It was about half an hour later when Jason pulled himself up on the dock, dripping wet, his muscles shiny and bulging. Maddie stared at him the way an art history major might stare at the Mona Lisa, and Zack stared at Tiffany, whose top was becoming increasingly looser with every mad dive into the water.
Maddie and Zack seemed to have worked out a silent contract. They could look, that was fine, just as long as they didn’t touch. Eventually, they’d both get bored of staring at these clichéd slasher-movie characters.
Oh yes, I’d noticed. I didn’t know if the rest of the Fright Squad had, but me—you couldn’t get anything past me.
Usually.
It may have been a long shot, but we had the jock, the loosey-goosey blonde with big breasts, the stoner, and the virgin. If things went sour—which they almost certainly would—everyone at Camp Moonfall was screwed except for Ellen.
I stayed close to her throughout the day strictly because my chances of survival were higher around her. She didn’t swim, just sat in the grass right off the lake’s shore, and soaked up some early summer sunshine. I tried talking to her, making it less creepy that I was hovering around, and even a few topics of conversation came to mind, but I decided to keep my mouth shut. Whenever I opened my mouth in front of a pretty girl—and believe me, Ellen was movie-star beautiful—things never went well.
Plus, I was still hung up on Lola.
Her and Lorne were a thing now. Officially. I found this out while browsing Lola’s Facebook page one lonely night. Her relationship status had been changed: In a relationship.
Freaking social media.
Ah, take me back to simpler times when I could get my heart broken in public, instead of the confines of my couch bed, with a goblin at my feet watching old Nickelodeon cartoons.
Anyway, I digress.
Later that night, we had a stereotypical campfire.
There we were, sitting in a big circle. Freddy had a joint hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and a guitar in his hands. The fire was burning, as was the marijuana. Freddy’s musical talent, however, was not.
“Where are you guys from?” Jason asked.
“Akron,” Zack answered, reaching for Freddy’s joint. Maddie slapped his hand away.
“Hey, sharing is caring, man!” Freddy said.
“Yeah, Maddie,” Zack said. “Sharing is caring.”
She shook her head.
Letting the issue drop, Freddy continued playing, fingering the chords all wrong. He was trying for ‘Sweet Caroline,’ but it was obvious he’d probably only heard the song once before.
“How do you know Uncle Octavius?” Jason asked us.
He was holding a beer, his fourth or fifth one, and it was almost empty. He was a big guy, though; it’d probably take a lot to get him drunk. Tiffany sat beside him on a fallen log, her head resting on one of Jason’s massive biceps. He hardly seemed to notice her. Ellen kept to herself on Freddy’s right, leaning on a cooler full of hot dogs and beer, uninterested.
We all answered Jason’s question, at the same time and with different responses.
“The University,” I said.
“The gym,” Zack claimed (as if he actually had ever been inside a real gym).
“My mom cuts his hair,” Maddie blurted, which might’ve been dumbest of all, seeing as how Octavius didn’t have much hair.
“Oh,” Jason said, and his constant smile wavered.
“What Abe said,” Maddie decided, chuckling. She brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and smiled goofily.
Zack looked on with a grim expression.
Freddy played on, though he’d stop every so often and ask a question like: “Man, what’s the point of fingernails? Why didn’t God just make the tips of my fingers as hard the rest of my skin?” to which no one offered an answer or really paid any attention.
“Yeah, we all went to Akron U,” I told Jason. “I’ve had Octavius as a professor for the past three semesters.”
“Wow, you must like him,” Jason said.
As I was about to answer, Tiffany tipped her head back and yawned loudly.
“Booooring!” she said, and then looked at Ellen, who was propping her chin up in her palm, and looking like I used to in class. “Ell, grab the vodka!”
“Oh no, too early for that, babe,” Jason said, shaking his head.
“It’s not early!” Tiffany argued. She stood up when it didn’t look like Ellen was going to bust out the vodka from the grocery bag behind the red and white cooler. “It’s almost midnight.”
I looked at my cell phone. The time was indeed fifteen minutes until midnight. I also saw that I wasn’t getting any service; that wasn’t surprising, though. Not out here.
“Yeah, I know it’s not,” Jason amended. “But I don’t want you to be hungover in the morning, when we have to start putting this place back together.”
She turned around, smiled her perfect smile at him, and said, “Always looking out for me, babe. But I wanna party! Especially before we have to start putting this place back together.”
Jason did this kind of half-shrug, half-head shake that all but conceded the fight of keeping his girlfriend sober. Anyway, how could he say no to her? I certainly couldn’t. The effect of the old woman hallucination had mostly faded, thank God.
Ellen leaned out of the way as Tiffany sloppily reached behind the cooler for the vodka. The guitar played something vaguely reminiscent of ‘American Woman’. At least, that’s what I thought it was. Who really knew? The guy was so stoned, he was switching nationalities at a steady clip. ‘German woman,’ in one chorus followed by ‘Mexican woman’ in another. When he finally said, ‘Native American woman’ I thought someone was going to take his guitar and throw it in the fire because enough was enough.
Alas, no one did.
“Shots?” Tiffany asked us. The bottle of vodka was shoved in my face, then Maddie’s, then Zack’s. “Shots? Shots? Shots?”
I said, “No, thank you.”
“Sign me up,” Zack said. Maddie put that idea down pretty quick with a firm head shake.
“Aw, you’re no fun,” Tiffany pouted.
“You’re just too much fun,” Ellen said, mockingly.
Tiffany proceeded to twist off the cap to the vodka, and chug. She got about half the bottle down before Jason stood up and took it from her hands. Fifteen minutes later, she was swaying.
“Why are we here?” Zack mumbled. “These people are idiots.”
None of them heard this, thanks to Freddy’s raucous strumming. If Cageface planned on making a reappearance, maybe the music would keep him away. For a little while, at least.
Jason and Tiffany danced around the fire like they were performing some sort of really, really weird ritual. We just sat there awkwardly.
Ellen must’ve heard what Zack said because she leaned over and whispered, “This isn’t normal behavior, I promise.”
“Nothing wrong with having a little fun,” I said.
“Yeah, but…the irony,” she said. “The drinking and drugs at what will become a rehab camp…”
“Life’s ironic,” Maddie said.
She didn’t look at Ellen; her eyes were still glued on the dancing couple. Not because of their level of attractiveness. At least, I didn’t think that was the reason. It was more that watching them dance to Freddy’s terrible guitar playing was a lot like driving by a brutal car crash. Once you set your eyes on it, it was hard to look away.
“Why aren’t you dancing?” Zack asked Ellen.
“How can someone dance to this?” she countered.
He nodded his head toward Jason and Tiffany, who were now grinding on each other like a dog with fleas will grind on the corner of a cabinet.
“That’s not dancing,” Ellen said.
Suddenly, the music stopped. All eyes were on Freddy.
He seemed to shrink beneath our gazes. “What?” he asked, shaking his hand. “My fingers are hurting.”
“Thank God,” Maddie mu
mbled, and Zack looked like the proudest boyfriend in the world.
Tiffany stumbled to her log, giggling. She picked up the vodka bottle, and took a big gulp. “Ooooh, story time!” she demanded in a slur. “Story time! Without the music, we have to fill the silence!”
Ellen rolled her eyes. “Guess that’s my cue.”
She got up and stretched her arms to the dark sky. No stars shone down. It was like this entire place was shrouded, like God had decided it wasn’t deserving of His light.
“Aw, you’re calling it already?” Jason said.
“Yeah, big day ahead of us, right?” she answered.
“Exactly, that’s why you need to have some more fun,” Tiffany said. “I bet Abe over there is single. Aren’t you, Abe?”
It was like a spotlight had been thrust on me, burning my skin. I felt my face grow amazingly warm. There was a good chance that I looked like a lobster.
“Uh…what?” I stammered.
“You’re single, right? No girlfriend, no wife?” Tiffany prodded.
Everyone’s eyes were on me.
“That’s kind of rude.” Maddie was glaring at Tiffany, arching her eyebrow, giving her the dreaded ‘Maddie Look’. “Are you implying that Abe can’t get a girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Tiffany said simply. Her voice was perfectly steady, perfectly calm. My face grew hotter still. Alcohol was basically a truth serum, wasn’t it? “But I’m also implying that Abe and Ellen can have a little fun tonight.”
“Uh…” I said.
Ellen opened her mouth. I expected her to say something rude too, but she didn’t. At least not in my direction. “Tiffany, you have a serious problem.” She turned to everyone else and said, “Goodnight.”
I stepped forward and—it probably wasn’t the best time to do this, since Tiffany had just proposed Ellen and I have ‘fun’—said, “Can I walk you there?”
Ellen smiled at me, but it lacked warmth. It was just a polite smile. “No, thanks.” Then she walked off toward the lodge that stood at the edge of the beach.
About five minutes later, Tiffany proclaimed that she had to ‘tinkle’ and wanted to use the lodge’s bathroom to freshen up. She left.
It wasn’t a long walk, and it wasn’t obscured by trees or anything else. The way was well-lit, too, because Jason and Freddy had taken it upon themselves to set up some brightly burning tiki torches along the paths. For these reasons, we weren’t worried about Ellen or Tiffany going off on their own. Had they been walking toward the place where we were staying, we’d have been more worried, as it was a little ways away from the lake, very dark, and out of sight of the campfire.
But we thought they were safe.
We were very wrong.
9
First Broken Rule
The rule in first-person narratives is that only one person can narrate the action as it happens or happened through their eyes. So, I could tell you more about us sitting around the campfire, which doesn’t offer much to the story, or I could tell you what happened to Ellen and Tiffany when they arrived back at the Moonfall Lodge on the beach. You might ask how I know what happened, and that would be a valid question. I mean, how could I possibly know if I wasn’t there?
The answer is simple: I saw the aftermath, worked it out after that.
Unlike Ellen’s remains, the attack was not impossible to piece together.
But I can only go so far in my descriptions. There were things I didn’t know.
So, for the sake of the story, I’m just going to make the rest of the stuff up. Fill in the blanks.
The important thing you need to glean from this rare occurrence of narrative rule-breaking is: Ellen died.
She was not the final girl, like I had made her out to be.
Sadly.
The night was cool, much cooler than the day, and Ellen was grateful for that. Her skin felt tender from the time she’d spent out in the sun. Six months of Pennsylvanian winter had left her looking like some pale creature that lived a mile beneath the earth’s surface; because she’d missed the sun so much, she sat out in it for hours the first chance she got. She knew she’d pay the price, she just wasn’t expecting it so soon.
Lying in bed sounded nice. Maybe cracking open a book. She’d brought along a few, knowing that the place wouldn’t have an internet connection. She’d hoped she’d at least be able to get a signal on her smartphone, but she wasn’t even that lucky.
A book would have to do.
She wasn’t really tired, she just couldn’t stand being around Tiffany when she was drunk—which was always. On top of that, Tiffany had slightly embarrassed her in front of the workers that Jason’s uncle had sent.
Psh, workers. Did they really need help putting the place back together? She glanced to her right at the dilapidated cabins that had once been used for the male campers and the female campers. The wood was warped on both, and windows were broken, their jagged remains like the maw of some great beast; the girls’ cabin didn’t even have a door. Ellen shuddered at the thought of what kind of spiders were lurking around inside.
She walked a little faster, wanting to be far away from any and all spiders, though she knew that, out here, that was damn near impossible.
At least the Moonfall Lodge was in passable condition. Jason and Tiff had come out the previous weekend and put it back in working order, which wasn’t saying much. A thick layer of dust that had covered everything had been turned into a thin layer of dust. They’d hooked up a generator, gotten some lights inside, removed the old rat-eaten mattresses, and scrubbed the bathroom until it was damn near sparkling (Jason had gotten the toilets and water working, but Ellen didn’t know how).
A downside of the lodge, besides being in the middle of nowhere, was that the upstairs doors didn’t lock. But the walls seemed thick enough that she wouldn’t hear Tiffany and Jason having sex; unfortunately, she’d been privy to that once before. It was not a pleasant experience. She hadn’t been able to tell if it was Tiffany or Jason who was bellowing. Not moaning. Bellowing. Like a cow in labor.
She shuddered again.
The front door of the Moonfall Lodge creaked when she pulled it open. The inside smelled like a mixture of mold and bleach. Which was weird. She thought that at least one would cancel out the other, yet there it was, lingering, mixing, tickling her nose so that she almost sneezed.
The bottom floor of the lodge was the living room area. She guessed. That was what she would’ve called it, at least. There was a moldy wraparound couch on the right side, placed in front of a fireplace. The design was probably once mint-green, but had been stained by water damage and the elements. It looked like something you’d see on the side of the road, which was where she wished it was.
She also wished the fireplace was on. It was chilly inside. Her skin had broken out in goosebumps, and she rubbed at the exposed flesh on her arms.
A draft.
She walked on, through a short hallway, toward the kitchen. A protein bar would do her good right about now; she was sick of hot dogs and liquor, the cheap diet of a college student.
On the walls were dusty group pictures of previous campers. She had already seen these. They went back all the way to the fifties. If there hadn’t been dates printed at the bottom of the photographs, she still would have been able to tell the era, just by the clothes and the hairstyles.
The frowns, too.
She paused at the one from ’67.
That was the year the boy had gotten lost. She scanned the rows of sunburned faces, running her index finger along the glass, creating a track through the dust.
Which one had it been? The chubby one in the back row? Maybe the kid with the lazy eye below him. He certainly seemed like the type of dummy to go swimming by himself at night.
She felt a pang of sadness as she looked at this once-happy camper. He had a nice smile, about the only one amidst the sea of frowns. But if the rumors were accurate, if that batty girl who’d survived in the eighties had been telling the tru
th, he didn’t have a nice smile any longer.
She shivered again, but not because she was scared. She wasn’t scared. All that had happened ages ago. If the psycho killer who’d stalked the camp was still around, he’d be older than dirt now—too old to kill again. She had shivered because it was too damn chilly in here.
Turning away from the pictures, she saw the reason for the chill. The back door was open, just off the gloomy kitchen.
She went to close it, and as she did, she heard the front door opening again. Who could that be?
Her skin broke out in goosebumps once more, but this time it wasn’t because of the temperature. It was because the person standing in the doorway was holding an axe.
Ellen’s mouth yawned, ready to scream.
The person ran across the room, kicking up dust and creaking the old floorboards. The axe swung, and Ellen’s scream died with her.
10
Never Trust Old Wood
Okay, I’m back for now.
The Fright Squad had continued sitting at the campfire with the others for about three minutes after the girls had left.
Freddy started playing the guitar again. He was still smoking a joint (it was the third he’d rolled since we’d been sitting there), and his playing suffered for it.
We were tired and bored.
Maddie leaned over to me and said, “We should probably get them back to the lodge.”
“We’re not babysitters,” Zack whispered.
“Actually…yeah, we kind of are. In a way,” I said.
Jason mumbled something. He’d drunk the rest of the vodka, and it had hit him fast.
When we announced our departure, Freddy and Jason responded with their own, saying they’d better check on the girls and hit the hay. They were pretty out of it, though—Freddy stoned, and Jason shit-faced. We doubted they’d make it back in one piece; probably drown in the lake, and how would Octavius feel about that?
Night of the Slasher Page 5