The Boathouse

The lamps are burning. That is wrong, and he cannot look away from it. Every cabin behind him is a black square. The main line has been down a day, the whole camp dark, and here at the water the two lamps in the boathouse door are lit, throwing a hard yellow light onto the plank where the blood has set. He looks at his hands. The blood is not his. His body is whole, no cut, no sting, no blood of his own to account for it, and still the hands are covered — the knuckles, the webs, the line of the palm, the blood going dark at the nails.

He hears himself breathe. It is the sound he has been trying not to make all night.

The camp behind him is quiet. It has been quiet for hours, but he has been moving through it, so it has not had the chance to settle. Now he stands still at the edge of the water and the quiet settles. Nothing moves. The pines do not stir. He breathes in the air off the lake — wet wood, rope, the gas from the generator under the floor, the thing the lamps burn on.

He came here running. He came out of the mess hall by the back, where the cups still sat on the staff table with somebody’s sweater, and he did not look back. He came past the archery range, the bales pale in the last of the light and an arrow standing in one of the targets, and he did not look at the ground beyond the bales. He came past the staff cabins with a door hanging open on a black room, and he did not look in. He went through the gap between the cabins without breaking stride. The light was going. The dark under the pines came down early. He ran the path toward the water, and every step was the loudest thing in the camp, and he kept thinking the noise was going to bring it.

Nothing brought it. That is the part he cannot get past. He is twenty-one, lean and quick, the oldest counselor by a year, a long body built for moving fast. He used all of it to get to the water, and nothing came at him.

The legs do not stop. The heart does not slow. He has gone a long way past afraid into a place where the hands still work and the legs still work, and the breath shallow in his chest, and he has not let the fear decide anything. He kept moving. Moving is the only thing he knows to do.

Dana Barros, who ran the camp and saw through everyone and called them all kiddo. Caleb Reyes, who minded the archery range and barely ever raised his voice. Gene Whitfield, the director, the man he’d resented for a week and never managed to hate properly. The rest are names he knows and faces he ate beside for a week, people who sat at the staff table with him and did not make it to the end of the week. He thinks of that table — the chair across from his, empty.

He turns his hands over, palms up. The blood is everywhere. He is the last counselor, and the buses are supposed to come in a week, and he stands at the water with the dead behind him and hands he does not recognize.

He looks down the bank, toward the dark. The trees hold nothing. He keeps looking, and there is never a shape, and he cannot stop.

He listens. The water laps the pilings. A rope creaks off the rail. The lamps hum, and the generator churns beneath them. The air off the water is cold against the sweat on his neck, and the sweat went cold a long while ago. He stands in the door of the boathouse, and the quiet rings around him, and there is nothing in it, and the nothing is wrong.

The water goes out to the dark, and the dark goes on past the far shore. Somewhere out in it there has been movement for a week. He has never seen it. He has never once seen it. He heard the camp go quiet before each death — the sound going out of the trees — and the quiet has been the only signal there ever was. It was quiet when he came through the camp, and it is quiet now, the same quiet, out on the water with him. The light from the lamps stops at the water line. Behind the light the dark is whole, and it is where the sound is.

The blood has set hard on the backs of his hands. He can feel it pulling at the skin every time he moves his fingers. He flexes them. He flexes them again, and the tremor that was in his hands is gone, and the blood pulls, and he makes himself stop looking at them.

From the dark water, past the pilings, comes a sound. It is quiet, too quiet to be breathing, down at the edge of what he can hear, and it cuts through the ring of the quiet and stops him. He holds still. The water laps. The rope creaks. The sound comes again — a breath in, a hold, a slow breath out, the length of a man waiting.

He does not turn. He does not run. Some part of him has been waiting to run, and it is loud in his chest now, telling him the path, telling him the gap between the cabins, telling him the door. He stays where the light puts him and waits.

It is at the waterline. It does not come in under the pines. It does not draw closer. It waits, and he waits too, and the dark between the boathouse and the treeline goes on holding both of them.

He looks down at the water. The surface has gone flat, and in the flat it has taken up his shape — a face, a jaw, a shut mouth, a boy in the dark. He looks at it too long. He has been checking his own reflection, in the cabin windows, in the black box of a dead television, and it has always come back as the boy he’d spent years perfecting. The face in the water is a stranger with his chin. He looks away. The surface holds the shape for a beat, and then the night takes it back.

The cold calm spreads through him, and his breathing evens out, and he does not look at that either. He has felt the calm come on him a few times in the week, always in the places where it should not have been, and it comes now without his asking. He stands in it and lets it stand. He does not look at it.

Two ways. He sees them laid out. He could stand in the door until the dark decides what to do with him, or he could go back. The axe is in the director’s quarters, in the drawer Whitfield never locked, the one with the taped handle and the head that has been sharpened so many times the blade has worn a curve into it. He has thought about that axe. He has not gone for it.

Going back means the way between the cabins, the open ground past the mess hall, the director’s door — all of it in the dark, with the weight in the treeline behind him. Staying means standing in the lit door and waiting.

The sound is still out there. It has not moved. It has let him decide.

He puts his weight onto the near foot and sets it on the plank, and the plank gives a small creak, and the sound on the water does not change. He looks down the bank at the dark, at the cabins, at the long way back, and the dark waits. The tremor has come back into his hands, a fine shake, the shake he buries by gripping things. He has nothing to grip. He curls his fingers, and the blood goes taut across the backs of them.

The sound comes again from the water, and it is closer.

He stands in the door of the boathouse, in the warm light, with the blood already dark on his hands, and he has not decided yet, and the dark and the water and the thing in it all go on waiting to see what he chooses.

And it knows. It knows he is the last one left.