In the mists of a swampy lake by an abandoned summer camp, one man is brought face to face with his destiny.
On the morning after Halloween, Ray Carmen was finishing up after his last overnight tour -- taking mostly college students and tourists around the lake and giving them a scare -- when an enigmatic woman begs him to give her a private tour across the lake. He can't resist, but as he approaches the old camp she takes a step out of his boat and onto the rickety old pier before disappearing into the darkness. Tired and not willing to risk putting his own weight on the ancient boards, Ray heads home and figures he'll deal with it after some sleep. While he rests, a violent group of men break into his house, demanding to know where she went. He fights back and chases the remainder of them to the camp.
She finds him before he finds her, and he learns one of her secrets. She has magical powers, something he once thought impossible. They work together against the remaining thugs and he decides to go visit an old friend who might -- might -- be able to help. On the way he vows to protect her from the mysterious man who is after her, someone she only calls the Bridgemaker. His friend reveals a simple yet ominous truth to Ray: there are a group of secretive, modern day men called the Knights of the Flood who live to protect the innocent from the things that lurk in the darkness, and Ray is destined to become one of them.
The Bridgemaker needs the young woman, Katelyn, in order to open a gate into the distant world of his dark master -- to build a bridge between our realm and his. If he is successful, the world plunges into eternal darkness. As time has gone by since their founding, some in the Knights have stopped taking such world ending threats seriously. Ray and his growing group of friends find themselves mostly on their own against this evil, and yet he keeps feeling like all of them are keeping something devastating from him. Their secrets threaten to undermine the entire cause, and fate continues to draw him closer to an ultimate confrontation with the Bridgemaker.
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The Bridgemaker
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.
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