I run a private campground. I have a set of rules to keep everyone safe and there are certainly some that people are more anxious to find out about than others. I thought I’d oblige, while I’m trying to figure out what to do with the stack of clothing sitting on my dresser. I’ve delayed on talking about this one, despite the requests, because it’s actually something I don’t have a lot of information about.
If you’re new here, you should really start at the beginning and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
When someone dies due to unnatural causes we don’t necessarily go hunting out the reason. It’s enough to know what the precipitating factors are and to warn people of those. When you see smoke, you don’t sit around waiting to catch fire. I do not need to know what is behind the frost to know it is dangerous.
If I were to write about rule #18 based on my own knowledge, it would be a rather short post. The frost only comes at night. We find the bodies in the morning. They’re often still frozen when they’re discovered.
Done.
However, there’s been an unexpected side-effect of making these posts. A camper has reached out to me about one of the rules and told me her story. She didn’t share it with me at the time because she thought we already knew everything. I wrote the rule, after all, didn’t I know what it was?
I’m not nearly the authority on these creatures that people seem to think I am.
To start with, I should say that this camper I talked to is a thrill-seeker. I’m familiar with that subset of my campground visitors. We have people that return despite having an encounter with one of my other residents. When I was a kid, I once laughed about them and called them crazy. I was parroting something I’d heard my classmates said. My father took me aside and explained that it only seemed crazy because I’d grown up with these things. For everyone else… it was like finding out dinosaurs were still alive. How would I feel, if I found a campsite where dinosaurs still roamed? Wouldn’t I want to go there, no matter how dangerous it was?
I think this might have been before Jurassic Park was released.
The woman that called me started visiting my campground a number of years ago and when she received the pamphlet, she wanted it to be real. She hoped desperately to have an encounter with one of the less lethal inhabitants of my campground, because it would prove that the world was more than what she’d thus far experienced. We know the tiger can kill us, but we still admire it for its majesty. And what better way to see one of these inhuman things up close than here, where so many of them are survivable? So she memorized the rules and came for the open camping weekends when she could spare the time.
She got her wish when the fairy on the deer crossed her path one day. She admitted to me during the phonecall that she snuck a look at them, but I suppose she’s not the only person who has done so, and it hasn’t ever come to harm. It was life-changing, she said. I can’t relate, but I did grow up here. I heard the awe in her voice, however, even after all these years. To see something ancient like that, something that was more than human and know without a doubt that there was so much more to this world than she’d been taught.
After that, she was hooked. The rules became a checklist. Obviously there were some creatures she didn’t want to ever encounter, but she sought out the more benign ones. She came across the man with no shadow one day and ended the conversation as she was supposed to, but watched him until he walked away along the road. Then she followed him, and was able to do so without him noticing for quite a while before a friend from another camp met her on the road and she lost sight of him before she got rid of her friend.
I don’t think for an instant that the man with no shadow didn’t realize she was following him. I suspect he was leading her to his grove. She got very lucky that someone stopped her before they reached it.
The children with no wagon stopped at her camp one day and she tried to engage in a conversation with them, without buying ice, of course. That was less than interesting, she said. The children wouldn’t talk about anything other than what size of ice she wanted and she finally gave up and sent them on their way.
The thing in the dark passed by her tent one night, she said, though after I pressed her for details I think it’s more likely that her solar lights were broken. (and since she’s likely reading this: please just leave that item crossed off your list, seeking out the thing in the dark is a BAD IDEA)
And since everyone is probably dying to know, yes, she’s been able to cross off the man with the skull cup from her checklist. He appeared as a young woman to her, with braided hair and wearing overalls. (for the sake of not writing the world’s most confusing paragraph, I’ll continue to refer to the man with the skull cup as ‘he’) She passed him on the road and initially he didn’t even look at her, just kept walking on by with his skull cup cradled in both hands. Then when she stopped and stared, he stopped as well and came back around to her. She admitted to me that she was excited to meet something inhuman that she could actually talk to, as the children had been less than engaging and for obvious reasons she couldn’t talk to the man with no shadow.
He’d only offered her a drink, however, and when she tried to ask him anything at all he only gave her a thin-lipped frown of disapproval. So that doesn’t change regardless of his appearance, I guess. Then he reached around her waist and she froze, not knowing what was happening, but he only pulled the creased list of rules out of her back pocket. Unfolded it, looked at it a moment, and then bit down on his thumb and broke the skin.
He crossed out his rule with his own blood. Then he folded the list up again and put it back in her pocket.
She said the look on his face warned her to not say a damn word the whole time this was happening. So she stood stock-still and silent, too scared to hardly breathe, until he left her standing there on the road.
She was giddy for the rest of the day, she said. She framed the list of rules once she was home and got a new pamphlet to carry with her at the campground.
I feel obligated to say at this point that I don’t approve of any of this.
Then, a couple years ago, she was able to cross off another rule.
Rule #18: While it can get cold at night, you should not see frost forming inside your tent. If you are woken by the cold and see frost, call the camp emergency number. Stay calm and stay in your tent. We will come get you.
This camper did not call the emergency line, not at first. Not until it was almost too late.
She woke in the night because she was cold. Initially, she was only half-awake, and thought that it was just a natural weather pattern and tonight was a little colder than other nights. She remembered pulling the blanket at the end of her cot up and then going back to sleep. Then, a little later, she woke again and fitfully tossed and turned for a few minutes before the cold sunk in enough to wake her fully. She sat up, groggy, and looked around her tent for any additional blankets she could use.
There was frost on the inside of the nylon. This was remarkable in that it was the middle of the summer and there should never be frost on the inside of the tent. Even more remarkable in that it was spreading at a rapid pace. It crawled along the fabric like a drop of ink in water, a glittering veil that sparkled when she shone her flashlight on it. She reached out a hand and touched the side of her tent and felt the ice crack under her fingers. Flakes of frost fell onto her arm. They burned and refused to melt against the heat of her body. She shook them off and slipped off her cot, putting her shoes on and finding a jacket. Then she unzipped the tent.
The ground was covered with a lattice of frost. The grass snapped under her feet as she stepped out of her tent. She stood at the edge of a patch of ice, perfectly circular, perhaps five yards across. It was frightening, she told me, to see something so unnatural. Her instincts recoiled, much like how our chest feels tight when standing at the edge of a fatal fall. This was not the first time she’d encountered something otherworldly, however, and so she ignored the urge to flee.
Familiarity is every bit as deadly as the land itself.
It couldn’t be that dangerous, she reasoned, if I tell people to stay in their tent when it arrives. I wouldn’t keep people in the presence of something immediately lethal. The rule only says to call the emergency line, after all. Which she did not do. Not right away.
The only way to survive the frost that we’ve found is to get away from it. We ask people to stay in their tent and call the emergency line so that we can come get them because it’s faster to relocate when on a four-wheeler, and that way we can wake up anyone that may be camping nearby and move them as well. And if they’re in their tent… well, it’s a lot easier to find someone in a tent than if they’re blundering through the dark, scared and confused.
I have told people to get out of there before a staff member arrives, if the frost grows too thick. I don’t leave people to die for the sake of my own convenience. Sometimes it is tempting, though. I’m on the phone with them the entire time, guiding them to the road so that they’re easier to find.
If she’d called, I could have told her all this. Instead, she walked into the circle of ice. She felt the cold creeping up from the ground, soaking through her shoes, sharp against the bare skin of her ankles. Her breath came out in thick clouds. The campground felt unnaturally still inside the frost and the only sound was the crack of the ice-coated grass as she walked further along. As strange as the phenomena was, there was also something wondrous about it. She felt it on her skin.
There was something peculiar in the middle. A bulge in the earth. She stopped a few feet short of it, more from the realization that the temperature had dropped precipitously than any real sense of danger. Her teeth were chattering and her body shook with shivers that were more akin to convulsions. The cold worked its way through her jacket, seeping into the fabric and stealing away the warmth from her body. The hem of her shorts was silvered with a layer of frost.
That’s when she finally called the emergency line. She wasn’t thinking straight at the time, she told me in our more recent conversation. She was most likely in the beginning stages of hypothermia and entirely unaware of that, due to how fast the cold had taken hold on her, and it impaired her judgement. At least she had the sense to call the emergency line, even though she did so while still standing there near the center of the ring of ice, staring at the bulge in the earth. It started to crack, like an egg, as she watched.
The camp emergency line goes to my cellphone. It’s set to ring loud enough to wake me up at night. She told me that there was frost in her tent. Nothing else - not that she was standing there, staring at its heart, as the cold slowly stole away her life. I got her location and dispatched someone over the radio. Then I told her to do what I tell everyone - stay in the tent and keep talking to me. To tell me how fast the frost was advancing.
But she didn’t. She didn’t really register my words. She’d called the emergency line, as she was supposed to… and so she hung up.
I got back on the radio and told my employee to get there as fast as they could, that I had a bad feeling about this one.
My fears were realized. That mound in the earth split open. Dark soil poured out, bubbling out of the wounds like boiling water. The ice was quick to cover it, but the earth did not stop moving - it took form - consolidating into packed clumps of encrusted soil, the ends splitting and taking form into fingers. Hands. There were hands coming up out of the earth, formed of dirt, veined with white lines of frost, coated with ice like glassy skin. A multitude of them, like a field of flowers blooming.
Then, wrists. A forearm. And an elbow, leveraging itself against the ground, and the earth churned furiously and she turned and ran, knowing that something was coming up out of the ground and she didn’t want to still be there when it emerged.
She didn’t make it very far. The ground cracked beneath her and the ice wrapped around it as it disintegrated, encasing the soil, and icy fingers clutched at her ankles. She tumbled forwards, landing hard on her chest and stomach, and clawed at the soil in front of her, trying to find purchase, but the earth was frozen hard as stone. The grass snapped as she raked at it, the slivers of ice biting into her fingers like needles and her hands prickled with agony. Her blood flowed sluggishly from the wounds and even its warmth could not melt the ice around her.
The hands began to drag her backwards. She couldn’t even kick them off, for their touch had chilled her flesh and her legs were unresponsive. Then, when she thought her time had run out and she was about to be pulled into the embrace of the frozen earth, she caught sight of a figure standing there in front of her, at the edge of the circle of frost.
Her mind worked slowly, dulled by the cold, and she initially mistook them for a camp employee, here to take her to safety. Then, when he failed to rush to her rescue, she realized that she was staring at something human in appearance alone.
She only remembers a few details. Their bare feet, pale skin, tinted blue and covered in lacy frost. A branch held loosely in one hand, some kind of evergreen.
It seized her by her hair. Dragged her free and held her up - she dangled in its grip, nearly senseless from pain - and then it contemptuously threw her aside. She hit the ground and that was when her body failed her and she could only lay there, watching the frost encroach as her breath crystalized on her numb lips.
She watched the grass in front of her glitter in the moonlight as it iced over; she watched as her fingertips on the arm that lay splayed on the ground before her turned white and how the ice greedily crept up to cover her hand, to form bridges over her flesh, pinning her to the ground.
Not that it mattered. Her body was numb, she couldn’t feel her legs, and even though she knew that when she closed her eyes she wouldn’t wake up, it was just too hard to keep them open any longer.
My employee found her unconscious, at the edge of a thick circle of ice. It had half-covered her body and he grabbed her arms and heaved, breaking her free of its grip. Then he dragged her over to the road, threw her up on the four-wheeler, and drove to the entrance of the camp to meet the ambulance when it arrived. They treated her for severe hypothermia at the hospital. She lost some mobility in her hands from frostbite. There are the imprints of hands burned into the skin of her ankles and those have never faded. But at least she is alive.
I called the staff member that had responded into my office after this conversation with her. He didn’t recall seeing anything unusual, other than the unnatural circle of ice and frost. No disturbed earth. No hands. And certainly no one else there except for the camper.
If this were anywhere else, we could dismiss this as a delusion induced by nearly freezing to death. However, this is old land. It surprises me not at all that there is a sentient entity connected to the frost, because among the creatures that prey upon humanity, most are intelligent and cunning. At least this creature seems more indifferent than predatory. That means I don’t have to deal with it right now.
I’m a campground manager. I’ve known for a while that the unnatural aspect of my land is part of its appeal to people. There is something special about this place, and it’s not just the dangerous inhabitants. The air feels purer, the sunlight seems brighter, and there is a rare tranquility under its canopy. My campers are given the list of rules, they understand the danger, and they come anyway for the reprieve and comfort that my land grants them.
A bargain with the devil of sorts, I suppose.
Read the rules. Memorize them if you can. But please, for the love of God, don’t use them as a bucket list. Your end might come a lot sooner than you expect. [x]