Note: We had our Writing Workout last night at Write On – a writing group located in Rock Falls. We were given three prompts to pick from, and this is the one I chose.
Letters From Summer Camp. Imagine your character is a child or camp counselor at a summer camp that is the setting of a horror-comedy movie. Write a letter home to family or friends from your character's perspective, telling your family about the strange happenings at camp.
Dear Jason,
Remember how you warned me last spring that signing up for this counseling gig at Camp Wherever was a terrible idea? Well, I am about to admit something I never dreamt I would, and if circumstances were different, I’d feel miserable about it, dreading the knowledge that you’d spend this fall gloating about your foresight. So, here it goes: YOU WERE RIGHT!
There, that’s out. I suspect you’ll pause here to relish your victory, but before you get too big a head, I am going to disappoint you. You were right, but not in any way that you imagined.
It isn’t because of bratty kids. Or that my fellow counselors are trust-fund slackers. It has nothing to do with mosquitoes, rock-hard foam mattresses, or cabins with no air conditioning. The food admittedly wasn’t great, but no worse than the dorm food we stomached for nine months freshman year. I wish those issues mattered now.
I regret coming here because I know I will never leave.
No one does.
Ever.
I mean it.
You probably think I’ve gone nuts in the woods. Well, maybe I have a little bit. I mean, I am hunkered in the corner of my cabin at midnight, writing this letter by flashlight without a clue on how I will ever post it. Outside, the drums have started. I call them the rain-dance drums. That’s probably not PC, but I grew up in the 80s, and dang it, it sounds like every stereotypical Native American drum that I have ever heard.
I heard the drums the first night I came. It wasn’t as loud as it is now. I think Tammy Warner, she was one of the other counselors, had it right: It’s getting stronger. Whatever “it” is.
Dang it, I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Writing is helping, I think. It’s distracting my brain from that sound, so I want to make this letter last, maybe even until dawn. When the sun arrives, the drums go away. I want to make a run for it then, but we are miles from anywhere, and everyone who has tried loops back to here before nightfall. Every path, every road just winds back to the camp. It’s like the camp is a black hole, bending the laws of nature and physics, sucking everything toward it with its massive gravitational pull. Maybe I’ll be the lucky one that pulls away. Finds the right path. Escape.
Anyway, that first night, it was just counselors here at Camp Whatever. Mr. Takoda, who owns the camp, met us here. A squirrelly looking fellow, probably 98-pounds soaking wet with one of those old handlebar mustaches. He’s some sort of Chippewa or Sioux, I think, and looked like he was about two hundred years old. He gave us keys to the cabins and our assignments, and then left with a bus. See he was picking up the kids in Stovington, the next day. We were just here to get everything ready. Clean the cabins, prepare the mess hall, all that jazz.
It was a lot of work, but fun then. Twelve counselors. Six males and six females with sixty kids coming the next day. We counselors got along well enough, we’re all the same age and stuff. A couple of the guys were even cute. But don’t get jealous, the best-looking ones are already gone. The cabins were old, sturdy structures with six-by-six frames and slate roofs. Ten cabins in all, plus the mess hall, and a building with six shower stalls and four toilets. The lap of luxury.
I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought. There’s the drumming, you see, and if you listen very close, there’s something else. Chanting, I think. But it’s more like some producer turned off the lead singer’s voice on a pop song and all you can hear is the backing vocals. Hollow bits and pieces with breaks and fades, and the words aren’t anything I can understand, but sometimes I can just make out a little bit, and I want to stop what you are doing and listen closer. Maybe just walk outside and see if it’s clearer there. Maybe go down the path that leads to the lake…
Oh, the lake, it’s a thing of beauty during the day. So clear that you can see every fish that swims by. Musky. Blue Gil. Trout. I don’t know anything about fish, I am just making up that’s what they are. They could be piranhas for all I know. The bed is made of little white rocks, and some of them look like they have little painted symbols on them. I like to think they’ve been down there since the last ice age, and the Neanderthals smeared some berry juice or something on the pebbles before tossing them into the water. At dusk, a fog over rolls over the lake, a thick, green fog – I’ve never seen green fog, have you? It absorbs into the into the lake like a blob, turning it into a mossy swamp of yuck.
The drums come from that direction, but I don’t think there from the lake. No, it’s from the other side of the lake. Billy O’Hearn, a real cocky counselor with more muscles than brains, said there’s an old Indian burial mound over there. Eight to ten feet high, about twenty feet in diameter. I don’t know how he would know that. We all came here on the same day. Cocky Billy followed the drums two nights ago. His buddy, Frank Conners, tried to stop Billy, but there was nothing good old Frank could do. Billy was all muscles and Frank was half his size. Really busted Frank up seeing Billy go. Maybe even more than seeing the kids going, one by one. Although the going is better than the finding.
This isn’t making any sense I suppose. Not to you. You’re probably thinking, ole Connie, is telling a real ripper here. Well, I wish that were the case. Jason, there’s something out here I can’t explain. All I can say is everyone eventually follows the drums, and when we find them the next day – or what’s left of them – well, it’s not pretty. Billy O’Hearn didn’t have any skin when we discovered his body about a half down Eagle Point trail.
Frank Conners couldn’t handle finding Billy like that. He jumped in the lake, and just kept swimming toward the middle, so far there was no way he’d have the strength to come back. He wasn’t going to let the drums get him, I guess. I don’t think it mattered. When his body floated to shore, his eyes and teeth were all gone, along with everything inside his skull. Like something just sucked them all out.
There’s only eight of us left, Jason. Five kids. Three counselors. None of us have seen old Mr. Takoda since he dropped the kids off. Some of us wonder if he ever was real.
I’m want to keep writing, Jason, but thos drums. What is that voice singing?
You were right, I sure do regret coming here…
