed, sounding embarrassed. “Sorry, man.” He put his phone back in his pocket.
“It’s cool,” I said. “You don’t have to apologize.”
Kenelly slid close to him, putting her hand on his chest. “He’s a great dad. It’s incredibly sexy.”
Jonah slung his arm around her, an easy closeness. He grinned down at her.
She grinned back.
I looked away, feeling embarrassed to be witnessing that, and thinking about my stupid conversation with Mads earlier and then my other conversation with a headstone. I drank more beer.
Rylan was coming by, a pile of logs over her shoulder. She deposited them on the ground next to the space that was apparently going to be the campfire.
I decided now was as good a time as any to talk to her. I fell into step with her as she headed back for the forest, where she was apparently gathering the wood. “Hey, can we talk?”
“Dominique texted again. She’s going to be here in like twenty minutes.”
“That’s great,” I said. It was. I was relieved. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
“I’m sorry about the thing with Mundy. I’ll tell her that I made it up if you want.”
“That’s not it either.”
She stopped, facing me, hands on her hips. “So, then, what?”
“There’s a keg? A campfire? What is this?”
She shrugged. “We have to label things?”
“Is this what you usually do before you go in and film a scary place? Get trashed? Because I seem to remember that you and Wade were drunk when you went into Ridinger Hall.”
She spread her hands. “Big deal. It’s not like you don’t drink. You drink more than I do. I think you drink daily. And alone. And those are things that might mean you have a problem.”
I cleared my throat. “I don’t have a problem. And I don’t get drunk. I just have, you know, a beer or two. Look, the point is this. We’re out here with a potentially dangerous ghost, a murder ghost, and everyone’s acting like it’s a vacation.”
She tapped her chin. “It is kind of like the opening to every Friday the 13th movie ever, isn’t it?”
“Is it? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one of those.”
“You’ve never seen Friday the 13th? Are you kidding?”
“Is that the one where the guy turns out to have a vagina at the end or something?”
“No, that’s Sleepaway Camp, and it’s a girl that... never mind. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because ghosts can’t hurt us. We learned that in Boonridge. It’s all in our heads.” She tapped her temple. “So, something shows up and tries to stab us, no big deal. We just mind-over-matter it away.”
I considered this. Maybe she was right. After all, it was this exact line of thinking that had allowed me to escape from Point Oakes. I had realized that the gate only looked locked. Ghosts had tricked me. But it wasn’t real. I nodded slowly. “Okay, maybe you’re right. But can we tell everyone that before anything starts happening?”
“Why? Have you seen something?”
“No.”
“Do you have a creepy feeling?”
“No,” I said. Well, the bridge had been a little creepy, but now that I knew that there was another one, that was not a big issue.
“Okay, so…” She raised her eyebrows.
I sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Maybe I’m overreacting.”
* * *
Scout pushed his glasses up on his nose. The guy had shoulder length dreadlocks which were of varying thicknesses. He smelled strongly of weed and patchouli. He was kneeling over the campfire, trying to show everyone how easy it was to start a fire by rubbing sticks together.
The trick, he had told us, was not to rub, but rather to spin. He had a stick that he was rolling between his fingers, perpendicular against wood and kindling on the ground.
Thing was, nothing was happening.
“Scout, baby,” said Cat, “let’s just use a lighter.”
“No, I’m almost there,” Scout said. “Just be patient.”
There were now makeshift benches around where the campfire would be, consisting of logs that had been rolled in from a felled tree in the forest. The rest of that tree, and also pieces of a few others, had been dragged in and hacked up with saws and hatchets for the rest of the firewood. Everyone had helped, albeit drunkenly.
Dusk was gathering. It could only be about 7:30, and yet everyone was already three sheets to the wind. Maybe it was better. Everyone would pass out early, and maybe sleep through the night. For some reason, ghosts were often more active in darkness.
“Rylan and I had a conversation about this,” Scout was saying. “You remember this, Rylan?”
“About rubbing two sticks together?” said Rylan.
“No,” said Scout. “About patience.”
“Oh,” said Rylan. “Yeah, definitely. We were saying how people want immediate results. They aren’t willing to wait and see what happens.”
“Right,” said Scout. “That’s why it’s nice to be out h
ere in nature. Nothing instantaneous. Everything’s a slow burn.”
“Is it?” said Alice, the thesis writer. “There have to be instantaneous things in nature.”
“Well, you were talking about that stuff with your mom, which was really kind of heavy,” said Rylan. Then she furrowed her brow. “Oh, sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought that up.”
“No, it’s cool,” said Scout, continuing to spin the stick. “I’m an open book, right? I’ll let anyone know. My mom has cancer, right?” He looked up at all of us over the rims of his glasses.
There was a murmur of apologies from everyone, including me. That sucked.
“Well, she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her,” he said. “So, I quit school to stay home and watch after her. And she has insurance, but it’s not great, and the bills are piling up. That’s when I decided to start selling weed to help out with the money, you know? Also, she uses it for pain, and I was buying stuff anyway, and to get it cheap, I was going past the middle men and straight to the growers. So, it just made sense.” He turned back to the stick and redoubled his efforts. “But about patience? My mother, she’s waiting for something to help her out, and it sometimes takes such a long time to know if the chemo or the radiation is doing anything. It’s such a waiting game. At first, we were both frustrated, but then I started to sort of accept the uncertainty, right?”
“Yeah,” said Rylan. “What you said was really brilliant. Like, no one really knows the future. It is uncertain. And the truth is that if you did know everything, life wouldn’t even be worth living. If everything was all stretched out in front of you, and it was all going to be great, what would be the point of that? So, being patient, living with the uncertainty, that’s just what life is.”
“Exactly,” said Scout.
“Deep,” said Jonah, nodding.
Headlights cut across the clearing, and we all stood up.
It was Dominique.
She parked the car and cut the headlights. When she opened the door, the dome light came on inside, illuminating her as she stood up, and the light from below lit up her face like a spooky-flashlight effect. She waved at us all. She reached into the back seat and got out a backpack, which she slung over her shoulder. Then, shutting the car door, she sauntered over to us.