Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Anastasia had not gone far, when she got the distinct and uneasy feeling of being watched. She looked around her, but could see no-one. The rest of the class was some distance away and out of sight. To her left, she noticed a dense thicket of holly trees. Was there something in there? She pushed through the spiny leaves into a wide clearing.
Empty.
Just as she was about to turn around and leave, she heard a twig crack and a tall man with a face carved from redwood made his way into through the branches of the trees. Clearly this man was a Native American, she thought, one of the First Nation’s people. Was he Calapuyau? Did they still exist in this area? She stood facing the tall Native American from across the ring of holly trees, so they must. Then the obvious question; what was she doing in this part of the woods all by herself?
The man stared at her and then she noticed that he was carrying a weapon in the form of a stone axe bound with twine. As soon as she saw the weapon, she started to back away. And then she was running, running towards the scouts and Ms. Lytton where she knew she would be safe. She pushed through the holly trees, scratching her arms and legs badly and then ran, without stopping, all the way back to where the others were still collecting flowers.
“Where’ve you been?” asked Wendy.
She decided not to mention her vision of the old Indian; the last thing she wanted to do was draw attention to herself and be labelled a crackpot. “I just went for a walk,” she said.
“You should be more careful… You can wind up anywhere in these woods…”
She looked at her friend, perhaps she knew about the Old Indian after all, she thought.
Walter knocked on the door of 162 Waverly Drive and a thin woman with white rimmed glasses and thick black hair opened the door. “Mrs. Short?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“My name is Detective Walter Cullen. I’m with the Albany County police department?”
“Oh yes, my husband said you would call. Won’t you come in?”
He stepped into the carpeted hallway and followed Mrs. Short into the kitchen.
The Short family was an interesting, if tragic case. Their eight year old son Brian, an only child, had been taken from them suddenly one night in late 2013. The case was highly unusual, given the age of the child and his apparent lack of any medical history. Whilst foul-play was not suspected, the county coroner had been called to conduct an autopsy on the young boy to ascertain the precise cause and time of death.
According to the police report, the autopsy had taken place at the Surgeons General Hospital on November 27th and was concluded the same day. However, the coroner’s findings were not released to the family until several weeks later. The hospital had said that they were waiting on toxicology reports, which turned up negative in any case. Walter was suspicious about this and went to the Albany County Sheriff’s office, where the report had been filed and noted that the examination was dated November 29th.
It was obvious that someone wasn’t telling the truth.
He sat down at the kitchen table and Mrs. Short offered him a glass of water. “Mrs. Short…”
“Please call me Angela.”
“Very well, Angela… I’d like to get straight down to business, if you don’t mind.”
“No… that’s fine.”
“According to the coroner’s report your son died of acute pancreatitis. Is that right?”
“That’s what they say, but my husband and I don’t really believe that.”
“Why not?”
“… Pancreatitis doesn’t just come out of nowhere… There are symptoms, you know, for weeks — even months — in advance.”
“Stomach cramp… that sort of thing…”
“Exactly. Brain was a normal healthy young boy. He playing around, no problem…”
“Have you challenged the report officially?”
“I have.” She reached for a pack of Kents, lit one and blew a cloud of blue smoke across the room. “After we brought it up… the coroner, what’s his name?”
“Thomas Sloane…”
“That’s right, that asshole. He said that the diagnosis was only speculative and that the real cause of death was unknown…”
“Unknown?”
“Yes. Can you believe that?”
He shook his head.
“I mean, I thought that if you signed off on a document the least that you could do is be honest, you know? But our boy isn’t the only one this has happened to… there are others…”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah… That’s the reason the whole thing is being swept under the rug. But you’re taking an interest in the case now, so that’s something at least…” she sounded hopeful.
“I’m not here on an official capacity… There isn’t really an awful lot that the police can do in a case like this. They usually don’t bother with them.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I have a child too and I’m curious…”
“I see,” she said nodding slowly and then took a drag of her cigarette. “Well, regardless, we’re very happy someone’s working on our behalf. Lord knows, it’s taken long enough.”
“Is that Brian there?” he pointed to a picture of a young boy with brown hair being held by an elderly lady.
“Yes,” she said retrieving it from wall.
“Is that the boy’s grandmother?”
“Yes… He loved his gran…” she smiled.
“I wonder if you could tell me about incidents leading up to Brian’s passing… Things he might have said. If he had any strange interests, or unusual visitations from people or organisations?”
She sat pensively for a moment. “No, I can’t think of anything,” she began. “Well, there was one thing. But perhaps I’d better show you…”
He followed Angela up the stairs and went into a small room off the landing.
“We keep it just as it was…”
He looked around the little room. It had been several years since a child had slept in it, but you would hardly have known. Then the thought struck him that Brian would have been twelve by now. He would have lost interest in most of these toys and taken up an interest in girls, most likely. He felt a strong empathy for the Shorts. He wasn’t sure how he would react if his daughter were taken from him in similar circumstances. But he knew from losing his wife, Julia, that it served no good purpose to dwell on the past too long. You had to get on with life as best you could and avoid turning the places they frequented into a shrine, or a tomb…
Angela bent down and lifted up an old cardboard box filled with papers; placing it on the bed. “These paintings,” she said taking out a number of crumbled pages. “We just thought that he was expressing himself… You know, boys will be boys, but then… Now that I think about it does seem almost prescient… Sort of, spooky, really, in light of what happened…”
Looking at the paintings, he could see what she meant. The images, daubed in black and red paint, showed what appeared to be a huge dark figure with square head standing in a doorway.
“He called it the Shadow Man…”
“The Shadow Man?”
“It all began when he started having those… what-do-you-call-them?” she said search for the word. “Night terrors… He said that on several occasions a giant came into his room and pressed down on his chest…”
“Night terrors…” said Walter aloud. “Do you mind if I take this?”
“No, I don’t mind. Do you think it could be related?”
He had stopped listening to her now and looked at the drawing one more time. It stirred something deep within him; something unruly, something better left alone.
After the herbalism class, Anastasia followed Wendy and Valerie back down the mountain and into the confines of the amphitheatre. The structure was built from large stone steps that doubled as seats. In the centre was a fire pit filled with ashes and above that was a stone column with its top broken off. Wendy went to the edge of the pit and started crushing bits of charcoal with the toes of her white plastic Converse shoes.
Valerie turned to Anastasia and said, “I love your hair…”
“Thanks… I don’t like how wavy it is…” she said pulling at it.
“Are you kidding me? I wish I had hair like yours.”
“Really?”
“Hey, why don’t you let me braid it?” She began taking strands of her golden hair and threading them over one another; back and forth in an intricate dance.
“So, what did you think of Ms. Lytton?” she asked.
“I like her, actually.”
“She’s a bit dry don’t you think?”
“Yeah maybe,” But then again most adults are, she thought. “I still can’t get over how flirty she and Mr. Collins were on stage this morning. I mean… how obvious can you get?”
“Oh that’s nothing, believe me,” replied Valerie. “One time I was going into the library to return a book and you know the way Ms. Lytton and Mr. Collins both have their offices in there? Yeah well, I was walking by Mr. Collins’ office and the door was open… and you won’t believe what I saw…”
“What? Tell us…” said Wendy coming closer.
“… I saw Ms. Lytton, down on her hands and knees on the floor and Mr. Collins was making her drink out of a bowl of milk… And he was saying things like; Does Ms. Kitty want some milk? and there’s a good kitty.”
“Ugh. Did they catch you looking?”
“No, I don’t think so…”
“You’re lucky that would have been awkward…” she giggled.
“Whatever about that, but did you ever see anything as freaky as Mr. Haight? The Caretaker?”
“Oh I know…”
“That was some speech he gave at assembly this morning. I didn’t know whether to laugh or run away crying…”
“‘Those children had their all skin burnt clean off…’” said Wendy hunching over to do her best impression of the middle-aged janitor. They all laughed and then fell silent.
Valerie pulled on the braid to make sure it was straight. “There what do you think?”
“Looks nice,” replied Wendy.
“I’m bored now,” she said and kicked her feet. “Hey, I’ve got an idea lets play truth or Truth or Dare.”
“OK.”
“Truth…”
Wendy thought for a moment. “Which of the Seven Form boys would you be with…”
“None of them… My heart is for David,” she said clutching at her breast dramatically.
“Who’s David?”
“He’s the dreaming instructor…”
“And he’s totally dreamy…” pined Valerie.
“OK then, which one of them would you be with, if you absolutely had to…”
“Oh I see… well that’s different… Probably Alex, or possibly Burke, I guess. You?”
“Alex,” she nodded. “… Or maybe Marvin.”
“Uh, why Marvin?” her face twisting in disgust.
“Why not?” shrugged Wendy. “I just think he’s cute and sweet is all…”
“What about you Anastasia?”
“She hasn’t met any of the boys, yet Val. Remember?”
“Oh that’s right. You’ll have to do a dare, then… And I know just the thing…” said Valerie a mischievous grin darkening her face. “Follow me…”
Valerie led them out of the stone amphitheatre in the direction of the Library. About half way along they came to a flagstone path and at the end of the path, just next to the forest was the white shed. “There it is,” said Valerie. “I dare you to take a look.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“I am… You can’t chicken out now…”
“It’s a stupid dare. What about what Mr. Haight said?”
“You didn’t honestly actually believe that did you?”
She had believed it, now she felt a bit stupid for having done so. “Alright, I’ll do it.”
As she drew nearer the shed, she had the vague intuition of some impending catastrophe. The feeling started out small and remote, but began to deepen with each step, until it could no longer be ignored. She stopped and turned around to look at her two friends, standing some yards behind her. “Go on,” urged Valerie.
This was stupid, she thought. What, in the hell, am I afraid of? She turned back in the direction of the shed, but as soon as she did, the unsettling sensations returned. It was as though there was some malevolent energy pulsating from behind the shed. The horror of it repulsed her, but at the same time she felt a sort of attraction to it and to all things devilish and wild.
She stepped closer along the flagstone path and lay her fingers lightly upon the latch. Hoping against hope that it might yet be locked and that she wouldn’t have to continue on any further. She couldn’t go on; but neither could she back out — not with Wendy and Valerie both watching her. So, she decided to do the next best thing. She lied.
“It’s locked.”
“No, it isn’t,” chided Valerie.
“It is, come and see for yourself.” She was hoping they would be too afraid to come and see for themselves, but they both walked abruptly in her direction.
“It’s not locked,” said Valerie looking at the door bolt.
“Well, I couldn’t open it.”
“Weakling… Let me have a go…” Valerie reached towards the locked and a large, dark, hairy hand grabbed her by the wrist.
Harmon crossed Clinton Avenue and went up by St. Catherine’s Community School to his apartment. Along the way he surveyed some of the derelict houses by the roadside. The ornately framed windows reminded him of picture frames, only instead of them shedding light on the interiors and the lives of those who lived there, they revealed nothing but a piece of old chip board. In some ways it had been the dilapidated streets of Albany which had initially turned his mind towards the idea of being a painter. He found the vacant lots and backstreets interesting, as though they might open up into another world where different laws of physics prevailed, or at least fewer of them. But as he grew older, he came to resent these hollowed out old wrecks. They were indicative of social decay that was now consuming his life as well as that of the city. It was strange that a young man of twenty-six should think like that. And yet, it was somehow inescapably true, where he was concerned.
In the last year, he had completed more than a hundred canvases, some of them quite large-scale works and all of them delicately rendered in expensive oils. But he had sold almost nothing; and hardly enough to keep from drowning in debt and bills. His parents helped him out on occasion, but he hated having to rely on them for money. Maybe, if he gave another year to painting that someone somewhere would recognise his ability. Maybe, then, he would begin to get noticed. But it wasn’t to be, and the gap in his resumé was widening. His only other option was to earn a bit of extra cash by busking on the street with his guitar. He hated being reduced to begging on the street like this. But what else could he do?
Worse still was the looks he got from people, women mostly, as they went pottering about their daily errands with hair cuts worth hundreds of dollars. These people never dropped a coin in his guitar case, in fact ironically, the only people who ever gave him any money were the homeless drunks and drug addicts that were everywhere around here. It had forced him to view the world entirely differently.
It wasn’t the poor and disenfranchised that were to be hated, feared and despised, rather it was the well-off classes. They were the ones who spent the day drifting around jewellery stores dangling diamonds off their earlobes, while he sat half starving on the street corner across the way. You couldn’t eat diamonds, at least not without breaking all of your teeth.
Walter sat in his car for a few minutes researching ‘night terrors’ on his phone. Up until now, he had thought that it was synonymous with nightmare, but as he researched more on the subject, he became aware that it was a legitimate and self-contained phenomenon. The condition affected one in five people at some point in their lives and was characterised by a phantom presence that creeps into people’s bedrooms whilst they slept. This phantom entity is usually unpleasant to look at and can apparently take on any form it chooses, including; a shadowy figure called Hat Man (so called because he is typically seen wearing a fedora) an old hag, a troll or even a giant.
Almost all of the sleep paralysis victims describe being watched from a vantage point in the room. At others times the entity would climb on top of them or choke them from behind. A common characteristic reported in all cases was the inability of the victim to either move or speak throughout the experience and why the condition was also referred to as ‘sleep paralysis’. He wondered if the recent deaths in the Albany could be related somehow. Perhaps an inter-dimensional phantom like the Hat Man was behind it all. There were even reports of a sexual motivation behind some of these attacks. The reluctance of people reporting made it difficult to say how common this phenomenon was. This made sense. The victims were already feeling alone, vulnerable and probably fearing for their sanity. And what were they going to do? Phone up their local police station and tell them they were being raped by a ghost? Nah, he started his car. He bet the boys down at the precinct would get a kick out of that.
“What are you girls doing here?” bellowed the Caretaker. “You know you’re not supposed to be anywhere near this shed…”
All three of them recoiled in horror.
“Weren’t you at this morning’s assembly?” he said laying a wooden slat across door to bar the way.
“Yes, Mr. Haight,” replied Valerie.
“There’s chemicals and machinery in there that would blind you… Go on. Clear off…”
The three girls hurried from that place, feeling more embarrassed than scared.
She was beginning to get more accustomed to Camp Calapuyau and she wasn’t at all sure she liked it. There were just too many restrictive rules. No playing at the tool shed, and no mixing with boys. This was supposed to be a summer camp, she thought, it was supposed to be fun…
Without really meaning to, they arrived at the door to the library. Wendy tugged on the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Is it open?” asked Valerie.
She cupped her hands round her face and peered in through the glass. “No, it’s locked.”
“Well, there goes another plan…”
Around the side of building, she found three totem poles stuck into the ground. “Hey, what are these?”
“That’s Jahbulon,” said Valerie pointing to the one in the middle. “He has three heads; a man’s head, a frog’s head and a cat’s head. See?”
She looked again at the bottom face and saw that it did indeed resemble that of a toad.
“He’s the reason we celebrate Bealtaine.”
“What’s that again?”
“It’s the Festival of Fires, we have it every year on the June 9th, in honour of Lord Jahbulon.”
“What are you some kind of a cult?”
Wendy laughed at this. “Well, you could say that… I bet that’s how it looks from the outside at any rate…”
“What religion are you, Anastasia?”
“Christian, I guess.”
“But you don’t go to church anymore, I’ll bet,” she said smiling.
“Well, not so much anymore,” she admitted.
“Then how can you call yourself a Christian?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think I’m any less Christian because of that.”
“Part of the reason why Eamon Radcliffe started this camp was that we could have a safe place from the persecutions of people like you… But we don’t have to hide anymore… We’ve been slowly chipping away at your institution; chipping away until there’s nothing left…”
She realised that Valerie was right, of course. Christianity had been in steady state of decline in America and the West, she couldn’t even remember the last time she had heard someone say Merry Christmas to her on the street. Nowadays it had been replaced with ‘Happy Holidays” if it was ever said at all.
“I’m bored with this newblood… You coming?”
“You go along…”
“Suit yourself,” said Valerie shooting her a harsh look and walking back in the direction of the Meeting Hall, her blonde hair swinging back and forth behind her.
“I’m so sorry about all that,” said Anastasia.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. Valerie can take things a bit too far sometimes…”
“Tell me about it…”
“I try not to get involved with the politics of this place. Sometimes the less you know the better…”
She was beginning to think her friend was right.
On their way back to the dorms, they passed Mr. Bulwark standing on a grass verge. He was looking up into the sky and following the trajectories of a cloud of swarming midges above his head. She noticed that his two bulbous eyes moved independently of one another. But this wasn’t the only disconcerting aspect of the man’s demeanour. Around his mouth he had a glaze of some tan-coloured fluid, which might have been honey or maple syrup. The flies were periodically getting stuck in this film of treacle and facial hair and just as frequently his large pink tongue reach out of his mouth and lick all around his face and chin.
“Eww, that’s gross.”
One of his peripatetic eyes fixed itself on them, “You girls best be getting along. Gym class starts in five…” he said.
They couldn’t wait to get away from there.
The Winters lived in a big house out in the MacDonald Dunne Forrest, just outside Adair, the next town over. They had lost their daughter Rosemary, earlier that same year. Rosemary was only seventeen, a gifted student with a bright future ahead of her. But that all came crashing to a halt, when they found her body laying half naked somewhere out in the woods.
Like in the Brian Short case, an autopsy report proved vague and inconclusive. Unlike their case, however, news of Rosemary’s death had galvanised the local Adair community and this resulted in a relentless manhunt for the suspected killer. A man in his mid to late twenties had been arrested and detained by the Portland Police Department in connection with the incident, but had later been released without charge. Why this was so, he had never been able to figure out.
He parked his car in a lay-by and crossed over the road to their house; a grey wooden period style home. Standing in the front lawn was a man holding a length of hose, watering the flowers. “Mr. Winters? Peter Winter?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Mr. Cullen from the Albany Police Department. I’m here to discuss—”
“Rosemary… Yes, I know, come on inside.” He shut the water off. “My wife and I have been expecting you. How did you find the drive?”
“Fine,” he said. “Very pleasant…” He always enjoyed the winding roads of the forest, especially when they were damp with rain.
“It’s a beautiful area,” Mr. Winter said echoing his thoughts. “Come on in.”
He followed him into a dark hallway filled with small delicate prints of fox hunting in the English countryside. “Are you a fox hunting enthusiast?”
“Not really. My wife likes to collect old stuff like that.”
“I see.”
“You’ll meet her in a moment. Audrey…” he called up the stairs. “The man from the police department is here… She won’t be a moment. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes,” replied Walter following the man into the kitchen.
A moment later tea was served. The cups featured the same images of fox hunting. Some enthusiast, he thought. The lady of the house came into the kitchen in her dressing gown and pyjamas. She sat down at the head of the table, “I’m sorry for my appearance Inspector, I’m not feeling all that well…”
“Don’t mention it… I’ve been following the case of your daughter for sometime… hoping to shed light on the issue.”
“Well, do forgive me for not being overly enthused,” she scowled. “We’ve had numerous investigators and detectives out looking for our daughter’s killer and nothing.”
“Surely, you’re aware that the Portland Police turned up a suspect only last week?”
“No,” said Peter shaking his head.
“You weren’t informed?”
“How did you hear about it? Through the police department was it?” His hand shook unsteadily as his set the cup back down into the saucer.
“No, it was in one of the local newspapers. The Portland Express…”
“Oh, we don’t get that newspaper out here.”
“Well, surely someone would have told you?”
Their silence indicated otherwise. Never in his thirty odd years on the force had he ever heard of such gross incompetence. The first people to be informed about a new suspect was always the victim’s family. “You should get in touch with Portland and find out what went wrong… But later. Right now, I want to talk about your daughter. Particularly, her frame of mind before she passed away?”
“Well, what do you mean? She was a normal teenaged girl,” replied Audrey.
“Did she ever complain about any strange visitors in her room at night?”
A look of shock came over Peter’s weathered features. “It’s funny you should ask that, because she did complain about a figure in her room. A dark shadow, I think it was.”
So there was a pattern after all. “How often did she mention it?”
“Quite regularly… It would come into her room and sit on the end of the bed. I seem to recall her saying something like that. Kind of creepy, actually…”
“That’s right. I remember reading that in her diary.”
“She kept a diary?” his interest piqued. “Can I look at it?”
“I’m not sure… The police took a number of her things for evidence, but I think they dropped it back. Hang on, I’ll go check.”
A moment later, she was back with a black and white book. Walter undid the latch and flicked through the pages. The hunt was on, and he was getting closer to his quarry.
The girls of Form Seven stood doing stretches on the smooth wooden floor of the gym hall. They complained bitterly that they had to do gym class inside on such a nice day, while the boys were allowed out on the lake all morning, but Mr. Bulwark assured them that they would get their chance later on. “Today is basket ball practice,” he said. “Start with laps of the court.”
The girls took off around the hall. After about a lap and a half, she started to become self-conscious as though someone were staring at her. The obvious culprit was Mr. Bulwark, but whenever she glanced over at him he appeared to be focused on something else. Perhaps, it was just her imagination, she reasoned.
He blew a whistle and the girls came to a standstill in an ad-hoc group at the end of the hall. Bulwark dragged a large canvas bag filled with basketballs towards them. “Alright, line up against the wall. Now that you’re all warmed up, we’re going to do some stretches…”
Bulwark started to demonstrate a number of different stretches and lunges, which despite his excessive girth, he seemed to manage quite well. “OK, very good,” he said. “Take a ball from the basket and wait for me…”
While they were selecting from the bag, a tall, young man with short brown hair and pleasant, friendly smile came into the hall carrying a box of miniature traffic cones and reams of reflective tape.
At the sight of him the other girls grew excited. “It’s David…”
“Hello Bill,” he said. “I’ve come to drop these back…”
“Just put them in the store room will you.”
All of the girls started crowding around him, with Valerie at the forefront. “Hey, David… I heard that you are our dreaming instruction again this year, is that true?”
“Yes, it is.”
It was clear from some of the reactions of the girls that they could hardly contain their joy. David smiled; shunted the box into the store room and closing over the door. “So, I’ll guess I’ll see you all up in the lodge this evening? Remember to bring your totems with you and your Book of Shadows.”
“Yes, David. We will…”
“Alright,” said Mr. Bulwark, with a hint of jealousy. “If you’ve all got a ball, then I want you to dribble them up and down the court, until I tell you to stop.”
The girls took off down the court; filling the hall with the noisy, cacophonous sound of basket balls bouncing off a hardwood floor.
Walter arrived home to an unusually silent house and left the girl’s imitation cow-hide diary on the kitchen table, before opening up the freezer to see what was for dinner. He extracted a frozen lump of beef and put it in the microwave on defrost. Then he went back to the diary and opened it on page one. The first page contained the typical disclaimer; “This Diary Is Private; Hands Off” and “If you’re reading this and you’re not me, you’re in BIG trouble.”
He skimmed through the first couple of entries which were accounts of her likes and dislikes of everything from boys to fashion to her teachers at school. There were also accounts of excursions with her friends and family. These interested him only in as far as it gave a window into her world. It was clear that Rosemary was your average teenage girl with a loving supportive and a healthy social life. He wondered how Anastasia compared to this girl. Losing her mother at such a young age couldn’t have been easy on her; living with him and his moods on a daily basis even less so.
The rest of Rosemary’s diary was sprinkled with the private aspirations and dreams befitting of a girl of her age. He read how she desired the love and security of a husband and family at some point in her future. Again he wondered if Anastasia shared these same ideals. It was much harder for her growing up than it had been for him. The world had becoming increasingly more fragmented and girls were being pushed more and more into the realms of business and politics, so much so that expectations of being a mother necessarily took a back seat. Would Anastasia ever have a baby? Somehow, he felt sure that she would… But not in the ordinary way. How then? Adoption, most likely…
He stopped think about it and got back to reading the diary. In an entry dated September 21st 2015, he read the following;
… I think there’s a ghost in my room. I was lying in bed with my eyes closed when someone sat on the edge of the bed. I felt the mattress dip distinctly, but when I opened my eyes there was no-one there. It was the strangest thing…
This was the first indication that there was anything amiss in the girl’s otherwise normal life. It was a fairly mild incident — of that there was no doubt — and one which could easily be explained away without recourse to the supernatural or paranormal. But he had to admit that it was interesting nonetheless. He flicked ahead a few pages, until he came to one dated October 10th. It read;
Another strange dream last night, at least I hope that’s what it was… It seemed so real… It was horrible… I woke up in the dead of night and saw this black shadow standing in the middle of the room. I was too afraid to call out for help, in case the thing attacked me. I waited to see what it would do… I didn’t move an inch all night, I just lay in my bed paralysed with fear. I was certain I had been awake, and what is more, I felt whoever it was in that room, it was like he knew me…
A loud beep interrupted his reading. He went to the microwave and lifted the sweaty, steaming, pink hunk of meat onto a plate, before transferring it into the oven. The next entry of note had been penned on 14 November 2015. In it, she described how she had awoken with her feet covered in mud and pine needles. Her memories of the previous nights dreams were hazy and incomplete. But while she could not account for anything else, one thing was now abundantly clear in her mind; at some point during the night and for reasons completely unknown to her, she had gone outside the house. The prognosis was obvious. Rosemary suffered from an extreme form of sleep walking. She had gone off into the forest, where she had most likely fallen, hit her head and died of exposure.
As he continued reading he saw that she had written a different entry on the same day (using a different colour pen), which made him question his assumptions. Rosemary wrote of a small triangular mark on the back of her thigh that she had only noticed after showering. It wasn’t particularly painful, but it clearly worried her, as she didn’t know what it was or how it had gotten there. The entries continued through January, all of which featured the odd appearance of the Shadow Man (as she had come to term him); his advances were becoming noticeably more invasive and aggressive towards her. During this period, Rosemary wrote that she was feeling increasingly isolated from her friends and family and that she was falling behind in her school work. This he realised was the girl’s final plea for help, but for some reason no one heard it or came to her aid.
The last entry in her diary was dated February 29th 2016; a leap day, and seemed to suggest a more positive outlook on the world. However, the entry was vague and relied upon a host of commonly used platitudes such as “everything happens for a reason” and “I know it will all work out for the better in the end.”
Was it possible there was someone preying on the young girl? Perhaps her killer had gotten hold of her somehow and forced her to write these messages. He didn’t know; maybe if he could find out the identity of the man they had brought in for questioning in Portland he would have a better idea.
Harmon logged onto the internet and began scrolling down through the posts his friends had made over the last week or so. He stopped when he saw a post from Samantha Harding. Evidently, her parents hadn’t gotten around to deleting her account yet. The post mentioned something about “love at first sight being annoying” and Harmon wondered if it wasn’t another direct snub towards him. He had, after all come on fairly strong when he first met Samantha. He dismissed it as paranoia. He was fairly sure that she had regularly been fending of a slew of admirers; she certainly was pretty enough. He continued to scroll through her photos her found another curious coincidence. In a series of images of her sitting on a train, he saw her take a photograph of a particular book that they had been discussing together and then in the very next image she was giving an obnoxious hand sign. This was harder to shake off as mere paranoia and it made him feel uncomfortable.
He clicked away from it and posted some more photographs of his newest painting. The image was of a young girl; aged about nine years old sitting on the floor of his bedroom with her back to the viewer. This was the sight that had greeted him upon awakening in this very room one morning, several weeks ago. Confused as to the identity of the young girl he naturally reached out towards her. As he was about to touch her shoulder, the girl turned suddenly to reveal serpentine eyes filled with burst blood vessels and a mouth filled with rows of hooked teeth. He recalled how badly it shocked him and how he had awoken that same instant to an empty room. He played around with a number of comments in the subject line of the painting and then settled on; “Don’t Sleep, They’ll get you.”
He liked it; it had a kind of eerie feel to it. He posted it up onto his feed and awaited any likes and comments it might attract. He waited five, ten, fifteen minutes without so much as a response and then he switched off the computer. That was it, he thought, I’ve definitely made the wrong choice. In the past when he had been painting scenes of urban decay around Albany, he had gotten numerous likes and comments on his work. But since moving over to the surreal environment of his dreams, interest in his work had declined sharply. What was it all about? he wondered. He recalled how his tutors had warned him against investigating the surreal world of dreams as it had been sufficiently and expertly covered by the likes of Salvador Dali and Magritte; whom he both loved and respected. He had assumed that criticism of the surrealist genre was confined to the snobby art world and that the general public at large would be more forgiving. But for some reason it was impossible to get his friends to give him any feedback on his work.
Perhaps they were jealous, he thought. Yes, that was it, they are jealous of his creative abilities, as well as by the strange and mysterious life he led. What he needed was a hook, some kind of viral marketing strategy to get them interested in his work. The comment he had written earlier to describe the mood of his painting came back into his mind.
About ten minutes into gym class, Anastasia was blind-sided by a basketball to the face. Once she got over the initial shock, she looked around and saw Valerie, Annette and Amelia all standing together looking at her. “Sorry, Anastasia,” called Amelia with feigned compassion, but she could see by Valerie’s easy smile that it had been no accident.
After that her relationship with the rest of the group continued on a sharp, downward curve. She was rarely passed the ball; except by Wendy, her one remaining friend it appeared, and jeering ensued whenever she tried to take a shot on net. To make matters worse, she could not shake the feeling that Mr. Bulwark was staring at her breasts whenever she moved around. Naturally, this made her feel even more self-conscious and uneasy to the degree that it interrupted her game. Whenever Mr. Bulwark caught her slacking, however, he would blow his whistle and shout; “Get in there.”
This frustrated her, but what could she do? In the end, she had to adopt a new way of running. But this more stiffened posture put extra strain on her muscles and led to her getting exhausted more quickly. In the end, Mr. Bulwark blew his whistle again and called time. As the girls all filed past him out of the hall, she heard him say. “Good work, girls. Now don’t forget to get out of those wet things and take a shower…”
Harmon’s flat was so small that often the only surface large enough to work on was his bed. He mixed a small amount of vermillion with yellow ochre to create a bright orange colour and then used a roller to coat the canvas thoroughly. He managed to get some of the paint on the sheets, but he didn’t mind. There was paint all over his flat; paint on the walls and on the tables and chairs; along with more unnamable stains.
Some weeks ago, he had started to keep a dream diary; jotting down snippets of dreams and sketching out scenes from them to be used as the basis of paintings later on. Sometimes he would dream about galleries and see entire exhibits laid out before him. He would see works of exquisite beauty in, as yet undiscovered styles. Often these images contained words or letters and compartments which contained yet more images. But his recollection of these compartments and the words were often fuzzy and so he was unable to accurately recreate them in the real life.
He flicked through his dream diary to select an image. He knew that he was going to recreate a scene from one of his most recent dreams, but he wasn’t exactly sure which one. In the end, he settled on the on; the image was of a bare-chested muscular man with a shaven head who looked like he belonged in some kind of martial arts spectacular. The man appeared dejected and next to him in all capital letters were the words; “ALL THIS TIME MY FRIEND WAS A TRAITOR.”
He didn’t understand the significance of these words. He couldn’t even remember the context of the dream, but this in itself was not unusual for him, as very often his dream recall was incomplete. Nevertheless, there was something compelling about the image and he felt certain that it would be well received down in “The Cascades”; a café-bar that sometimes let him display his work. They might even offer him a few free drinks. He could live in hope…
The girls were exiting the Meeting Hall, just as the Seven Form boys came by. They stopped to exchanged hugs and kisses with the girls. This left her feeling even more like an outsider than ever, and to make matters worse, some of the boys were actually very handsome, particularly a tall blond-haired boy named Alex.
But, as she was soon to discover, being the new girl had its own advantages; everyone wanted to talk to her and find out more about who she was and where she had come from. Alex and his close friend Marvin took the greatest interest. Alex looked like he might be at home on a football field scoring touchdowns, while Marvin looked like he would be more comfortable indoors playing video games. He was smaller, darker and slightly overweight, but there was something sweet and endearing in his lack of confidence.
She noticed that both Annette and Amelia appeared to be especially sour at her for having attracted so much attention from the boys. She tried her best to enjoy their pain and make the most of it. “You are the new girl, aren’t you?” asked Alex.
“That’s right.”
“Wendy aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“Introduce yourself…” said Wendy, forgetting her manners.
“I’m Alex,” he said stretching out his hand. “And this is Marvin,” he said pointing to his silent companion.
“Pleased to meet you…”
“So where are you from?”
“Albany.”
“Really, that close by? We’re from the East Coast… So how are you finding your first day at the camp?” He began his not too original line of questioning and smiled.
“It’s not so bad…”
Wendy passed behind her; touching her arm.
“You don’t think it is a bit weird?”
“Maybe a bit, yeah…” She turned in time to see Mr. Bulwark exiting from the sports hall; and giving her a half curious look back in her direction as he did so.
“Don’t worry,” said Alex, his bright smile returning. “You’ll get used to it. What level are you guys all on?”
“Stage four,” replied Valerie.
“What about you Wendy?”
“I completed Stage three at the start of the summer.”
“I’m still stuck on three,” pouted Annette.
“Oh don’t feel bad,” Wendy said rubbing her shoulder. “Stage three is a really difficult.”
“Yeah, I was stuck on that one for a good while,” replied Valerie.
“What are you talking about?” asked Anastasia.
“The different dreaming stages,” explained Wendy. “There’s five in total.”
“Six,” corrected Valerie.
“Well, six…. But the last one is sort of forbidden.”
“Not forbidden exactly,” corrected Valerie. “Just unknown…”
“But what are they?”
“David will probably go over all that since you’re new here and all…”
“You’ll have to start at the beginning,” said Annette, as though struck by some frightful realisation and then a look of relief came over her. “Well, at least I don’t have to do that…”
She had this anxious feeling that sometimes appears when one has missed a number of classes at the start of the year and finds themselves lagging behind in their work load.
“So Anastasia?” called Alex.
“Yes?”
“Anastasia what?” he said. “What’s you surname?”
“Cullen…”
“Cullen? What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s a detective…”
“A detective? Like a police detective?
“What other kind is there?”
“I think she means Police Chief, don’t you?” said Amelia hovering close behind her shoulder like a bird of prey.
“No,” replied Anastasia shrugging her off.
“What about your mother?”
“Well…” she looked at her feet in the yellow dirt of the road. “She’s dead, actually.”
There was a silence. “Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She took a deep breath. “It was a long time ago… What do your parents do?”
“My parents are both investment bankers, from Corsica originally.”
“My dad works for the ICG,” said Valerie.
“What’s that?”
“The International Crisis Group?”
“Never heard of it.”
“They deal with all humanitarian matters across the globe and help out in war situations. My father is one of the project managers.”
She was impressed. Everyone at Camp Calapuyau seemed so refined and well-connected. For the first time all morning, she began to wonder if she wasn’t completely out of her depth.
* * *
After dinner, Walter drove across town to Hill Street and knocked on the door of Amanda Carrington’s residence. A middle-aged man wearing a dark dressing gown and slippers answered the door with a perplexed expression on his face.
“I’m from the police department. I’m here to speak with Amanda,” he explained.
Mr. Carrington invited him inside. “Would you like anything? A coffee perhaps?”
“No, that’s all right, I’m fine.”
“Why don’t you wait in here? I’ll give them both a call,” He opened the door to a bright and spacious living area with a plasma TV screen in one corner and comfortable looking couch in the other. Lying on the rug was a large mass of ivory coloured hair, belonging to a dangerously overweight family dog. The docile retriever lifted its head up off the floor momentarily, decided he wasn’t a threat and went back to sleep. He started to get the feeling this might have been a wasted trip. These girls didn’t have any real information that could help him out. But it was important to check all avenues. He sat down on the blue couch and moments later the man poked his head in around by a set of double doors. “They’ll be down in a minute.”
He nodded.
“Terrible news about Samantha, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Presently there was the sound of light and quick feet upon the stairs. The man withdrew and in the same instant Amanda and Julia appear through another door. He noticed that they were dressed for a night on the town. They were both wearing short black mini-skirts and harmoniously coloured blouses. Amanda sat in the chair in front of him with Julia perched to one side; her long black stockinged legs arranged lengthwise towards him, as though on display.
“Hello again,” he began; being selective with his words. “Thank you for meeting with me. I know what a difficult time you must be going through right now…”
The girls both looked at each other anxiously and appeared to rearrange themselves into more conservative poses.
“I won’t take up too much of your time,” he continued. “I’d just like to ask you both a few questions that’s all…”
“Sure,” began Amanda. “I mean if there’s anything we can do to help…”
“Did something happen to Samantha?” asked Julia. “I mean, did someone do something to her?”
“No. We have no reason to suspect anyone… If that’s what you mean…”
The girls both seemed to relax.
“You were both friends with Samantha, weren’t you? You went to school together?”
“That’s right. We took nearly all of our classes together…”
“What about outside of school? Did you see much of her there?”
“Sure,” said Amanda running her fingers through her hair. “We were best of friends. I saw her almost every weekend.”
“And how would you describe her mood over the last couple of weeks. Did she seem distressed? Was anything bothering her?”
“No,” she replied frowning. “She didn’t mention anything, anyway.”
“So, no strange dreams, or anything like that?”
“Dreams? No… She would have told me. We told each other everything…”
He grimaced.
“I did notice that she looked a bit thinner than usual,” interjected Julia.
“Oh yeah,” Amanda concurred.
“We thought she might be a bit bulimic that’s all.”
“Yeah, she like to stick her fingers down her throat…”
His eyebrows went up when Julia said this.
“OK,” he said standing up. “Thanks for your time…”
They both got up off the chair and followed him across the room, barefoot, siren-like. “Is there anything we can do for you, Mr. Cullen?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… We can stick our fingers down your throat, for starters…”
His eyebrow went up involuntarily. “Maybe later…” he said.
Unbelievable… What the hell was the matter with teenagers these days, anyway, he thought as he made his way out the front door to his car. He had no intention of going near those two, but this was the first time he had experienced that he had been propositioned like that and he knew it was only a matter of time, before the crept back inside of his mind again.
Anastasia followed Wendy around the back of the amphitheatre and up the sloping path into the forest. They climbed a set of flagstone steps that chicaned between beds of wild chickweed and pennyworth. The path led them up a steep muddy slope; at the top of which was a wooden hut with a single yellow light shining forth into the gloom. She could see the other girls gathered together outside; waiting to go in. To her right, in a clearing, lit by the last reflected light of evening was a wooden house, not unlike the kind you would regularly see in older neighbourhoods around Albany. The house rested on the hillside, and was propped up on stilts to keep the structure level.
“That’s the Director’s house,” said Wendy. “Jasper Collins and Miss Lytton both live there… Mr. Bulwark, too.”
“It’s a nice house.”
“On the outside maybe…It’s a bit of a dump inside…”
“Really?”
“It’s just a bit damp…”
She could see reeds growing up at the front of the house, which suggested that the ground there was waterlogged and marshy. “I see what you mean…”
“Come on,” said Wendy impatient. “We’ll have to get inside quick, if we want to get a good seat….”
Together they tramped up the wooden steps through the door of the little chalet. It was much newer looking than the other chalets down by the lake. Inside the girls were all reclining on oversized bean bags, but there was; at present, no sign of the Dreaming Instructor.
Wendy found a small white bean bag in the corner and they shared it. The room was more like a chill-out room at a festival or dancehall than an actual classroom. A designer lamp made of twisted steel sat on a small cabinet and there were also a number of psychedelic themed posters on the wall; including Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver. All around the top of the room ran a single shelf on which were books, ornate wooden boxes and numerous glass jars filled with seemingly random pieces of bric-a-brac. David emerged through a curtain, concealing a mysterious back room.
“Ah ladies, you made it,” he said lighting another lamp in the corner. “Excellent, shall we begin?” he seated himself on a stool in front of them and scanned around the room with his inimitable gaze. “Let me get a good look at you all… A lot of stage fours here, I see… that’s good. Wendy stage three, not bad… We’ll have to work on that… And Annette… Stage two… What happened?”
“I know,” she groaned and pretended to sob into her hands.
The seventh form girls found her theatrics amusing.
“Not to worry. We’ll work on stage three later on together… Who else have we got?” he said glancing around. “You,” his eyes rested on her. “What’s your name?”
“Anastasia Cullen, sir.”
“Anastasia…” he said nervously flicking a broken piece of chalk through his nimble fingers. “You don’t appear to have reached any level…”
All the girls except Wendy laughed at this.
“It wasn’t a joke,” he said indignant. “Well, how do you account for this?”
“I don’t know…”
“She’s a newblood, sir,” said Amelia.
The girls laughed again.
“And a Christian,” said Valerie.
“A Christian?” The chalk was spinning again now, this time faster.
“But she’s not really. I mean she’s not practicing,” interjected Wendy. She seemed to be making a deliberate effort to stress that point. What for?
“My,” repeated David. “A Christian… Not too many of them left about,” he said and sounded very pleased. “Well, I suppose we’ll have to start back at the beginning with you. You have a lot of catching up to do.”
“How is she going to catch up with us?” protested Amelia. “She should be back in Form One with the juniors.”
“Now, now, girls remember that you’re all family here… Besides, I think you could do with a bit of a refresher course… Who can tell me what the first level of dreaming is?”
Amelia raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“In the first stage, you look for your hands.”
“That’s correct,” he wrote this up on the blackboard. “And the second stage? Valerie?”
“In the second stage, you must fall asleep within a dream.”
“That’s right. We call it ‘translation’ because we are moving through the dream world.” He wrote down; Second Stage; translation. “And the third?”
“Seeing yourself within a dream,” said Annette.
“Correct,” he said writing that up on the board. “The fourth is dreamwalking and the fifth is shapeshifting. What’s the sixth?”
“The sixth is only for adepts,” came the reply.
“That’s right… It is forbidden to know or learn about the sixth gate ahead of time… But lets say we did want to find out, where would we go?”
Several of the girls put up their hands.
“Yes, Wilma?”
“Apocalypsis, by Eamon Radcliffe…”
“That’s right,” he said writing that on the board. “Have you all go your Book of Shadows to hand? Take them out… This is very important… You must write down every dream you have in there from now on. Can anyone explain to Anastasia, why do we do this?”
“It helps with dream recall,” replied Valerie. “As what use is being able to control your dreams, if you can’t recall them when you wake up?”
“Very well put Valerie,” he moved around the classroom again looking at his feet. “So with regards the first stage of dreaming, the basic principle is what?… Regular reality checks?”
The girls agreed.
“And how do we do these?”
“We look for our hands regularly and ask ‘Am I dreaming?’”
“Excellent. Then you were having a lucid dream and what’s one of the great things about lucid dreaming?”
There was no answer.
“It means that you can fly, doesn’t it? And you walk through walls, stop and reverse time, and take over people’s minds. How does that sound to you Anastasia?”
Anastasia had never had a flying dream before, and she wanted one now more than ever. “It sounds great,” she said.
There was an audible groan from some of the other Seven Form girls.
“Ok class, I want you to write down your most recent dreams, or a dream that had a great effect on you in your notebooks and then I’ll interpret them for you.”
The dream that stuck out most in her mind was the one that she had when she was very young. She was in a harbour, sitting on a slipway used by boats to get in and out of the water. She had a big bag of toys and was playing with them, as children do. Her mother was there and a man who was supposed to be her father, according to the logic of the dream, but in reality looked nothing like him. Her parents were both standing on different sides of a canal, a fact which represented a schism between them. All of a sudden, her father grew angry with her, he picked up the bag of toys and threw them into the sea. Then concrete slipway split from the land and she was upturned and thrown into the sea.
But, she decided not to write this dream down; it was too personal. Instead, she settled for the more recent dream. In the dream, she was walking around her house in Albany. But there were extra rooms and staircases that did not exists ordinarily, when she was awake. Nothing much ever happened, but in one instance, she encountered a bear living in one of the basement rooms. She wrote this down and he came over and examined it. He told her the dream suggested that she would soon be exposed to both new and exciting experiences and find hidden depths within herself. “The symbol of the bear,” he said. “Means that you will find within yourself a deep inner strength.”
She recalled what she had learnt from the class with Mr. Collins earlier that morning about animals. Dream interpretation didn’t seem all that difficult to her, in light of this. “Over all a very auspicious dream,” he said and passed the book back in her direction.
She smiled. Up until now their attraction had been largely hypothetical, but now she felt the genuine connection that develops when learning about the world from someone. It was like a warm tingling feeling that covered her over and made her feel protected and she didn’t want to ever let it go.
Walter’s feeling that tonight’s investigation would be a wasted effort had been correct. He knew from reading Rosemary’s diary how difficult it was for sleep paralysis victims to come forward to talk about their experiences. Maybe Samantha had been a sufferer, but simply hadn’t spoken up about it. It might explain her deterioration in health, shortly before her death. He put his notes aside and started up the car. There was a full moon rising over the Pine Forest Mountain in the distance. What time was it? Nine thirty; how long had he been sitting here he wondered? Anastasia would probably be getting ready for bed now. He seemed to recall the camp had a ten o’clock curfew. Ouch! He couldn’t imagine Anastasia being fond of that.
He wondered how she was getting on. If she was fitting in all right. Stop worrying, he thought, it’s not like she is twelve anymore. She is all of fourteen and kids these days grow up fast. Faster than most parents would like to admit, at any rate. He just hoped that she had more sense than the two femme-fatales he had encountered tonight.
As he drove back towards his house he recalled his own upbringing and how he had gotten involved in drug abuse. He had knocked all of that on the head, but every now and again he got the urge to roll a joint or pop some pills. He was thinking about it now; with Anastasia away in camp, he could do what he liked. But, no this was madness… He had given it up for her. He would not go back to his old ways. Not for anything…
Wendy and Anastasia went back into the warm night air. It smelled of woodbine and pine sap. She watched as Valerie and the others passed them by on the way back to the dorm rooms. “They don’t like me much do they?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” murmured Wendy. “Don’t worry. They’ll come around. They’ll find someone else to hate on eventually.”
She was about to say something else, when a sound coming from her lefthand side made her turn. Standing on the porch of the house, she saw two figures drenched in the pale glow of moonlight. She recognised them as Kat Lytton and Mr. Collins. “Please Kitty,” Mr. Collins said. “Don’t be like that, come inside…”
She and Wendy looked at one another and snickered.
“Wendy Hamilton and Anastasia Cullen….” said Ms. Lytton who evidently had no trouble making their identities despite the gloom. “Your supposed to be at your dorm room. Curfew is in five minutes.”
“Yes, Miss Lytton,” replied Wendy. “Come on lets go…”
How had Ms. Lytton been able to see them? It was true that the light of the moon lit up everywhere to an appreciably bright level, but it did not penetrate the dense canopy overhead. They ought to remain invisible and yet Ms. Lytton had picked them out easily. How could this have been? As they passed by the front of the house, Wendy turned to her and said; “Don’t look.”
But it was too late. She had spotted him. Sitting motionless, in the centre of the swamp that was their front garden was Mr. Bulwark, gazing vacantly at the moon.
When they came back to the dorm rooms, Anastasia got her tooth brush and went to the shower block to brush her teeth. The washroom was long and narrow, with seven stalls on the right covered over by blue shower curtains. She stopped by a washbasin and began brushing her teeth. Several of the other girls; including Annette and Wilma were at the other wash hand basins further down. They finished up before her. Her whole body tensed up as they went by. She was expecting some kind of attack. None came, however, and they left without so much as a word. Get a grip, she thought. A swishing sound from one of the stalls behind her. “Hello?”
No reply…
“Is there anybody there?”
All of a sudden, she was reminded of the seven foot tall Indian she had seen in the forest earlier that day. She imagined him standing in the shower in muddy boots, holding his stone axe, heavy breathing. The only barrier between her and a brutal death murder was that thin bit of plastic shower curtain. She didn’t waste time spitting out the remaining toothpaste, she just gathered up her things and left. Better just to swallow it, she thought, than stay in that cold and draughty room one more second, by her self.
When she got back to the dorm room, the Seven Form girls were all there; all except for Wendy. She noticed the dubious poses of the girls, as though they had just this minute been up to something or other. Carol Mason sat on the corner of her bunk, filing her nails, with Annette standing by her side. Despite their obvious attempts to appear nonchalant, there was something fake about the whole scene. There was an unnatural silence in the room, the nature of which she was at a loss to explain. She soon realised what it was, as she drew nearer the bed. Someone had up ended the waste paper basket there. Sweet wrappers, banana peels, and nameless things were all thrown across her bedspread. She cast a hateful eye across the room and her gaze found the malefic grin of Valerie Vanderbilt.
“Don’t Anastasia…” said Wendy who had just now appeared beside her.
She brushed her off and continued towards Valerie who was standing on the other side of the room near her bed. She saw the blouse that she had given Valerie earlier that same day and snatched it off the bedspread. “Hey, hands off…” cried Valerie tugging on the end of the garment. “That’s mine…”
“It’s mine…”
“Careful. You’ll rip it…”
There was a loud bang and Ms. Lytton’s voice sounded angrily in the room. “What’s going on here? Why are you all out of bed?”
“Take your stupid top… It’s cheapo anyway,” said Valerie relinquishing her grip.
What had she done, she wondered? If she thought things had been bad so far, just wait until tomorrow and the rest of the week and the week after that. She had now made enemies with the entire group and as she had earlier learnt; these were powerful people. Reputation and ritual meant everything to people like this.
“Alright lights out!” cried Ms. Lytton.
After Ms. Lytton had shut off the lights and closed over the dorm room door, she lay shivering for a moment in the cold airless bed. She listened for a while to the noises the other girls made as they drifted off to sleep and gradually even these subsided. But Anastasia could not sleep. The near violent encounter with Valerie only moments ago had her adrenaline pumping and she was unable to close her eyes for fear that at any moment some reprisal might be inbound from some corner of the room. She waited and the longer she waited, it became obvious that no such reprisals were to come. She felt like a doll on a string; being toyed with emotionally. Then, the urge to get out of bed and punch Valerie all over the head and in the mouth gripped her. She resisted it and her anger subsided.
After that, she lay there looking at the oblique shaft of opaque blue moonlight shining in through the window across the way. She felt like crying, but even her body was against her on that front. She longed to be at home with her father and away from this place… It was only the first day of Camp Calapuyau. Did she really want to stay for a month of this? She decided that if things didn’t improve that she would call up her father and have him come collect her. She hated the idea of running away; especially since it was her mother who had applied and gotten the place at the camp for her. She had assumed that this would mean that she would have a good experience, but the opposite had proven to be the case.
Sometime later, she was not exactly sure how long, she awoke again into the darkness of the dorm room. Everything was still and quiet around her. The other girls were in their beds, fast asleep and breathing softly. And yet there was something out of place… Her eyes turned towards the window, where the face of a man was peering in through the window at her. His eyes were wide and bright like the moonlight streaming in behind him. Her imagination must have been getting the better of her again, because it looked like the same Native American man, she had seen in the forest again. His searching eyes found hers in the darkness. She tried to scream, but she wasn’t able to move and then lapsed into unconsciousness.
Anastasia had not gone far, when she got the distinct and uneasy feeling of being watched. She looked around her, but could see no-one. The rest of the class was some distance away and out of sight. To her left, she noticed a dense thicket of holly trees. Was there something in there? She pushed through the spiny leaves into a wide clearing.
Empty.
Just as she was about to turn around and leave, she heard a twig crack and a tall man with a face carved from redwood made his way into through the branches of the trees. Clearly this man was a Native American, she thought, one of the First Nation’s people. Was he Calapuyau? Did they still exist in this area? She stood facing the tall Native American from across the ring of holly trees, so they must. Then the obvious question; what was she doing in this part of the woods all by herself?
The man stared at her and then she noticed that he was carrying a weapon in the form of a stone axe bound with twine. As soon as she saw the weapon, she started to back away. And then she was running, running towards the scouts and Ms. Lytton where she knew she would be safe. She pushed through the holly trees, scratching her arms and legs badly and then ran, without stopping, all the way back to where the others were still collecting flowers.
“Where’ve you been?” asked Wendy.
She decided not to mention her vision of the old Indian; the last thing she wanted to do was draw attention to herself and be labelled a crackpot. “I just went for a walk,” she said.
“You should be more careful… You can wind up anywhere in these woods…”
She looked at her friend, perhaps she knew about the Old Indian after all, she thought.
Walter knocked on the door of 162 Waverly Drive and a thin woman with white rimmed glasses and thick black hair opened the door. “Mrs. Short?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“My name is Detective Walter Cullen. I’m with the Albany County police department?”
“Oh yes, my husband said you would call. Won’t you come in?”
He stepped into the carpeted hallway and followed Mrs. Short into the kitchen.
The Short family was an interesting, if tragic case. Their eight year old son Brian, an only child, had been taken from them suddenly one night in late 2013. The case was highly unusual, given the age of the child and his apparent lack of any medical history. Whilst foul-play was not suspected, the county coroner had been called to conduct an autopsy on the young boy to ascertain the precise cause and time of death.
According to the police report, the autopsy had taken place at the Surgeons General Hospital on November 27th and was concluded the same day. However, the coroner’s findings were not released to the family until several weeks later. The hospital had said that they were waiting on toxicology reports, which turned up negative in any case. Walter was suspicious about this and went to the Albany County Sheriff’s office, where the report had been filed and noted that the examination was dated November 29th.
It was obvious that someone wasn’t telling the truth.
He sat down at the kitchen table and Mrs. Short offered him a glass of water. “Mrs. Short…”
“Please call me Angela.”
“Very well, Angela… I’d like to get straight down to business, if you don’t mind.”
“No… that’s fine.”
“According to the coroner’s report your son died of acute pancreatitis. Is that right?”
“That’s what they say, but my husband and I don’t really believe that.”
“Why not?”
“… Pancreatitis doesn’t just come out of nowhere… There are symptoms, you know, for weeks — even months — in advance.”
“Stomach cramp… that sort of thing…”
“Exactly. Brain was a normal healthy young boy. He playing around, no problem…”
“Have you challenged the report officially?”
“I have.” She reached for a pack of Kents, lit one and blew a cloud of blue smoke across the room. “After we brought it up… the coroner, what’s his name?”
“Thomas Sloane…”
“That’s right, that asshole. He said that the diagnosis was only speculative and that the real cause of death was unknown…”
“Unknown?”
“Yes. Can you believe that?”
He shook his head.
“I mean, I thought that if you signed off on a document the least that you could do is be honest, you know? But our boy isn’t the only one this has happened to… there are others…”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah… That’s the reason the whole thing is being swept under the rug. But you’re taking an interest in the case now, so that’s something at least…” she sounded hopeful.
“I’m not here on an official capacity… There isn’t really an awful lot that the police can do in a case like this. They usually don’t bother with them.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I have a child too and I’m curious…”
“I see,” she said nodding slowly and then took a drag of her cigarette. “Well, regardless, we’re very happy someone’s working on our behalf. Lord knows, it’s taken long enough.”
“Is that Brian there?” he pointed to a picture of a young boy with brown hair being held by an elderly lady.
“Yes,” she said retrieving it from wall.
“Is that the boy’s grandmother?”
“Yes… He loved his gran…” she smiled.
“I wonder if you could tell me about incidents leading up to Brian’s passing… Things he might have said. If he had any strange interests, or unusual visitations from people or organisations?”
She sat pensively for a moment. “No, I can’t think of anything,” she began. “Well, there was one thing. But perhaps I’d better show you…”
He followed Angela up the stairs and went into a small room off the landing.
“We keep it just as it was…”
He looked around the little room. It had been several years since a child had slept in it, but you would hardly have known. Then the thought struck him that Brian would have been twelve by now. He would have lost interest in most of these toys and taken up an interest in girls, most likely. He felt a strong empathy for the Shorts. He wasn’t sure how he would react if his daughter were taken from him in similar circumstances. But he knew from losing his wife, Julia, that it served no good purpose to dwell on the past too long. You had to get on with life as best you could and avoid turning the places they frequented into a shrine, or a tomb…
Angela bent down and lifted up an old cardboard box filled with papers; placing it on the bed. “These paintings,” she said taking out a number of crumbled pages. “We just thought that he was expressing himself… You know, boys will be boys, but then… Now that I think about it does seem almost prescient… Sort of, spooky, really, in light of what happened…”
Looking at the paintings, he could see what she meant. The images, daubed in black and red paint, showed what appeared to be a huge dark figure with square head standing in a doorway.
“He called it the Shadow Man…”
“The Shadow Man?”
“It all began when he started having those… what-do-you-call-them?” she said search for the word. “Night terrors… He said that on several occasions a giant came into his room and pressed down on his chest…”
“Night terrors…” said Walter aloud. “Do you mind if I take this?”
“No, I don’t mind. Do you think it could be related?”
He had stopped listening to her now and looked at the drawing one more time. It stirred something deep within him; something unruly, something better left alone.
After the herbalism class, Anastasia followed Wendy and Valerie back down the mountain and into the confines of the amphitheatre. The structure was built from large stone steps that doubled as seats. In the centre was a fire pit filled with ashes and above that was a stone column with its top broken off. Wendy went to the edge of the pit and started crushing bits of charcoal with the toes of her white plastic Converse shoes.
Valerie turned to Anastasia and said, “I love your hair…”
“Thanks… I don’t like how wavy it is…” she said pulling at it.
“Are you kidding me? I wish I had hair like yours.”
“Really?”
“Hey, why don’t you let me braid it?” She began taking strands of her golden hair and threading them over one another; back and forth in an intricate dance.
“So, what did you think of Ms. Lytton?” she asked.
“I like her, actually.”
“She’s a bit dry don’t you think?”
“Yeah maybe,” But then again most adults are, she thought. “I still can’t get over how flirty she and Mr. Collins were on stage this morning. I mean… how obvious can you get?”
“Oh that’s nothing, believe me,” replied Valerie. “One time I was going into the library to return a book and you know the way Ms. Lytton and Mr. Collins both have their offices in there? Yeah well, I was walking by Mr. Collins’ office and the door was open… and you won’t believe what I saw…”
“What? Tell us…” said Wendy coming closer.
“… I saw Ms. Lytton, down on her hands and knees on the floor and Mr. Collins was making her drink out of a bowl of milk… And he was saying things like; Does Ms. Kitty want some milk? and there’s a good kitty.”
“Ugh. Did they catch you looking?”
“No, I don’t think so…”
“You’re lucky that would have been awkward…” she giggled.
“Whatever about that, but did you ever see anything as freaky as Mr. Haight? The Caretaker?”
“Oh I know…”
“That was some speech he gave at assembly this morning. I didn’t know whether to laugh or run away crying…”
“‘Those children had their all skin burnt clean off…’” said Wendy hunching over to do her best impression of the middle-aged janitor. They all laughed and then fell silent.
Valerie pulled on the braid to make sure it was straight. “There what do you think?”
“Looks nice,” replied Wendy.
“I’m bored now,” she said and kicked her feet. “Hey, I’ve got an idea lets play truth or Truth or Dare.”
“OK.”
“Truth…”
Wendy thought for a moment. “Which of the Seven Form boys would you be with…”
“None of them… My heart is for David,” she said clutching at her breast dramatically.
“Who’s David?”
“He’s the dreaming instructor…”
“And he’s totally dreamy…” pined Valerie.
“OK then, which one of them would you be with, if you absolutely had to…”
“Oh I see… well that’s different… Probably Alex, or possibly Burke, I guess. You?”
“Alex,” she nodded. “… Or maybe Marvin.”
“Uh, why Marvin?” her face twisting in disgust.
“Why not?” shrugged Wendy. “I just think he’s cute and sweet is all…”
“What about you Anastasia?”
“She hasn’t met any of the boys, yet Val. Remember?”
“Oh that’s right. You’ll have to do a dare, then… And I know just the thing…” said Valerie a mischievous grin darkening her face. “Follow me…”
Valerie led them out of the stone amphitheatre in the direction of the Library. About half way along they came to a flagstone path and at the end of the path, just next to the forest was the white shed. “There it is,” said Valerie. “I dare you to take a look.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“I am… You can’t chicken out now…”
“It’s a stupid dare. What about what Mr. Haight said?”
“You didn’t honestly actually believe that did you?”
She had believed it, now she felt a bit stupid for having done so. “Alright, I’ll do it.”
As she drew nearer the shed, she had the vague intuition of some impending catastrophe. The feeling started out small and remote, but began to deepen with each step, until it could no longer be ignored. She stopped and turned around to look at her two friends, standing some yards behind her. “Go on,” urged Valerie.
This was stupid, she thought. What, in the hell, am I afraid of? She turned back in the direction of the shed, but as soon as she did, the unsettling sensations returned. It was as though there was some malevolent energy pulsating from behind the shed. The horror of it repulsed her, but at the same time she felt a sort of attraction to it and to all things devilish and wild.
She stepped closer along the flagstone path and lay her fingers lightly upon the latch. Hoping against hope that it might yet be locked and that she wouldn’t have to continue on any further. She couldn’t go on; but neither could she back out — not with Wendy and Valerie both watching her. So, she decided to do the next best thing. She lied.
“It’s locked.”
“No, it isn’t,” chided Valerie.
“It is, come and see for yourself.” She was hoping they would be too afraid to come and see for themselves, but they both walked abruptly in her direction.
“It’s not locked,” said Valerie looking at the door bolt.
“Well, I couldn’t open it.”
“Weakling… Let me have a go…” Valerie reached towards the locked and a large, dark, hairy hand grabbed her by the wrist.
Harmon crossed Clinton Avenue and went up by St. Catherine’s Community School to his apartment. Along the way he surveyed some of the derelict houses by the roadside. The ornately framed windows reminded him of picture frames, only instead of them shedding light on the interiors and the lives of those who lived there, they revealed nothing but a piece of old chip board. In some ways it had been the dilapidated streets of Albany which had initially turned his mind towards the idea of being a painter. He found the vacant lots and backstreets interesting, as though they might open up into another world where different laws of physics prevailed, or at least fewer of them. But as he grew older, he came to resent these hollowed out old wrecks. They were indicative of social decay that was now consuming his life as well as that of the city. It was strange that a young man of twenty-six should think like that. And yet, it was somehow inescapably true, where he was concerned.
In the last year, he had completed more than a hundred canvases, some of them quite large-scale works and all of them delicately rendered in expensive oils. But he had sold almost nothing; and hardly enough to keep from drowning in debt and bills. His parents helped him out on occasion, but he hated having to rely on them for money. Maybe, if he gave another year to painting that someone somewhere would recognise his ability. Maybe, then, he would begin to get noticed. But it wasn’t to be, and the gap in his resumé was widening. His only other option was to earn a bit of extra cash by busking on the street with his guitar. He hated being reduced to begging on the street like this. But what else could he do?
Worse still was the looks he got from people, women mostly, as they went pottering about their daily errands with hair cuts worth hundreds of dollars. These people never dropped a coin in his guitar case, in fact ironically, the only people who ever gave him any money were the homeless drunks and drug addicts that were everywhere around here. It had forced him to view the world entirely differently.
It wasn’t the poor and disenfranchised that were to be hated, feared and despised, rather it was the well-off classes. They were the ones who spent the day drifting around jewellery stores dangling diamonds off their earlobes, while he sat half starving on the street corner across the way. You couldn’t eat diamonds, at least not without breaking all of your teeth.
Walter sat in his car for a few minutes researching ‘night terrors’ on his phone. Up until now, he had thought that it was synonymous with nightmare, but as he researched more on the subject, he became aware that it was a legitimate and self-contained phenomenon. The condition affected one in five people at some point in their lives and was characterised by a phantom presence that creeps into people’s bedrooms whilst they slept. This phantom entity is usually unpleasant to look at and can apparently take on any form it chooses, including; a shadowy figure called Hat Man (so called because he is typically seen wearing a fedora) an old hag, a troll or even a giant.
Almost all of the sleep paralysis victims describe being watched from a vantage point in the room. At others times the entity would climb on top of them or choke them from behind. A common characteristic reported in all cases was the inability of the victim to either move or speak throughout the experience and why the condition was also referred to as ‘sleep paralysis’. He wondered if the recent deaths in the Albany could be related somehow. Perhaps an inter-dimensional phantom like the Hat Man was behind it all. There were even reports of a sexual motivation behind some of these attacks. The reluctance of people reporting made it difficult to say how common this phenomenon was. This made sense. The victims were already feeling alone, vulnerable and probably fearing for their sanity. And what were they going to do? Phone up their local police station and tell them they were being raped by a ghost? Nah, he started his car. He bet the boys down at the precinct would get a kick out of that.
“What are you girls doing here?” bellowed the Caretaker. “You know you’re not supposed to be anywhere near this shed…”
All three of them recoiled in horror.
“Weren’t you at this morning’s assembly?” he said laying a wooden slat across door to bar the way.
“Yes, Mr. Haight,” replied Valerie.
“There’s chemicals and machinery in there that would blind you… Go on. Clear off…”
The three girls hurried from that place, feeling more embarrassed than scared.
She was beginning to get more accustomed to Camp Calapuyau and she wasn’t at all sure she liked it. There were just too many restrictive rules. No playing at the tool shed, and no mixing with boys. This was supposed to be a summer camp, she thought, it was supposed to be fun…
Without really meaning to, they arrived at the door to the library. Wendy tugged on the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Is it open?” asked Valerie.
She cupped her hands round her face and peered in through the glass. “No, it’s locked.”
“Well, there goes another plan…”
Around the side of building, she found three totem poles stuck into the ground. “Hey, what are these?”
“That’s Jahbulon,” said Valerie pointing to the one in the middle. “He has three heads; a man’s head, a frog’s head and a cat’s head. See?”
She looked again at the bottom face and saw that it did indeed resemble that of a toad.
“He’s the reason we celebrate Bealtaine.”
“What’s that again?”
“It’s the Festival of Fires, we have it every year on the June 9th, in honour of Lord Jahbulon.”
“What are you some kind of a cult?”
Wendy laughed at this. “Well, you could say that… I bet that’s how it looks from the outside at any rate…”
“What religion are you, Anastasia?”
“Christian, I guess.”
“But you don’t go to church anymore, I’ll bet,” she said smiling.
“Well, not so much anymore,” she admitted.
“Then how can you call yourself a Christian?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think I’m any less Christian because of that.”
“Part of the reason why Eamon Radcliffe started this camp was that we could have a safe place from the persecutions of people like you… But we don’t have to hide anymore… We’ve been slowly chipping away at your institution; chipping away until there’s nothing left…”
She realised that Valerie was right, of course. Christianity had been in steady state of decline in America and the West, she couldn’t even remember the last time she had heard someone say Merry Christmas to her on the street. Nowadays it had been replaced with ‘Happy Holidays” if it was ever said at all.
“I’m bored with this newblood… You coming?”
“You go along…”
“Suit yourself,” said Valerie shooting her a harsh look and walking back in the direction of the Meeting Hall, her blonde hair swinging back and forth behind her.
“I’m so sorry about all that,” said Anastasia.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. Valerie can take things a bit too far sometimes…”
“Tell me about it…”
“I try not to get involved with the politics of this place. Sometimes the less you know the better…”
She was beginning to think her friend was right.
On their way back to the dorms, they passed Mr. Bulwark standing on a grass verge. He was looking up into the sky and following the trajectories of a cloud of swarming midges above his head. She noticed that his two bulbous eyes moved independently of one another. But this wasn’t the only disconcerting aspect of the man’s demeanour. Around his mouth he had a glaze of some tan-coloured fluid, which might have been honey or maple syrup. The flies were periodically getting stuck in this film of treacle and facial hair and just as frequently his large pink tongue reach out of his mouth and lick all around his face and chin.
“Eww, that’s gross.”
One of his peripatetic eyes fixed itself on them, “You girls best be getting along. Gym class starts in five…” he said.
They couldn’t wait to get away from there.
The Winters lived in a big house out in the MacDonald Dunne Forrest, just outside Adair, the next town over. They had lost their daughter Rosemary, earlier that same year. Rosemary was only seventeen, a gifted student with a bright future ahead of her. But that all came crashing to a halt, when they found her body laying half naked somewhere out in the woods.
Like in the Brian Short case, an autopsy report proved vague and inconclusive. Unlike their case, however, news of Rosemary’s death had galvanised the local Adair community and this resulted in a relentless manhunt for the suspected killer. A man in his mid to late twenties had been arrested and detained by the Portland Police Department in connection with the incident, but had later been released without charge. Why this was so, he had never been able to figure out.
He parked his car in a lay-by and crossed over the road to their house; a grey wooden period style home. Standing in the front lawn was a man holding a length of hose, watering the flowers. “Mr. Winters? Peter Winter?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Mr. Cullen from the Albany Police Department. I’m here to discuss—”
“Rosemary… Yes, I know, come on inside.” He shut the water off. “My wife and I have been expecting you. How did you find the drive?”
“Fine,” he said. “Very pleasant…” He always enjoyed the winding roads of the forest, especially when they were damp with rain.
“It’s a beautiful area,” Mr. Winter said echoing his thoughts. “Come on in.”
He followed him into a dark hallway filled with small delicate prints of fox hunting in the English countryside. “Are you a fox hunting enthusiast?”
“Not really. My wife likes to collect old stuff like that.”
“I see.”
“You’ll meet her in a moment. Audrey…” he called up the stairs. “The man from the police department is here… She won’t be a moment. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes,” replied Walter following the man into the kitchen.
A moment later tea was served. The cups featured the same images of fox hunting. Some enthusiast, he thought. The lady of the house came into the kitchen in her dressing gown and pyjamas. She sat down at the head of the table, “I’m sorry for my appearance Inspector, I’m not feeling all that well…”
“Don’t mention it… I’ve been following the case of your daughter for sometime… hoping to shed light on the issue.”
“Well, do forgive me for not being overly enthused,” she scowled. “We’ve had numerous investigators and detectives out looking for our daughter’s killer and nothing.”
“Surely, you’re aware that the Portland Police turned up a suspect only last week?”
“No,” said Peter shaking his head.
“You weren’t informed?”
“How did you hear about it? Through the police department was it?” His hand shook unsteadily as his set the cup back down into the saucer.
“No, it was in one of the local newspapers. The Portland Express…”
“Oh, we don’t get that newspaper out here.”
“Well, surely someone would have told you?”
Their silence indicated otherwise. Never in his thirty odd years on the force had he ever heard of such gross incompetence. The first people to be informed about a new suspect was always the victim’s family. “You should get in touch with Portland and find out what went wrong… But later. Right now, I want to talk about your daughter. Particularly, her frame of mind before she passed away?”
“Well, what do you mean? She was a normal teenaged girl,” replied Audrey.
“Did she ever complain about any strange visitors in her room at night?”
A look of shock came over Peter’s weathered features. “It’s funny you should ask that, because she did complain about a figure in her room. A dark shadow, I think it was.”
So there was a pattern after all. “How often did she mention it?”
“Quite regularly… It would come into her room and sit on the end of the bed. I seem to recall her saying something like that. Kind of creepy, actually…”
“That’s right. I remember reading that in her diary.”
“She kept a diary?” his interest piqued. “Can I look at it?”
“I’m not sure… The police took a number of her things for evidence, but I think they dropped it back. Hang on, I’ll go check.”
A moment later, she was back with a black and white book. Walter undid the latch and flicked through the pages. The hunt was on, and he was getting closer to his quarry.
The girls of Form Seven stood doing stretches on the smooth wooden floor of the gym hall. They complained bitterly that they had to do gym class inside on such a nice day, while the boys were allowed out on the lake all morning, but Mr. Bulwark assured them that they would get their chance later on. “Today is basket ball practice,” he said. “Start with laps of the court.”
The girls took off around the hall. After about a lap and a half, she started to become self-conscious as though someone were staring at her. The obvious culprit was Mr. Bulwark, but whenever she glanced over at him he appeared to be focused on something else. Perhaps, it was just her imagination, she reasoned.
He blew a whistle and the girls came to a standstill in an ad-hoc group at the end of the hall. Bulwark dragged a large canvas bag filled with basketballs towards them. “Alright, line up against the wall. Now that you’re all warmed up, we’re going to do some stretches…”
Bulwark started to demonstrate a number of different stretches and lunges, which despite his excessive girth, he seemed to manage quite well. “OK, very good,” he said. “Take a ball from the basket and wait for me…”
While they were selecting from the bag, a tall, young man with short brown hair and pleasant, friendly smile came into the hall carrying a box of miniature traffic cones and reams of reflective tape.
At the sight of him the other girls grew excited. “It’s David…”
“Hello Bill,” he said. “I’ve come to drop these back…”
“Just put them in the store room will you.”
All of the girls started crowding around him, with Valerie at the forefront. “Hey, David… I heard that you are our dreaming instruction again this year, is that true?”
“Yes, it is.”
It was clear from some of the reactions of the girls that they could hardly contain their joy. David smiled; shunted the box into the store room and closing over the door. “So, I’ll guess I’ll see you all up in the lodge this evening? Remember to bring your totems with you and your Book of Shadows.”
“Yes, David. We will…”
“Alright,” said Mr. Bulwark, with a hint of jealousy. “If you’ve all got a ball, then I want you to dribble them up and down the court, until I tell you to stop.”
The girls took off down the court; filling the hall with the noisy, cacophonous sound of basket balls bouncing off a hardwood floor.
Walter arrived home to an unusually silent house and left the girl’s imitation cow-hide diary on the kitchen table, before opening up the freezer to see what was for dinner. He extracted a frozen lump of beef and put it in the microwave on defrost. Then he went back to the diary and opened it on page one. The first page contained the typical disclaimer; “This Diary Is Private; Hands Off” and “If you’re reading this and you’re not me, you’re in BIG trouble.”
He skimmed through the first couple of entries which were accounts of her likes and dislikes of everything from boys to fashion to her teachers at school. There were also accounts of excursions with her friends and family. These interested him only in as far as it gave a window into her world. It was clear that Rosemary was your average teenage girl with a loving supportive and a healthy social life. He wondered how Anastasia compared to this girl. Losing her mother at such a young age couldn’t have been easy on her; living with him and his moods on a daily basis even less so.
The rest of Rosemary’s diary was sprinkled with the private aspirations and dreams befitting of a girl of her age. He read how she desired the love and security of a husband and family at some point in her future. Again he wondered if Anastasia shared these same ideals. It was much harder for her growing up than it had been for him. The world had becoming increasingly more fragmented and girls were being pushed more and more into the realms of business and politics, so much so that expectations of being a mother necessarily took a back seat. Would Anastasia ever have a baby? Somehow, he felt sure that she would… But not in the ordinary way. How then? Adoption, most likely…
He stopped think about it and got back to reading the diary. In an entry dated September 21st 2015, he read the following;
… I think there’s a ghost in my room. I was lying in bed with my eyes closed when someone sat on the edge of the bed. I felt the mattress dip distinctly, but when I opened my eyes there was no-one there. It was the strangest thing…
This was the first indication that there was anything amiss in the girl’s otherwise normal life. It was a fairly mild incident — of that there was no doubt — and one which could easily be explained away without recourse to the supernatural or paranormal. But he had to admit that it was interesting nonetheless. He flicked ahead a few pages, until he came to one dated October 10th. It read;
Another strange dream last night, at least I hope that’s what it was… It seemed so real… It was horrible… I woke up in the dead of night and saw this black shadow standing in the middle of the room. I was too afraid to call out for help, in case the thing attacked me. I waited to see what it would do… I didn’t move an inch all night, I just lay in my bed paralysed with fear. I was certain I had been awake, and what is more, I felt whoever it was in that room, it was like he knew me…
A loud beep interrupted his reading. He went to the microwave and lifted the sweaty, steaming, pink hunk of meat onto a plate, before transferring it into the oven. The next entry of note had been penned on 14 November 2015. In it, she described how she had awoken with her feet covered in mud and pine needles. Her memories of the previous nights dreams were hazy and incomplete. But while she could not account for anything else, one thing was now abundantly clear in her mind; at some point during the night and for reasons completely unknown to her, she had gone outside the house. The prognosis was obvious. Rosemary suffered from an extreme form of sleep walking. She had gone off into the forest, where she had most likely fallen, hit her head and died of exposure.
As he continued reading he saw that she had written a different entry on the same day (using a different colour pen), which made him question his assumptions. Rosemary wrote of a small triangular mark on the back of her thigh that she had only noticed after showering. It wasn’t particularly painful, but it clearly worried her, as she didn’t know what it was or how it had gotten there. The entries continued through January, all of which featured the odd appearance of the Shadow Man (as she had come to term him); his advances were becoming noticeably more invasive and aggressive towards her. During this period, Rosemary wrote that she was feeling increasingly isolated from her friends and family and that she was falling behind in her school work. This he realised was the girl’s final plea for help, but for some reason no one heard it or came to her aid.
The last entry in her diary was dated February 29th 2016; a leap day, and seemed to suggest a more positive outlook on the world. However, the entry was vague and relied upon a host of commonly used platitudes such as “everything happens for a reason” and “I know it will all work out for the better in the end.”
Was it possible there was someone preying on the young girl? Perhaps her killer had gotten hold of her somehow and forced her to write these messages. He didn’t know; maybe if he could find out the identity of the man they had brought in for questioning in Portland he would have a better idea.
Harmon logged onto the internet and began scrolling down through the posts his friends had made over the last week or so. He stopped when he saw a post from Samantha Harding. Evidently, her parents hadn’t gotten around to deleting her account yet. The post mentioned something about “love at first sight being annoying” and Harmon wondered if it wasn’t another direct snub towards him. He had, after all come on fairly strong when he first met Samantha. He dismissed it as paranoia. He was fairly sure that she had regularly been fending of a slew of admirers; she certainly was pretty enough. He continued to scroll through her photos her found another curious coincidence. In a series of images of her sitting on a train, he saw her take a photograph of a particular book that they had been discussing together and then in the very next image she was giving an obnoxious hand sign. This was harder to shake off as mere paranoia and it made him feel uncomfortable.
He clicked away from it and posted some more photographs of his newest painting. The image was of a young girl; aged about nine years old sitting on the floor of his bedroom with her back to the viewer. This was the sight that had greeted him upon awakening in this very room one morning, several weeks ago. Confused as to the identity of the young girl he naturally reached out towards her. As he was about to touch her shoulder, the girl turned suddenly to reveal serpentine eyes filled with burst blood vessels and a mouth filled with rows of hooked teeth. He recalled how badly it shocked him and how he had awoken that same instant to an empty room. He played around with a number of comments in the subject line of the painting and then settled on; “Don’t Sleep, They’ll get you.”
He liked it; it had a kind of eerie feel to it. He posted it up onto his feed and awaited any likes and comments it might attract. He waited five, ten, fifteen minutes without so much as a response and then he switched off the computer. That was it, he thought, I’ve definitely made the wrong choice. In the past when he had been painting scenes of urban decay around Albany, he had gotten numerous likes and comments on his work. But since moving over to the surreal environment of his dreams, interest in his work had declined sharply. What was it all about? he wondered. He recalled how his tutors had warned him against investigating the surreal world of dreams as it had been sufficiently and expertly covered by the likes of Salvador Dali and Magritte; whom he both loved and respected. He had assumed that criticism of the surrealist genre was confined to the snobby art world and that the general public at large would be more forgiving. But for some reason it was impossible to get his friends to give him any feedback on his work.
Perhaps they were jealous, he thought. Yes, that was it, they are jealous of his creative abilities, as well as by the strange and mysterious life he led. What he needed was a hook, some kind of viral marketing strategy to get them interested in his work. The comment he had written earlier to describe the mood of his painting came back into his mind.
About ten minutes into gym class, Anastasia was blind-sided by a basketball to the face. Once she got over the initial shock, she looked around and saw Valerie, Annette and Amelia all standing together looking at her. “Sorry, Anastasia,” called Amelia with feigned compassion, but she could see by Valerie’s easy smile that it had been no accident.
After that her relationship with the rest of the group continued on a sharp, downward curve. She was rarely passed the ball; except by Wendy, her one remaining friend it appeared, and jeering ensued whenever she tried to take a shot on net. To make matters worse, she could not shake the feeling that Mr. Bulwark was staring at her breasts whenever she moved around. Naturally, this made her feel even more self-conscious and uneasy to the degree that it interrupted her game. Whenever Mr. Bulwark caught her slacking, however, he would blow his whistle and shout; “Get in there.”
This frustrated her, but what could she do? In the end, she had to adopt a new way of running. But this more stiffened posture put extra strain on her muscles and led to her getting exhausted more quickly. In the end, Mr. Bulwark blew his whistle again and called time. As the girls all filed past him out of the hall, she heard him say. “Good work, girls. Now don’t forget to get out of those wet things and take a shower…”
Harmon’s flat was so small that often the only surface large enough to work on was his bed. He mixed a small amount of vermillion with yellow ochre to create a bright orange colour and then used a roller to coat the canvas thoroughly. He managed to get some of the paint on the sheets, but he didn’t mind. There was paint all over his flat; paint on the walls and on the tables and chairs; along with more unnamable stains.
Some weeks ago, he had started to keep a dream diary; jotting down snippets of dreams and sketching out scenes from them to be used as the basis of paintings later on. Sometimes he would dream about galleries and see entire exhibits laid out before him. He would see works of exquisite beauty in, as yet undiscovered styles. Often these images contained words or letters and compartments which contained yet more images. But his recollection of these compartments and the words were often fuzzy and so he was unable to accurately recreate them in the real life.
He flicked through his dream diary to select an image. He knew that he was going to recreate a scene from one of his most recent dreams, but he wasn’t exactly sure which one. In the end, he settled on the on; the image was of a bare-chested muscular man with a shaven head who looked like he belonged in some kind of martial arts spectacular. The man appeared dejected and next to him in all capital letters were the words; “ALL THIS TIME MY FRIEND WAS A TRAITOR.”
He didn’t understand the significance of these words. He couldn’t even remember the context of the dream, but this in itself was not unusual for him, as very often his dream recall was incomplete. Nevertheless, there was something compelling about the image and he felt certain that it would be well received down in “The Cascades”; a café-bar that sometimes let him display his work. They might even offer him a few free drinks. He could live in hope…
The girls were exiting the Meeting Hall, just as the Seven Form boys came by. They stopped to exchanged hugs and kisses with the girls. This left her feeling even more like an outsider than ever, and to make matters worse, some of the boys were actually very handsome, particularly a tall blond-haired boy named Alex.
But, as she was soon to discover, being the new girl had its own advantages; everyone wanted to talk to her and find out more about who she was and where she had come from. Alex and his close friend Marvin took the greatest interest. Alex looked like he might be at home on a football field scoring touchdowns, while Marvin looked like he would be more comfortable indoors playing video games. He was smaller, darker and slightly overweight, but there was something sweet and endearing in his lack of confidence.
She noticed that both Annette and Amelia appeared to be especially sour at her for having attracted so much attention from the boys. She tried her best to enjoy their pain and make the most of it. “You are the new girl, aren’t you?” asked Alex.
“That’s right.”
“Wendy aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“Introduce yourself…” said Wendy, forgetting her manners.
“I’m Alex,” he said stretching out his hand. “And this is Marvin,” he said pointing to his silent companion.
“Pleased to meet you…”
“So where are you from?”
“Albany.”
“Really, that close by? We’re from the East Coast… So how are you finding your first day at the camp?” He began his not too original line of questioning and smiled.
“It’s not so bad…”
Wendy passed behind her; touching her arm.
“You don’t think it is a bit weird?”
“Maybe a bit, yeah…” She turned in time to see Mr. Bulwark exiting from the sports hall; and giving her a half curious look back in her direction as he did so.
“Don’t worry,” said Alex, his bright smile returning. “You’ll get used to it. What level are you guys all on?”
“Stage four,” replied Valerie.
“What about you Wendy?”
“I completed Stage three at the start of the summer.”
“I’m still stuck on three,” pouted Annette.
“Oh don’t feel bad,” Wendy said rubbing her shoulder. “Stage three is a really difficult.”
“Yeah, I was stuck on that one for a good while,” replied Valerie.
“What are you talking about?” asked Anastasia.
“The different dreaming stages,” explained Wendy. “There’s five in total.”
“Six,” corrected Valerie.
“Well, six…. But the last one is sort of forbidden.”
“Not forbidden exactly,” corrected Valerie. “Just unknown…”
“But what are they?”
“David will probably go over all that since you’re new here and all…”
“You’ll have to start at the beginning,” said Annette, as though struck by some frightful realisation and then a look of relief came over her. “Well, at least I don’t have to do that…”
She had this anxious feeling that sometimes appears when one has missed a number of classes at the start of the year and finds themselves lagging behind in their work load.
“So Anastasia?” called Alex.
“Yes?”
“Anastasia what?” he said. “What’s you surname?”
“Cullen…”
“Cullen? What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s a detective…”
“A detective? Like a police detective?
“What other kind is there?”
“I think she means Police Chief, don’t you?” said Amelia hovering close behind her shoulder like a bird of prey.
“No,” replied Anastasia shrugging her off.
“What about your mother?”
“Well…” she looked at her feet in the yellow dirt of the road. “She’s dead, actually.”
There was a silence. “Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She took a deep breath. “It was a long time ago… What do your parents do?”
“My parents are both investment bankers, from Corsica originally.”
“My dad works for the ICG,” said Valerie.
“What’s that?”
“The International Crisis Group?”
“Never heard of it.”
“They deal with all humanitarian matters across the globe and help out in war situations. My father is one of the project managers.”
She was impressed. Everyone at Camp Calapuyau seemed so refined and well-connected. For the first time all morning, she began to wonder if she wasn’t completely out of her depth.
* * *
After dinner, Walter drove across town to Hill Street and knocked on the door of Amanda Carrington’s residence. A middle-aged man wearing a dark dressing gown and slippers answered the door with a perplexed expression on his face.
“I’m from the police department. I’m here to speak with Amanda,” he explained.
Mr. Carrington invited him inside. “Would you like anything? A coffee perhaps?”
“No, that’s all right, I’m fine.”
“Why don’t you wait in here? I’ll give them both a call,” He opened the door to a bright and spacious living area with a plasma TV screen in one corner and comfortable looking couch in the other. Lying on the rug was a large mass of ivory coloured hair, belonging to a dangerously overweight family dog. The docile retriever lifted its head up off the floor momentarily, decided he wasn’t a threat and went back to sleep. He started to get the feeling this might have been a wasted trip. These girls didn’t have any real information that could help him out. But it was important to check all avenues. He sat down on the blue couch and moments later the man poked his head in around by a set of double doors. “They’ll be down in a minute.”
He nodded.
“Terrible news about Samantha, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Presently there was the sound of light and quick feet upon the stairs. The man withdrew and in the same instant Amanda and Julia appear through another door. He noticed that they were dressed for a night on the town. They were both wearing short black mini-skirts and harmoniously coloured blouses. Amanda sat in the chair in front of him with Julia perched to one side; her long black stockinged legs arranged lengthwise towards him, as though on display.
“Hello again,” he began; being selective with his words. “Thank you for meeting with me. I know what a difficult time you must be going through right now…”
The girls both looked at each other anxiously and appeared to rearrange themselves into more conservative poses.
“I won’t take up too much of your time,” he continued. “I’d just like to ask you both a few questions that’s all…”
“Sure,” began Amanda. “I mean if there’s anything we can do to help…”
“Did something happen to Samantha?” asked Julia. “I mean, did someone do something to her?”
“No. We have no reason to suspect anyone… If that’s what you mean…”
The girls both seemed to relax.
“You were both friends with Samantha, weren’t you? You went to school together?”
“That’s right. We took nearly all of our classes together…”
“What about outside of school? Did you see much of her there?”
“Sure,” said Amanda running her fingers through her hair. “We were best of friends. I saw her almost every weekend.”
“And how would you describe her mood over the last couple of weeks. Did she seem distressed? Was anything bothering her?”
“No,” she replied frowning. “She didn’t mention anything, anyway.”
“So, no strange dreams, or anything like that?”
“Dreams? No… She would have told me. We told each other everything…”
He grimaced.
“I did notice that she looked a bit thinner than usual,” interjected Julia.
“Oh yeah,” Amanda concurred.
“We thought she might be a bit bulimic that’s all.”
“Yeah, she like to stick her fingers down her throat…”
His eyebrows went up when Julia said this.
“OK,” he said standing up. “Thanks for your time…”
They both got up off the chair and followed him across the room, barefoot, siren-like. “Is there anything we can do for you, Mr. Cullen?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… We can stick our fingers down your throat, for starters…”
His eyebrow went up involuntarily. “Maybe later…” he said.
Unbelievable… What the hell was the matter with teenagers these days, anyway, he thought as he made his way out the front door to his car. He had no intention of going near those two, but this was the first time he had experienced that he had been propositioned like that and he knew it was only a matter of time, before the crept back inside of his mind again.
Anastasia followed Wendy around the back of the amphitheatre and up the sloping path into the forest. They climbed a set of flagstone steps that chicaned between beds of wild chickweed and pennyworth. The path led them up a steep muddy slope; at the top of which was a wooden hut with a single yellow light shining forth into the gloom. She could see the other girls gathered together outside; waiting to go in. To her right, in a clearing, lit by the last reflected light of evening was a wooden house, not unlike the kind you would regularly see in older neighbourhoods around Albany. The house rested on the hillside, and was propped up on stilts to keep the structure level.
“That’s the Director’s house,” said Wendy. “Jasper Collins and Miss Lytton both live there… Mr. Bulwark, too.”
“It’s a nice house.”
“On the outside maybe…It’s a bit of a dump inside…”
“Really?”
“It’s just a bit damp…”
She could see reeds growing up at the front of the house, which suggested that the ground there was waterlogged and marshy. “I see what you mean…”
“Come on,” said Wendy impatient. “We’ll have to get inside quick, if we want to get a good seat….”
Together they tramped up the wooden steps through the door of the little chalet. It was much newer looking than the other chalets down by the lake. Inside the girls were all reclining on oversized bean bags, but there was; at present, no sign of the Dreaming Instructor.
Wendy found a small white bean bag in the corner and they shared it. The room was more like a chill-out room at a festival or dancehall than an actual classroom. A designer lamp made of twisted steel sat on a small cabinet and there were also a number of psychedelic themed posters on the wall; including Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver. All around the top of the room ran a single shelf on which were books, ornate wooden boxes and numerous glass jars filled with seemingly random pieces of bric-a-brac. David emerged through a curtain, concealing a mysterious back room.
“Ah ladies, you made it,” he said lighting another lamp in the corner. “Excellent, shall we begin?” he seated himself on a stool in front of them and scanned around the room with his inimitable gaze. “Let me get a good look at you all… A lot of stage fours here, I see… that’s good. Wendy stage three, not bad… We’ll have to work on that… And Annette… Stage two… What happened?”
“I know,” she groaned and pretended to sob into her hands.
The seventh form girls found her theatrics amusing.
“Not to worry. We’ll work on stage three later on together… Who else have we got?” he said glancing around. “You,” his eyes rested on her. “What’s your name?”
“Anastasia Cullen, sir.”
“Anastasia…” he said nervously flicking a broken piece of chalk through his nimble fingers. “You don’t appear to have reached any level…”
All the girls except Wendy laughed at this.
“It wasn’t a joke,” he said indignant. “Well, how do you account for this?”
“I don’t know…”
“She’s a newblood, sir,” said Amelia.
The girls laughed again.
“And a Christian,” said Valerie.
“A Christian?” The chalk was spinning again now, this time faster.
“But she’s not really. I mean she’s not practicing,” interjected Wendy. She seemed to be making a deliberate effort to stress that point. What for?
“My,” repeated David. “A Christian… Not too many of them left about,” he said and sounded very pleased. “Well, I suppose we’ll have to start back at the beginning with you. You have a lot of catching up to do.”
“How is she going to catch up with us?” protested Amelia. “She should be back in Form One with the juniors.”
“Now, now, girls remember that you’re all family here… Besides, I think you could do with a bit of a refresher course… Who can tell me what the first level of dreaming is?”
Amelia raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“In the first stage, you look for your hands.”
“That’s correct,” he wrote this up on the blackboard. “And the second stage? Valerie?”
“In the second stage, you must fall asleep within a dream.”
“That’s right. We call it ‘translation’ because we are moving through the dream world.” He wrote down; Second Stage; translation. “And the third?”
“Seeing yourself within a dream,” said Annette.
“Correct,” he said writing that up on the board. “The fourth is dreamwalking and the fifth is shapeshifting. What’s the sixth?”
“The sixth is only for adepts,” came the reply.
“That’s right… It is forbidden to know or learn about the sixth gate ahead of time… But lets say we did want to find out, where would we go?”
Several of the girls put up their hands.
“Yes, Wilma?”
“Apocalypsis, by Eamon Radcliffe…”
“That’s right,” he said writing that on the board. “Have you all go your Book of Shadows to hand? Take them out… This is very important… You must write down every dream you have in there from now on. Can anyone explain to Anastasia, why do we do this?”
“It helps with dream recall,” replied Valerie. “As what use is being able to control your dreams, if you can’t recall them when you wake up?”
“Very well put Valerie,” he moved around the classroom again looking at his feet. “So with regards the first stage of dreaming, the basic principle is what?… Regular reality checks?”
The girls agreed.
“And how do we do these?”
“We look for our hands regularly and ask ‘Am I dreaming?’”
“Excellent. Then you were having a lucid dream and what’s one of the great things about lucid dreaming?”
There was no answer.
“It means that you can fly, doesn’t it? And you walk through walls, stop and reverse time, and take over people’s minds. How does that sound to you Anastasia?”
Anastasia had never had a flying dream before, and she wanted one now more than ever. “It sounds great,” she said.
There was an audible groan from some of the other Seven Form girls.
“Ok class, I want you to write down your most recent dreams, or a dream that had a great effect on you in your notebooks and then I’ll interpret them for you.”
The dream that stuck out most in her mind was the one that she had when she was very young. She was in a harbour, sitting on a slipway used by boats to get in and out of the water. She had a big bag of toys and was playing with them, as children do. Her mother was there and a man who was supposed to be her father, according to the logic of the dream, but in reality looked nothing like him. Her parents were both standing on different sides of a canal, a fact which represented a schism between them. All of a sudden, her father grew angry with her, he picked up the bag of toys and threw them into the sea. Then concrete slipway split from the land and she was upturned and thrown into the sea.
But, she decided not to write this dream down; it was too personal. Instead, she settled for the more recent dream. In the dream, she was walking around her house in Albany. But there were extra rooms and staircases that did not exists ordinarily, when she was awake. Nothing much ever happened, but in one instance, she encountered a bear living in one of the basement rooms. She wrote this down and he came over and examined it. He told her the dream suggested that she would soon be exposed to both new and exciting experiences and find hidden depths within herself. “The symbol of the bear,” he said. “Means that you will find within yourself a deep inner strength.”
She recalled what she had learnt from the class with Mr. Collins earlier that morning about animals. Dream interpretation didn’t seem all that difficult to her, in light of this. “Over all a very auspicious dream,” he said and passed the book back in her direction.
She smiled. Up until now their attraction had been largely hypothetical, but now she felt the genuine connection that develops when learning about the world from someone. It was like a warm tingling feeling that covered her over and made her feel protected and she didn’t want to ever let it go.
Walter’s feeling that tonight’s investigation would be a wasted effort had been correct. He knew from reading Rosemary’s diary how difficult it was for sleep paralysis victims to come forward to talk about their experiences. Maybe Samantha had been a sufferer, but simply hadn’t spoken up about it. It might explain her deterioration in health, shortly before her death. He put his notes aside and started up the car. There was a full moon rising over the Pine Forest Mountain in the distance. What time was it? Nine thirty; how long had he been sitting here he wondered? Anastasia would probably be getting ready for bed now. He seemed to recall the camp had a ten o’clock curfew. Ouch! He couldn’t imagine Anastasia being fond of that.
He wondered how she was getting on. If she was fitting in all right. Stop worrying, he thought, it’s not like she is twelve anymore. She is all of fourteen and kids these days grow up fast. Faster than most parents would like to admit, at any rate. He just hoped that she had more sense than the two femme-fatales he had encountered tonight.
As he drove back towards his house he recalled his own upbringing and how he had gotten involved in drug abuse. He had knocked all of that on the head, but every now and again he got the urge to roll a joint or pop some pills. He was thinking about it now; with Anastasia away in camp, he could do what he liked. But, no this was madness… He had given it up for her. He would not go back to his old ways. Not for anything…
Wendy and Anastasia went back into the warm night air. It smelled of woodbine and pine sap. She watched as Valerie and the others passed them by on the way back to the dorm rooms. “They don’t like me much do they?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” murmured Wendy. “Don’t worry. They’ll come around. They’ll find someone else to hate on eventually.”
She was about to say something else, when a sound coming from her lefthand side made her turn. Standing on the porch of the house, she saw two figures drenched in the pale glow of moonlight. She recognised them as Kat Lytton and Mr. Collins. “Please Kitty,” Mr. Collins said. “Don’t be like that, come inside…”
She and Wendy looked at one another and snickered.
“Wendy Hamilton and Anastasia Cullen….” said Ms. Lytton who evidently had no trouble making their identities despite the gloom. “Your supposed to be at your dorm room. Curfew is in five minutes.”
“Yes, Miss Lytton,” replied Wendy. “Come on lets go…”
How had Ms. Lytton been able to see them? It was true that the light of the moon lit up everywhere to an appreciably bright level, but it did not penetrate the dense canopy overhead. They ought to remain invisible and yet Ms. Lytton had picked them out easily. How could this have been? As they passed by the front of the house, Wendy turned to her and said; “Don’t look.”
But it was too late. She had spotted him. Sitting motionless, in the centre of the swamp that was their front garden was Mr. Bulwark, gazing vacantly at the moon.
When they came back to the dorm rooms, Anastasia got her tooth brush and went to the shower block to brush her teeth. The washroom was long and narrow, with seven stalls on the right covered over by blue shower curtains. She stopped by a washbasin and began brushing her teeth. Several of the other girls; including Annette and Wilma were at the other wash hand basins further down. They finished up before her. Her whole body tensed up as they went by. She was expecting some kind of attack. None came, however, and they left without so much as a word. Get a grip, she thought. A swishing sound from one of the stalls behind her. “Hello?”
No reply…
“Is there anybody there?”
All of a sudden, she was reminded of the seven foot tall Indian she had seen in the forest earlier that day. She imagined him standing in the shower in muddy boots, holding his stone axe, heavy breathing. The only barrier between her and a brutal death murder was that thin bit of plastic shower curtain. She didn’t waste time spitting out the remaining toothpaste, she just gathered up her things and left. Better just to swallow it, she thought, than stay in that cold and draughty room one more second, by her self.
When she got back to the dorm room, the Seven Form girls were all there; all except for Wendy. She noticed the dubious poses of the girls, as though they had just this minute been up to something or other. Carol Mason sat on the corner of her bunk, filing her nails, with Annette standing by her side. Despite their obvious attempts to appear nonchalant, there was something fake about the whole scene. There was an unnatural silence in the room, the nature of which she was at a loss to explain. She soon realised what it was, as she drew nearer the bed. Someone had up ended the waste paper basket there. Sweet wrappers, banana peels, and nameless things were all thrown across her bedspread. She cast a hateful eye across the room and her gaze found the malefic grin of Valerie Vanderbilt.
“Don’t Anastasia…” said Wendy who had just now appeared beside her.
She brushed her off and continued towards Valerie who was standing on the other side of the room near her bed. She saw the blouse that she had given Valerie earlier that same day and snatched it off the bedspread. “Hey, hands off…” cried Valerie tugging on the end of the garment. “That’s mine…”
“It’s mine…”
“Careful. You’ll rip it…”
There was a loud bang and Ms. Lytton’s voice sounded angrily in the room. “What’s going on here? Why are you all out of bed?”
“Take your stupid top… It’s cheapo anyway,” said Valerie relinquishing her grip.
What had she done, she wondered? If she thought things had been bad so far, just wait until tomorrow and the rest of the week and the week after that. She had now made enemies with the entire group and as she had earlier learnt; these were powerful people. Reputation and ritual meant everything to people like this.
“Alright lights out!” cried Ms. Lytton.
After Ms. Lytton had shut off the lights and closed over the dorm room door, she lay shivering for a moment in the cold airless bed. She listened for a while to the noises the other girls made as they drifted off to sleep and gradually even these subsided. But Anastasia could not sleep. The near violent encounter with Valerie only moments ago had her adrenaline pumping and she was unable to close her eyes for fear that at any moment some reprisal might be inbound from some corner of the room. She waited and the longer she waited, it became obvious that no such reprisals were to come. She felt like a doll on a string; being toyed with emotionally. Then, the urge to get out of bed and punch Valerie all over the head and in the mouth gripped her. She resisted it and her anger subsided.
After that, she lay there looking at the oblique shaft of opaque blue moonlight shining in through the window across the way. She felt like crying, but even her body was against her on that front. She longed to be at home with her father and away from this place… It was only the first day of Camp Calapuyau. Did she really want to stay for a month of this? She decided that if things didn’t improve that she would call up her father and have him come collect her. She hated the idea of running away; especially since it was her mother who had applied and gotten the place at the camp for her. She had assumed that this would mean that she would have a good experience, but the opposite had proven to be the case.
Sometime later, she was not exactly sure how long, she awoke again into the darkness of the dorm room. Everything was still and quiet around her. The other girls were in their beds, fast asleep and breathing softly. And yet there was something out of place… Her eyes turned towards the window, where the face of a man was peering in through the window at her. His eyes were wide and bright like the moonlight streaming in behind him. Her imagination must have been getting the better of her again, because it looked like the same Native American man, she had seen in the forest again. His searching eyes found hers in the darkness. She tried to scream, but she wasn’t able to move and then lapsed into unconsciousness.