13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors (5 page)

The TV yap-yap-yapped from the corner, the
late night host bidding his audience goodnight.

“
Screw it,” Marisol said. She
sprang out of bed, padded to the bathroom, and swallowed two
Tylenol PM.

Sleep hit her like a dark wave and pulled her
into the motel bed’s scratchy sheets. A dream materialized in her
mind, trapping her in a smaller body.
How
old am I?
She gazed at her tiny hands, with pink
polish flaking off nails bitten down to the quick.
Just a rugrat. Maybe five or six.

She was on a bus. Another girl sat next to her
and trees flew by outside the window. The bus pulled off the
highway onto a dirt road, and a crop of rustic buildings appeared
on the horizon.

“
Welcome to Camp Fresh Air,” a
smiley young woman said when Marisol stepped off the bus. “You’re
going to have so much fun.”

Other smiley-faced twenty-somethings herded
the kids from the bus into a hall with sky-high ceilings and miles
of long tables. Marisol felt miniscule. She skipped over to a table
of boys playing cards.

“
Go fish,” one of the boys
said.

“
I know that game,” Marisol
squeaked. “Can I play?”

“
No chubby churros allowed,”
another boy barked.
Dick.

The first boy glared at him and set his cards
on the table. “That’s not nice.” Then the boy did exactly what
Marisol had done to Brent. He dug his fingers right into that
dick’s collarbone.

“
Ow!”

The boy laughed and so did Marisol, though
something deep in the pit of her stomach told her she shouldn’t
have.

“
This game is dumb anyway,” the boy
said. “Come ’ere.” He grabbed Marisol’s hand. “I want to show you
something.”

Marisol followed the boy to a row of cubbies,
where he pulled out a shoebox. He knelt down on the floor and she
followed suit, staying quiet when he put a finger to his lips,
though she doubted anyone would have noticed them among the
hundreds of kids running amok.

“
Don’t scream,” he whispered before
lifting the lid to reveal a menagerie of creepy
crawlies.

“
Awesome,” Marisol breathed. “I
like bugs, too. But you gotta be careful with that one.” She
pointed to a dragonfly with a half-crushed wing buzzing along the
bottom of the box. “They’re pretty but they bite.”

“
It can’t hurt me if I hurt it
first,” the boy said. He pinned the dragonfly down with his thumb
and plucked one wing off, and then the other. The boy grinned as
the maimed dragonfly flailed around the box.

Next, he squeezed a fat Japanese beetle
between two fingers. “Wait ’till you see what I do to this
one.”

The squeal of the hotel phone jolted Marisol
from the dream. The scratchy sheets were soaked with sweat and the
fast food she’d eaten for dinner churned in her stomach.

Images of tortured bugs danced in her mind.
And even uglier things rose to the forefront. A flayed squirrel
left to rot under a bunk bed. A chipmunk with a stump for a tail
nailed to a tree. Despite the horrors flickering behind her eyes,
she forced her mouth to form a socially acceptable
greeting.

“
Hello?”

“
Hello, sweetie! Are you all right?
You sound panicked.”

Lorna.
“You’re the
one calling me in the middle of the night,” she barked.

A few seconds ticked by. “Marisol, it’s nine
a.m.”

She jumped out of bed and yanked the curtain
aside, only to be blinded by daylight. “Oh. You’re right.
Sorry.”

“
Are you sure you’re all
right?”

“
Yeah. Yes, I’m fine. I just
overslept.” An odd little melody, like a tune hummed by a happy
little kid, found its way into her ear.

“
Your therapist told me you missed
your appointment.”

Shit.

“
Sorry. I just forgot. Maybe if I
was allowed to be in charge of my own life I’d remember that kinda
thing.”

Lorna sighed into the phone. “Forgetting your
appointments isn’t helping your case.”

“
Fine. I’ll call her to reschedule.
Hey, next time I meet with her, can I look at my file?” The hummed
melody intensified. She wanted to swat it away like a fly buzzing
too close to her ear, but she couldn’t hang up until she had an
answer from Lorna. “Hello?”

“
Yes, I’m still here. Marisol, I’ll
be honest, I just don’t think that’s a good idea at this point.
You’re still recovering from the accident. I know it must seem like
I’m keeping you in the dark, but I can promise you that everything
I do is in your best interest, sweetie. I care about you more than
you know.”

“
Ugh. You’re killing me with the
saccharine bullshit, Lorna.” The humming became almost deafening,
threatening to swallow the world. “Call me back when you realize
I’m just a case and not your kid.”

She slammed the receiver down, expecting sweet
relief from that humming. But it droned on, forcing her to turn and
face the TV. Instead of morning talk shows, Marisol found herself
staring at an image of a little boy humming to himself while he
carved up a sparrow with a pocket knife. His hands were slicked
with deep red blood and dotted with tufts of downy feather. He’d
already hacked one wing off and was working on the second. The
sparrow’s dead black eyes stared at Marisol.

She jammed her finger against the power button
but the image never flickered. The boy’s lighthearted humming
turned her stomach. She gave up on the power button and ripped the
plug out of the wall.

The humming ceased and Marisol breathed a sigh
of relief. But she didn’t have time to dwell on creepy shit that
most definitely shouldn’t be on TV at 9:00 a.m., when little kids
could be flipping through the channels looking for
cartoons.

She dug Brent’s phone out of her purse,
called
the home
, and asked
for Brent.

“
Hello?”

“
It’s me calling from your
phone.”

“
Jesus.” Marisol heard him fumbling
with the receiver. “You can’t call me here. The other staffers
might recognize your voice.”

“
Doubtful. You get my file
yet?”

“
Working on it. I’ll call you
tonight. Don’t call here again.”

● ● ●

SOMETHING’S
missing.

Marisol had met up with Brent at an all night
diner and spent the last twenty minutes combing through a printout
of her file.

“
No wonder you were so fucked up,”
Brent said. “You saw a kid drown.”

With sketches of six different foster homes
and euphemisms like “urban” and “street-smart,” the file fleshed
out the drips and drabs of memory that returned after the accident.
Like many of the other latchkey and foster kids in the Bronx, she
spent nearly every summer at a camp for “underprivileged
kids”—whatever that was supposed to mean—in rural New Hampshire.
She became friends with a boy her age and, when they were fourteen,
he and Marisol snuck away from their counselors, found a canoe, and
paddled out to the middle of a deep lake. The boy fell overboard
and, after a three-day search, was presumed dead.

According to the file, a year after the
accident, Marisol suddenly went catatonic for three weeks. When she
finally spoke again, she earned herself a textbook diagnosis
of
childhood disintegrative
disorder
. In their notes, countless shrinks and
therapists had theorized that she’d regressed back to a time before
she knew the boy.

Rather than sadness or self-pity, she was
struck by the overwhelming feeling that a massive piece was still
missing from the puzzle. The words in her file smirked at her,
daring her to dig deeper, to get lost in the great white void
between the lines of text.

“
I just can’t imagine,” Brent said
as he doused his tofu scramble with hot sauce. “It’s so
tragic.”

“
But why did it take me almost a
whole year to lose my marbles?” she asked. “If I was going to turn
into a full-on nut job, how come it didn’t happen right
away?”

Brent shrugged. “If there’s one thing I’ve
learned from working with crazy kids, it’s people can become
unhinged in a thousand different ways.”

A sapphire sky with a few golden clouds rose
to the surface of her mind. The image undulated, as if reflected in
water. The scents of sunscreen and mid-summer trees hung in the
air. She could hear the gentle lapping of paddles dipping into a
lake.

“
You got a car, right?” she asked
Brent.

He shook his head. “No. No way. New Hampshire
is, like, a five-hour drive.”

Marisol dug his phone out of her purse and
taunted him with it. “I’ll buy you a soy latte so you can stay
awake.”

● ● ●

WHEN
they crossed the
Vermont border into New Hampshire, the sun was still hiding behind
the rolling green hills to the east.

“
In one mile, take the exit,” the
phone’s emotionless voice told them.

Marisol was half-asleep, her head resting
against the glass of the passenger-side window. As Brent’s car
glided down the off-ramp, something jolted her awake.

“
What?” Brent asked.

“
I don’t know. I feel
weird.”

“
Does this place look
familiar?”

She looked from left to right, gazing at the
trees and cracked asphalt. Even the bottom of the off-ramp had the
strange air of an abandoned place—a heady mix of serene silence and
indefinable dread.

She nodded. “Take a left.”

They sped past miles of unmowed grass and
decaying signs for Camp Fresh Air. Marisol’s heart almost seized up
when Brent turned onto the dirt road and the camp came into view.
But the once rustic and friendly crop of buildings now looked
dilapidated. The vaulted roof of the main lodge had caved in,
leaving a few long tables exposed to the elements like the ribs of
a rotting corpse. The cabins wore a thick crust of hastily sprayed
graffiti tags and the din of buzzing grasshoppers made her head
swim. The camp had become suitable only for vandals and teenagers
looking for semi-private places to get drunk and
hook-up.

Brent parked in the main lot, forcing the two
of them to walk past the boarded up buildings. Marisol froze
halfway through and doubled over.

“
Oh my god,” she wheezed. “I don’t
know if I can do this.”

“
I don’t have any pillows to offer
you,” Brent said. “But I sure as hell didn’t just drive five hours
so you could have a panic attack and leave before we even see the
lake.” He grabbed her hand and dragged her forward, past the
bathhouse, until they stood on the beach.

Brent inhaled the fresh air and slipped off
his shoes. “It’s actually pretty here.”

“
No, don’t!” Marisol shrieked just
before he dipped his feet into the water.

“
What? Why?”

“
I don’t know exactly. Just
don’t.”

“’
Kay. How about that
canoe?”

She didn’t know how she could have missed it.
Though the rest of the camp had seen better days, a shiny green
canoe with a fresh coat of paint lay by one of the dunes, waiting
for her. She let Brent help her drag it to the water.

“
Just me,” she said when he tried
to get in. “Maybe you should go back to the car?”

“
You’re joking, right?”

“
Actually, no.”

Brent threw up his hands. “You can find your
own goddam ride back to New York.” He stomped back toward the
parking lot, though Marisol had a feeling he’d be waiting for her
when she got back to shore.
If
she got back to shore.

She shoved off and paddled into open water.
The sun was nearly up, illuminating a few fluffy clouds in the sky
and turning the lake a warm gold. The sight took the edge off her
nerves, almost setting her at ease. She smiled and dipped one hand
into the cool water as she stared down into the depths of the
lake.

That’s when the humming started. The same
melody she’d heard from the TV in her motel room. The notes
thrummed in her veins and her arms sprouted with goosebumps. She
couldn’t bring herself to look up.

“
Hi,” said an impish little voice.
“You didn’t really forget me, did you?”

A boy sat at the opposite end of the canoe,
smiling at her. The boy from the TV, except a few years older. The
same boy who’d caused her lawyer to flip his car.

“
You,” she growled.

Buried memories flooded through her. Wingless
bugs and birds. Flayed squirrels. Dismembered chipmunks. And then
there were stray cats caught in nets, dissected, disemboweled. The
camp director’s dog howling in pain as the boy shoved a sharpened
stick into its eye.

Even at fourteen, Marisol knew what was
coming. She’d asked one of the junior counselors about
it.