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Sam laughs. “I’m sure you will. How is everything else? Are the guys stillthere?”
“Yeah. We watched the closing ceremony last night because Xavier would never recover if he started watching the Olympics and didn’t bring it full circle with a closing ceremony. I swear, though, I thought Lionel Richie was never going to stop singing,” I tell him.
“Fortunately, I missed that,” hesays.
“Oh, it was quite the spectacle. We watched a few movies after and they fell asleep in the living room. I got home pretty late, but we ordered a pizza and played some games. They’re leaving tomorrow. Dean is still working on that job. He hired some girl to play secretary while he was here and she’s supposed to take messages and if there’s an emergency, she’s to give them our number so they can call Dean here. So far, there haven’t been anycalls.”
“Which means Dean thinks the girl failed and now has to go home and findout.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Alright, babe. I’ve got to get some sleep. I miss you. I loveyou.”
“I love you and miss you. Goodnight. I’ll calltomorrow.”
I hang up and adjust the pillows back to where they were. I was going to sit up and read, but I’m feeling suddenly exhausted. I snuggle down in the bed and realize it feels even colder without Sam when the sound of his voice is still in my ears. I sit up and reach to the end of the bed where his robe is still hanging from the bedknob. I pull it up and drape it over the cotton blanket like an extra layer. Turning off the light, I stare through the window at gray clouds stretched across the moon like dingy gauze. As I watch, they roll in thicker. I can feel the rain coming. Everything is still and quiet as I let myself fall asleep.
Camp Hollow
1984
Ashes from the last campfire of that summer twenty years before were still at the bottom of the pit when the owners and staff come in to fix up the camp for the session. Even two decades of wind, rain, and snow haven’t washed all of them away. When Amber, the first counselor to walk past, glances at it out of the corner of her eye, she almost thinks she sees the glow ofembers.
Now they burn along with the rest, the thick logs pulled from the woods, the twigs and dry pine needles added to make the flames burn hotter. The smell is still there. Singed wood and burned sugar. Sweat and dirt. The smell of the end of a night of camp. Under it is another smell, the promise of cooling rain ready to break from the tension in the air.
But none of the campers sitting on the benches around the fire seem to care about the coming rain. Or they don’t notice it. Their focus is on the counselor sitting in front of them on a stump, his knees spread wide like he’s finding stability to stay in place. Anthony’s tennis shoes are stark white, making campers with shoes streaked in dirt after a few days at camp wonder how many pairs of those bright white sneakers he has stashed in his cabin.
The way he leans on his thighs, his elbows pressing into the firm muscles as his hands hang between them, loosely linked at the fingers, puts his face at just the right angle to catch the orange and yellow glow of the fire just so, to enhance the words he speaks just loudly enough to overcome the crackling of the fire and the rhythmic breathing of the campers. The wells of his eyes are kept in shadow. The edges of his face are indistinct, shifting and morphing so in moments he’sunrecognizable.
Anthony can feel each of the people watching him. Not just the eyes on him. The people behind them. The held breaths. The lingering doubts. The total devotion. It doesn’t matter. He holds all of them.
Some of them already know the story he’s about to tell. Others have their own versions. They’ll murmur the details under their breaths in concert with his voice when the details are the same. They’ll hold feverishly onto the contradictions so they can argue them in the quiet of the cabin later. They’ll tell their own version and try to find common threads with others.
But for now, they all belong to him.
“That night was just like tonight. The campers had been here since Monday, just as you have. Many of them had been here every summer for as long as they could remember. It was like their second home. They knew every inch of it. Every cabin. Every table in the mess hall. Every bed in the infirmary. Every drop of the lake. Every place where they could get away from the counselors, sneak off so no one would seethem.
“And that’s what two campers named Mary Ellen and Brad were doing that night. These two had been a couple for years. Everyone knew they were going to follow right in their parents’ footsteps when they grew up. They would get married, be successful, and have beautiful children they would send right here to Camp Hollow to spend their summers. But you’ve probably guessed by now that Mary Ellen and Brad never had the chance to do any of that. They would never grow any older than seventeen.
“Because when the campfire began that night, they crept off into the woods to get some time alone together. That was where Brad’s body was found the next morning, his head split in two by a hatchet. Mary Ellen was never found.
“But they weren’t the only ones to fall victim to the Camp Hollow killer that night. By morning, twenty more bodies littered the camp. They say the killer was a psychopath living on the other side of the woods in a shack he built after escaping his own captors when he was a boy. He’d been held and tortured for years because he was small and weak. They forced him to work. Treated him like a slave. And over time, he got big and strong. One night, he finally broke free. He killed his captors with his bare hands and ran into the woods.
“He knew nothing but the life of torment, so the woods seemed like freedom. He finally felt like he had peace. He built his shack and survived off the land. The peace didn’t last. Soon, Camp Hollow was built. He hated everyone who came too close. He wanted to be left alone. Over the years, people from the area would go missing or end up dead in what everyone said were accidents. But they weren’t. They were him. Protecting his home. Ensuring no one would ever hurt him again.
“No one knew he was there. No one knew he crept through the woods at night, ready to eliminate anyone who came into his path. Over time, the camp grew. More campers came. They got too close. He couldn’t stand it. They needed to be punished for coming too close, for ruining his peace. For making him feel like he wasn’t safe. He needed to make them pay and to make sure they would leave him alone.
“That night, he put on a mask he’d made from an old blanket, the only thing he brought with him from the house where he’d been held and tortured. He took his hatchet, his favorite tool, and made his way into the woods.
“It was a dark night just like this. Clouds were moving over the moon. There was a storm rolling in. The campers didn’t notice. They were sitting around the fire, toasting marshmallows, singing. It was another night at camp.
“The killer didn’t care. He knew the woods better than anyone. He knew every tree. Every root coming up out of the ground. Every branch. It didn’t matter how dark it was. He could navigate those woods blinded and never miss a step.
“None of the campers around the fire even knew what happened out in those woods until it was far too late. They barely saw him coming toward them through the darkness. He almost looked like one of the shadows, a figment of their imaginations. They sang as he came. They hadn’t heard the screams from the woods. But they heard them when the hatchet came down on their counselor’shead.”
The campers gasped and whispered to each other, each of them wanting to be loud enough to be heard but also quiet enough to keep their words secret to everyone else but the person next to them.
“They couldn’t move fast enough. Some got away while others were being slaughtered. Some fell into the fire as they tried to escape. Others fell where they were sitting. He moved around the camp, invading the cabins, chopping down doors. Some tried to fight him off, but none had what he had within him. They were no match for him.
“When he was finished, he went back through the woods the way he came. Some believe he brought Mary Ellen with him to be his bride. No one saw his face, but even if they did, they couldn’t have said who he was. He had no name. He never had.
