12
“Tell us a ghost story,” Summer says to Lennon from across the campfire.
The sun’s been falling for a half hour or more, and we’re gathered around the fire inside the granite shelter, watching Lennon carefully feed another stick of wood to the flames. He was right about the boulders: They make good benches. We’ve all been sitting here for the last hour, drying out from swimming in the waterfall pool, eating our rehydrated pouches of food. I’m still hungry and could eat another one. But then we’d have to boil more water, and it’s so dark, I can barely make out the edge of the river. Definitely not worth the trouble.
“Why do you think I know a ghost story?” Lennon says.
A chorus of noises echo around the rocks as everyone encourages him.
“You totally know one, dude,” Brett says. “Stop playing.”
Lennon looks up from the fire. “Maybe I do.”
“Ha!” Summer says. “I knew it. Tell us one about killer hillbillies in the woods.”
“Please don’t,” I say.
“Not any about a boogeyman with a hooked hand who attacks people making out in parked cars either,” Kendrick says. “I don’t like hooks.”
Summer laughs and tries to tickle him.
Everyone’s in a good mood, relatively speaking. Reagan, in her own way, has sort of tried to make up for what she said to me earlier. She brought along a small hammer—one of her many purchases from the outdoor gear store—so she helped me stake down the poles for a tarp at my tent’s entrance. She asked me if I was okay, and I lied and said that I was. Then she gave me one of her extrahard back pats, and that was that. We’re good. I guess. She’s been sitting on the same rock with me, and Brett just slid between us. Which should be exciting—his side pressing against mine—but I can’t enjoy it. I’m too busy thinking about her earlier “territorial” speech and how it seems like she’s trying to steer me away from Brett.
Why?
“Come on,” Reagan begs Lennon. “You and your freaky goth fetish . . . We know you’ve got a good ghost story.”
“You have the perfect voice for spooky tales,” Summer adds. “You sound like one of those old horror movie actors from black-and-white movies. The Wolfman. Dracula. All of that.”
“Vincent Price,” Kendrick guesses.
“No, the other one. Dracula. He was in Lord of the Rings.”
“Christopher Lee,” Lennon supplies.
“Yes!” Summer says. “Thrill us, Christopher Lee.”
Lennon pushes up from a squat and brushes off his hands. “All right,” he says. “I heard something a few months ago. But it’s not fiction. It’s what someone actually told me. You sure you want to hear it?”
No, I do not want to hear, thank you. I don’t like being scared. And now that it’s getting dark, I’m starting to worry again about sleeping on the ground. The tents I picked out with Reagan are actually pretty cool, I suppose, as far as tents go. They’re small, but made for two people, which means that there’s some wiggle room inside with just one person occupying. But they’re still not tall enough to stand inside, and knowing that I’ll be stuck in that tiny space later with little more than a thin scrap of nylon between me and all the nocturnal animals that use the waterfall for a watering hole is starting to freak me out.
But everyone else is apparently a million times braver, and they all want Lennon to frighten them.
“I’m so ready,” Summer says.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Long legs bent, Lennon sits on the edge of a boulder and leans forward, settling his forearms on his thighs. “Okay, so back before school ended, I was taking weekend wilderness survival classes on the other side of Mount Diablo. It’s run by ex-military people along with this retired search-and-rescue ranger who used to work in Yellowstone. His name was Varg.”
“Varg?” Summer repeats.
“It’s Swedish,” Lennon says. “And this guy was no one to fuck around with. Six five, big as a barn, scars everywhere. He’s rescued people from landslides and cave-ins. Fires. And he’s found a lot of dead bodies. People go missing in the wilderness all the time, and if they’re lost, they sometimes run out of food and starve to death, or they are attacked by animals or crushed by falling rocks. Fall into hot geysers.”
“Jesus,” Reagan complains.
“In winter, they freeze. Varg said he found an entire family frozen in the mountains. Amateur mountain climbers. They’d been there a week, trapped on a ledge. An animal had eaten the husband’s leg.”
“Ew!” Summer says.
I make a mental note to never, ever go camping in winter.
Lennon twines his fingers together loosely. “But Varg said even though he’d found dozens of corpses throughout his career—which is a lot of dead bodies—he never once believed in the possibility of ghosts. Not until he traveled to Venezuela.”
“What’s in Venezuela?” Brett asks, holding his phone up.
“Are you videoing this?” Lennon asks.
“Of course. Now I’ll have to edit that part out.”
As the waterfall cascades steadily behind him, Lennon gives Brett a long, unnerving look.
Brett shuts off his phone and pockets it.
Then Lennon continues.
“When Varg was outside Caracas, doing some kind of search-and-rescue seminar with local rangers, they spent the night in the mountains during a full moon. Nothing extraordinary happened. They built a fire. Ate. Talked. A lot like this, I suppose,” Lennon says. “But when it got late and everyone had turned in for the night, he stayed at the campfire, making sure the embers were out. And as he was sitting there, the hairs on the back of his neck rose. He had the distinct feeling someone was watching him.”
“Uh-oh,” Kendrick murmurs.
Lennon points to the tree branch hanging above the granite shelter. “Varg looked up at a nearby tree and saw a boy about our age sitting on a branch. He was high up, and the trunk of the tree didn’t have any low-hanging branches, so Varg couldn’t figure how he’d gotten up there. He called up to the boy, but the boy didn’t answer. And because it was dark, Varg couldn’t see him well, but his mind tried to rationalize his presence, and—I guess because of the nature of his job—he was worried that the boy was stuck. In trouble, you know. Needed help.”
“I don’t like where this is going,” Summer says, curling up against Kendrick’s side.
Lennon continues. “When he got closer and stood beneath the branch, the light from the moon gave him a better view of the boy. He was wearing strange clothes. It took Varg a few moments to realize that they were a soldier’s uniform . . . from, like, the eighteen hundreds.”
“Oh, shit,” Reagan murmurs.
Brett slings his arm around her shoulders. She leans into him. When Brett notices I’m watching, he says, “Come on, girl. I got enough for everyone.” And he puts his arm around my shoulders too, and pulls me closer.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Uncomfortable. I think that’s how I feel. Really, really uncomfortable. Especially when Reagan’s judgmental eyes slide toward mine. And Lennon has paused his story, so I glance in his direction. Murder. That’s what his face looks like. Not toward me, but Brett. Flickering shadows cast by the campfire’s flames deepen the hollows of his cheeks and outline the sharp planes of his face.
Don’t you ever miss us?
Oh, God. Before I can think about it, I pretend to cough and pull out of Brett’s arm, slapping a hand against my chest for added effect.
“You okay?” Brett asks, genuinely concerned.
I nod vigorously and cough once more before stealthily scooting an inch away. He doesn’t try to put his arm around me again, and I’ve never been so relieved. My brain is telling me how backward this is—didn’t I come out here for this exact reason? For a chance to spend time with him? But my body is telling me to move a little farther away.
What’s wrong with me, anyway? Is what Reagan said earlier messing with my head?
“Is that the end of the story?” Summer asks Lennon.
He flicks an unreadable glance toward me before answering her. “Do you really want to hear the rest?”
“Yes!” Summer and Kendrick say.
Lennon complies. “So, Varg was alarmed to find a boy dressed in this manner, but he tried to be rational about it. He called out to him again, but the boy still wouldn’t answer. Varg wondered if he couldn’t understand English, so he ran a couple of yards away to the tents and woke one of the local men to help translate. When they returned to the tree, the boy was gone.”
“Oooh,” Summer says.
Goose bumps dimple my arms. I pull down the sleeves of my hoodie and cross my arms over my stomach.
“Varg was badly shaken up by this, naturally,” Lennon says. “He didn’t know if it was a ghost, or his imagination. Maybe he’d fallen asleep at the fire and dreamed it. He told himself all kinds of things. But that was his last night in the mountains there, so the next day, they drove to the city, and he got on a flight back to the States. When he returned to Wyoming, it was night before he made it into Yellowstone. He lived inside the park, in dormitory-style housing with other rangers. And when he got up to his room, which was on the second story, he opened his window to let in some air, and just outside, on an impossibly high branch, was the silent soldier boy. He’d followed him home.”
My eyes water. Not gonna lie: I am 100 percent scared.
“Wicked,” Brett whispers.
“No way,” Summer says. “Oh my God. What did he do?”
Lennon hunches lower over his legs, leaning closer to the fire. “Well, he—”
“He what? He what?” Summer says.
Lennon’s head tilts. “Did you hear that?”
“Shut the hell up,” Reagan whispers, visibly frightened. “Stop it, Lennon.”
“Are you scared?” Brett asks Reagan, hugging her closer. “Oh my God. You totally are!”
“Hey!” Lennon shouts. “I’m serious. Listen.”
The campfire is quiet. All I can hear is the steady cascade of the waterfall. And—
Oh.
“What the hell?” Brett whispers.
It’s coming from the tents, and it sounds like—
Like someone’s going through our stuff.
Lennon signals for everyone to stay where they are, and then he straps a small headlamp onto his head, flipping on the light as he jumps off the rock and heads out of the granite shelter.
A dozen scenarios race through my mind, and none of them are good. I’m terrified, but I not staying here while Lennon marches away to his death. I jump up and chase him into darkness, tracking the bouncing light of his headlamp until I catch up to him.
“Stay behind me,” he whispers.
I can hear the rest of the group debating whether to follow, and they are soon behind us, making as much noise as the mystery interloper.
The sound of our footsteps creeping toward the tents is overloud in my ears. Twigs break. Leaves crunch. We head around a tree that marks the outer edge of the campsite. Our tents are all spread apart, some of them closer to the river, some closer to the woods. The first one is Lennon’s. Mine is just to the left, near a big boulder. We creep between the two tents, watching each step. I hear noise, but the dull roar of the waterfall is confusing my brain. I frantically look around, trying to spot danger, when Lennon blindly reaches back a hand to halt me.
My heart slams against my rib cage. Then I spot it near the river.
Several yards ahead, the navy-blue silhouettes of Reagan and Brett’s tents stand in the moonlight, their dome shapes like igloos rising from the dark riverbank. One of those tents doesn’t look right. It’s misshapen. A giant, half-deflated soccer ball. And when Lennon’s headlamp shines over it, an enormous dark shape turns around to face the light.