Burnt Mountain (33 page)

She turned her blighted face up to me and shook her head again. “No. I’ve got to drive. I’ve got to go up to camp! Right
now! I’ve got to get Chris and Ben. Bummer hitchhiked home… hitchhiked, Thayer, down that whole goddamn mountain, seven years
old and he…”

“Carol…”

“Something terrible is going on up there. Oh, I know about last night, that’s bad enough, but Bummer told me… other things.
Terrible things. Monstrous things. I have to get them home—”

“
What? What things?
I haven’t heard of anything at all going on at the camp that shouldn’t be, I mean—besides last night, and that was just…
Carol, Aengus would know! Aengus wouldn’t let anything happen to any of the—”

“
For God’s sake, Thayer, Aengus is part of it!
Just like last night! Bummer doesn’t lie! Why else would a seven-year-old hitchhike down that mountain by himself? He didn’t
even know where he was! It took him all day long—”

“Baby, just let me call Aengus. We can clear this up with one phone call—”

“
No… you can’t!
And I can’t call my boys! Aengus is the one who threw all the cell phones into the lake two or three nights ago. They had
a ceremony about it….”

I sat down beside her slowly, my breath gone, and simply stared at her. This could not be happening. This was not possible.
Bummer had had a bad dream. There was no way on earth that my husband would throw all the cell phones at Camp Forever in its
lake. No matter what Carol and I thought about the dreadful amphitheater scene last night, the boys meant too much to him;
they were the listeners to his tales….

“Carol, I want to go with you up there. Whatever it is, I can help—”

“The only way you can help me is to keep my son safe! Can’t you even do that for me? And if not for me, for Bummer?”

“Yes,” I whispered. I was nothing against this unleashed passion of fear and fury. “Yes, of course. We can watch TV and eat
popcorn, or maybe just nap till you get back. But really, you must let me call. This can’t be—”

“I’m just going long enough to get my boys into my car and come home! Lay off me, Thayer!”

“But if there was any kind of… danger—”

“Oh, God, Thayer, they don’t want me! They just want the boys!”

“They? Who is—”

But she was gone through the hedge before I could finish my sentence. I heard her car’s engine growl into life. I heard the
shriek of its tires taking off down the long drive, and then heard nothing at all.

Bummer sat still on the stool beside me, leaning against me. I looked down at the top of his head. It did not move, and I
could hear long, slow breaths and feel the warmth of them on my skin through my tee shirt. Asleep. Okay. I’d tuck him into
our bed and watch television beside him, and if he woke up we’d have a snack, and maybe he’d tell me about the terror, whatever
it was, on Burnt Mountain. And then Carol and the boys would be back with embarrassed explanations, and we could all sleep
then. And tomorrow Aengus would be home….

Carol’s voice rang in my ears. I shook my head, hard.
No… you can’t!…
Aengus is the one who threw all the cell phones…

I carried Bummer, a dead and somehow sweet weight, into the bedroom and pulled the comforter up under his chin and sat down
on his other side and called Aengus’s cell phone. He did not answer. When I dialed the camp’s main number there was no answer,
either. Well, all right, then. It was, after all, the dinner hour. And Aengus could have put his phone down anywhere; I was
always running after him with it.

I dialed Carol’s cell then. Again, no answer. I got up and tiptoed out into the kitchen and there it was, on its side on the
counter where she had been sitting. This was all ridiculous. It was like a bad suspense movie. We would all laugh about this
later. When Bummer woke up I would simply ask him what had so frightened him. Chances were we could work it out right here
at home, before Carol and the boys even got back.

He did not wake until about nine. The night was still suffused to the west with the sunset’s last flush. Out beyond the veranda
the night creatures were tuning up: the sonorous burr of cicadas; the soft
cronk
of the big bullfrog who lived by the creek in our woods; the sleepy hoot of the small owl who lived back there, too. Soon
the sinuous stream of bats that lived in the lightning-hollowed tree behind Carol’s house would come flowing home. Soon there
would be a late moon rising. Late moon rising… it sounded like a folk song, and not a terribly happy one.

Bummer yawned hugely and stretched, and then looked at me across the comforter.

“Thayer,” he said. “Am I at your house?”

“Yep. You’ve been sawing wood for a few hours. Are you hungry?”

“Yep. What is ‘sawing wood’? Do you have any French fries?”

” ‘Sawing wood’ is snoring. You’re a great snorer. Olympic material. I’ve got a few French fries, but they’re frozen. They
wouldn’t be as good as fresh ones.”

“That’s okay. I put ketchup all over them anyway. Is my mother back yet?”

“No. She hasn’t had time to get there and back yet.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. I went and nuked the frozen fries and brought them to him on a plate with a glass of milk and the ketchup
bottle. I walked stiffly, feeling trapped under thick ice where no light penetrated, nor any feeling.

Just before the last French fry disappeared he said guiltily, “I almost forgot. Would you like some?”

“No, thanks. I’ve already had a bite.”

“Mama says I have the manners of a warthog. I’m not quite sure what a warthog is….”

“Not very pretty. But I never heard they had bad manners.”

I was silent for a little while as he finished his milk. Then I said, “Bummer?”

“Yeah?” He looked up at me milkily.

“Do you think you could tell me about what scared you so up at camp? I can’t reach anybody up there, and your mother left
her cell phone here, and I can’t think who else to call who might know if things are okay. I guess I could call Mr. Mabry….”

“Nah, I heard Mrs. Mabry say that Big… Mr. Mabry was taking her out to Hollywood, California, with him when he went on business.
She said she wasn’t going to do a thing but lie around the pool at the Bel Air Hotel with all the starlets, and Mother said
Mrs. Mabry would fit the Bel Air like socks on a rooster…. Well, she didn’t say it to Mrs. Mabry, you know. She said it later.”

“I bet she did,” I said, biting back a grin. “But about camp…”

He drew in a long breath and exhaled it slowly. It was such an adult gesture that my heart squeezed. I put my arm around him,
and once more he leaned against me.

“Late at night when we’re all supposed to be asleep the bus driver—you know, Mr. Tir Na Nog—comes to our bunks and he… stoops
down and sings this kind of song, real low, and then he puts his mouth down on somebody’s mouth and he… sucks. You can hear
him sucking. Then he goes on to the next person, and the next, until he’s done it to everybody in a cabin. And in the morning
they’re all different. They’re all polite and nerdy like. My brothers are different now. I think I was supposed to be soon.
He hasn’t gotten as far as my bunk yet.”

“Bummer… why don’t they wake up?” I breathed in shocked disbelief. Oh, dear God…

“I think they put stuff in our dessert,” he said. “I always take mine back to my bunk, but I don’t eat it. I don’t like anything
but vanilla, and we don’t ever have that.”

He would say no more. I simply sat and held him, rocking him back and forth, my stomach roiling with the poison
that had leached into this summer night. It couldn’t be true, of course. It could not be true.

But how could a seven-year-old make up something like that? And hitchhike eighty miles on a mountain road to escape it?

Bummer slept again. I could seem to do nothing but rock him.

Near ten he lifted his head.

“I want my mother,” he said.

“I do, too,” I said. “Let’s go get her.”

Ordinarily I never in the world would have said such a thing to this frightened, sleepy child whose mother had not come back
down the mountain. But this was not an ordinary time, and I was not the ordinary me. I did not even know who I was. I knew
what I needed to do, though. I reached for the phone to call Nick, and then I stopped. I would
not
call
anyone
to tell them I was going to see my own husband, as if I was afraid of him. Nor to tell them that Carol Partridge had gone
there and not come back. We were grown women. And especially, I would not call Nick. Set Nick against Aengus? The thought
was unbearable.

I put Bummer into the front seat of the Mustang and belted him in and wrapped him in a thick sweater and laid the comforter
over him. Then I got in and started the car. It growled deeply and happily: Road trip! Going up a mountain!

“It’s a long way,” Bummer said drowsily.

“I know. I know most of the way, but you’ll have to help me later. I’ll wake you up when it’s time. Go back to sleep, Bummer.
The dynamic duo is on the job.”

I saw the flash of his teeth, and then his head dropped into the comforter and he was asleep before I turned the Mustang onto
the interstate heading north.

The road up Burnt Mountain was familiar to me, though I could not remember the last time I had been on it. Even in the darkness
my hands on the wheel made the necessary turns almost without thought. There were fewer and fewer cars, and then, higher up
into the thinner air, there were none. All around us was a surrealistic moonscape; I could not quite comprehend the fact that
I was driving through it in a car with only a sleeping child beside me. It was not like driving in the world. It was as if
we had somehow drifted into a magical, dark forever. Well. That would be fitting on a night like this, wouldn’t it?

I passed an old sign set into the woods beside an overgrown trail that led deep into the limitless woods:
Camp Edgewood: 3 Mi.
, it said. I didn’t look down the old camp road, overgrown now with young mountain trees. But my heart raced down to the summer
camp I imagined there and found again the days at Sherwood Forest—of cold, sun-dancing water; long afternoon shadows; crowded,
clamorous evening meals; dark magic beside the leaping campfire.

And Nick. And Nick.

I knew that I would never turn down that road.

Near the very top of the mountain, I slowed the car and Bummer woke.

“I don’t know the way from here on,” I said.

“Go all the way to the top and take the little road to the left that goes down the other side,” he mumbled, yawning.

I had never been all the way to the top of Burnt Mountain. When we reached it, I paused a moment at the scenic overlook and
looked out. The whole of the valley that stretched all the way down to Atlanta lay bathed in light from the iron moon. In
the far distance the city lights prickled like fireworks.

“That’s the Sturgeon Moon,” Bummer muttered sleepily. “I learned that at camp. They’re big old fish. I don’t think we have
any of them down here. Take that road up there and it goes all the way down to camp. There’s a sign.”

A little way down on the other side I saw it, a neat white sign on a stone post that read:
Camp Forever.
I turned onto the gravel road. Bummer slept again. I drove, breathing hard, thinking nothing at all.

Far down the little road there was a large clearing where a sprawling log building sat. Beyond it I could see more small log
structures… bunkhouses, a pavilion, a boathouse… and the moon-burnt sheet of the lake. I stopped at the clearing edge and,
leaving Bummer in the car, got out and walked on dead feet toward the buildings. All the other buildings were dark, but a
dim porch light burned on this one, that pale-urine light on pines that spoke of every camp in the woods everywhere. Aengus
stood under it, his arms folded across his chest, leaning against the porch railing. His black hair shone like a helmet in
the faded yellow light, and he was smiling his puckish, V-shaped smile. He wore shorts and a tee shirt that read
Camp Forever
and flip-flops and looked so like a teenager that I drew in my breath sharply. All around me unreality hummed like electricity.

“Aengus?” I whispered.

“I thought you might come,” he said. His voice was light
and full of a kind of suppressed glee. His was a voice I did not know, somehow a piece of this forest.

“I’m looking for Carol Partridge,” I said, feeling as if I was speaking to someone I had never met. “Bummer and Ben and Chris’s
mother; you know Carol. She… she said she was coming up here. She said there was something wrong. She left Bummer with me,
but that was hours ago and she hasn’t come back…. Aengus, what’s wrong up here? Bummer needs his mother….”

The night was wild and cold on the back of my neck.

Aengus didn’t move, or stop smiling.

“Well, she was here, Thayer,” he said. It was kind of a drawl. “A few hours ago, I think. She was half-crazy, spouting all
kinds of nonsense about things her kid told her, the little one. About people stealing kid’s childhoods, I think it was… sucking
their childhoods out of their mouths. Real imagination that Bummer has. He ran off earlier today. I was glad to hear he got
home okay. I told her he’d be just fine with you. Told her you’d have made as good a mother as she was, probably.”

Aengus shook his head smiling ruefully. “I never saw that side of her. A real hysteric. When I wouldn’t unlock the dormitory
where her kids were she said she was going to the police. I told her to go right ahead, the only police with jurisdiction
over this camp are the ones in Terrell County, barracks right down the road. Chief is our caretaker’s cousin. That seemed
to upset her even more.”

“Aengus… where is Carol now?” I whispered. Nothing about this silent, moon-drowned place was right. Nothing about the man
I had married was right.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Like I said, she was here, but she’s gone. I never saw her leave. The other guy told me, the bus driver,
old Nog. She said some god-awful things to him, said she’d come back up here and shoot him if she had to. Upset him so his
son had to come get him. I don’t think he’ll be coming back. Said his heart was hurting him. Probably had a heart attack,
old guy like that. She probably killed our bus driver, if you want to know what I think.”