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“Henry,” shesays.
“Your husband?”
She nods. “It’s the only explanation I can come up with. Like I said, I’d never thought about those kinds of things before. My children were the ones who delved into spirituality and ran off to follow some man they believed was the second coming. I raised them with religion, don’t get me wrong, but it was simple religion. Church on Sundays, family dinner on Easter, lighting candles on Christmas Eve. They wanted more and went searching for it. Maybe sometimes I felt like the Lord was nudging me one way or another. There were times when it was like things my husband or my children said to me were the divine talking. But after Henry died, everything went quiet.
“I didn’t go to church. The children were gone, so I didn’t do much for the holidays. I believed he was somewhere and maybe he was watching me, but I never thought about hearing him. But that night, everything changed. Henry spoke to me. It’s the only thing I can think of that would make me do the things I did. He was still taking care of me. He told me something was wrong. He told me to turn the light off. And he told me to turn around at just the rightmoment.”
“For what?” Iask.
“I’d left the door to the laundry open while I was drying my clothes. It was so hot in there, even at night, and I wanted a breeze. I was standing by one of the windows looking out, trying to see if I could still see the girl running and wondering when someone was going to catch up to her. Then I got the strongest feeling of needing to turn around. When I did, I sawhim.”
“Him?”
“The man in the mask. There was a storm coming in that night so there were a lot of clouds, but there was just long enough of a break for the moonlight to shine on him. He was walking from the woods, heading in the direction of the campfire. I saw something in hishand.”
“The hatchet,” Iwhisper.
“It didn’t seem right. Why would one of the staff be walking around the camp in a mask with a hatchet late at night? I’d seen them wrap their faces in bandanas when they were chopping wood, but nothing like that, and it was far too late for them to be chopping. I walked out of the laundry and followed him. He didn’t know I was there and even though I wanted to say something, I couldn’t get the sound out of mymouth.”
“Henry,” Isay.
She smiles. “When he was alive, all through our courtship and our marriage, I was a talker. I loved to tell him everything that happened in my day and then everything the children did. If I ran out of things to tell him, I’d start up a conversation about politics or books or anything I could think of. I just loved talking to him. And he was very good about it. He would listen to me and respond when he needed to and then talk about whatever I’d come up with. At some point, though, he would have his fill. Not that I could really blame him. He worked hard and sometimes just wanted to relax with a drink and a TV show. He’d reach over and take my hand, give it a squeeze, and say ‘oh, honey.’” She laughs gently at the memory. “He didn’t want to hurt my feelings or make me feel like he didn’t care what I had to say. If I kept going, he would keep listening, but I knew that was him telling me I’d said enough for the timebeing.
“So I like to think that was him giving me one more ‘oh, honey.’ I didn’t say anything. But I followed him. It was curiosity more than anything. I’ll be the first to admit I’m guilty of always wanting to know what’s going on. I’m nosy that way. I figured I would just follow the man, find out he was doing something explainable and go back to the laundry, or maybe see that he was trying to be ghoulish and scare the kids. He’d get chastised and everything would befine.”
“What about the screams?” I ask.
“I wasn’t worried. Maybe I should have been. Maybe I was disconnected. I’d lost Henry so suddenly and kept thinking of all the things we’d never get to do together, all the fun we’d never get to have, and it made me want everyone around me to enjoy their lives. I envied those children. They were having fun, being frivolous, maybe doing things they weren’t supposed to do, but it was all in good spirits. I was still telling myself the girl running was just playing. I didn’tknow.”
“What happened when you followedhim?”
“I watched him go to the fire pit. I waited for him to frighten the campers or even to just walk by. When it happened, I was so shocked, I don’t think I even realized what I wasseeing.”
“When whathappened?”
“He drove the hatchet down through one of the camper’sheads.”
Ihave seen death. I’ve watched as people took their last breaths. I know the soul-emptying feeling of being right there and yet seeming impossibly far away, too far to save the person slipping through your fingers. It’s horrible in any circumstance. It’s indescribable in a murder as horrific as this.
Human beings aren’t supposed to rip each other’s lives away. Watching it happen changes you. It changes the world around you. It’s unimaginable to try to process it when it’s happening. It’s not supposed to be. It’s unnatural, out of sync with what life is meant to be. In those moments and in the breathless seconds after, you can convince yourself it didn’t happen. Your brain can’t grasp it. Even when you’ve seen it countless times before. Even when death is a familiar part of life, you don’t want it to bereal.
“What did you do?” Iask.
“I ran. I wished I didn’t. I felt like I should have stayed there and done something. I should have helped in some way. But I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do. It was chaos. There’s no other way to describe it. No other word could even come close to fitting what was happening. I saw that first blow and the campers all trying to get away. One of them fell into the fire and another was cut down trying to help him out. I knew I couldn’t do anything. I could hear Henry yelling at me, screaming at me to run. To get away. So I went back to the laundry. The dryer had stopped and I opened the door and got inside. It was still so hot in there I felt like I was suffocating. My skin melted where it touched the metal of the drum.”
She pushes the sleeve of her shirt up and holds her arm out to me, displaying a shimmering patch of scar tissue that sends a shiver rippling throughme.
“I couldn’t make a sound. I could barely breathe, but I couldn’t open the door. I didn’t know where he was or what was happening.I could hear the screaming. I didn’t even realize the storm had started until it got so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. It was a blessing, but it also meant I didn’t know what was going on. I stayed there for what felt like hours. I was terrified he was going to come in and turn the dryer on, but I was terrified of getting out and him seeing me. Then something came over me. I wasn’t afraid anymore. It was like a sense of calm came over me. Not courage, exactly. It wasn’t that I felt suddenly brave. I justfelt…”
“Settled,” I say.
“Yes,” Maude says, the word coming out as a breath and dropping her shoulders with it. “It was acceptance. I wasn’t giving up, but it was like I’d just come to terms with this being the existence I was facing. There wasn’t life outside anymore. No past. No future. Just this glass ball I was existing in. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I couldn’t change that this man came to the camp. I couldn’t change what I’d seen him do. And I probably couldn’t change anything he was going to do. And that was alright with me. What was going to happen was going to happen, but I could do something about it.
“I got out of the dryer and I ran out into the campground. I didn’t even look before I left. The rain was still pouring and the flashes of lightning were letting me see around me. I saw bodies. These kids just lying in the mud, bloodied and mangled. I went to each one of them and checked to see if they were still alive. One of them was. He wasn’t as badly injured as the others. Like he’d gotten a chance to run after being hit by the hatchet only a couple of times, but couldn’t keep going.
“I tore my shirt to help me apply pressure and tried to get him to talk to me. I wanted to get him up and into the infirmary, but he wasn’t strong enough. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear more people screaming. I knew the masked man was still there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone running at me and I tried to protect the boy. It turned out to be one of the counselors. He picked the injured boy up and carried him to the infirmary. I didn’t turn the lights on. I didn’t want the building to be noticeable. Instead, I used my flashlight and wrapped his injuries in sheets and towels. There was so much blood. I didn’t know if he was going tolive.”
“Did he?” I ask.
