Ghost Trapper 13 The Trailwalker Read online

  “Well, we want enough footage to have plenty of options. My partner Stacey also really likes camping. She'd probably be somewhere in the woods if she wasn't working. Doing wildlife photography. So this is like a vacation for her.”

  “But not for you?”

  “Not as much,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Yeah, my dad keeps saying this place is like living in a resort. It's more like what's left of a resort after a natural disaster or something. Maybe a flood. Or an earthquake.” He sighed as he looked at the sprawling cottage's deep-set front door shadowed by its low, hooded front porch roof, built in the same style as the main lodge. “I better go.”

  “Okay. It was good talking to you.”

  He looked startled by this. “Really?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn't it be?”

  “I don't know. Sorry. We're kind of stuck out here alone. I haven't seen anybody else in forever. So that's probably why I seem so weird.”

  “You don't—”

  “Bye.” He hurried inside, as if I'd done something to panic him. I'm not super great with people. Maybe Stacey was having better luck with the other guy.

  The walk back around seemed longer when I was alone, the trail skirting the edges of Stony Owl Hill and the lake. I turned off my flashlight so I could get a better sense of the place, doing my best to navigate by the pale beams of moonlight that leaked down through the towering trees.

  Insects sang in the woods, but it otherwise was quiet, perhaps too early in the night for the owls. Alone for the moment, I could really feel how isolated we were out here in the mountains, miles from the nearest town. How close were the campground's nearest neighbors? If someone screamed, would anybody hear? Probably not.

  It was hard not to think of what Ephraim had said, and perhaps he'd hurried away afterward because he felt he'd exposed too much of his feelings. The beast, lurking in the dark, just out of sight.

  Lord of the Flies had, of course, been named for the demon Beelzebub, sometimes identified as the devil himself, sometimes as a different but powerful demon. As a gloomy and depressed teenager unhealthily obsessed with death and the macabre, I'd read more about such things than the average person really ought to.

  The invisible beast of the wild, or at least the idea of it, stalked me all the way back to the cabins.

  Chapter Twelve

  “So that was how we came back in the ninth,” Nate was saying as I returned to the camp. I heard him before I could see him; he and Stacey were on the other side of the fire. “I hit it over the fence for a triple. This pitcher's balls would dip at the last second, very tricky, you had to adjust for that...”

  The fire was larger than I remembered, as if Nate had been feeding it more wood, really dragging things out. As long as we had to hide our true job from the clients' kids, we couldn't really get to work until Nate was gone.

  “Anybody else getting sleepy?” I asked, faking a yawn as I arrived.

  “Didn't y'all sleep all morning?” Nate asked.

  “Not really,” I said, which was kind of true because I hadn't slept all that well.

  “How was your walk?” Stacey asked.

  “It got pretty eerie on the way back.” I checked for a reaction from Nate. “Do you ever find this place scary at night? Or haunted, like in the legend?”

  “I'm not scared.” Nate crossed his arms. “This place is great. There's not many people to hang out with, but it's going to blow up when it opens for summer. Girls everywhere. Plus I'll get paid the whole time.”

  I nodded along, reflecting on my utter failure to extract anything like a ghost story out of this kid.

  “Nate's been mapping the mountain,” Stacey said.

  “Yeah, for my Geology badge. I've been all over. I know these woods better than my dad, even.”

  “Have you found anything interesting out there?” I asked. “Anything unusual?”

  He smirked, and I felt a little irritated by the expression. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Like what?” Stacey asked.

  Nate looked at her and shrugged, his smirk fading a little. “No big deal really. Like for one thing, there's an island where the creek meets the lake; you can only get to it over this one fallen tree, which isn't that easy. Effie probably couldn't handle it, not that he's ever tried. It's better during the day, though. You don't want to go to the lake at night.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Uh, it's just hard to see and slippery. There's rocks in the creek. You don't want to fall.” Nate was starting to sound evasive, which naturally made me want to know more. “Anyway, daytime, I'll take you there if you want.” He stood up and brushed off his khaki shorts. “I should get going.”

  His sudden departure surprised me; I'd had the impression he was digging in for a long night of hanging out and eyeballing Stacey. I was glad to be wrong.

  “Bye,” I told him. “Be safe.”

  “Yeah, I've walked this path a million times. Later on, Stacey.” He gave her a finger gun before walking off toward the trail. The glow of his flashlight floated away into the woods like a will o' the wisp.

  “I think that kid's got a crush on you,” I said to Stacey.

  “He didn't have one remotely supernatural experience, as far as I could fish out of him. He only talked about sports and parties and where he wants to go to college and girls he's dated. Any luck with the other guy?”

  “Ephraim finds the campground unpleasant, but he didn't seem to have specific encounters with anything. Or maybe he did, but backed off telling me directly. He talked about Lord of the Flies and the beast they thought was haunting the island.”

  “But it turned out to be a pig, right? Like a talking pig? Or was that Charlotte's Web?”

  “They both had talking pigs. Very different ones. Should we put this fire out and head inside?”

  “I was going to brew some coffee first. Couldn't do it in front of the kid since we're hiding our nocturnal activities.”

  “Good thinking. On both counts.”

  Stacey set up a steel camping percolator that steamed in the campfire, and soon poured hot, dark coffee into my travel mug. It tasted strong enough to fuel a truck driver for a nonstop cross-country haul. “Well, that opened my eyes,” I told her.

  We lingered by the campfire longer than I'd intended. With the boys gone, it was actually kind of peaceful and pleasant; the crackling of the burning logs, the stars growing visible above the clearing where we sat.

  But beyond our little pool of firelight lay a vast darkness full of things unseen.

  “So Allison's the only person who's actually encountered anything strange,” I said, thinking aloud when the silence started to eat at me. “And maybe the little girl, but she's not exactly a chatterbox.”

  “And you,” Stacey said

  “And me.” I looked over at Bobcat Cabin, where I'd chased the invisible thing that sounded like a laughing child. “I wonder if our microphone's picked up the giggler.”

  “I wonder if those boys are really telling us everything.” Stacey refilled my coffee cup, then her own. “That's the last of the coffee. Ready to quash the fire?”

  After shoveling dirt over it, we headed inside to watch and listen.

  On a screen that gave us an exterior thermal-camera view of the boys' cabin area, the campfire area still glowed dull red under the soil we'd smothered it with.

  Other monitors showed the shadowy bedrooms in Bobcat Cabin. Our microphone in the broken-down closet connecting the bedrooms picked up only occasional creaks and groans and a distant chorus of night insects. Maybe it would catch a few giggles later.

  “Not much happening at the moment,” Stacey said. “I wonder if the lodge cameras are picking up anything like last night. That attic seemed like a gold mine of paranormal activity.” She frowned. “Well, 'gold mine' doesn't sound right. Maybe a silver mine. That's more ghostly, don't you think?”

  “Don't you think it's strange Josh has never mentioned coming here during his childhoo
d?” I asked, dropping onto my bunk.

  “Maybe he's mentioned it enough that Allison's tired of hearing it, so he didn't say it aloud. He doesn't really take our investigation seriously anyway. Even after we showed him evidence.”

  “We need to get his guard down and learn about his personal history with this place. Away from his family, so there's no interruptions.”

  I focused on watching the inside and outside of the dilapidated Bobcat Cabin, listening carefully for giggles, footsteps, or anything else that shouldn't have been present in the shadowy old building.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For a long while, all we caught on the camera was intermittent swells of blue as cold mountain winds blew through the campground, rustling leaves and pushing the aged timbers of the cabins until they creaked.

  The open door to Bobcat Cabin squeaked and banged in the wind. I was tempted to go out and close it tight—each bang boomed through our speakers—but I was not eager for another visit with the invisible giggler.

  After a couple of hours, I grew restless from the lack of activity. “Let's take a walk up to the lodge.”

  “Yeah, finally!” Stacey jumped to her feet and pulled on a denim jacket. “The lodge is where it's at.” She'd been chomping to go up there for a while, hoping our equipment had recorded more activity in the attic.

  We stepped out of Wolf Cabin into a cool night with a chilly breeze. Stacey stuck close by my side as we walked over to Bobcat Cabin and secured the front door so it would stop banging in the wind.

  The trail up to the lodge was dark under the tree canopy. Unseen creatures rustled overhead, as if plotting to pounce on us from above. Owls hooted; the sprawl of branches seemed full of the birds. It sounded like a whole owl city up there.

  We emerged into the moonlit clearing around the huge central fire pit where all trails converged. The main lodge waited ahead, seeming larger at night, its aged wooden walls even darker, the moonlight scarcely casting a glow across its roof.

  “The place sure looks like it would have a ghost in the attic.” Stacey looked up with apprehension at one of the few small windows on the second floor. She seemed less enthusiastic about the lodge the closer we got.

  We skirted the edges of the lodge, keeping out of its shadow, emerging into the parking lot where our van waited near the lodge's front entrance. The van was a welcome sight, a little dash of home in this unnerving environment.

  “Ah,” Stacey said, as if feeling the same when she climbed into the van. She brought a few of the built-in monitors to life, showing us locations in and around the main lodge. The windows again stood open in the office, stiff canvas curtains swaying in the breeze. “I wonder if we caught anything up here.”

  “Feel free to start looking.” I opened my laptop and connected to the lodge's weak WiFi signal, providing satellite internet.

  Unfortunately, the signal was intentionally weak, meant primarily for the office area, in keeping with the Conners' general anti-screen policy for the camp. I was trying to access online newspaper archives, but ended up staring at the annoying little arrow circling around and around, waiting for a page to load.

  The signals from our cameras were more clear, so we had a view of the cluttered attic and the office with its windows, plus some downstairs spots like the museum.

  “I'll run a quick analysis on the audio records, check for activity spikes,” Stacey said. “The ambient wildlife noise isn't doing us any favors with the automated analysis, though. Lots of false positives.”

  I nodded. The owls were loud outside, but not a thing was stirring inside, not even in the attic. The deflated ball and the badly hand-made car remained still, along with all the other junk.

  Stacey checked her audio anomalies, but after a while it seemed every jolt of activity was another owl or coyote.

  “I'm going into their office,” I said, packing up my laptop. “The WiFi's too spotty out here. Wait out here.”

  “But Allison said she heard things in there when she was alone.”

  “Right. Hopefully something will show up to haunt me.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Don't worry. I've got The Old Kentucky Boys Bluegrass Gospel on tap. Mountain music for the mountain ghosts.”

  “Okay.” She looked doubtful as she watched me step down from the van.

  The lodge certainly didn't feel any more welcoming than it had before. The skin on the back of my neck already crawled as I stepped up onto the porch, into the shadows of its low roof. Before opening the door, I steeled myself with an extra-deep calming breath like they teach in yoga. Well, it was meant to be a calming breath, but I wouldn't say it worked all that well.

  I pushed open the door and stepped into the lodge.

  In the main room, decades of fireplace smoke had baked into the walls, leaving a permanent aroma of charred wood. The wall of photographs showed a hundred or more moments spanning the history of the camp.

  My footsteps sounded loud in my ears as I walked down the side hall and into the office. Our cameras watched patiently, unblinking, as cold mountain breezes rustled the heavy canvas curtains around the huge windows.

  I dropped into Allison's chair; the neatness of her desk made it easy to borrow. Josh's desk was chaotic with odds and ends and some model Italian sports cars for added clutter, so I would have needed to clear room for my computer.

  Facing the open windows, I searched local newspaper databases. I wasn't surprised to learn the online archives only reached back a few decades. That's typical, especially for smaller local papers. I was lucky to find any digital archives at all.

  The easiest articles to find were the most recent, only months old. A typical one described in a giddy tone how “historic treasure” Camp Stony Owl would once again open, “gathering a new generation of campers into its feathery wings.”

  The article showed Josh and Allison's family in a black and white version of the framed picture on her desk. It read like a barely modified press release; very likely Josh or Allison had written most of it, and the papers had simply run it.

  “Camp Stony Owl is the kind of place that young people need today more than ever,” one paper quoted Josh. “In this environment, with their feet on the ground and their eyes on the natural world instead of a screen, their hands busy climbing and building and making, they can find the missing parts of themselves. Those parts of ourselves that are often lost in today's world, and so hard to get back.”

  The article gushed about the family's restoration efforts and their plans to open in the beginning of summer. Nothing new to me.

  What I really wanted was some deeper history, but the article brushed over that very lightly: “The campground has been closed for many years, its mysterious ancient stone owl left neglected and overgrown. The Conners' efforts promise to bring new life to this impressive and fascinating site.”

  Digging deeper took a while. While the twenty-first-century editions were easily searchable online, records from the 1990s and earlier were just image scans and not quite so easy to search. Even those did not extend as far back as the camp's long history.

  Each time the curtain rustled or the lodge's timbers creaked, I looked up, half-expecting to see a shape in the large window. I'd kept the curtains open to the night outside, presenting myself as a target to any local entities in search of one.

  Something thumped upstairs, directly above my head.

  “Stacey, see anything up there?” I whispered via my headset.

  “I see no evil, I hear no evil,” she said. “Fingers crossed for a return of last night's cold front from beyond the grave.”

  “Anything turn up on your audio analysis of what we missed tonight?”

  “Oh, yeah. A whole chorus of ghosts chanting 'Wheeeeere is my boooooody? Wheeeeeeeeere is my booooooody—'”

  “Seriously?”

  “No, I'm just saying, I would have mentioned that first,” Stacey said. “Nothing so far. I'll keep searching.”

  “Me too. Some of these
old newspapers are conveniently stored in blurry PDFs that default to weird sizes. I've found nothing so far. Let me know if anything starts creeping around the lodge.”

  “You got it, Sarge. Over and out. End of transmission. One and done.”

  I continued working at my laptop. As the hour grew later, I felt more and more like I was being watched, but Stacey reported nothing. I kept looking through the windows at the porch beyond, the outlines of its supports and banister barely visible in the gloom. Someone or something could have been standing out there, not far away, watching.

  The power of suggestion could have been playing a role, of course, after I'd heard Allison's story. For that matter, being alone in that lodge at night would have been creepy under the best of circumstances.

  After a lot of searching in the archives, I found something huge.

  “Stacey,” I said, “listen to this. Thirty-three years ago, three kids died right here at the camp.”

  She gasped. “No way.”

  “Yes way. It says they snuck out at night and went paddling in a canoe. No life vests. There was a storm. They drowned. The camp immediately closed. And it looks like it stayed closed ever since.”

  “Uh, whoa. You'd think somebody would have mentioned that to us,” Stacey said.

  “Yeah.” I grabbed my pocket notebook and started jotting details. The three kids had been fourteen to fifteen years old.

  “Why would teenage boys go out on a boat in a storm?” Stacey wondered. “Well, now that I say it aloud, it kinda answers itself.”

  I nodded, not that she could see it. “Maybe they were out to prove they were tough. Or maybe more was involved. We need to find out everything.”

  “The poor kids,” Stacey said. “Imagine their parents. Send them off for a week at summer camp and never see them again. Ellie, I'm seeing a cold spot forming upstairs.”