My grandpa told me a story—a confession, really—right before he died. This was 15 years ago. I had ended up alone with him in hospice and he was lying in bed struggling to breathe.
He said he needed to say something. He and some other kids had killed a boy at summer camp. Ezekiel. He didn’t open his eyes, just held me and started talking, stopping every so often because he couldn’t catch his breath.
Growing up, my grandpa had gone to a summer camp way up north near the Canadian border. The camp was founded by Teddy Roosevelt, people said, and nice families from Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and even Chicago sent their boys there to toughen them up.
My grandpa was 11 that summer. Ezekiel was younger, maybe 9 or 10. Ezekiel was a strange kid. He came from a farm in Minnesota and was going to camp on a scholarship. His family was deeply religious and didn’t have a telephone, though nobody knew if that was on account of their beliefs or from being poor. They weren’t Amish, but they were in the ballpark.
The camp counselors didn’t know what to do with the kid. They called him “Ezzy” and told him to tie knots and build fires, but Ezekiel would have none of that. He was probably sick of doing real chores on the farm; he definitely didn’t need toughening up. Instead he’d stay in the tent and write long letters and read his prayer book, muttering to himself like he was speaking in tongues. The camp had all kinds of Protestants and a few Catholics, but nothing like him, no faith-healers or snake-handlers. And the way he’d look at you could make your blood run cold.
Looking back at it, Ezekiel was probably afraid, out in the woods with a bunch of rich kids, so he was leaning on his faith. Not that the other kids didn’t give a shit. They bullied Ezekiel–it was fun–and it quickly got out of hand, the way it usually does when adults look the other way.
The kids pretended to lay hands on Ezekiel and yelled gibberish, hid cigarette butts in his food, stole his letters and read them aloud at campfire and wiped their asses with the pages. They did the same to his prayer book. Then one day, on a hike, some older boys took Ezekiel off the trail. It was a big pine forest, almost cold even though it was July, filled with the sound of birds and the wind. My grandpa didn’t know what they did to him. He took no part, he swore to God. Whatever the older boys did, they took it too far. The rest of the day Ezekiel lay in his cot, his back to everyone else.
The next morning was a Sunday, brilliant weather. The chapel sermon by the lake was about courageous acts of faith. My grandpa told himself that he was going to be brave, like Daniel in the lions’ den. If he saw something wrong, he would speak up. He looked over at Ezekiel, who, like usual, wasn’t listening. The kid was staring out at the lake and the ripples of blue-black water kicked up by the wind.
They had morning swim that day, always ball-numbingly cold, but there was a water slide and a diving tower on a raft and you could get used to the water after a couple minutes, stop shivering at least. The boys were doing dives off the tower. The platform was about 15 feet above the water. My grandpa was in the lake, hugging the raft and watching his friends tumble through the air and fall headfirst into the water.
To everyone’s surprise, Ezekiel was up next, tiny and awkward-looking up on the top of the tower. Everyone quieted down. He stretched his hands out in front of him, bent his knees, and—
Someone shouted something.
My grandpa didn’t catch what it was, but it knocked Ezekiel off balance. He tripped and fell off the ledge and landed face-first onto the raft. They heard his skull break, like the sound of a large egg getting cracked open under a towel, watching him stupidly as he bounced back up and into the water, then looking at the empty diving platform, at the blood on the raft, the blood already thin and runny from mixing with the lake water.
The shock passed. Then bedlam: people diving into the water, others running to the shore, whistles, screaming, water churning everywhere.
The lake was very deep here—for safer diving—and the water quickly got inky black, starting at four or five feet down.
Too much time passed.
Finally they pulled Ezekiel up and swam him to land. As they carried him out, his head fell back limply. His face was crushed in the middle, water dripping from the crown of the dead boy’s head.
It took a while to reach Ezekiel’s parents. It turned out they did have a telephone but a bad storm had knocked out the lines. They didn’t get word until late, and, roads being what they were, wouldn’t make it to the camp until the next day.
What to do until then? There was no hospital nearby, no sheriff’s office. The Lodge was the only real building on the grounds, a two-story log cabin supposedly built by pioneers with a dining hall attached. They put Ezekiel in the basement of the Lodge since it was cool and dark down there, put him out on a table so he wouldn’t have to be on the dirt floor, and put a handkerchief over his face so they wouldn’t have to look at it.
Then the thunderstorm that had been out west blew through east, a bad one with hail and pounding rain. All the tents got washed out by nightfall and everyone had to sleep in the Lodge, fifty or sixty kids in sleeping bags on the floor, all trying to fall asleep as fast as humanly possible, focusing on the sounds of the storm so their thoughts wouldn’t drift down to the basement.
My grandpa unluckily had ended up next to the basement door. As you can imagine, he wasn’t sleeping well. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the blood on the raft, Ezekiel carried out from the water, his face…
BOOM.
A loud crash. My grandpa sat up. Thunder? Nobody else moved. Even the counselors, who had stayed up late on the porch talking gloomily among themselves, men barely older than the boys, were now fast asleep. He looked out alone at the sea of sleeping bodies, the crash still humming in his ears.
Then there was a thud, then another. Someone was a walking up the basement stairs, the old wooden steps creaking under his weight. He reached the top step and paused, right behind the basement door. Then he went all the way back down.
After a minute or two, he started up the stairs again. Then back down again. Eleven steps each way.
My grandpa was furious—he figured one of the boys had snuck downstairs to look at the body or mess with it, and he found his flashlight and stood up and threw the basement door open.
It was pitch black down there. Now he understood how literalness of that expression: in front of him was a darkness so complete that it felt heavy and liquid, like it would cover his hand in tar if he stuck his arm into it. He switched on his flashlight and dragged the beam down the steps, all eleven, until he reached the bottom. Nothing, no one was down there, just the circle of light from his flashlight on the basement wall opposite the stairs.
Then Ezekiel walked into view, like he was stepping into a spotlight. Except it wasn’t Ezekiel. This was his body. This was something else, pale, the handkerchief hanging off of his smashed-in face, and only one eye which saw nothing at all.
My grandpa slammed the door shut. No one else had woken up. A deep, almost drugged sleep hung over the room. He felt so crazed with fear that he thought he might pass out.
The bottom step creaked. Then the next, and soon it reached the top and grew still, but only for a second. The doorknob turned, and the door inched open.
My grandpa stepped back, whimpering, when an idea flashed through his mind: the prayer book. He ran to Ezekiel’s bag nearby and opened it and grabbed the book, degraded from its recent mistreatment, and went back to the door, which was now wide open. Ezekiel was on the top step. He looked almost normal in the near complete dark, when the flashlight wasn’t on him, like any other kid who had stepped into a shadow.
Ezekiel grabbed the book from my grandpa, seeming to weigh it in his hands. To think something over. Then he turned and walked back downstairs.
My grandpa shut the door and locked it, waited. Nothing happened. Silence.
Then he grabbed his sleeping bag and brought it to the opposite side of the room, by the front door where it was wet from the storm. He lay in a puddle and waited for daylight.
Ezekiel’s parents came during breakfast. Their clothes were normal. His mother couldn’t speak, but his father managed to thank them for letting Ezekiel rest with his prayer book the night before. If they noticed the book’s condition, they didn’t say anything. Then they drove off with their boy and that was it. No lawsuit or anything. Different times.
***
Once he finished, my grandpa stared up at the hospice ceiling. He didn’t seem relieved for having told me. Then he looked pver, is dark blue eyes sunken deeply into his face.
“I hear him,” he said. “When it’s quiet. Late at night. I hear him on the stairs. After we had Richard, it started. Got worse as I got older.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Now I’m here, and I hear him all the time.”
***
My grandpa died 15 years ago. For a long time I forgot about what he said. No memory at all. It’s weird, I know, but you never want to remember your family members like they were at the very end. It’s not them. They’ve already left the building and it’s some animal dying there instead.
I recently became a father. We’re all good. Mom’s healthy. Baby’s healthy and beautiful. We’re hardly sleeping as we figure out how to take care of this little human. A lot of time spent in a dark quiet house. Well, sometimes quiet.
The things is, I’m hearing things. I’m embarrassed to admit it. When it does get quiet, and I’m the only one awake, I sometimes hear footsteps on the basement stairs. I hear the steps squeak, and they stop once I tune in, like it knows I’m listening.
Then it starts up again. Not always. But often.
And when I’m falling asleep in bed, I get the feeling we’re not alone. It’s the same feeling I had when I was with my grandpa in hospice—that someone was under the bed.
I’m freaked out, honestly. I don’t know what else to do but write this up. I don’t want to pull anyone else into this mess. But I can’t live alone all my life with it either.
I don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry.