Campfire Tales: A Horror Anthology

Orientation

You don't remember how you got here, but you jolt awake in the light grey pleather seat of a rocky bus ride, a backpack in your lap with your arms wrapped around it and a duffel bag and pillow resting on top of your feet. Everything is muzzy, and you're groggy from just waking up. You're in the window seat.

The bus is small and slightly loud, but you don't notice yet. Instead, you look out the window and see trees going past, as well as the shoulder of an old dirt and gravel road. The bus hits another pothole and everyone is bounced in their seats.

"Hey, I was wondering when you'd wake up."

Looking to your left, you find a girl you've never seen before. She's smiling at you. Her hair is red like rust, and so are her teeth. Her fingers tap against her knees. "Is this your first time at a summer camp?"

Still at a loss for words, and only halfway awake, you nod. It's best to assume that your parents signed you up for a camp in the beginning of spring and you simply forgot until now. The girl's smile gets even wider. Her eyes are red too.

"Camp Good Company is fun. I've been coming here for a couple years now."

It's called Camp Good Company. The summer camp is located in the middle of the forest. It borders a national park and a nature preserve, and an old reservoir no longer in use has become the lake. The woods are thick and easy to get lost in. Almost too easy.

A few miles from camp, there are firewatch towers. Park Ranger Ned Kirby is a year-rounder, and can occasionally be met on the hiking trails. He loses his thermos constantly. He looks exactly the same in every picture taken of him. Even the cracked and browning ones you see hung up on the wall of the mess hall. Same uniform, same goofy smile, same scruff, same laugh lines. He doesn't age. He doesn't seem to know, either.

At the beginning of camp you have to pick someone to be your buddy, for the buddy system. Make sure you pick someone you can get along with. You can't switch, and you don't want them to ditch you. Your fellow campers are an interesting group of people. If you assume all of them are people.

There are some rules. You can't go to activities or leave the main cabin area without your camp buddy. Camp Director Duck is very severe when she tells everyone. They take the buddy system very seriously here, even though it's a camp for older kids. Everyone listens regardless. They don't want to find out what happens when they don't.

The chaperones are friendly. The counselors always have a list of fun activities for you and the other campers. Archery, axe-throwing, dodgeball, rune carving, even one on speaking this archaic language no one's ever heard before. 

The laws of men don't apply in the rec room. Just the laws of Camp Counselor Alex. Get ready to play darts.

Camp counselor Bethany has fangs. Camp Counselor Bethany has yellow eyes. She makes the best friendship bracelets. Look at this rainbow one. Isn't it sparkly?

Camp Counselor Drew leads the forest hikes. He is the tall one. He is taller than the trees. If you are lost, look for him. You can see him from anywhere.

The coyotes howl every night. From dusk to dawn, like a strange CD player on repeat. The night after the big bonfire, all of the coyotes in the woods go silent, and you can hear Camp Counselor Angel's unmistakable howling laughter coming from the woods. When you see him again at breakfast, his perfect white teeth are stained red. He smiles and jokes with you. He never stops smiling.

"Dang." Says Camp Director Duck. Your eyes widen. She's never used any curse stronger than "Beans" before.

The rec room can either be fun or safe, not both at the same time. Which one depends on if the despotic ruler of the rec room, Camp Counselor Alex, is present. He doesn't get along with Camp Counselor Grayson. You think one might kill the other by the end of the summer.

You and the other members of cabin six keep seeing Camp Counselor Grayson's doppelganger. He's ghostly, and never makes a sound. He always leaves before Real Grayson can see him, and never believes the campers when they try to tell him. After a while, the lot of you begin to wonder why the doppelganger is so bloody. You think he's lost to Camp Counselor Alex before.

Cabin twenty always smells like gasoline and petrol. It's the closest to the lake, and doesn't have a fire pit like the other cabins. No one's allowed near it.

During the first week you stop by the lake and sit on the boating dock with you buddy. It's the red girl. It's against the rules to swim in the lake after dark. One boy does anyway. There is at least one person that does every year. He holds his breath, ducks down, and is never seen again.

You figure you won't swim, and just take off your socks and shoes to stick your feet in the water. Something brushes against your skin. When you move to pull your legs out, it digs its nails into your flesh. You open your mouth to scream. You're lucky your buddy was there.

Someone keeps making weird shapes out of strings and twigs and hanging them up around the boy's cabins. Derek vanished after he took one down.

When you stay out in the woods at night there are three inevitabilities. You will get mosquito bites. You will hear strange noises you can't explain. You will feel the eyes on the back of your neck, something hungrier than a mere bear. When you stay out in the woods at night, these are the kinds of things that happen.

It's only Tuesday and the two best friends already hate each other; did they ever even like each other in the first place?

A boy in cabin nineteen drowns in the lake. The counselors all murmur about the curse on cabin nineteen, and about the monster in the lake. The cabin four counselor laughs. Nothing bad has ever happened to a cabin four camper in the water.

Something happened to Nestor's new camp buddy on their hike. You're running out of people brave enough to partner with him.

You don't ask about the pile of fresh dirt behind cabin twenty, shaped just large enough for a human body.

You make friends with a girl you always see in the arts and crafts building. She never tells you her name. She likes making bead jewelry. Dozens of pieces are on her arms, legs, and around her neck, like colorful vines. Nobody knows who she is.

There is something hidden under the boating dock at the lake. When you try to peer through the rickety wood slats, you see a pair of glowing blue eyes look back up at you from the murky water below. A finger jabs you in the eye.

At the end of the summer, you stand on the edge of the woods, early in the morning, just outside a rusted gate on a dirt road through the trees. The foliage around you is still wet with dew, and you aren't sure how you got here.

You barely have time to look around before a group of people see you and come running up. It's your family, a police officer, and Park Ranger Ned Kirby. They've been looking for you. You were gone so long you were declared a missing person. Where did you go?

You still have your camp clothes on, underneath the ones you had worn on the bus ride over. The logo on your shirt is too faded and worn to make out, though it had been fine earlier. You have no proof of what happened, or where you went. But the memories flash in your mind just perfectly. Did it ever exist at all?

Park Ranger Ned Kirby never looks at your face.

Years later you decide to look up more information about that camp. You search up the names of the people you befriended there, hoping to be met with social medias or public records. You are not. Hours of research prove fruitless and you find, much to your growing unease, no record of it ever existing.

But you remember. We are, we were, we will be, Good Company. The camp that never existed. Memento Nobis.