The Next Kid Who Notices

Cabin Porcupine smells the same as it always has — old rain and older secrets — which is the first thing Dylan Marsh notices when he drags his duffel bag through the crooked screen door on the first afternoon of a brand-new summer at Camp Silvertip. The second thing he notices is that all three kids already unpacking on the bottom bunks go quiet the second he mentions the water stain on the ceiling.

"It's shaped like a wolf," he says, tipping his head back. "Anybody else see that?"

"Everybody sees that," says a girl named Junie, not looking up from her sleeping bag. "Don't ask about it at dinner. Seriously. Don't."

Dylan asks about it at dinner anyway, because that's the kind of kid Dylan is, and what he gets in return is a mess hall full of campers suddenly very interested in their sloppy joes, and one counselor named Trevor — a tall guy with a whistle who flinches like someone stepped on his foot — clearing his throat and changing the subject to canoe safety so fast it practically leaves skid marks.

It's not until Free Exploration the next morning that Dylan gets an actual answer, and it comes from the last person he expects: the camp caretaker, a wiry old man with a beard like a wire brush, sitting on an overturned bucket outside the equipment shed, running a whetstone over a hatchet blade like the world isn't in any hurry today.

"You're new," the man says, without looking up. "Gremlin."

"I'm Dylan."

"Sure you are." The old man — Gus, according to the kid who pointed him out — finally lifts his pale blue eyes. "You're the one asking about the wolf stain."

"I just thought it was cool."

"It's a water stain, kid. Roof's bad in Porcupine. Has been for years." But Gus says it slow, like he's testing whether Dylan's going to push, and something about the careful way he says it makes Dylan push anyway.

"Everybody got weird when I asked. Even the counselor."

Gus sets down the whetstone. That, Dylan will learn eventually, is apparently a big deal — Gus never stops sharpening things, not for breakfast, not for lunch, not for anything short of an actual emergency — but Dylan doesn't know that yet, so he just watches the old man's face do something complicated.

"There's a story," Gus says finally, "about a night hike that got weird a couple summers back. Some kids wandered off the path, got scared out of their wits by their own imaginations, and now half this camp acts like the mountain's got teeth. It doesn't. It's a mountain. Rocks and trees and thin air, same as any other."

"So there's nothing up there?"

"Didn't say that." Gus picks the whetstone back up, and the conversation is apparently over, except Dylan notices — because Dylan notices things, it turns out, same as certain other campers who came through these cabins before him — that Gus's eyes flick, just once, toward the equipment shed behind him. Toward a support beam low near the crawlspace, where the wood looks freshly disturbed, like somebody knelt there recently and checked on something small and important and put it carefully back.

Dylan doesn't ask about that. Something tells him not to, the same something that made him lower his voice without meaning to during this whole conversation.

That night, lying in his bunk under the wolf-shaped stain, Dylan can't sleep. Not because of ghost stories — he doesn't scare that easy — but because somewhere around eleven-thirty, with the whole cabin snoring around him, he hears it.

Not a growl. Nothing that dramatic. Just a low hum, so faint he almost convinces himself it's the wind, rising up out of the ground itself and into the wooden slats of his bunk, buzzing gently against his palms where they're pressed flat on the mattress.

It doesn't sound angry. It doesn't sound hungry.

It sounds, Dylan thinks, lying very still in the dark, like something waking up slow and stretching after a long, long sleep — and wondering, for the first time in a while, who's brave enough to come looking.