For Want of a Mother
By C.D. Carter
Roy's favorite tree, the one he'd lean on for hours while devouring the pile of comics he kept hidden under his bunk, looked more inviting than it ever had, touched on its damp bark by the harsh, orange rays of sundown during summer's dog days.
A thunderstorm had swept through that afternoon around lunch, sending campers and counselors fleeing their various activities for shelter from the sideways rain that dropped from the gray sky all at once. That rain, Roy thought, should make the moss beneath the tree even softer than usual, like nature's inviting natural cushion, set next to the enormous tree that served as the centerpiece of Roy's hideaway – the place that served as a respite from the noise and chatter and confusion of camp life, of life at Camp Crystal Lake.
The counselors, and the heads of the camp, would've had a conniption if they had found a camper – especially as young as ten-year-old Roy – all by himself in the woods, more than a few hundred yards from the camp's cafeteria. It was, Roy knew, the benefit of having no friends: he was a ghost at Crystal Lake, and he liked it that way.
An observer of the popular summer camp rather than a tried-and-true participant in its never-ending activities and frivolities, Roy was there because his mother made it so. His father had no say because he was dead. Or maybe he had walked out. Mom had never offered a straight answer on that one.
Roy plunked down at his tree, the unmistakable one with the oblong stretch of bright green moss on one side, and opened the day's comic, something called, "Star Mummy," about a raised-from-the-dead mummy from Ancient Egypt who teams up with the aliens that built the Egyptian pyramids a long time ago. It seemed plausible, Roy thought, if you believed in aliens. And who didn't?
Roy squinted as those final harsh rays of an early August evening peeked over the comic book and hit him squarely in the eyes just as Star Mummy was being discovered by some bespectacled alien archaeologist called Trono. Roy lowered the comic and adjusted himself on the moss seat he loved so much, trying to get out of the way of those last pesky ambassadors of the sun. That's when something – someone, or two someones – caught the eye of little Roy, whose black hair was still damp and matted to his forehead from the day's storm.
He was far enough from the intruders of his secret personal space that he knew he didn't need to make a run for his cabin. The town was too far away for these two to have wandered all the way to Camp Crystal Lake, so Roy knew, right away, that they were certainly from the camp in some capacity. He leaned to his left, squinted, and identified the couple: Marcus, that slender boy with the square jaw and flop of sandy blonde hair, and Henrietta, one of the counselors at the girls' cabin who had apparently become a counselor after coming to Crystal Lake as a camper for her entire childhood. "Almost since I was a baby," Henrietta had said at the camp's orientation.
There they were, Henrietta and Marcus, doing what looked to Roy like an awkward dance in which Marcus had much more interest. There was some nervous laughter from both parties. When Marcus leaned forward and grabbed Henrietta's hips, she turned her head and laughed so hard, she snorted. Roy, in the perfect silence of the woods beyond the camp, heard Henrietta say something about beer, which Roy understood made people act stupid, though that never seemed to stop anyone from drinking the stuff.
"We can get more when we get back," Marcus said, trying again to press his body against Henrietta's.
She didn't dodge him this time; there was a definite change in posture once they were face to face.
It was strange, the way all this made Roy feel. He couldn't explain it if he had to, but watching these camp counselors move together and kiss and put their hands here and there gave Roy a sensation that seemed to start in his shorts and move through his chest in a sort of warm line until that line hit his brain and made his head feel tingly, as if a dozen needles were gently poking his brain. That warmness, bouncing back and forth between his shorts and head, made Roy want to do something. He had no idea what that something was, but the urge was real – it consumed his every thought – and the more he watched Henrietta and Marcus, the more intense that alien feeling got.
Roy's eyes seemed unable to close.
Nighttime at Camp Crystal Lake closed in. The lake was a sheet of glass in the windless evening, the trees as still as Roy had ever seen them, the dusk as quiet as he had ever imagined. Roy sat hundreds of feet from the counselors, who were now groaning, with Marcus's hands exploring what was underneath Henrietta's yellow Crystal Lake T-shirt, but it was like he was right there, right next to them, as they did the things he knew they shouldn't be doing.
A twig, a branch, a stick cracked somewhere to Roy's right – further into the woods than he had ventured. Even in the daylight, the woods to the east of Crystal Lake were a dark and terrifying place for a little boy, or anyone with a healthy fear of the unknown. Roy managed, somehow, to look away from the teenage counselors and peered toward the direction of that faint noise, which wouldn't have been audible except for the silence of the young night.
The warm, foreign feeling that had been the center of Roy's world for the past few minutes seemed to die all at once. That splendid, maddening tingle was gone as quickly as it appeared because, out in the purple twilight there was a figure, the shape of a person who, while not intimidatingly large, was the greatest horror Roy had ever seen. The shadow of a person had one hand on a tree. It seemed to peer to the left, then to the right of the tree, with Marcus and Henrietta the shadow-thing's clear focus.
Roy was still, as still as he had been in his short life, and he prayed to anyone who would listen that the person out there in the dark woods wouldn't hear the thud of his heart slamming against his chest, again and again until he was afraid for his health. Could a heart beat through a person's chest? Roy, in a moment that made him flush with raw panic, thought that he might soon find out.
More twigs and branches cracked when the shadow in the woods moved to another tree, this one about ten feet closer to the counselors. Henrietta, her white shorts suddenly on the ground, moaned and sighed. Roy supposed that noise was enough to drown out the cracking footsteps of the shadow-thing that moved toward them and…
It was a woman.
The appearance of a woman – not just a woman, but one of definitively grandmotherly features – did not compute for Roy, who had always associated fear with men. It was men, after all, who wreaked comic book havoc, and it was men who stopped that havoc. Women had nothing to do with fear or evil or, really, much of anything in the fictional world to which Roy escaped every day at camp. But now this woman, this old woman, put fear into Roy that made him gasp for breath. He was sure she could hear him now. Between his heart racing and his rapid breathing that somehow became more rapid by the second, Roy thought he couldn't make more noise if he tried. Still, the woman's full attention was on the counselors.
It was a moment of pure panic: the kind that floods the brain and drowns all reasonable thought – every consideration that might lead to rationality. Roy jumped to his feet, turned to run back toward the campground, and promptly slipped on the wretched "Star Mummy" comic book lying open at the base of his favorite tree.
Roy lost his balance, with no chance to regain it before his face hit the dirt. He rolled once, popped up, frantically scanned the blackened landscape and saw both parties – the counselors and the lady – staring at him. Marcus was visibly shaking, trying to button his jean shorts with trembling hands.
Some involuntary yelp escaped Roy and he fled on the strength of some ancient impulse to move and survive at any cost. Roy ran as fast as his legs would take him down the narrow dirt path that led back to the cluster of Crystal Lake cabins designated for campers. His pumping legs seemed to get ahead of his body and once again, he found himself face down in the dirt. Only this time is was mud, and it was in his mouth. He spat and that weird little yelp escaped once again before he took off, got to his cabin, sprinted to his bunk and dove into his bottom bed, mud and all.
Roy heard Henrietta crying somewhere in the distance. He heard Marcus trying desperately to calm her down with a voice that wavered and cracked with every third word. It wasn't the counselors Roy thought about as he lie wide-eyed in his bed. It was the woman, the grandma of the woods outside of Camp Crystal Lake. Why was she there? What was she doing? These questions and a hundred variations of them raced through Roy's mind that night until, finally, at some unholy hour, sleep overcame him and his eyes closed and the woman in the woods was once again looking at him from a distance, this time in his dreams.
The bacon tasted like rubber.
Roy pretended to eat it because he was fully committed to blending in with the camp crowd for the remainder of his time at Crystal Lake: five days and counting. Roy chewed on that awful imitation bacon in the camp cafeteria, which bustled with early morning activity as it did every morning. It was a little past 7 a.m. and already so hot that beads of sweat dotted Roy's forehead. But maybe that was from the stress of the night before, when a trio of adults had seen him at his secret wooded place, flagrantly breaking the camp's principle rule: stay on the grounds.
Roy had heard his mother complain about stress, about bills and men whose name she cursed and people in government who, as she said, hated regular people. He hadn't known exactly what she meant about stress until this blazing-hot morning.
Roy was consumed with thoughts of the night before. He rubbed his chin as he pondered what he had seen in those woods because, in his inglorious face plant, he scraped his chin on a pile of pebbles. There had been no pain in the moment. Roy figured he could have cracked his leg into two pieces and still would've kept moving.
A tap on the shoulder. Roy jumped. A piece of the rubber bacon fell from his lips.
"Sorry Roy," said Ulrich, a Swedish kid who was – Roy knew – the only person who could conceivably qualify as a friend at Camp Crystal Lake.
They had shared a bond over comics on the first day of camp, just a few hours before Ulrich, in his high-pitched Swedish accent the kids found to be the height of hilarity, denied that he knew anything of comic worlds. Ulrich had denied his comic knowledge so many times to the camp's bullies that Roy thought he knew what Jesus must've felt like with that panicky, spineless disciple.
"What is it, Ulrich?" Roy said, not even trying to cover his foul mood exacerbated by lack of sleep.
"Thought you should know," Ulrich said, "that there's a counselor giving you some kind of awful look over there. I've watched him the whole time this morning and golly" – Roy hated when Ulrich said golly – "he's hardly looked away from you."
Roy peered to his left and saw Marcus there, eating his scrambled eggs but not looking at said eggs. His eyes were locked on to Roy with an intensity that made Roy squirm on the wooden bench he shared with three other kids dressed in blue Crystal Lake shirts. Even the way Marcus chewed his eggs was terrifying; Roy could see his jaw muscles flex and bulge as he took out his fury on his poor, poor breakfast.
Roy then did something that, with the sobriety of hindsight, probably was not among the ten or twelve best things to do in that moment. Roy smirked at Marcus and offered an exaggerated wink of the eye. While Roy had never punched anyone, he supposed this was a similar feeling: watching Marcus's eyebrows arch, his eyes widen, his lips turn into a small, red pencil above his dimpled chin – it was all so glorious. Roy even considered blowing a kiss to the raging camp counselor, though the thought of being labeled a fruit or a weirdo of some kind was more than enough to reel in that urge.
The bell at the cafeteria entrance rang and the fifty or so kids of Camp Crystal Lake shot out of their seats like the benches had been lit aflame. Roy stuffed one last piece of chewy bacon into his mouth and hustled down the short flight of stairs with a group that includes skinny, scrawny Ulrich, white-blonde hair flopping this way and that.
"Why on earth was that counselor staring at you like that?" Ulrich asked as they made their way toward the day's first activity, which, for the boys, was fishing. "He looked like he wanted to sock you right in the nose. Golly."
"Ulrich," Roy said with a sigh. "The golly thing."
"Oh, right," Ulrich said. He smiled. "It's not, what you say? Cool?"
"Yes," Roy said, trying not to acknowledge the mere concept of himself, an expert on the inner workings of Star Mummy, as the arbiter of cool. "Not cool at all."
They got to the lake's shore before Roy could address Ulrich's question in anything but mumbling nothings about Marcus, the counselor he had caught red handed with Henrietta, both of them possibly drunk. Or just drinking. Roy didn't know the difference.
The counselors handed out fishing rods to each of the two dozen boys gathered under a cloudless sky, baking in the windless morning. Roy grabbed the handle of the rod and looked up to see Marcus. He lingered for a moment and moved on to Ulrich, but not before he glanced back to Roy. This time it was Marcus, not Roy, who was smirking. Roy's fishing rod trembled in his suddenly unsteady hand because he knew Marcus the counselor knew something he didn't.
That smirk spoke a thousand words; none of them good.
"At Camp Crystal Lake," another counselor, this one named Jimmy, announced to the campers, "we pride ourselves not on just fun, not on just entertainment or a good old time. Since 1935, we've prided ourselves on teaching. We want you to go home with knowledge you didn't have when your parents dropped you off at this beautiful lake a few short days ago."
"And as my old man once told me," Jimmy said, his swollen belly poking out from beneath his Crystal Lake shirt, "it's a high calling to teach a man to fish. A man's gotta learn to fish or he'll go through his whole miserable life asking others for fish, or to fish for him, like all those goddam blackies out there…"
"Jimmy!" a nearby counselor snapped. "Jesus. Enough." Roy didn't understand the big deal. There were only whites here. Maybe a Jew or two. And Ulrich, of course.
"Right, well," Jimmy said, clearing his throat. "We're gonna teach you boys here to fish today, and you'll be better for it."
Marcus emerged from the huddle of counselors near the water's edge. Roy, even in the morning's sticky heat, felt a frozen shiver run up his spine. Marcus didn't look so much angry now as he did mischievous. He didn't make eye contact with Roy, but he didn't have to. The wry smile on Marcus's handsome face told a story that Roy feared he might soon know.
Marcus picked up a dirty white bucket and hauled it over toward the line of campers, standing there with fishing rods in hand, squinting into the sun's harsh glare. "First, we gotta get one of these worms on each of your hooks, boys," Marcus announced, plopping the bucket on the ground and reaching in to grab one of the squirmy things. He lowered the first rod in line, gently took the hook between his thumb and forefinger, and pierced the worm through its midsection.
"Watch carefully, fellas, because next time, you're gonna have to do this yourself," Marcus said. "Remember that us counselors aren't gonna be around your life to do everything but wipe your ass. We're not your mommies."
Marcus mounted another worm onto a hook, then another, and another, until he was face to face with Roy, who looked to Ulrich, only to find his friend staring intently at his shoes. "Hey buddy," Marcus said in a tone so pleasant, so overtly friendly, that it made Roy want to cry. "Let's get you a good little worm here. We'll get a fat sucker that'll surely nab you a fish out there in the lake."
Marcus picked up the white bucket and tilted it slightly to show Roy what it contained. There were hundreds of worms crawling around at the bottom of that bucket, over and under each other, around each other, making disgusting squish-squish sounds with every movement.
"Here," Marcus said, this time in a shout, "take a look."
It happened before Roy could register the sequence of events. He felt cold slime on his forehead. It rushed down, over his eyes, over his nose, over – and into – his mouth, and down the front of his Crystal Lake T-shirt. The terrible wiggling goo ran down his chest and stomach. Roy coughed and saw a trio of worms fly out of his mouth on to Marcus's white sneakers. He fell backward, rolled over and smashed a handful of worms into his face. Their innards covered his cheeks and forehead. Somewhere out there, seemingly a hundred miles away, boys laughed and squealed. Roy looked up to see Marcus shaking his head, that grin firmly planted on his face, while two campers laughed so hysterically that they hardly made a sound.
Roy was stunned. He felt no emotion – not hate or anger or embarrassment or disgust.
But when he felt the slimy wiggling in his mouth – one last worm that had sneaked in when the army of crawlers was poured over his face – he spewed vomit. There his breakfast lie, in the dirt, with a fat worm luxuriating in the contents of his stomach. Roy dry heaved this time because there was nothing left to vomit.
"Dang boy," Marcus said. "You made quite the little mess here. Didn't he, fellas?" Marcus turned to his fellow counselors, who shook their heads as if the whole thing had been choreographed. "You go ahead and clean up this mess and we'll get started with the fishing. You can join us when you're ready."
Roy began to shake. He looked at Ulrich, whose face was paler than usual. He mouthed "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and continued on with the rest of the boys toward the water.
Roy struggled to his knees, shaking uncontrollably now. There were three main piles of spilled worms on the ground. The thought of digging his hand into those piles of slimy horror made him dry heave again. He didn't know he was crying until he felt a tear slide down his cheek, through the sludge of exploded worms on his skin.
I hadn't meant to spy on two canoodling counselors in the woods, Roy thought, feeling an overwhelming rush of self pity. They were just there, within earshot of my tree. I can't help that. I was doing nothing wrong. They were in the wrong. They should be punished. Not me. Never me.
Then his thoughts drifted to the other part, the other person, of that dreaded night in the woods: the old lady, creeping around and through trees in the quiet of early night. The moaning of Marcus and Henrietta, the crackling of leaves and branches, the sound of his heart threatening to explode out of his chest – Marcus recalled it all at once and thought he might pass out. Still on his knees, his hand hovering above a small pile of worms trying to make their getaway before they became fish food, Roy's onslaught of terrible recollections ceased.
At the other end of Camp Crystal Lake, just beyond where the girls learned to jump rope and hula hoop with their counselors, stood that familiar figure, this time in the mid-morning sunlight. It was the woman. The old woman. She was standing just outside the cafeteria cabin, taking a drag of a cigarette, when Roy caught her eye from afar. She was wearing an apron, splashed with something dark near the top. Her head nodded in a subtle way – so subtle that Roy wasn't sure if he was seeing things in his emotional haze.
The lady took one last puff and tossed her cigarette to the ground before crushing it under her heel, turned away from Roy and walked back into the cabin.
Roy wasn't scared. He was curious. Fear had melted away when the lady became less of a mystery. She was a cook at Camp Crystal Lake, not some terrifying old bat who got her kicks by spying on horny counselors in the thick of the woods. Well, maybe she was that too, but at least she had a place here at camp. Roy was relieved, and he understood why he had never seen the woman around camp: the handful of cafeteria workers stayed behind the scenes except for a skinny black man they called Chaps.
The look the woman had given him in that moment, as she took in smoke and let it drift lazily out of her flared nostrils, was one of curiosity and – Roy believed – concern. Or some sort of motherly care. It had to be. She was so very motherly.
Roy turned to the counselors and campers. Some were hopping into canoes and headed out onto the lake, laughing, fishing rods in hand. Marcus and another counselor who resembled a string bean turned to Roy and yelled in unison, "Hurry up, Roy."
Roy wiped his face and found the mashed remains of a worm or three on the back of his hand. Revulsion and disgust were gone though, replaced by a calm sort of anger, an anger that boiled under the surface of Roy's gentle exterior, an anger he had never experienced. It felt good to allow himself to feel this way. To acknowledge hate in such an unapologetic way – a way his mother would not have approved – was the very definition of therapeutic. It healed Roy. It soothed him. It made him feel like a whole person.
He picked up handfuls of worms and tossed them into the their home, that nasty white bucket. "I'm coming," he shouted.
Marcus seemed perturbed by Roy's lightheartedness. Roy knew the bully counselor wanted to see the small child cry and vomit and dry heave on the ground for a while longer. Boys like Marcus felt most alive when others suffered. And Roy knew that he'd like to take the hook of his fishing rod and bury it in the eyeball of one Marcus Miller.
He knew he'd like to pluck out both of those pretty green eyes and use them for fish bait – to put those eyes deep into some fish's belly, then cut it open to find those lovely little peepers once again and say, "Oh, hi Marcus, good to see you is it good to see me again how was it in the bowels of a fish for a little while did you miss me was it as gross as having a couple hundred worms dumped on your head I hope you die Marcus I hope you suffer and scream and feel anguish and beg for mercy and cry like a baby and choke on your vomit and bleed out of your empty eye sockets and die Marcus die Marcus die Marcus die Marcus."
Roy handed the bucket to Marcus. "May I have my fishing rod, sir?" he asked and smiled from ear to ear. A look of horror spread across Marcus's face, effectively destroying that eternal grin. It was as if Marcus had heard the unspeakable thoughts burning in Roy's brain.
Marcus handed him a rod. Roy saw the counselor's hand tremble. "Thanks, Mr. Marcus," Roy said cheerfully. Marcus looked at the string bean counselor and shook his head.
Roy thought of the lady, the kitchen woman. He wanted to talk to her. He needed to talk to her.
Probably it wouldn't be too difficult. Roy hoped so, anyway, and the more he thought about it that night, tossing and turning and once again forgoing sleep for most of the night, it made more sense. Meeting the kitchen lady wouldn't be difficult at all.
Rustling in the boys' cabin had stopped for some time. Even the two boys talking about Phyllis Turner's bra – for she was one of a few Crystal Lake girls who needed one – had died down. Roy, in eavesdropping on that elicit back and forth, understood that he had a lot to learn about girls in the next few years. Quite a bit indeed.
The last boy to fall asleep, a kid Roy only knew as JJ, was now snoring with one arm thrown above his head. The only counselor in the boys' cabin, a round-faced teenager named Wallace, was dead asleep, covers pulled up to his nose.
Roy slowly pulled down his white sheet and brown blanket and reached under his bed. He felt around until he grabbed a comic off the pile he had concealed quite expertly for the past three days. In one motion, he rolled out of bed and snatched the comic. Roy was so pleased with his plan.
A dozen tiptoed steps and Roy was at the front door of the cabin. It had been left cracked so the cool summer breeze could circulate through the boys' cabin, which wreaked of sour body odor and farts.
Roy, without touching the door, slipped through and deftly jumped off the top stair. The only light came from the half moon that shone overhead. Glints of white moved across the lake on a night that had been windier than most. Roy stopped, before making his run for it, to admire Crystal Lake. It was, no matter how much turmoil defined the camp, a tranquil place – like a planet far away from his mother and her boyfriends screaming at each other about money and booze and things Roy didn't understand. The lake was ten million miles away from the kids at school who mocked Roy's home haircut or his meager lunches that so often included just half a sandwich. His mother needed the other half.
Crystal Lake – the lake itself, in all its majesty – was far, far away from the children who cracked jokes about how Roy had even attended the summer camp. They reminded Roy quite frequently that he was there, among more deserving kids, because of the camp's fund for poor children whose families couldn't afford the fee. "Welfare baby," they called him.
Crystal Lake. Roy knew he wasn't part of the crowd that flocked here every summer. He was surely part of the lake, its serenity, and the woods that surrounded it. Roy felt part of something older, even ancient. There was glorious permanence about the lake that did not apply to the feeble people who flocked to it every summer.
It might have been the wind, as it came in gusts that night, but Roy's thousand-yard stare at Crystal Lake was broken by the distinct sound of rustling. He could hardly tell if that sound of quick, noisy movement had come from near or far, or somewhere in between. His head on a swivel now, Roy scanned everything around him. No one by the lake. No one on the edge of the woods. No one near the cabins.
The night's wind kicked up again, and as that gust moved Roy's hair off his forehead for an instant, he was sure – positive – he heard laughter. Not a belly laugh, but a snicker – a controlled, stifled sort of laugh. "Had to be the wind," Roy whispered. "Had to be."
Roy scampered up the hill behind the boys' cabin until he reached his tree, as inviting as it ever was, that green moss seat just waiting for him. It was darker than usual – comic book reading might prove difficult with only a half a moon shining down – but that's not why he came tonight.
Plunked down on his soft, green seat, Roy flipped open the night's comic, this one called Starlacon, featuring the last human being in the universe and his partner, a scantily clad woman who made Roy feel those now-familiar warm feelings. Roy flipped through the comic, pretending to be interested in the story of a far-off future universe ruled by mostly-evil highly-evolved protozoa, but he could hardly focus on anything but his objective: to meet the old woman from the kitchen.
Seconds turned into minutes and minutes seemed to turn into hours, though there was no way to be sure. Roy didn't have a watch. He had solid it last spring for fifty-eight cents so he could buy a Coke and a pack of baseball cards. Reading through Starlacon – which turned out to be terribly boring once the human woman was in her full space suit – was too much for Roy after so much time went by. He placed the comic on the ground and stood up, only then realizing that his butt was numb from sitting on what he thought was the world's most comfortable seat. He stretched his arms above his head and yawned as quietly as he could.
"Son."
Roy reflexively pulled down his arms as a squeal escaped him. Adrenaline coursed through his veins; it almost made him feel like he was floating, or that his head had drifted off his shoulders. Everything was in slow motion, even the sudden turn that brought him face to face with the old lady.
She wasn't so old up close. Except for a few faint lines on the edges of her mouth and the puffiness under her dark eyes, Roy thought she looked practically young. It was her hair, in those tight little curls, that made her appear elderly from a distance. It was silly, up close, to say she looked any older than Roy's mother after a night of drinking with her friends or boyfriends or whoever was passed out on the living room couch the next morning.
"You've seen something you shouldn't have seen, boy," the woman said in a loud whisper. "And you've done something you were not allowed to do, being out here at night by yourself. You've broken virtually every rule we have here at the camp."
Roy felt bile rise from the depths of his stomach. "But you were out here too, ma'am," Roy said with a stutter.
"Yes, I was," she said, raising her chin and crossing her arms across her chest. "I indeed was out here because those disgusting counselors were breaking camp protocol, as you were. They had no right being out here, desecrating each other's bodies like heathens and–"
"Then why didn't you stop them?" Roy said, stunned by the verbal challenge that had seemed to leap from his lips.
"Why, I never," the lady said, though her outrage seemed disingenuous, as if she had practiced this in the mirror. She was, Roy thought, hiding something.
"If you must know," she continued, locking on to Roy's eyes, "my son was exposed to the terrible indecency of those horrid counselors. He saw them doing their terrible–"
"Your son?" Again, Roy was taken aback by his disrespect. He thought he feared this woman, this kitchen worker at Camp Crystal Lake.
"Yes, my son," she said, and pointed toward the cluster of cabins inhabited by the camp's founders, Mr. and Mrs. Christy, and their handful of summertime workers. Roy looked that way and felt the bile rise once more. He saw, in the distance between his favorite tree and the workers' cabins, a face in the window of one little wooden house. It was a little face, the face of a child. But there was something about that face – angular except for its bald head – that scared him into not breathing.
That face wasn't right. It wasn't right at all.
All the necessary parts were there – two eyes, a nose, a mouth – but they weren't exactly where they were supposed to be. Its mouth was offset to one side, one droopy eye was set beneath the other, and its nose was large and angled. And dear god, that head – it looked, Roy thought, like someone had over-inflated the thing's cranium.
The face that stared unblinking from that cabin was grotesque. It made Roy want to run, not just away from the woman and his favorite tree, not just from the woods, not just from the camp, but away – far away where that face could never look at him – through him – again.
"Looks like yours," the old woman said, "made me put him away, away from you rotten children. The judgment of my sweet boy has" – she choked up – "been so hard on him. All he wants is to be a regular boy. All he wants is to play and be carefree like the rest of you. To be normal and accepted. That's all I've ever wanted for my son. That's all I–"
"I'm sorry," Roy said, and he could almost feel the pain emanating from the kitchen worker, the maker of rubbery bacon. "I shouldn't have…"
"He did not ask to be born this way," the woman said as she swiped a single tear from her cheek. "I thought that we could overcome this. I was terribly, terribly wrong. The meanness and vicious nature of young girls and boys should never be underestimated, young man. Never. They are animals, every last one, and they'll seek out the weakest among them and trample those poor creatures. Perhaps that's just the way of things."
Her tone was equal parts resentment and crushed hopes.
"It is," Roy muttered. He glanced toward where the face had been, but the window was empty.
"You know then," the woman said. "You know how awful they can be. You know that well."
"I do."
The lady crouched so she was eye to eye with Roy. "What do you want, young man?" she said. "Why have you come here tonight?"
Roy's eyes locked with hers, and when he tried to speak, nothing emerged – not even a stammer. He couldn't bear to say what he wanted to say because acknowledging that truth would have broken him. It would have left him naked and exposed and completely vulnerable before a stranger.
Roy wanted a mother, a parent.
He had a mother, someone who had birthed him into this horrid world, sure, but she was more of a caretaker than a mother. She kept a roof over his head and provided at least some food every day.
She gave no love, she swayed back and forth between fits of joy and sorrow. She cursed and yelled for no apparent reason, sometimes devolving into suicidal threats that made Roy cry into his pillow at night. She reminded Roy that his father – who she sometimes referred to as if he had died – didn't love him enough to stick around. She raved about his dad's other family, and some woman named Stella, who she hated more than Satan himself. Roy, until this moment in the woods with the woman from the camp kitchen, didn't know just how much he longed for physical contact with someone who even resembled a mother.
Without thinking, without even considering it for a split second, Roy lunged into the lady's arms and swung his arms around her neck. His face buried in her black sweater, Roy bawled and begged this woman – this perfect stranger – not to let go. It felt like a dam had broken. It was, in a strange sense, exhilarating.
"You want a mommy," she said in a hushed tone. "And you want protection from those terrible boys. Those evil boys. That's what you want. Of course that's what you want. Anyone would."
The woman squeezed Roy. She ran her fingers through the back of his thick, black hair; her manicured fingernails felt wonderful on Roy's scalp.
He continued to cry, a little softer now, and almost smiled at the prospect of being jealous of the monstrous thing – the child – that had stared, emotionless, from that faraway cabin. Roy considered: Would I trade places with that boy, deformities and all, if I could have a mother's love? Was a life of isolation worth the unconditional love of another? Do I want to be that unfortunate child if it meant some sense of belonging, of being wanted in my own home, by a mother who hugged like this – like she meant it?
The embrace ended. Roy wiped away tears and snot with the back of his hand. His eyes felt swollen. All he wanted to do was to shut those tired eyes, curl up in the woman's arms and fall asleep. How wonderful that would be. To transform into a helpless baby who drifted off into the deepest sleep with the security of its mother: her touch, her presence, her mere existence and the love that would smother him.
Roy wanted to be the woman's son. The thought consumed him as she stood up and a shy smile ran away from her face.
The woman looked past Roy, and dread gripped her face. "On no," she gasped.
Roy couldn't even turn around before the pain pierced his rib cage and the breath was knocked from his lungs. He found himself, once again, face down in the dirt. This time, he couldn't breathe and writhed in pain from what felt like a collapsed rib cage. It was as if one side of him had collided with the other side. The pain was almost mind bending.
There was laughing. Someone yelled, "Get her!" and footsteps moved away in a hurry. More laughing. Then whispering.
I'm going to die here, Roy thought. He was sure of it. Some camper or counselor would find his corpse lying by his favorite tree in the morning. They'd take his comic book, kick his lifeless body and run back to camp. He'd be forgotten, left to become one with the woods. Maybe that wasn't all bad.
It was like rising from the dead when air finally flowed into Roy's mouth, down his throat, and into his lungs. He heaved and swallowed more air as greedily as he could before looking up from his place on the ground and seeing Marcus, holding a thick tree branch over his shoulder.
"Counselors are brought here to teach campers, Roy," Marcus said, as smug as ever. He took the branch off his shoulder and ran his hand across the smooth bark. "So that's what we're doing tonight. You need to learn a lesson about violating the camp's rules. They're there for a reason – the rules, that is – and campers need to observe them."
"It's also critically important, Roy," Marcus said, pointing a finger at Roy in an almost playful manner, "that Mr. and Mrs. Christy never find out about what you saw last night. Or what we're about to do to educate you about our rules. We love Mr. and Mrs. Christy. We'd never want to cause them any unnecessary concern. Isn't that right, Roy?"
Still gasping for breath, Roy rolled once and found himself blocked by a tree, his tree.
Marcus raised the branch above his head, his face now gripped with fury, and stopped just before he began a downswing that Roy was sure would've killed him on the spot.
"Well, get her already!"
Marcus was distracted by whatever was going on in the distance. Roy, just seconds before resigned to dying under the force of Marcus' bludgeoning branch, scurried across the ground until he was a couple feet from the counselor, and kicked as hard as he could at his knee. It bent inward and to the side in a most unnatural motion. Marcus screamed and fell to the dirt. His whole body shook as he held his decimated knee.
Roy leapt to his feet and grabbed the branch Marcus had dropped. There was no planning or considering or thinking – only action. Roy slammed the heavy branch into the same knee he had kicked. He then hit Marcus as hard as he could in the midsection just for good measure. Marcus, crying and yelping for help, shut his eyes and writhed like a dying animal. "Don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me, please don't kill me."
What a grand idea, Roy thought. He smirked. What a service he would be doing the world – to rid the planet of an unfeeling monster like Marcus Miller, someone who preyed on those weaker than him, someone who made the world a worse place simply by being alive.
Roy was sure, as he raised that branch above his head – ignoring the searing pain in his ribs – that Marcus had tormented the poor little boy in the cabin window. The lady's tears for her son were probably at least partly due to Marcus' relentless attacks on those shorter, punier, uglier, quieter, less popular, weaker than him.
It was a loud, sudden metallic snapping sound that startled Roy out of what he later understood to be a murderous rage. He had wanted to kill Marcus. But he didn't, thanks to that snap, which was followed by a thud, which was followed by a scream that echoed in the woods, bouncing off trees and turning Roy's spine into a thin line of ice.
There lie Jimmy the counselor, with two fellow counselors cowering beside him. Jimmy screamed uncontrollably. He screamed like a banshee. The chubby counselor's histrionics were for good reason: his leg was caught in a bear trap.
Roy couldn't see much in the darkness of night, but he could see enough. Jimmy's lower leg bone was exposed, the skin ripped into thin fleshy ribbons by the bear trap's razor teeth. Roy saw a line of blood spurt onto the dirt. Then another. And when he looked up, he saw the terrifying boy, this time to the side of the cabin, lurking beside an overgrown bush, and he saw the woman holding on to the railing of the small wooden staircase that led to the front door of her cabin. She was panting, flustered. The counselors had chased her down, presumably on Marcus' orders. What their plans were for the camp cook, Roy had no idea. Nor did he care to think about it.
Marcus shuddered and moaned. "Shut your damn mouth," Roy said, exhilarated by the freedom to curse. It felt almost as good as ruining Marcus' right knee.
Roy was overcome with a sense of calm. The pain in his ribs had gone from roaring to dull, probably thanks to the adrenaline he felt moving through his body, acting as a natural steroid – one that stripped away the crippling fear he had felt just moments ago.
One stride at a time, Roy walked toward the two counselors crouched over Jimmy, trying desperately to pry open the bear trap that had eaten its way through Jimmy's chubby leg. One of the other boys was holding a big black baseball bat – one the boys had used in a sandlot game a few days before.
One counselor yanked on the trap. "Oh god, please don't," Jimmy wailed. Roy saw a light flick on in one of the workers' cabins. Another one flashed on in the girls' cabin across the way. Camp Crystal Lake was awakening to sounds of terror in the forest.
Roy continued his progress toward the older boys. He had one intention: to strike them with Marcus' branch until they were incapacitated like their fearless leader. This wasn't a matter of collecting courage for something brash and violent; this needed to be done. Roy, if he had been etched into one of his comics, would have been the deliver of justice, the defender of the weak and meek, the punisher of the bullies, fiends, and monsters that tormented good people.
In the very periphery of his vision, Roy saw the deformed boy move. He was still next to that enormous bush, but now he was in a readied stance, a practiced stance. The boy with an unexplainable face was holding a bow, with an arrow pulled back.
Roy stopped. The arrow was aimed directly at him. His bravery melted away and in its place came a rush of pure terror, so raw it made the top of his head tingle. The boy let go of the arrow, and on its way it went, hurdling right toward Roy.
Until it entered the neck of one of the counselors fiddling with the bear trap. The kid stiffened, grabbed the back of the arrow, and fell down in a heap. He twitched. He made a gurgling sound that made Roy's stomach flip flop. Then he was silent. Dead.
His buddy, the other counselor, jumped from the dirt, leaving Jimmy to scream like a pig in heat. He hadn't gotten five steps before an arrow sliced through his abdomen, sending him to his knees. Roy watched the counselor examine the arrow as if he couldn't figure out what it was. His curiosity was short lived. With a slimy thud, an arrow drilled itself deep inside the counselor's left eye. The arrow burrowed even deeper when the dead teenager flopped forward, as dead as his friend.
It wasn't three seconds before another arrow zipped into sight and plunged directly between Jimmy's eyes. Probably that was best for Jimmy, Roy thought. He was out of his misery.
Roy's terror turned to panic. He whipped around and looked for the woman's son. He wasn't there. The boy, Roy discovered when he scanned the surrounding woods and brush, was nowhere. He had vanished in the night. His mother – what Roy thought of as his own mother – was standing half inside and half outside her cabin. Before she entered the cabin and slammed the door, she mouthed, "Run" to young Roy, who turned on his heels and made a beeline to the boy's cabin as the footsteps of counselors and camp workers made their way to the blood-soaked scene. Mr. Christy's booming voice called for Chaps the cook.
Roy hardly even noticed the bow and arrows lying on and near an unconscious Marcus Miller, who would, one day soon, be known as the murderous Camp Crystal Lake counselor, the one who one summer night lured his fellow counselors to the edges of the camp to hunt them down like animals in some sort of twisted game. Marcus was half in and half out of consciousness, and Roy knew that the formerly fearless leader of the camp's counselors would soon choose death over what came next.
Tucked away in his bed as chaos reigned, as people screamed and cried upon discovering the counselors' bodies, Roy couldn't bring himself to smile. He couldn't feel anything except for a longing for the kitchen woman. Her embrace was the greatest warmth he had ever known.
Quiet and numb in his bunk, Roy knew he'd soon go home to his biological mother.
He would desperately miss his real mother though, the mother of the strange and horrifying boy – the boy who was Roy's brother. Because they shared a mother. A mom. A mommy. And they always would.
23