I run a private campground. I have a list of rules to ensure everyone stays safe… and it’s time to add a new one.
As a particular astute reader pointed out (thanks u/SlurpeeSlurper) in my last post, there’s been some inconsistencies regarding my elder brother. Did he work in the oilfields? Disney? Was he away on a ship for a deep sea research expedition? And why did his name keep changing?
Let me make this absolutely clear. I do not have an older brother. I’m the eldest and I have only one brother and his name is Tyler.
Now then. Let me explain what happened, starting with the staff meeting. I try to not hold many emergency staff meetings. Reserving them for actual crises ensures that everyone attends. For lesser matters I utilize the whiteboard in the staff breakroom. I did the trendy thing and bought whiteboard paint and painted an entire wall. It’s popular for leaving notes like “I brought in cupcakes, they have pink frosting, don’t eat the ones with green frosting I don’t know what left them” or “the woman with extra eyes says she’s out of chamomile”, or “can anyone cover my shift this Friday???” Sometimes there’s pictures or a game of hangman. I reserve the upper right corner for my announcements and that’s how I convey non-urgent information to my staff. That way, when I call an impromptu staff meeting, they know it’s something important.
The employee hall is another barn-like structure with a corrugated steel roof and thin metal walls. Enormous fans keep the air circulating so that it stays tolerable in the summer. There’s a breakroom with a fridge, sink, stove, and countertop space. A couple general purpose rooms, including two at the entrance that we open up during our larger events for volunteer usage, and the meeting room.
I’ve been trying to convince my uncle to take some camp funds and build himself a new house on the property so we can use his current one for our staff building. They’d appreciate A/C and I like its central location. My uncle isn’t convinced yet. He doesn’t like change.
The cupcakes with the green frosting were on the conference table when I entered. Subtle. Real subtle. I took them outside and left them on the ground. Hopefully the birds would dispose of them for us. My staff trickled in, nervous at there being an emergency meeting and disgruntled at being interrupted in their Halloween preparations. The timing of this was less than ideal. Everyone was already on edge from it being October.
“Everyone knows my elder brother, right?” I said. “He just got back from hiking the Appalachian trail.”
The words flowed from my mouth so easily that for a moment I forgot why I was having this meeting. Everything was fine. There was no emergency. Then I glanced down at the framed picture sitting on the table before me and I looked back up to see my staff all staring back at me, smiling happily and nodded. Of course they knew Steven who spent the past year by the ocean finishing his novel. James who got back from California where he’s a firefighter. Eric who just completed his master’s degree in medieval history at a European university.
I held up the picture.
“See this?” I told them. “Since this is an old land, we take our family history very seriously. This is our family tree. It hangs in my office. Does anyone notice anything strange about the last entry?”
No Steven. James. Eric. No elder brother.
“I only have one brother,” I continued. “He’s sitting right there and he’s younger than me. I’m not sure what this ‘older brother’ is but he’s not my brother.”
I told them that I didn’t have answers but that I was going to work at finding them. While this was certainly unsettling to hear - that the boss doesn’t know what’s going on - I believe in being honest with my staff. In the meantime, I wanted them to act like nothing was wrong, but to take extra caution around this interloper. Don’t go anywhere with him alone. Work in pairs (and this was the standard procedure for October anyway but it especially needed repeating now). And I told them all to get out their cellphones and set a reminder for every fifteen minutes that I only have one brother, a younger one. No one could forget this, I said. And I got out my phone as well and we all sat there in silence for a few minutes while people tapped on their screens.
Then I told Bryan to come with me. We were going to go on a visit.
I took a shopping bag with me. Bryan brought two of his dogs. The rest he instructed to patrol the campsite. Bryan’s family is from Ireland. They came over in the potato famine and have retained that Irish heritage fairly strongly in their bloodline. Most of the family has red hair, except for Bryan and his dad. They have black hair.
We took two of the four-wheelers down through the camp road to the eastern edge. I haven’t done much development to the eastern side of the camp. It is still thick forest that drops into a depression along the southern side. It floods every year and the groups that camp in this area have developed a multitude of ingenious methods for dealing with the mud. I didn’t build this area out because I didn’t have to - these campers roll in, unload, and do all the construction themselves. It’s frankly impressive.
The lack of human structures also means that it’s easy to hide things among the trees. The forest crowds in around things that don’t want to be found. I shut my vehicle down and took my grocery bag and told Bryan to wait for me at the road. To come find me if I wasn’t back in two hours. Then I started off into the woods, hoping that the person I was looking for was in the mood to receive visitors.
One of my staff members first found the lady with the extra eyes some years ago. He’d had a particularly bad week. His wife had left him. I can’t say he didn’t deserve it, he’s honestly a jerk, but that’s still a hard thing to go through. The lady with extra eyes found him and invited him in for tea. He told me, later, that he didn’t know whether to refuse or not and which would get him killed, so he accepted because he honestly didn’t care if she did kill him and figured he’d at least die with a nice cup of tea first.
And the lady hadn’t killed him, merely made him some tea and served him some biscuits and let him tell her all about his wife leaving.
There isn’t a happy ending to this. She didn’t give him any life-changing advice. Just tea. He wasn’t able to make amends and the divorce went through and he’s been bitter ever since. At least his bitterness makes him a hard - albeit angry - worker.
Today, I was in luck. The lady was receiving visitors. I found her cottage - a single room with stone walls and a thatch roof. Smoke curled up from the chimney. I knocked on the door and it creaked open at my touch. Inside, the woman was busy with a tea kettle hanging over the stove.
“I brought you chamomile,” I said, holding up the grocery bag.
“Lovely, lovely. Put it on the shelf.”
The floor of her cabin is packed dirt. The interior is merely a round dining table and another rectangular one against the wall for food preparation. I’m not sure where she sleeps. I’m not sure if she sleeps.
The lady herself is rather plain, appearing in her early thirties with long brown hair. Her eyes are gray. She has a lot of them. They cover her forehead and her cheeks. I don’t know how many there are. Staring at her long enough to count them all would be rude.
She brought the hot water over along with two cups and threw some leaves into each before filling it with water. Then she settled herself in across from me and we waited for the tea to cool enough to drink. I told her about my brother that isn’t my brother and she listened. Then, because I think she’s lonely and just likes to hear people talk, I told her a bit more - about how I’m sharing these accounts online and she thought that sounded delightful.
She says hello and says you should all come to visit her. I’m sorry if that sounds ominous. It’s not.
I wasn’t certain what I was hoping for. She was my first recourse because of all the potential allies, she’s the safest to talk to. The man with the skull cup would be my second recourse and if that failed… I would implore the thing in the darkness.
“I can’t get rid of him for you,” she said when I finished, “if that’s what you’re here hoping for.”
It was. It would be rude to say so, however, and I remained silent.
“I can give you some assistance at least, and you will have to deal with this problem yourself.”
The tea, she said, was her first gift. It would allow me to retain a clear head while in the presence of my not-brother. This was one of the patterns we’d identified in the staff meeting. Anyone talking to my not-brother or merely in the general vicinity would immediately believe that he was my brother, that he had every right to be here, and give him absolute trust. This effect could last for hours. It took an outsider to point out the problem and even when it was right there in front of me on the screen, I still struggled to realize that my brother is not my brother.
I asked her how long the effect would last. She waved her hand dismissively.
“I don’t know, you humans are the ones with the cellphones, google how long it takes to metabolize tea.”
The second gift, she said, was the gift of sight. She asked me if I had an optometrist I could see on short notice. I replied that I should be able to get an appointment in the next few days and asked why she inquired.
“Because I’m pretty sure you’ll need one to get this out.”
And she took up a minuscule splinter from the table, rolled it between her fingers, and stabbed it into the sclera of my eye.
For the record, my optometrist won’t see me until next Friday. That splinter is still in there and it is deeply irritating.
I stumbled around her tiny one-room house for a minute or so, clutching at my face and bumping into the tables. I trusted the woman with extra eyes and so when she’d stepped up close to me I hadn’t thought to react until it was too late. She busied herself with cleaning up the tea cups while telling me that the splinter would grant me the ability to see what really was for the next twenty-four hours and after that it would be nothing more than a splinter that the doctor would need to remove.
“One last thing,” she said as I stared up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly as my eye filled with tears. “Keep that eye closed until you’re out of the woods. There are things out here that aren’t safe for a mortal to see clearly.”
Now, I’m sure you’re desperately curious as to what I could have seen in the forest with that splinter lodged in my eye. However, I have spent so much time and effort trying to convince other people to follow a set of rules that are designed to keep them from suffering a horrific fate and I wasn’t about to do the stupid thing and go ignoring the lady with the extra eye’s warning. So depth perception be damned, I kept that eye shut tight.
Bryan graciously let me ride on the back of his vehicle after I almost walked into a tree.
My house was different when I walked inside. The light from the windows was brighter. There was a gold sheen across every piece of furniture, like it glowed with light from within. I went to the office and the books on the shelves, the ones my father collected and the ones passed down through the generations, they sparkled like stars. I cried, but not because of the splinter in my eye. I think I understand a little better what it means to be an old land. It isn’t all bad. It isn’t all dangerous. Some of it is beautiful, radiant with the life of those that came before us.
I closed the one eye before I went into the bedroom, the master bedroom that I now claimed as my own, the one my mother died in. I wasn’t certain what I would see… and I was afraid to know. Perhaps it would glow with the warmth of those that came before me…
Or perhaps it wouldn’t.
I suppose I’ll never know.
I took the shotgun down from its spot and returned to the living room. I got on the radio and called for my elder brother (and this time, a name did not appear unbidden in my mind) to come by the house. I had more Halloween preparations I wanted him to take over, I said.
He was quick to respond. I waited in a chair, the shotgun loaded and resting over my knees. I listened as the front door opened and shut behind him, listened to his footsteps as he rounded the corner.
I wish the lady with extra eyes had warned me. I wish she’d tried to prepare me in some way. As it was, I could only stare for a moment, my voice swallowed up by the cold terror settling in my stomach.
He was empty. His abdomen and chest cavity were open and hollowed out, the skin rolled back and neatly tied on either side of his body like one draws curtains. His sternum was gone, the ribs cracked so that they protruded from either side of his body like fangs. I could see clear through to the smooth muscles at the back of the cavity, to the bulge of his spine. He stared at me a moment and asked what was wrong, why I’d gone so pale all of a sudden.
I stood, raised the gun and pointed it at his chest, and asked him what he was.
He was silent a moment. Then he lunged at me - I fired - and the blast hit him in the center of his mass because that’s where I’d practiced to hit, that’s where my dad taught me, but there was nothing left to destroy. It knocked him down but he flipped to his feet, barely even stunned, while I desperately tried to reload. Then he was springing forwards, his hand closed on the gun, and he wrenched it from my hands and threw it across the room.
I found myself on the ground. Dazed, unsure of how this happened, aware of a sharp pain in my knee. Then he was over me, snarling that this campground was rich pickings for him and if he couldn’t replace me, then he’d dispose of me instead.
I felt his nails against my abdomen and wondered what he’d do with my organs, once they were removed.
That was when Bryan’s dogs came in through the window.
My not-brother jerked to his feet as the glass shattered. I caught a glimpse of his face, his lips peeled back in frustrated rage, and then he turned and ran. The dogs pursued, knocking over furniture as they went, bounding over top of my prone body in one jump. The dogs are Irish wolfhounds. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but their gray coats looked almost black.
According to my staff, the dogs pursued my not-brother off of the campgrounds. He ran impossibly fast for a human, but I suppose that’s to be expected of something that isn’t actually human. The chase seems to have broken the effect he had on all of us as well, as my staff were able to see clearly what he was as he went running by with a pack of baying hounds close behind.
I really wish one of them had been quick enough to catch it on video. I would have liked to see that thing running for its life.
I’m a campground manager. It’s a dangerous job sometimes, but it has its benefits. I have the trust of my staff and those that camp here are under my protection. For that reason, I suspect that my not-brother will be back. Had he been successful in replacing me, he would have had easy access to all those people that come and stay here. He may yet try again.
Because of this, I am adding a new rule to my list.
Rule #20: I only have one brother. He is younger than me and his name is Tyler. If you meet anyone claiming to be my older brother, inform camp management immediately. He is not my brother.