Swamp Scarefest

by B. A. Frade

  “Your sister told you to go home and get something,” the woman said. “Get what?”

  “Oh. A bucket.”

  “Ah. For water to put out your campfire.”

  I blinked. “How’d you know that?”

  She smiled and started ringing up our purchases. “Matches, s’mores fixings—it’s obvious you’re going camping tonight, Aidan.” She paused and gave me another long look with those strange eyes. “Why don’t you just call your folks and have them bring you a bucket?”

  I dropped my gaze and shrugged. “We left our cell phones at home. Liv wanted to keep the campout, you know, authentic.” I didn’t add the real reason, which was that Liv didn’t trust me with my phone. Why? I’ve used it to record her falling victim to my world-famous pranks. No doubt Liv suspected I might try to pull something on this campout and wanted to avoid being the star of another viral Vine. Sometimes, she was too smart for her own good.

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “No phones? Interesting. Well, it’s your lucky day because I happen to have just the thing your campout needs.” She reached under the counter and pulled out a wide-mouthed, oversized tin pail with a wire-and-wood handle. Dented and ancient-looking, it had definitely seen better days. “Here. Take it.”

  Now, I wanted to refuse because I like my buckets new, plastic, and so brightly colored they’re painful to look at. Also, my parents had drilled it into my head since birth that I wasn’t to take anything from strangers. An old bucket was harmless, of course, but still, my gut reaction was to turn down the offer. “Oh, um, gee, thank you, but I can’t. I, er, don’t have enough money.”

  “No need to pay, dearie, it’s my gift to you and Liv. Look how perfect it is for carrying your things, such as this”—she held up the fake blood and gave me a sly smile—“which I’m guessing you don’t want Liv to know about, hmm? I’m also guessing you didn’t have a plan for sneaking these things into the wagon. Well, not to worry.” She winked. “I know how to hide things. Observe.”

  Her hands moved surprisingly fast as she loaded the marker, blood, and Silly String into the bottom of the bucket. Then she tucked the Cheezy Balls and marshmallows on top and pushed the bucket toward me.

  I looked at the woman with newfound admiration. She was right, of course. I hadn’t thought about how I would get my surprises to the campsite without Liv noticing. Now, unless Liv peeked beneath the snacks, sneaking them past her wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Thanks. This is awesome. Oh, and I can bring your bucket back tomorrow,” I added as I handed her money.

  She paused, tilted her head to the side, and fixed those weird-colored eyes on me again. “You think you’ll be able to do that, do you?”

  Something about her gaze, the way she asked the question, sent a chill down my spine. Then she smiled, looked away, and started counting out my change.

  The store door banged open. I turned and saw Liv holding Snort by the collar. “Yo, bro, what’s keeping you? Snort and I are ready to go!”

  “Coming!” I turned back to collect my change. “Well, thanks again for the…”

  My words died in my mouth. The woman was gone. My change was sitting in a pile on the counter. A second later, I heard someone whistling in the back room. Only one person I knew whistled like that—Mr. Meyer.

  “Okay,” I mumbled to myself. “So… maybe Mr. Meyer isn’t out after all?” As I was trying to figure out if I’d misunderstood the woman, other things from our conversation suddenly struck me.

  She knew Liv was my sister. She knew our names. And she knew I wanted to hide that stuff from Liv. How’d she know all that about us?

  Chapter Four

  “How could you not see her? She was standing behind the counter when you bellowed in at me.”

  Liv and I were making our way down the sloping dirt path behind the store to the lake with our wagonload of supplies. Snort was running ahead, nose to the ground, happily sniffing. Every so often, she’d emerge with a big stick in her mouth, trot with it for a few yards, then drop it in favor of a bigger, better stick.

  “A weird lady who somehow knows everything about us.” Liv gave me a sideways glance and then started laughing. “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m not kidding!”

  “And I’m not falling for it!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She plucked her soccer ball from the wagon and tossed it from hand to hand. “It means you’re trying to prank me again.”

  “Prank you?” I gave her the innocent eyes. “When have I ever—”

  “You put sugar in the saltshaker and salt in the sugar bowl. You taped the handle of the sink sprayer so it would shoot water at me when I turned on the tap. You drew frowny-face eyebrows on me with permanent marker while I was asleep. And worst of all”—she glowered—“you served me vanilla pudding that was really mayonnaise covered with whipped topping, recorded me while I ate a big spoonful, and posted my near-puke online for all our friends to see.”

  I couldn’t help it. As she listed my successful escapades, a triumphant smirk crept across my face. I was smart enough to wipe it off before she wiped it off for me, though. “Yeah, so?”

  “So you’re trying to freak me out before our first solo campout with this lame story about a mysterious old lady with creepy, changing eyes. Well, too bad. It’s not going to work.” She bounced her ball on her knee and caught it. “I can’t believe you thought it would. It’s not even one of your better pranks.”

  I gave up—not because Liv had worn me down, but because we were nearing our destination.

  Years earlier, our parents clear-cut an area set far back from the lakeshore. Far back, so they could catch us before we hit the water if we made a dash for the lake. They added a stone fire pit a few years after that. While we had to scrounge for kindling in the surrounding woods when we came down for campfires, they kept a stack of logs nearby. It was peaceful there at night, listening to the sound of waves lapping the shore and frogs croaking—so peaceful we usually overlooked the pungent whiff of swamp gas that blew in off the lake when the conditions were just wrong.

  Luckily, today the conditions were just right, so there was no gassy stench. We chose the perfect spot to set up our massive six-person tent, dubbed Taj MaTent by our dad because it was as grand as the famous Taj Mahal palace in India and about as big. Tall enough for me to almost stand upright in, it had two mesh windows, front and back zippered doors, and a smooth vinyl floor that kept out the damp. I had helped Dad set it up on our last camping trip, so I knew what to do. Sort of.

  “It’s fine,” I reassured Liv when she gave the lopsided monstrosity a skeptical once-over.

  “Uh-huh. And what might these be for?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm as she held up a pair of bungee cords.

  “They’re extra,” I lied. I took them from her and stuck them in my backpack.

  With the tent up and stable (more or less), we each claimed a spot inside and got our belongings organized. That took me about two seconds—unroll sleeping bag, sneak Meyer’s items out of bucket and into backpack, and… well, that was it, really. Liv took a little longer because she actually organized her stuff.

  Outside, we did rock-paper-scissors to determine who would collect firewood. Liv showed the flat-handed gesture for paper, but I did the two-fingered scissors. Since my scissors cut her paper, I won the right to choose whether I wanted to pick up sticks or fill the bucket with fire-dousing water. Naturally, I chose water-fetching duty because it was easier. I grabbed the old tin bucket and started toward the lake. Liv stopped me.

  “Yo. Footwear.”

  I glanced down at my feet. “Oh, right.”

  The lake is too gross to swim in, but wading knee-deep is fine. You absolutely have to wear some kind of foot protection, though, because people used to dump all kinds of junk in there. Emphasis on “used to,” thankfully. Nowadays, the water isn’t polluted so much as choked with weeds and riddled with snapping turtles the size of Volkswagen Bugs. But m
uch of the original junk still lurks under the surface. Now and then, storms churn up the lake bed, and stuff washes into the shallows. Sometimes the stuff is good, like the baseball we found last year and the old tire we turned into our tire swing. Other times, the junk is just junk or worse, dangerously sharp and hidden by muck. Hence, the foot protection.

  There’s also a small island in the middle of the lake. That sounds cool, but it’s pretty lame—exactly one sticky, sap-oozing pine tree with bark so rough it’s unclimbable, one midsized boulder hardly worth scaling, a few wild blackberry bushes, and lots of prickers and poison ivy. When we were little, Mom and Dad told us to stay away from the place.

  A forbidden island was too much for Liv and me to resist, of course. So the first chance we got, we paddled our inflatable raft out there. Unfortunately, we got caught. Our parents grounded us for a week. To make matters worse, we both came down with bad cases of poison ivy. We itched and scratched the entire week we were grounded. We haven’t been back to the island since.

  Inside the tent, I dug my old, beat-up sneakers out of my backpack. I made sure to rezip the pack because I couldn’t have Liv catching a peek of the Silly String and other stuff. She’d go ballistic if she thought I might prank her, and where was the fun in that? I stuck my slingshot in my back pocket and went outside.

  Liv was already roaming around in the woods collecting kindling. Snort was digging in the dirt, probably burying something or digging something up—two of her favorite pastimes, along with slobbering on us and retrieving stuff. I grabbed the bucket and headed down the narrow winding path that led to the shoreline.

  A few minutes later, I stood on the thin sliver of beach. The lake spread before me in all its swampy, muck-bottomed glory. Insects buzzed over the surface. A bullfrog gave a series of low, humming croaks. Birds zipped by overhead, chirping and tweeting their heads off.

  A cloud passed in front of the afternoon sun just as I was about to slog into the water with the bucket. The air darkened, and everything fell silent. It was as if someone had dimmed the lights and hit the mute button at the same time.

  I paused. Something from a book I’d read came back to me, something about how woodland creatures stop making noise when they sense a threat nearby. But if there was something threatening around the lake, I couldn’t see it.

  That doesn’t mean it’s not here, a voice whispered inside my head.

  Hairs rose on the back of my neck. My heart thudded in my chest.

  “Hello? Liv? Hey, Liv, are you out there?” My voice wasn’t much louder than a whisper, yet it sounded deafening in the stillness. I held my breath and listened hard. Nothing.

  Then, suddenly, something rustled in the shadows beyond the distant tree line. I squinted, but I couldn’t see into the gloom. The thing moved again. Whatever it was, it sounded big, and it was coming my way. Coming my way fast.

  I backpedaled toward the lake’s edge, whispering, “Please let it be Liv, please let it be Liv.”

  It wasn’t Liv.

  Chapter Five

  “Woof!”

  Snort burst out of the underbrush and hurtled toward me.

  “Augh!”

  I tossed the bucket aside to fend off her joyful attack. She danced around me, tongue lolling, then hurried off with great urgency to sniff something. It was only after she’d padded away that I realized the nature sounds had come back on again.

  I laughed with relief and shook my head at my own stupidity.

  Duh, Aidan, it was just Snort, I chided myself. What did you think was out there? You’re lucky Liv didn’t hear you scream!

  I realized that I couldn’t go back to the campsite right away because Liv would take one look at my face and know something was up. Plus, if I got there too soon, I’d have to gather kindling. So instead, I collected a bunch of small rocks in the bucket and then launched them one after another from my slingshot. I was aiming for the boulder on the island. Most of the stones fell short and landed in the water. The sound they made—part sploosh, part blorp—was highly entertaining, so I kept firing away until I was down to my last rock, a smooth, sizeable chunk of grade-A feldspar with a starburst of mica right in the middle of one side. I’d saved that one for the final launch because it was so cool-looking. It turned out to be superbly aerodynamic too. When it flew out of the pocket of my slingshot, I was sure it would hit the boulder. But it must not have because I heard a dull thud instead of a satisfying rock-on-rock crack.

  Rock supply depleted, I slipped my slingshot in my back pocket and grabbed the bucket. I waded into the water, trailing the pail behind me and scanning the silt-and-muck-covered bottom for interesting junk. We’d had a big storm the week before, so I thought the lake might have coughed up some good stuff. But sadly, there were no treasures.

  Or so I thought, until I pulled up the pail. Resting in the slime-speckled water was…

  “A book?” I muttered, disappointed. “Can’t be very good since somebody threw it away.”

  Still, a find was a find, and since I didn’t feel right just dumping it back into the lake, I splashed to shore, crouched down, and reached through the murky water to take it out. The cover beneath my fingers felt smooth and soft, like leather. It also felt dry.

  Startled, I yanked my hand back. “What the—” I stared at the book. It looked completely ordinary—a brown leather volume about the size and thickness of a notebook, submerged in a bucket of scuzzy water. Still…

  Instead of reaching back in, I tipped the bucket and dumped the book out onto the ground. The water beaded up and rolled off the cover, revealing a pattern embossed in dark gold leaf. I looked at the side of the book, to its spine. Tales from the Scaremaster, it read.

  “Whatcha got there?”

  I shrieked and whirled around. I’d been so focused on the book that I hadn’t heard Liv and Snort approach.

  Liv burst out laughing. “Nervous much?” She wandered over. “What are you looking at, a dead fish or something?”

  “Gross,” I replied. “No, it’s an old book.”

  “A book?” She squatted down next to me and looked at my find. “Tales from the Scaremaster. Catchy title.”

  I scratched my head. “Yeah. The book seems kind of… weird, don’t you think?”

  She shrugged. “Where’d you find it?”

  “In the bucket. I mean, it was in the lake. I fished it out with the bucket. You can pick it up if you want.” I added this last part with a nonchalant wave as if I couldn’t care less if she did or not, though I secretly hoped she’d touch it. If she freaked out because it was dry, I’d know I wasn’t crazy.

  “In the lake?” Liv made a face. “Then it’s swamp trash, not a book. You want it, it’s all yours. Personally, I wouldn’t touch that slimy thing with a ten-foot pole. Although…” She paused and peered more closely at the book, and then straightened and leveled a look of exasperation at me. “Seriously? Nice try, Aidan.”

  “What?”

  She grabbed the book and shook it under my nose. Grains of sand sprinkled off the binding. “You fished it out of the lake, huh? Then how come it’s not wet?”

  “It came out of the water that way!” I blurted without thinking.

  “Really. It came out of the water dry,” she said flatly. “How gullible do you think I am?” She riffled the pages with her thumb. “Even the inside is dry.”

  “It is?” Okay, maybe I could have come up with a logical reason for the outside to be dry. But the inside? Those pages should have been a mulchy, soggy mess.

  “Yup, dry. Also blank.”

  I frowned. “Wait. There’s nothing written in the book?”

  She gave a classic Liv eye roll of disgust, turned to the first page, and held up the book for me to see. “You know there isn’t. Also—and I can’t stress this enough—it isn’t wet. Which means it couldn’t have been in the lake. Which means one of two things.”

  “What?”

  “One, you’re trying to prank me. Again. Or two, Tales from the Sca
remaster is a mysterious book that is unaffected by the laws of nature. Hmm. Which do I think it could be?” She tapped her finger to her lips as if considering her options, then pulled an “Aha!” face. “I do believe you’re trying to prank me!”

  Her sarcasm barely registered with me because I was too busy examining the first page. I was a little disappointed there was nothing written there, actually. I mean, I found a book called Tales from the Scaremaster; I kind of expected there to be tales.

  Liv shook her head and started to close the book. Then she stopped. Her brow furrowed. “Wait a second.” Her tone went from full-bore sarcastic to mildly confused. “That’s strange. I could have sworn…”

  Her eyes suddenly widened. She made a strangled noise in her throat, slammed the cover shut, and hurled the book aside. It hit the soft sand with a muffled thud.

  A chill crawled up my spine. “What is it?”

  Liv hugged herself. Her mouth worked as if she was struggling to speak. “That page was blank,” she finally managed to say. “Right? You saw it! But now, there’s a—a message.”

  My blood turned to ice in my veins. “What do you mean, a message?”

  “See for yourself.” Liv jerked her chin at the book. “But be careful! There’s something truly creepy about… that.”

  Part of my brain screamed, “Don’t pick it up!” But another part was dying to know what Liv had seen. The dying part beat out the screaming part. I pulled the book toward me, brushed off the sand, and opened it.

  And immediately wished I’d left it where it landed.

  Chapter Six

  Liv fell over laughing.

  “‘What do you mean, a message?’” She did a perfect imitation of my voice before switching back to her own. “Seriously? Are you kidding me?” She was barely able to get the words out between her guffaws.

  I threw the book at her. She caught it. With a wide grin, she opened it to a blank page, whipped a pen out of her back pocket, and scribbled something on the paper. Then she handed it back to me.