They made it easy to follow the rules. Enjoy the summer, don’t leave the cabins after dark, and never, ever, descend the stairs under the lake.
The last rule didn’t make sense to Gabe since stairs under a lake was a looney toons set up, not an actuality.
Gabe had been coming to Camp Welby since he was a little boy. He didn’t like to admit he used to cry himself to sleep. He certainly didn’t say anything about wetting the bed, either. But he’d been blessed with some compassionate camp counselors who helped him skate through the night terror years without public incident. It was the reason he returned to the camp after his freshman year of college.
His return as a camp counselor definitely didn’t have anything to do with the rumor that Emma LaFraigne was also returning in the same capacity. None at all.
Freshman year of college zoomed past like sugar rush roller skaters. He’d received his acceptance letter from the camp in April. He sat on his dorm room bed, under the gaze of a steely eyed Jim Morrison, and dreamed of the sweaty summer nights where a heartfelt confession didn’t fall flat.
Set in the Minnesotan wilderness, the campers had to arrive via floatplane. The popularity of arrival diminished in recent years after a spike in accidents. Gabe thought that was tied more to the age of the average floatplane than pilot competency. Still, camper attendance only made it to sixty campers instead of his childhood average of two hundred. The relative vacancy gave the lake an eerie, sparse feeling.
After the first day of welcoming campers, Gabe and his fellow counselors found themselves free. Willow and Lucas, two friends from Bear Lake said they’d stick in camp while the rest of the counselors made their inaugural trek to Cairns Point above the north end of the lake. There were cairns stacked in various sizes at the edge of the cliff overlooking the lake. The twenty foot drop wasn’t big enough to fully scare off the uneasy, but it did mean cajoling, bribes, and obscure threats had to be made in order to ensure everyone leapt into the water at the same time.
One doesn’t mess with tradition.
One counselor, Ryder, hung back to talk to Gabe about a rumor he’d heard a couple years back. It had to do with the last rule in the unofficial counselors notebook that previous years wrote their names and best (or worst) experiences of the summer in.
“It’s not a joke, you know,” Ryder said as he fiddled with the bark on his walking stick. “My brother told me a kid in his year found the stairs.”
Gabe gave him a look. “Come on, man. I know how brothers are. He just wanted to freak you out before coming here.”
“I don’t think so. He told me this a couple years back. Right after his last year of high school. That was the year they stopped letting high schoolers work here.”
“That’s ominous. Did he say anything else or did he just leave it at that?” Ryder looked around to check that no one else was listening in.
“He told me not to come up to Cairns point past midnight. He didn’t say why. But he made me promise.”
Gabe checked his watch, the aqua blue text read nine fifteen pm before shaking his head. “I think he’s just trying to do that older brother thing. We’re not going to be out here that late anyway, but I think he’s full of it.”
Ryder threw his hands up, “I was just saying…”
“Come on, let’s catch up with the group.”