Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 68
Wanda leaned toward Bob. “Zoie and I used to love camp when we were little girls,” she told him for the tenth time. “The only downside was that we had to be away from Momma and Daddy. Isn’t it awesome we don’t have to put the kids through that? We’ll all be together for a full week!”
“Awesome.”
If Wanda noticed his sarcasm, she ignored it.
A deer ran across the road in front of the minivan, and Bob hit the brakes. Thankfully, the minivan hadn’t been going very fast. It couldn’t. It had no pick-me-up for steep grades, especially at high altitudes. Even though he easily missed the deer, Bob felt his blood pressure go up.
“Can you keep it down?!” Bob bellowed at his kids. “I’m trying to drive up here.”
Momentary silence.
“Do you think there are fairies in there, Daddy?” Cindy asked him. She was staring out the side window at the dense forest crowding the side of the road.
“Why not?” Bob said.
Wanda had told him over and over that Cindy was extra-sensitive. He could never “burst her bubble.” If she wanted to believe there were fairies, it was his job to go along with it.
Wanda changed the subject. “So what are we going to do when we get there?” she asked the kids.
Bob groaned. Not this again.
All three of them started shouting at once:
“Big bubbles, talent show, karoke, scanger hunt, puppets, paint rocks, tampoline, dancing, hula hooping, gymstatics!” Cindy called out.
“Trampoline, archery, horseback riding, canoeing, tubing, mountain biking, hiking!” Aaron shouted.
“Agility, kayaking, diving, sailing, swimming, tug-of-war, running, ping-pong, volleyball, bungee jumping, zip-lining,” Tyler yelled.
Wanda laughed delightedly. She did this on purpose to spin up the kids.
Bob was tempted to cover his ears with both hands. But obviously, he couldn’t do that and drive.
And what about fishing? he thought. Bob loved to fish.
Wanda hated it. But Wanda could manipulate with the best of them when she needed to. She’d used Bob’s love of fishing against him when she was talking him into this trip.
When it became clear Bob was going to Camp Etenia whether he liked it or not, Bob had comforted himself with the idea that he could wander off and fish on his own. That’s when the truth came out. “Well, you won’t get to just go off by yourself,” Wanda admitted. “They have fishing tournaments, and maybe you can talk the boys into entering one with you.”
Why did everything have to be so organized?
The kids kept firing out activities. Bob figured they’d have to stay for about five years to do everything the kids wanted to do, and they were staying for only a week.
“Only.” Yeah, right.
Seven days was an eternity.
“Seven days of fun and frolic,” Wanda kept saying to him while she was getting everyone ready for the trip. She made it sound like that was supposed to be a good thing.
How was Bob going to survive it?
Camp Etenia, Bob had to admit, was a great-looking place. Or it would have been if it wasn’t infested with noisy families.
Nestled in a narrow valley between two tall, wooded mountain ranges topped with craggy rock, Camp Etenia hugged the edges of a massive, meandering deep blue freshwater lake, Lake Amadahy. According to the camp brochure, Amadahy was Cherokee for “forest water.” That would have been an appropriate name for a lake in the woods, except for the fact that the camp was nowhere near Cherokee territory. When Bob pointed that out to Wanda, she didn’t seem to care.
Accessed via a ten-mile dirt-and-gravel road that left the highway at the bottom of a steep grade, Camp Etenia didn’t announce itself until you were almost upon it. Then an understated rustic sign nearly hidden behind a maple tree reassured tired travelers they were in the right place: CAMP ETENIA: JUST AHEAD.
The camp itself was as picturesque as its surroundings. The main lodge was a huge log cabin flanked by two stone chimneys and an ample porch that ran along the front and sides of the building. The structure was covered with a shiny green metal roof. The camp’s thirty-five cabins looked like the lodge’s children; little log-and-stone buildings were scattered near the main lodge like baby ducks swimming around their mom. Bob and his family were slated to be in cabin #17, Cabin Nuttah. Nuttah, apparently, was an Algonquin name meaning “strong.”
Bob’s boys thought that “Nuttah” was a hilarious name. “We’re going to stay in a nut house,” Tyler had told all his friends when they’d gotten their assignment.
“Don’t mess with my Nuttah,” Aaron kept saying.
“Will it have lots of peanuts in it, Daddy?” Cindy had asked several times.
Wanda said, “We’ll get nutty!”
Bob responded, “I’m going nuts.”
He thought the name was idiotic because, again, the Algonquin tribe lived nowhere near here, either. The owners of Camp Etenia seemed to have reached into a swirling vortex of Native American names and randomly picked a few.
Camp Etenia’s parking lot was a shady, tree-guarded gravel rectangle behind the main lodge. When Bob pulled the minivan into the lot, he was reminded you couldn’t drive your car to your cabin.
“That would ruin the ambiance,” Wanda said when Bob complained about it.
“Is excruciating back pain from lugging all our crap also part of the ambiance?” Bob asked.
Wanda smiled at him and applied fresh lip gloss.
Well, I guess that answers that question, Bob thought.
Now that he stood here next to a minivan crammed with luggage and toys—not to mention a cargo carrier stuffed with more of the same—Bob’s back started throbbing just at the idea of getting everything to the cabin. And of course, Cabin Nuttah was the farthest one from the parking lot.
“It’s right at the edge of the woods, Bob,” Wanda had gushed when the cabin was assigned to them.
“Oh joy and bliss,” Bob said.
And here they were. One woman’s heaven was another man’s hell.
Bob looked up at the traitorous sky, which had traded its clouds for vast expanses of pale blue. The sun was almost directly overhead, and it shined down with ferocity. Bob figured it was at least eighty degrees, and the air felt heavy and muggy.
Their feet crunching over the gravel, Wanda and the kids were practically dancing around the car. Cindy was spinning in circles, Aaron was doing some kind of dance, and Tyler was drumming on the minivan’s hood. Wanda was calling out, “Hi,” and “How are you?” to everyone within earshot.
“Look, utterflee!” Cindy squealed.
Bob followed the direction of Cindy’s plump pointed finger and saw a monarch butterfly disappear into a clump of salmonberry bushes. He flashed back to his childhood, remembering when his dad took him camping and they picked salmonberries to go with their fried fresh trout dinner.
“Come on, Dad,” Aaron said, “we have to get signed up, or we’ll miss out on all the good stuff.”
“Bob, why don’t you go take care of all that.” Wanda handed Bob four sheets of paper, covered with lists.
He knew the lists were the activities each child had chosen and the ones Wanda had decided they’d do as a family. He sighed. It was going to take all afternoon to do this.
“The kids and I will go scope things out and start meeting people,” Wanda said. “When you’re done with the sign-up, you can bring stuff to the cabin.”
“Oh, I can? Goody,” Bob muttered.
“What’s that, honey?”
“Nothing.”
Bob watched his family scamper off, but he didn’t move. He wished he could just get in the car and drive away. He looked at the driver’s seat. What would happen if he did that?
The sweet scents of wildflowers warred with pungent exhaust smells, but overpowering both, the powerful aromas of juniper and pine commanded attention. They made Bob think of a gin and tonic, his favorite drink. “It tastes like an evergreen tree,” Wanda had said the first time he made her one. After that, she started calling gin and tonic “that tree drink,” and eventually, she shortened it to “a tree.” “Make me a tree,” Wanda would say occasionally after the kids were asleep on Friday nights.
He could use “a tree” right about now.
Suddenly he got shoved from behind. A kid yelled, “Sorry,” as Bob staggered into the side of his minivan. Clutching the open second-row door, he noticed an overweight, sweating, middle-aged man wrestle with multiple duffel bags and suitcases. The man met Bob’s eye, and Bob gave him a sympathetic smile. Then Bob shut the minivan’s doors and looked around.
He was immediately sorry that he did.
Taking in the camp from behind the driver’s seat and watching his family spill from the minivan with uncontained enthusiasm had been bad enough. Seeing the whole of this purgatory in one wide angle was practically unbearable.
Kids ran all over, like they’d been given a drug that rendered them senseless but kept them in perpetual motion. Men were morphing into pack mules; sweating dads staggered around under the weight of their burdens. Moms were socializing and organizing. In the midst of the chaos, camp counselors blew whistles and shouted incomprehensible instructions.
Bob tried to decipher what they were saying, but he couldn’t. Steeling himself, he approached a pony-tailed blonde, blue-eyed counselor. She blew her whistle when he was just four feet away from her. The high-pitched screech catapulted into his ears and zigzagged around his brain for several seconds before he could speak.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but which way to sign up for activities?”
Ridiculously, she blew the whistle again, but this time it was at least a short burst, and she pointed to a shallow flight of stairs on one end of the lodge. “Go up those stairs, and follow the walkway to the front porch. Get in the line, and it will lead you to the sign-up tables inside.” She blew the whistle again.
Bob’s fingers itched to pull the whistle off her neck, but he contained himself.
“Thanks,” he said through a murderous smile.
Bob went up the stairs and found the line on the lodge’s front porch. From here, he could see that his family was already settling in. Cindy was holding hands with another girl, this one with black braids, and spinning around on a big dock that stretched over the lake. What was it with little kids and spinning? Near Cindy, Wanda was talking to a woman while Bob’s boys and another boy took turns trying to skip rocks across the surface of the lake.
And here he was, standing in a line so he could take care of paperwork. Story of his life.
Bob lost track of how long he waited. Flies droned around his head, and he felt his nose starting to burn. That would teach him to ignore Wanda’s advice to put on sunscreen.
“It’s going to rain,” he’d told her confidently.
“You never know,” she’d said. It was amazing how often she did know what he didn’t know.
Someplace nearby, someone played a guitar. Someplace even nearer, someone ate beef jerky. Bob wrinkled his nose. The smell made his stomach roil.
Other parents were chatting in line, but Bob kept his head down. For the first time since he’d pulled the minivan out of his driveway, he was able to think about the proposal he wished he was home working on. He didn’t have time to take a week’s vacation, and if he did, he sure didn’t want to take it running himself ragged doing activities with a bunch of strangers. Honestly? He needed to be alone.
Bob turned to watch his family again. Cindy and her new friend were now playing a makeshift game of hopscotch between the lawn and the lake, while the boys were trying to balance on the pilings along the edge of the dock. He was sure he was going to hear a splash pretty soon.
Bob finally reached the doorway of the lodge. Hard to believe, but it would eventually be his turn. Curious in spite of himself, he looked around the lodge’s interior. It was just as the brochure depicted: exposed log walls, lots of big heavy wood furniture padded with cushions covered in vaguely Native American patterns. A massive buck’s head presided over the fireplace, and the chandeliers hanging from the log roof were made of antlers. This was not the best place to be a deer.
Bob took one last peek at his family before he stepped completely into the building. As expected, the boys fell into the lake. Cindy continued to play hopscotch. Wanda laughed at her sons … only because they were laughing, too.
If anyone had asked Bob if he loved his family, he would have answered a vehement “Yes!”—because he did. But that didn’t mean he liked them all the time, and lately, he’d been liking them less and less. They always wanted something.
Daddy, look at the picher I drew, Cindy would say.
Dad, can you throw the ball to me? Aaron would ask.
Dad, please help me with my school project, Tyler would beg.
Honey, the garage door is rattling; please fix that, Wanda would order. Yeah, order. She always said “please” but it felt no less like an order than it did when his boss said, “Get that done today, please.”
Bob was tired of all the requests, all the obligations. He needed to breathe.
“It’s your turn, dude.” Someone tapped Bob on the shoulder.
He looked around.
A young dad who obviously still loved fatherhood stood behind Bob. The dad grinned and pointed over Bob’s shoulder. “You’re up.”
At the table in front of Bob, a hefty, tanned woman with super-short dirty blonde hair and smile lines around her eyes looked up at him. “Hi. I’m Marjorie.” She gave him a big smile, and he admired her very white, even teeth while she pointed to the white plastic name tag pinned to her green Camp Etenia shirt. “Welcome to Camp Etenia.”
“Oh, is that where I am?” He was aiming for dry humor, but apparently he missed the mark.
Marjorie’s smile faltered. She frowned for a second and then said, “Name?”
“Mackenzie.”
The woman tapped the keys on a wireless laptop. “Bob, Wanda, Cindy, Aaron, and Tyler.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, let’s get you signed up. Have you prepared your list of activities?”
Bob handed the woman Wanda’s neat lists. The camp offered 112 activities and asked that campers come prepared with lists of at least twenty, ordered by preference. Wanda’s lists held seventy-two activities altogether. Bob wondered what Marjorie would do with that.
But she didn’t seem surprised at all. “Perfect,” Marjorie said as she began typing.
Bob watched her, his jaw clenched. One of the objections he had to Camp Etenia—in fact, to any summer camp—was the rigidity of the whole thing. He had no issues with being outdoors or doing fun things, but doing things on a schedule, following a list—that drove him nuts. Ha! Maybe he did belong in Cabin Nuttah.
Seriously, though, didn’t he get enough schedules and lists to follow at work? At least at work he was getting paid. Why did he have to be subjected to this crap at home, too?
Marjorie stopped typing. “I wasn’t able to get you into every activity listed, but I managed the top twenty for each of your children and for your family as a whole.”
“Awesome juice.” Bob enjoyed using one of Tyler’s favorite sayings. Tyler actually meant it when he said it, but for Bob “awesome juice” meant either “That sucks” or “I couldn’t care less.”
Marjorie handed Bob’s lists back to him, then looked both ways and behind her before leaning forward. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. Bob heard “Do you want,” but the rest was incomprehensible.
He leaned forward. “I’m sorry?”
Marjorie leaned forward, too. Her breath smelled like chocolate. “Do you want to sign up for a Bunny Call?” she asked.
He must have misheard her. Bob asked, “What’s that?”
Marjorie turned and pointed toward a tall rabbit standing in the far corner of the massive room, under an antique canoe hanging from the vaulted ceiling. The rabbit, which had bright orange fur, wore a white-and-black checked vest, a yellow-and-white polka-dot bow tie, and a black top hat, through which its floppy ears stuck straight up. The rabbit held cymbals, like old-fashioned windup monkeys used to have. Bob blinked. How had he missed the rabbit when he first looked around? It was like missing an anaconda in a pen full of puppies. The rabbit did not belong. It really did not belong.
Bob was mesmerized by the rabbit for several seconds. He couldn’t tell if the rabbit was a person wearing a costume or one of those creepy animatronic things he’d seen in a couple of restaurants his family had visited when he was young. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of rabbit that made you want to cuddle up to it. Its eyes were a little too big to be friendly; they bordered on crazed.
“Mr. Mackenzie? Bob?”
Bob blinked. “Huh?”
Marjorie grinned at him and winked. “When you sign up for a Bunny Call, the rabbit over there—his name is Ralpho—will visit your cabin.”
Bob looked back at the rabbit, Ralpho.
“He’ll come into your cabin screaming, clashing cymbals, and spinning his head.” Marjorie chuckled. “It’s really something terrifying to behold!”
Bob could just imagine it.
“It’s quite the wake-up call,” Marjorie added.
Bob didn’t get it. “Wake-up call?”
“Oh, right, I didn’t say. Ralpho makes his rounds between five a.m. and six a.m. During that hour, he’ll visit every cabin that signs up for a Bunny Call. It’s a bit of a naughty prank we play on the children on their first day here. Most of them love to have that rush of terror when they’re scared silly first thing in the morning.” Marjorie chuckled again. In her low voice, the sound was reminiscent of a villain’s devilish laugh. “Are you interested?”
Bob looked from Marjorie to Ralpho and back again. He thought about his annoyingly happy family and their insistence that he spend his only week off this summer in this poorly disguised detention center for overworked dads. He thought about how long he’d stood in this stupid line signing up for all the asinine activities. He thought about all the luggage he still had to schlep to Cabin Nuttah.
Then he thought about how his family reacted to loud noises in the morning. That thought began teasing some of his good humor to the surface.
