Starry Eyes(41)

Summer laughs and tries to tickle him.

Everyone’s in a good mood, relatively speaking. Reagan, in her own way, has sort of tried to make up for what she said to me earlier. She brought along a small hammer—one of her many purchases from the outdoor gear store—so she helped me stake down the poles for a tarp at my tent’s entrance. She asked me if I was okay, and I lied and said that I was. Then she gave me one of her extrahard back pats, and that was that. We’re good. I guess. She’s been sitting on the same rock with me, and Brett just slid between us. Which should be exciting—his side pressing against mine—but I can’t enjoy it. I’m too busy thinking about her earlier “territorial” speech and how it seems like she’s trying to steer me away from Brett.

Why?

“Come on,” Reagan begs Lennon. “You and your freaky goth fetish . . . We know you’ve got a good ghost story.”

“You have the perfect voice for spooky tales,” Summer adds. “You sound like one of those old horror movie actors from black-and-white movies. The Wolfman. Dracula. All of that.”

“Vincent Price,” Kendrick guesses.

“No, the other one. Dracula. He was in Lord of the Rings.”

“Christopher Lee,” Lennon supplies.

“Yes!” Summer says. “Thrill us, Christopher Lee.”

Lennon pushes up from a squat and brushes off his hands. “All right,” he says. “I heard something a few months ago. But it’s not fiction. It’s what someone actually told me. You sure you want to hear it?”

No, I do not want to hear, thank you. I don’t like being scared. And now that it’s getting dark, I’m starting to worry again about sleeping on the ground. The tents I picked out with Reagan are actually pretty cool, I suppose, as far as tents go. They’re small, but made for two people, which means that there’s some wiggle room inside with just one person occupying. But they’re still not tall enough to stand inside, and knowing that I’ll be stuck in that tiny space later with little more than a thin scrap of nylon between me and all the nocturnal animals that use the waterfall for a watering hole is starting to freak me out.

But everyone else is apparently a million times braver, and they all want Lennon to frighten them.

“I’m so ready,” Summer says.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Long legs bent, Lennon sits on the edge of a boulder and leans forward, settling his forearms on his thighs. “Okay, so back before school ended, I was taking weekend wilderness survival classes on the other side of Mount Diablo. It’s run by ex-military people along with this retired search-and-rescue ranger who used to work in Yellowstone. His name was Varg.”

“Varg?” Summer repeats.

“It’s Swedish,” Lennon says. “And this guy was no one to fuck around with. Six five, big as a barn, scars everywhere. He’s rescued people from landslides and cave-ins. Fires. And he’s found a lot of dead bodies. People go missing in the wilderness all the time, and if they’re lost, they sometimes run out of food and starve to death, or they are attacked by animals or crushed by falling rocks. Fall into hot geysers.”

“Jesus,” Reagan complains.

“In winter, they freeze. Varg said he found an entire family frozen in the mountains. Amateur mountain climbers. They’d been there a week, trapped on a ledge. An animal had eaten the husband’s leg.”

“Ew!” Summer says.

I make a mental note to never, ever go camping in winter.

Lennon twines his fingers together loosely. “But Varg said even though he’d found dozens of corpses throughout his career—which is a lot of dead bodies—he never once believed in the possibility of ghosts. Not until he traveled to Venezuela.”

“What’s in Venezuela?” Brett asks, holding his phone up.

“Are you videoing this?” Lennon asks.

“Of course. Now I’ll have to edit that part out.”

As the waterfall cascades steadily behind him, Lennon gives Brett a long, unnerving look.

Brett shuts off his phone and pockets it.

Then Lennon continues.

“When Varg was outside Caracas, doing some kind of search-and-rescue seminar with local rangers, they spent the night in the mountains during a full moon. Nothing extraordinary happened. They built a fire. Ate. Talked. A lot like this, I suppose,” Lennon says. “But when it got late and everyone had turned in for the night, he stayed at the campfire, making sure the embers were out. And as he was sitting there, the hairs on the back of his neck rose. He had the distinct feeling someone was watching him.”

“Uh-oh,” Kendrick murmurs.

Lennon points to the tree branch hanging above the granite shelter. “Varg looked up at a nearby tree and saw a boy about our age sitting on a branch. He was high up, and the trunk of the tree didn’t have any low-hanging branches, so Varg couldn’t figure how he’d gotten up there. He called up to the boy, but the boy didn’t answer. And because it was dark, Varg couldn’t see him well, but his mind tried to rationalize his presence, and—I guess because of the nature of his job—he was worried that the boy was stuck. In trouble, you know. Needed help.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Summer says, curling up against Kendrick’s side.