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The sound of the engine died abruptly, plunging us momentarily into near-complete silence as the boat continued on under its own momentum. The lights aimed at the abandoned camp at the far north-west of Grace Lake faded as well, and as that last bit of incandescent light vanished, the half-dozen college age girls on the boat gasped, and one of them let out a startled, fearful moan. The young men tried to keep a brave face about things, but I had done a good job getting everyone riled up about the murders that once took place there and the ghosts that supposedly inhabited the camp. That was what the baker’s dozen had paid me to do, after all. None of them noticed that I’d hit a switch with my right foot, designed specifically to kill the engine and the lights all at once. Even if they had noticed, none of them would be able to explain the sudden appearance of a green dot of light in the camp, roughly at eye level, as it moved freely from decaying cabin to decaying cabin.
Soon, a blue light that was a bit larger appeared and began to chase the little green light. The path they took was impossible for some sort of pre-programmed string of lights, and it was too fluid to be anything other than what these kids thought it was: ghosts, one of a camper, one of a killer. I knew better, but this little trick got me a lot of attention and positive reviews among the people who liked this sort of thing, and I wasn’t about to spoil it for them. Once people know how the sausage is made, some of them decide to stop eating it. This was the end of my best time of year: it was the first of November, early morning and just a few hours before sunrise, and Halloween had been the night before. Sure, I only charged twenty bucks a pop to ride them out on my barge and scare them, but the tour didn’t take terribly long, and I was able to do enough of them to almost eke out a living. The rest was supported by the shop in town where I sold silly things like crystals, spell books, and maps of haunted areas near by.
Not a thing I would have been able to do for a living had I not inherited the land containing both the camp and my own home from my grandfather. Why he bought an abandoned summer camp where the crazy cook had murdered a bunch of people was something he hadn’t thought to explain in the will, but my cousins were all glad they just got money left to them instead. I also inherited his old, blue Ford Ranger, which had been the last truck he owned before he died and somehow outlived the much newer car I had bought after getting my first real job post college. It turned out I wasn’t much happy with an office job, though, and I sought out something more interesting. The tours had been the longest job I ever had.
The entire ride on the barge up to the camp, I told tall tales, weaving in truth with a bit of showmanship. Almost nobody believed me, not really, but all of them wanted to suspend their disbelief. The idea of there being something else out there, something more than just the life we can see and observe, has always been popular. The recent resurgence in horror movies and the like had paid dividends for people like me, and not that long ago some famous author came to visit and interview me for her book about my stretch of Louisiana. She wanted to focus on something other than New Orleans, which I appreciated. That little blurb was worth its weight in gold to my little business, though I hated the picture she used of me by my barge. As we approached the pier, I had silenced myself a little before the engine and that added to the mystique. I wanted them to get their twenty dollars worth, and when the fear was at its most intense, I nudged the switch again. The engine came back to life, the lights flickered on, and I piloted us around and toward the pier that would take them to the small parking lot where they’d all parked.
As everyone got out of the boat, I hit the big overhead lights on the barge to make sure nobody left any bags there. A few of the guys tried to ask questions about what happened, and about what the strange lights they saw were, but part of what they paid for required me to act like I was freaked out and refuse to talk. It added to the mystique and feeling of getting something truly paranormal, not just a bunch of people stumbling around with cameras and lights in an abandoned mental hospital on YouTube. There were no strange instruments, or heat vision, or asking the ghosts questions on my tours. It was all a natural, slow build up of suspense that I did every Wednesday through Saturday night, into the early morning hours. Sunday was the swing day where I adjusted my schedule to work in the shop Monday through Wednesdays and build up interest in these tours. A young man had left his messenger bag between two of the bench seats on the barge, and I grabbed it and flagged him in the parking lot before he could take off. The last thing I needed was a negative review claiming I stole his crappy tablet. Once the last car left the parking lot, I stepped back onto the barge to head home.
Someone stepped onto the boat behind me. They didn’t weigh enough for me to notice, but their shoe scrapped on the wood just enough for me to hear it in the silence. When I turned to see who remained despite the lack of transportation home, I probably made a surprised face. A young woman who had not been on any of the tours stood opposite me on the barge, and she was the sort of woman I would definitely remember seeing. College age like the rest of my tourists, taller than average with long, wavy black hair near to her waist and eyes so brilliantly blue they almost glowed in my overhead lights. She wore a pair of plain jeans, well-worn sneakers, and a simple light grey shirt tucked into the jeans. The cotton clung to her and revealed her attractive, feminine form. Over one shoulder she carried a backpack that looked like it had seen better days. Her face was beautiful, with a cute nose and naturally plump lips. If I had been a cartoon character my jaw would have fallen open and my eyes done that pop-out heart thing. A small smirk ghosted her lips for a moment.
“I, uh, we’re done for the night,” I said. The sun was beginning to warm the sky, and the mosquitoes had come out. The tour wouldn’t have the same flare.
“I will pay extra,” she said, reaching into the backpack. “I just need to see the camp. Please?” She held out a white envelope. “It is important to me.” She walked across the barge to me, her eyes focused on mine. I felt lost in them.
“Next tour is tonight,” I said.
“I will be out of town by then, I am only passing through. Please?”
I sighed, and took the envelope. My eyes nearly bugged out like a cartoon character – again – when I opened it. The thing contained ten bills, and they were all hundreds. I shook my head and handed it back to her. “If you want to see an old camp that bad, I’ll show you, but I’m not taking this much money. You want the full show, too? Stories of ghosts and murders?”
She smiled, in a way that did not show her teeth, and shook her head. “I just have one question. Do you believe the camp is haunted?” she asked.
“No,” I said. I turned off the overheads so she would have a better view and started the boat toward the camp.
The mysterious young woman stood close to me until the camp came into view. It had been a long time since I saw it in even the smallest amount of sunlight. Nature had been taking back what was hers since before I was born. Most of the old buildings had trees growing out of them, or vines covering them, and several had completely collapsed. There just wasn’t a lot to see anymore, and I realized I was running out of track as far as showing the camp to tourists unless I made some subtle repairs. As we approached the rickety old pier that campers once jumped into the water from, I killed the engine and lights as I would have for any other tour. The barge slowed, and the young woman did something I did not expect. She stepped off the barge and onto the rotting wood. At the last second I reached for her, but she moved too fast for me.
“Hey, you can’t get off the barge!” I said, gesturing impotently to a sign that informed my tourists they had to keep hands, arms, and property they valued inside the railing.
“I will be fine,” she said without turning to face me. Then she disappeared into the brush.
For a moment I considered going after her, but the pier was only held together by spite at this point. Even if I made it to the shore without falling into the possibly alligator infested waters, there was no guarantee I could find her in the swampy woods beyond. After staring after her for a moment, I swore under my breath and restarted the engine. My dog would be aching to get into the yard by now anyway, and I needed food and sleep. The trip from the camp to my house didn’t take nearly as long as the trip from the parking lot to the camp: I’d designed the tour to take the longest path from civilization. As I pulled up to my own pier I made a mental note to take my two metal gas cans with me into the shop for a refill; the barge was getting thirsty, and I couldn’t do tours in my old fanboat.
Annun, my loyal black lab, waited patiently inside until I let him into the side yard off my kitchen. I named him after my best attempt to anglicize from the Welsh mythological hounds of Annwn. I’d put an interesting fence around that side yard to keep critters out, but he still sniffed every corner of the space each and every time he went into it. A three-foot earth wall reinforced by cinder blocks on either side of it kept most things and minor floods out, and atop that was a wooden privacy fence to keep everything else out. The problem I didn’t foresee when constructing this security for the dog was that grass would grow on the earth wall, and it wasn’t wide enough for even a push mower, so I got to use a weed-eater held much higher than normal around the perimeter. While he did what dogs do in yards, I started us some dinner for breakfast. The kitchen was pretty bare, so a steak with my last two eggs for me and some kibble, with the fatty bits of the steak, for him were accompanied with dark beer and water, respectively. By the time he was fed, given sufficient petting, and the cast iron pot cleaned, the sun was coming through space between curtains and shades in all the southern and eastern windows. Tired as I might have been I still checked all the doors to make sure they were locked.
The positioning of the sunrise explained why, when my grandfather built the house, the master bedroom windows were only on the west side of the house. Annun beat me up the stairs and into the bedroom. The last thought I had before falling asleep in the bed still wearing my jeans was wondering about the strange woman who wanted to see that old camp so bad. But that sleep was cut quite short by the sound of glass shattering downstairs. Annun stood at my bedroom door sniffing and then started snarling, and I sat upright and looked at the doorknob. Locked, but that would only buy me about three seconds if the intruder came up the stairs. Before getting to my feet, I tucked the pistol in my nightstand into the back waistband of my pants and then went to the closet and grabbed my shotgun. Neither gun had been fired in several years. My heart pounded in my chest as I approached the bedroom door and I could hear the stairs creaking.
“Annun. Stay,” I said. He sat on his haunches but never stopped snarling.
The man standing outside my bedroom door did not seem nearly as surprised to see me as I was to see him. He stood taller than me by nearly a head, which put him over seven feet tall, and was broad at the shoulders. His clothes were a disheveled mess, but so was his long, yellow-white hair. Despite looking and smelling like a hobo, the old giant was clean shaven. Arms a bit too long for his body reached out and grabbed the barrel of my shotgun and pushed it toward the ceiling before I pulled the trigger, sending a hail of shot up into the attic. Under his arms I could see his twin ascending the stairs to come join him. Hobo number one began to wrestle my shotgun from my grip, and I knew if the second guy got to me it was over. That meant this was not a fair fight, and I contested it as such. My knee found his groin as I let go of the shotgun and shouted for Annun. A blur of black fur and teeth bit into his right calf, and the man let out a pained, surprised yell.
My left hand wrapped around the gun in my waistband, and I raised it and fired twice into the chest of the man Annun was attempting to maim. The man coming up the stairs had a sudden change of heart, and he leaped over the railing and onto the floor of my living room. It didn’t do his legs any favor, and he started hobbling toward the door. I will never understand what came over me, but I timed it myself and jumped over the railing onto him, landing on his back and clocking him across the back of the head with the pistol. He threw a mean elbow back into my jaw, causing me to see double for a moment. He kept hobbling, trying to get to the door. A voice started shouting behind me: male, deep, speaking fast.
“She must be in the camp!” I realized he was saying.
The bloodied hobbler cleared my living room door, and I whirled to face the third man. Not twins – triplets. Triplet hobos were in my home, looking for the woman who wandered onto my boat only a few hours earlier. He snarled at me, and time felt like it slowed for me. In the corner of my eye I could see a bloody Annun taking the stairs as quickly as he could, but the man he was rushing toward was armed with what appeared to be a club made of stone. I took a deep breath, raised the pistol, closed one eye and fired three shots in quick succession. The first two caught him in the chest, center mass, and the third that I aimed at his head missed and went into the wall just above my refrigerator. It had been far too long since I fired a gun. Annun stopped at the bottom of the stairs for only a moment before running out the open door. I chased after him yelling at him to stop, but his adrenaline and instincts had kicked in.
The hobbled man and a fourth brother of his were swimming across the lake toward the camp, but they were not swimming like human beings did. The men jumped in and out of the water like dolphins, with their hands held together ahead of them as they went. Annun stood at the edge of the pier and barked angrily at them – the sort of barks that almost sounded like dog curses – and I rushed into the house, up the stairs, and grabbed my shotgun from the first dead man’s hands and quickly put on a t-shirt. If I had even a moment I would have called the sheriff’s office, but those two giant thugs could easily overpower the woman if they got to her first. Grabbing my keys on the way out, I jumped into my fan boat. Annun got in with me, and I quickly throttled up to full speed. They’d beat me to the camp but hopefully not by too much time. The throttle didn’t come down until I’d beached the boat.
“Stay,” I said firmly to Annun, who sat but whined. “Someone has to watch the boat.”
The two men were nowhere to be found, but neither was the young woman. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or alarmed by that as I stepped between a pair of the cabins and looked into a shattered window to see nothing but collapsed bunk beds. A small, strong hand covered my mouth at the same time I felt the blade of a knife against my throat. The faint hint of perfume briefly overtook the general stench of rotting wood and vegetation and I froze, holding my trigger hand up in a sign of surrender and only keeping my grip on the shotgun by the barrel. Her body was pressed against my back, and after a moment, she removed the hand from my mouth. The blade stayed at my throat.
“Big old men are after you,” I whispered.
“How many?” she whispered.
“Two dead in my house, two swam the lake.”
The blade moved away from my throat, and I let out a sigh of relief that she realized I came to help her. Before we could come up with any sort of plan, however, movement to one side of the cabins we stood between caught my eye. One of the big guys, not the one I pistol whipped, stood near what had once been a fire pit at the center of the cabins. He held a gnarly, stone club like his brother who now lay dead in my kitchen had. The young woman let out an annoyed, hissing sigh that almost drowned out the twig breaking opposite our enemy. I whirled, raising my shotgun and pointing it at the one I had pistol whipped. Unlike his brothers, his weapon of choice was a dagger of black steel that curved in a way that looked like it had been done to maximize the pain it caused. The hooked point sent a chill through me.
“Do not let them rush me,” she said.
Hooked dagger hobo took a step toward me, and I pulled the trigger of my shotgun. The shot, which did not spread near as much as movies imply, slammed into a force field a few feet from him. As the pellets hit this invisible barrier, it revealed a semi-circle of orange light before they fell to the ground. The man grinned at us and showed his yellowing teeth. I glanced to the woman to see if she saw what I saw, but she was no longer standing with me between the cabins. The man with the knife rushed me, and I dropped the shotgun and reached for my pistol with one hand. He raised his blade and I had to block his arm with mine. His free hand gripped my throat and pressed me against the rotting wall of the cabin as he choked me. Over his shoulder I could see the young woman standing atop the cabin behind him, facing the man by the fountain. She was sweating, with both hands held out toward him. My vision began to darken from being strangled.
If we could come into physical contact, then whatever barrier protected him from my shotgun must only have worked from a distance, and like in the house, this was not some fair fight. My hand wrapped around the pistol, and I shoved it against his stomach and fired twice. The hand around my throat released me and, instinctively, he grabbed at his gut with both hands. The dagger fell to the ground nearby, but that didn’t much matter to me. As he stumbled toward his brother, I pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger once more. The brother never even looked away from the young woman on the rotting rooftop. He just stood there, hands outstretched toward her, palms out, sweating like it was August during a heatwave. Curious about whether it was bullets versus shot earlier, I aimed my pistol at him and fired the remaining bullets his way. They each shattered against the barrier of magic around him and briefly showed the extent of it.
That caused him to look my way, even if only for a moment. His eyes danced from her to me, annoyance on his grim features. It gave her the upper hand for that one moment, and she put everything she had into the battle of wills the two were having. Suddenly he folded backward over his knees as his back hit the dirt behind him hard enough that his body was forced into it deep enough to leave a trench as he slid away from us. Bones cracked audibly from the force of whatever she was doing. He did not rise from the impact, and she soon climbed down the cabin to stand beside me. I retrieved the wicked looking dagger from the ground and stared at it.
“Thank you, for helping me,” she said.
“Ray Carmen,” I said, offering her my empty right hand.
“Katelyn Quin,” she said.
As she took my hand, our eyes locked, and I felt an electric feeling course through me. It gave me chills, and for a moment I lost myself in her blue eyes again. I’m not sure I believe in love at first sight, but I was definitely twitterpated at first sight. She was a beautiful young woman, and all the romanticism and chivalrous instincts of a lifetime of fantasy books and media made me want to protect her from these thugs whatever it cost. But I couldn’t just come out and say that to her. Fortunately for me, she spoke first and saved me from saying anything embarrassing or professing my eternal devotion.
“Thank you, again, Ray Carmen.” It felt good to hear her say my name. “You risked your life to help me. You are a rare person.”
“We should go,” I said.
“I should go,” she said.
“Come on,” I said. “I just killed a bunch of guys. You can at least fill me in on why.”
She looked into my eyes again, and then she nodded. Her backpack was hidden under the cabin she had scaled during the magic battle, and she followed me back to the boat where Annun was waiting obediently. When he saw me, his tail went to wagging, but it went even crazier for her. Katelyn let out a happy squeal and rushed over to pet him. The blood around his mouth didn’t give her any pause, and that gave me all the pause in the world. I set the dagger and my shotgun on the floor of the boat. It took me a moment to get the boat turned around from where I beached it, and we headed back across the water in silence. The sun was nearly overhead, putting it close enough to noon, and I was going on little sleep and a lot of adrenaline. As that began to fade, the fact I had just killed three men began to hit me in earnest. That wasn’t a thing I ever expected to do, nor was I prepared for the aftermath of it. But as the house, and the inevitable call to the sheriff’s office, grew closer, I told myself it had to be done. To save myself and Annun, and then to save Katelyn.
It had to be done.
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