The seven of us build the campfire a shallow distance into the Springfield woods, just deep enough that the twinkly light of town goes dark when the blaze bursts to life, leaving the only colors the sputtering orange and the night that swallows the miles around us.
“Who wants to go first?” Kian asks. He’s the one that lit the fire, the one that suggested this retreat into the woods a week before graduation, to get high and tell scary stories.
Erin doesn’t want to, so she doesn’t say anything. She puffs once, twice, and then politely passes the joint to Sam on her left.
“C’mon Erin,” Kian prompts, his grin expanding as he’s front-lit by the fire. “It’ll be good for you.”
Last year, Erin and Kian and Kian’s friend Rich watched The Conjuring in Kian’s family den and Erin fell to pieces long before the third act. She spent the next hour shuddering—her hands gripping the white sink in the downstairs bathroom, humiliated, but too afraid to shut the door and be left alone with her shaky, pale reflection.
“You should do it Erin,” Ricki says, because Ricki and Erin don’t really like each other. Ricki pretends to like Erin because they’ve run in the same circles since they were freshmen, and every guy Ricki’s ever met falls in love with Erin.
“I don’t want to,” Erin says, but we are already crackling with anticipation. Kian has won—Kian always wins. I settle in between Erin and Michael, get comfortable, and wait.
“Are you just…not going to do it?” Michael asks. “Telling’s not as bad as listening.”
Erin sighs, loudly. “I’m not going to be good at it.”
The magic of this is already filling the air like the smoky char of the fire in front of us. We all lurch forward, captivated like the murderous king listening to Scheherazade—all alive as long as someone is talking.
Erin tells the old cliché, the one with the babysitter and the clown statue. She tells it wrong, says that the babysitter puts the children to bed, and calls the parents for permission to cover up a clown painting. The crowd is generous, gives her a few oohs and winces, but it’s like asking them to be afraid of a puppet show. She doesn’t really know how to end it—doesn’t know how to let the suspense of the not-yet-slain babysitter hang in the shadows around them—so she just trails off. All her life, she has been hindered by prettiness; she does not know what it’s like to demand attention.
“Well done, Erin.” Sam says, because he likes Erin.
Kian waits the appropriate amount of time before leaping to his feet. “My turn!”
With animated arms and a voice that creeps through the octaves of his lower register, Kian paints a vivid picture of an old woman named Violet, and her small dog, Snowball. “Violet loves her dog,” he emphasizes, and tells them how Violet’s happy place is on her shiny plastic-shrouded couch, Alex Trebek on the TV and Snowball sitting on the floor, lapping at her knuckles with a needy tongue. Just to prove his point, he draws his own tongue sharply across the back of his hand. He tells them how Violet sees the Amber Alert about the escaped convict, and worries distantly about her young, pretty granddaughter, the kind of girl who goes missing and ends up naked under a deck with a mouthful of dirt.
“They don’t do Amber Alerts for convicts,” Michael says.
Kian shushes him emphatically.
“Anyway, she takes a little something-something to settle her nerves and drifts off on the couch. As she dreams, she’s comforted by Snowball’s licking on her hand.”
Erin has the lower half of her face in her hands. Mary, as enthralled as ever, is watching Kian like he is a balance beam gymnast she’s afraid won’t stick the landing.
Kian savors the slow build to the climax, of Violet waking to the sound of dripping, and shuffling up the hallway to find Snowball’s drying blood smeared down the shower wall, a Rorschach splatter save for the clear message.
“People have tongues too,” he says, followed by an evil laugh. The girls squeal, the boys ride their anxiety out with nervous chuckles.
“How could you tell one with a dead dog?” Mary demands.
Kian shrugs. “Because that one kills.”
Out in the woods, I can hear the teeming crinkling of life, all the buzzing, clicking bugs and the scavengers—a possum devouring a field mouse, mangling it in teeth as white as its long, moony face. A mile from here, there is a den of foxes, babies nestled under their mother. Behind me, a squirrel loops its way up a tree trunk, sees us, and scatters, nearly dropping to the ground in shock. It must be alarming to be a creature like that—a creature so hardwired by survival that it sees all the things my friends let go unnoticed.
Mary tells my personal favorite, the one about the father doing late night paperwork in his dining room before seeing a hellish face in the window, all black lipped smile and yellow teeth, grinning at him. How he rises, to call the police or scream, and flips on the light to realize that the demon has been inside the house all along. She doesn’t have the wisdom or showmanship to play up the liminal illusion of the tale, but I like her delivery, I like her quivering voice and darting eyes. And I like her choice; simple, understated. A man alone in a dark house, with a demon only he can see.
Sam tells one about a cannibal chef who pays for body parts—toes, fingers, genitals, organs, blood, skin, muscle. He takes too long, building to no punch line, exploiting only the grotesque to make his point. He’s trying to impress Erin, trying to craft on the spot for her amusement, but she’s busy watching the joint orbit the campfire.
Ricki tells the one about the blind man and his note, how he presses a crumpled bit of yellow paper into the hand of an unsuspecting do-gooder and the girl takes it all the way to the address before opening the note and reading, “She should be enough to tide you over until March.” The boys like this one, like its subtlety, but I don’t like open endings. I want to know what the danger is, even if I just see its tail whip around a corner. Is it human trafficking or an underground organ market? A Satanist black mass or a serial killer with a crypt of female bones in his basement? I don’t know. I consider asking, but I don’t think they’d notice me yet.
Michael goes last. He says his offering is called “So Much Light,” making him the first to give his story a title. It’s about a hunter—a gruff, lone figure threading his way through the woods of the Pacific Northwest. He gets lost, this hunter, and alone in the thick emerald darkness, begins to pray for something to help him. He stumbles deeper and deeper, the claustrophobic silence of the woods choking him, and then, there’s a cabin, in the middle of the woods; no road, no garage, just a house, with all the lights on inside.
“No.” Erin moans, covering her face with her hands. “Can we stop?”
“You can’t stop now!” Kian hisses, leaning forward. “Erin, don’t be a pussy.”
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” Mary whispers, and for a minute I think she’s looking at me, that she’s finally afraid enough.
Michael isn’t like Kian. He’s not going to force a story down the throats of an unwilling audience. “I can tell it tomorrow,” he offers. “Or, we can just—”
“You hurt his feelings!” Kian exclaims.
“Just finish it,” Ricki says. She doesn’t know why everything always has to be about Erin.
“Okay…” Michael takes a deep gulp of air. “The house is nice. Nice furniture, kitchen full of food, a warm bed. The guy—he feels bad. He feels super bad, but what choice does he have? He goes into the master bedroom and sees this painting, right beside the bed, of this stern guy with these bright blue eyes that follow him everywhere, and he’s freaked out but he’s so tired that he goes to bed, and when he wakes up it’s super early because of all the light, all the light from the open window right by his bed.”
Mary screams, comically loud, and out in the dark, the coyotes reprise her, screeching their high tonal cries. Kian throws his head back and howls and the group laughs, the relief of it all being over a sweet, searing release. Only Erin is not laughing, instead turning the color of spoiled milk, staring with dilating eyes, with held breath, at me.
She does not do anything for 15 seconds. I see the one breath rattle its way through her, and then she screams, not like in the movies—not a final girl operatic wail—but the kind that happens in nightmares where she cannot scream, a sharp burst that dies, leaving only a raspy whine as she falls behind the log, crawling away from me, shrieking and whimpering.
The group leaps up and Sam bends down to grab her. “What’s wrong?” he yells.
“It’s right there!” She screams, a trembling finger pointed at me. “Look-look-look!”
“There’s nothing there,” Ricki says, trying to hide her anger because she thinks this is just like what happened last summer, when Erin pretended to get caught by a current out in Lake Tahoe so Rich would dive in to save her.
“He’s right there!” Erin screams, twisting right and left as Kian and Sam try to lift her to her feet. Her face burns red, her breath shallow and failing. She sobs little broken sobs and writhes on the crunching leaves, flailing against their grip like a beached trout, pushing herself back into the dirt. When she pulls up enough to see I am still here she wails again, a child for whom the dark now holds endless possibilities.
It’s my turn, technically, but only Erin is afraid enough to see me.
Ricki looks from the dark woods to her sort-of friend and blanches, like she is beginning to consider that Erin is not doing this for attention.
If Ricki were afraid enough to hear me, I would tell her a story. I would tell her about a night just like this one in a parallel universe where laughter and slaughter rhyme, and how—on that other night in the other universe—Ricki was the one who saw my face and laughed so hard the fire went out.
Ricki is trying to calm Erin, telling her to breathe. “I’m right here,” she says, as if she wasn’t before.
Years from now, when Erin retells this story, and tries to sketch me from memory on a napkin in a Barnes & Noble, Ricki will tell Erin that she could never handle a conversation that wasn’t about her, and leave, and their friendship, a long dead thing, will finally, finally be laid to rest.
