Camp Blackwater

The brochure called it "Shivergrove's Newest Summer Adventure!" It did not mention the bell.

Bea Whitlock noticed the pond before she noticed the camp. Blackwater Pond, flat and dark as a mirror somebody forgot to clean, sat behind a brand-new dock with brand-new rope swings and a brand-new sign that said CAMP BLACKWATER, EST. THIS YEAR in cheerful yellow paint. Everything about the camp was new. The pond was not.

"My mom says nobody swims in Blackwater Pond after Labor Day," Bea told her cabinmate, a girl named Odette who was already unrolling a sleeping bag shaped like a shark. "On account of the bell."

"What bell?"

"There's supposed to be one down at the bottom. Nobody knows how it got there. If you hear it ring while you're swimming, you're supposed to get out. Fast."

Odette snorted. "It's June. We've got, like, eleven whole weeks before Labor Day."

That was the thing everyone in Shivergrove agreed on, actually — the rule was very specific. After Labor Day. Not before. So when Old Man Pruitt sold the land at the pond's edge to a camp company from three towns over, nobody stopped him. Summer camp, after all, only ran through August.

Still, on the first afternoon of free swim, Bea noticed that Counselor Greta stood at the very end of the dock the entire time, arms crossed, staring at the water like it owed her money. She noticed that none of the local counselors — the ones who'd grown up hearing the same warnings Bea had — ever actually got in.

"Buddy check!" Greta called, right on schedule, every ten minutes. It seemed like a lot of buddy checks for a pond that was supposedly perfectly safe.

On day four, during evening swim, Bea heard it.

A single low note, muffled, like a bell being rung underwater in another room of the world. It came from somewhere beneath her treading feet, and it did not stop at one ring. It rang again. Closer.

She looked around. Nobody else seemed to hear it. Odette was doing a very bad backstroke six feet away, humming camp songs, completely unbothered.

"Odette," Bea said. "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what? Also, is it just me, or is the water warmer down by your feet?"

It was not just her.

Bea's legs brushed something smooth and cold, like the curve of old metal, and then the bell rang a third time, so close it seemed to come from directly beneath her, and every hair on her arms stood straight up even though she was neck-deep in warm pond water.

"OUT OF THE WATER!" Greta bellowed from the dock, blowing her whistle so hard it nearly turned inside out. "Everybody OUT, right now, go, go, go!"

Later, wrapped in a towel and shivering for reasons that had nothing to do with temperature, Bea watched Greta write something in a battered notebook that did not look like official camp paperwork. It looked old. It looked like it had rules in it that predated the brochure by a hundred years.

"It's not supposed to ring in June," Bea heard her mutter to another counselor. "It's never rung in June before."

Somewhere out past the dock, the water went still and glassy again, patient, like it was only waiting for the next buddy check to end.