Chapter 16 Campfire Stories #2
King of clubs.
Jerome flipped over the top card. An ace of hearts.
Green shook his head.
“Sorry.”
Jerome stuffed the deck back into his pocket and pulled his guitar onto his lap.
Alf produced an old flip phone and pointed it at Green.
“Gotta drop that smartphone and get one of these, bro. This place doesn’t like smart things. Believe me.”
His words were slurred.
“And even my texts only get through like half the time out here. Like a message in a bottle. Whoosh. Splash. Tossed into the sea. Hey, what’s your friend doing?”
Valentina was shrugging out of her pack in the shadow of the crossed pines.
“She is…getting to work.”
“Cool. Well, welcome and all that. Pull up a log. You know Jerome. You met Casper. You got some drinking to do to catch up with us.”
“Listen, Alf, I’ve been trying to text you all day. You guys really shouldn’t be out here tonight.”
“No? Why’s that? Don’t tell me the moths are involved.”
Alf took a pull from a bottle and frowned.
“Alf. Look. This is serious. All those deaths.”
Alf swayed on his feet. His expression darkened.
“The deaths? Yeah? What about them?”
“Well, that’s why. They’re all…I mean, those people were all killed by the same thing.”
Alf’s eyes widened. He tottered back and forth.
“I told you,” Casper said to his back.
Jerome looked around at the dark trees.
“Woof. Bro. Well, that ain’t good news. Didn’t sound like attacks to me.
Jerome’s cousin, chick named Duke, plays D&D on Tuesdays with a guy who has been installing a new HVAC system at the sheriff’s office.
He said those campers didn’t OD. Said they all froze to death.
So, something is, what, freezing people? ”
Word gets around fast, apparently.
“Alf, has it been cold enough to freeze people to death?”
“How should I know? I’ve mostly been an indoor cat lately, smokin’ and watchin’ streams with Jerome.”
Valentina stepped forward into the firelight.
Clara’s poultice gleamed wetly in two thick lines, above and below her eyes.
The effect was something halfway between a zombie and a raccoon.
She reached forward and placed the back of her hand against Alf’s cheek.
He gasped and recoiled from her frigid skin.
“Listen to Mr. Green. You are in danger. This is not a night to wander the woods.”
“Shit, lady! You okay?”
Valentina ignored him and limped up to the fire. Her fingers looked stained with wine and seemed to be curled into involuntary claws. She leaned into the heat.
“Sorry, Alf, but you need to listen. You guys need to get going. Get home.”
“Okay, okay,” Alf said. “Heard, chef.”
He took another pull from his drink and glanced back at his friends.
“So, what do you want us to do though?”
“Like I said. Get back home. Get indoors. Someplace with lots of light and sound, if possible. We have business here, but you guys should get to safety.”
“Right, bro, the thing is. We were gonna camp here tonight. It’s a legit hike to get home. Like…hours. And on top of that…In answer to your previous question about my drinking, yes, I may be a little bit too drunk to get home.”
“I didn’t ask about your drinking.”
“Touché, Mr. Detective. Well played, bro.”
Jerome was fingering chords without strumming, making buzzing phantom music as he moved his fingers on the fretboard.
Casper stood and walked over. She seemed more sober than her friends.
“I live three hours away,” she said. “We spent the afternoon getting here. At least here we have the fire. That’s something, isn’t it? Like, better than walking through dark woods until two a.m., I mean?”
Green thought of the victims at Kinkaid Cabins, the blond girl in the mint green coat. They were sitting around a fire too. Maybe somebody was playing a guitar. It didn’t do them much good.
At the same time, a long walk through the woods sounded like the least safe thing in the world when the fawn was actively pursuing sparks of life to snuff.
Here, at least, he could warn them to run if the fawn approached.
He would know because Catskill would know.
Yet, they were also sitting in the heart of the fawn’s territory.
If Valentina and Clara were correct, they were camping alongside the mechanism that maintained the fawn’s foothold in reality, the mechanism Valentina was about to attack.
He looked to his teacher.
Her resting expression had become a wince. The pale wisps of her frozen breath vanished into the campfire smoke.
“I believe you are correct in thinking the walk home may be the greater danger,” Valentina said. “The decision, of course, is yours.”
Alf hooked a thumb at the fire.
“Well, we got light. Jerome’s got sound covered. I plan to be out cold in a tent in the next couple hours. I’m gonna stick to that plan. Brother, I’ve made all sorts of bad decisions and these mountains keep letting me live anyway.”
Casper studied the rising sparks.
The little bubble of firelight created a dome of smoky, shifting branches beyond which the stars were muted glimmers.
“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too, I guess. What is it, anyway? Some kind of monster?”
“Not a monster,” Green said. “An animal. But it’s dangerous and we’re trying to figure out how to keep everyone safe.”
He wasn’t sure that logic applied to something from outside their universe, but Valentina met his eyes and gave him the slightest of nods.
Jerome began playing again, a low and slow version of “Folsom Prison Blues.”
To Green’s surprise, the young man sang as he played. He had a good voice, deep and resonant.
Alf sighed.
“Shit, bro. Old man music. He loves the sad old man music. Gotta say, though, it kinda fits the vibe. For once.”
“Alf, did you make the brochure for this place? The one I saw in the station?”
“That I did.”
“And for Candle-Fly too?”
“I made most of those flyers.”
“Why?”
Alf took another drink and tilted his head from side to side.
“Because the best things don’t give a shit about advertising. It’s a favor. Or a hobby. Or, hell, I don’t know, man. You gotta do something, right? You ever worked at a gas station?”
“Do you actually work at that gas station?”
“Not on paper, but yeah.”
Valentina moved toward the barricade and Green watched her go.
“What made you think this place was worth visiting? It’s dangerous.”
“Have you seen it?”
“We came here a few days ago. I told you that.”
“Nah, man, like I said, not during the day. Go look.”
Alf rose and set his beer on the log, spilling it immediately. Foam cascaded. He turned and went to the barricade. Green followed.
“See? Hang on. You’re too damn tall, bro. Bend down.”
Alf was swaying on his feet, standing next to Valentina. The Hole in Nothing was a patch of dark between the crossed trees. There was nothing to see.
Green walked over and took a knee. He leaned over the barricade and put his cheek on the rough bark of the top branch. Then he saw.
The weather and the firelight made the sky above him a drab, dim nothing.
The sky viewed through the hole was different.
There, in the crook where the two leaning trees met, a wedge of sky was visible over the horizon.
It was like a picture of deep space, black marbled with veins of blue and violet.
The stars were vivid, dusted across the darkness like spilled crystals.
Valentina hunched down as well, staring up at the pie slice of cosmos.
“Lovely,” she said.
Green looked back to Alf.
He was smiling, his arms spread wide.
“See? Kinda seems like a stupid flyer is the least I can do, don’t it?”
“I…see your point.”
Alf turned his face up to the sky.
“Quelle surprise. He sees my point. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, bro, those flyers are mostly for me. Like, reminders. Shit, I’m not supposed to be there. The flyers ain’t supposed to be there. The room with that rack ain’t supposed to be there.”
Alf broke off in drunken laughter.
“The damn moths ain’t supposed to be there.”
He spun around in slow circles, eyes on the treetops, turning like a carousel. A branch caught his foot and he spilled onto the ground, laughing as he fell. He stood and walked back to the fire, picking leaves from his hair.
Green looked back to the vivid sky beyond the crossed pines.
Valentina’s breath was a strained wheezing in his ear. Up close, he could smell the poultice, a mixed scent of old fish and clay.
“Any idea why it looks like that?” he asked.
Her tired eyes looked distant.
“I knew that sky. It is the sky of a different time. Before electric lights blanketed so much of this country and world.”
“Why would the rift show us that?”
Valentina shook her head.
“I don’t know. Time distortion, perhaps.”
Green gave his mind over to the storybook stars.
Behind teacher and apprentice, the friends at the fire found their voices again.
The wind flowed down the mountainside.
Leaves spun and slid across the forest floor with a rattle and hiss.
Jerome played on. Alf had a loud one-sided conversation with Casper. Valentina studied the ghost of a sky from another lifetime.
Green stood in the midst of them all feeling a deep longing, a childhood longing, an aching certainty that if he only knew more, he could protect himself from his mistakes, he could be useful and meaningful and correct.
He had already stepped through an improbable gate and found himself in a new kind of life.
He was just beginning to understand his own new place in the world.
Now, he just wished he could preserve it.
He was tired of strange thresholds and new worlds.
Catskill’s thoughts were there in the dark beyond the firelight and the dark behind his own nascent instincts.
He saw the fawn through the wolf’s eyes, moonlight in the shape of a deer, slipping between the trees of a distant ridge.
It had once carried with it a spell of eerie beauty.
That spell was thin and powerless now that Green had witnessed the alien creature’s innate wrongness up close, had witnessed the consequences of its presence.
One way or another, this has to end.