CHAPTER EIGHT
I guess when you expect the worst it’s always a pleasant surprise if everything ends up going smoothly. I totally expected some dead soul to rise up from the waves and overturn the Zodiac as Dex and I motored towards shore, or perhaps we might have run into some hidden rocks and sank (then get pulled down by that…hand).
But we didn’t. We arrived in one piece and, loaded down with stuff, pulled the Zodiac up along the pebbly beach until it was far away from any rebellious tides. Dex even tied it to a tree to be safe.
The fact that we had to carry so much shit in a half–hour trek across the island was also distracting me from the ghostly dangers that lurked about. I had the backpack on, my sleeping bag under one arm, the cooler under the other, a camera case and the ghost equipment bag hanging off of each shoulder, and the lighting boards in my hand. The weight was nearly unbearable and made it hard to walk on the stones.
Dex was no better off, but at least he had the frame to carry everything on him like some sexy, overloaded pack mule. And he somehow managed to fish out a camera out of the old–looking case.
He shoved it in my free hand.
“You film our walk,” he said. I looked down at it. I hadn’t seen one of these in years but it was a totally vintage Super 8 camera. Luckily that meant it was easy for me to carry (it’s kind of shaped like a gun), but still. If I fell over at any point, and that was very likely, the camera would be the thing breaking my fall.
“OK,” I said slowly.
He reached over and flicked it on. “But don’t film anything unless you have to. You’ve only got three minutes and 20 seconds of film before we have to refill and we won’t have the time to do that yet. Or, I won’t have the patience.”
I wanted to ask him why he didn’t film it but he did have both his hands full. What a little opportunist he was.
Dex walked into the forest and I followed. We broke through the bushes, taking our time since both of us weren’t very agile, and came across a small trail heading up and down with the coast.
We walked along the path in silence, listening to the cry of far–away ravens, the crunch of dead leaves and broken twigs beneath our feet, and the sound of waves against the shore, stirring the pebbles. From the glimpses between the heavy trees I could see that Mary Contrary was still anchored out on the water. Whether she was tied up or not, I was still going to worry about her. What if we came back to the boat tomorrow to charge our phones and she was gone? I had a mini heart attack just thinking about it.
After we trudged along for a few minutes, another faint trail looked like it broke off into the depths of the forest, marked by a red and white plastic disc on a tree.
“Straight or turn?” I asked Dex as he stood at the intersection. “Is this even a path?”
He pointed south where our path continued. “If we go south for a bit we can see the ruins of the caretakers’ cottage.”
That sounded creepy. “Uh, how about we come back and do that. Let’s just get all this crap off of us.”
He nodded and we started on the path heading inland. It wasn’t as well trampled as the perimeter trail and with each step we took over the jumbled roots and overgrown ferns, I felt more and more uneasy. Sometimes the path wasn’t even obvious anymore, especially when the spaces between the trees opened up. It took Dex’s vigilant eye on spotting the discs on the trees to keep us going in the same direction.
It was when we reached this strange little glade that I told Dex we had to stop. My shoulders were killing me and the cooler was slowly but surely working its way out from under my arm.
I probably could have picked a better place. All the trees around us were dead and decaying, weighed down by old moss that dripped with stringy moisture from their branches. They looked like crippled, hunched–over people being enveloped by killer slime, frozen forever in agonizing positions.
Even when Dex said, “Are you sure you want to stop? It can’t be that much longer to the campsite,” I heard more fear in his voice than the annoyance that I was slowing things down.
I put the cooler down as gently as possible and then flung my backpack off through that one arm. Even with the weight off, I felt as broken as the rotting trees.
Dex saw the pain in my face and relented. He took his bag off as well and put everything else down on the ground. He walked over me and passed me a bottle of water from the cooler.
“Thanks” I said, taking a swig of it.
“Shoulders hurt?” he asked.
I nodded. He walked behind me, reached over and placed both of his strong hands on my shoulders and started massaging them very slowly. It was a beautiful pain.
“Did you take massage classes as well?” I asked lightly, trying to keep him from knowing how much I was enjoying it.
He grunted a no. I expected him to make a remark about giving Jenn massages but he didn’t. And I was glad. That would have been too much. I liked to live in this weird fantasy world of mine where mentions of Jenn were jarring and inappropriate. Though, you know, half the time I was bringing her up.
Dex continued to massage but I could tell his attention was elsewhere. Had we been anywhere else, I might have felt a bit rejected. But I could feel he was scanning the dank, dark forest around us, taking everything in. I started to pick up an uncomfortable vibe, one that was miles away from the massage or Jenn.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t like it here.”
“I don’t like it anywhere here,” I admitted. But for Dex to say the same thing was saying a lot.
He slowly brought his hands to a stop and paused. We held our breaths in unison. There was something weird here. A feeling in the air, like the atmosphere was dragged down with the heavy, overgrown moss.
We heard a crunch behind us.
We whipped around, my upper body aching from the sudden movement, and saw a family of raccoons creep out from behind an old rotted stump.
We had a lot of raccoons in the Pacific Northwest and it was a nightly occurrence in the area around my parents’ house. I still didn’t feel any easier around them.
There were two babies and four adults. They stopped about five feet away from us and even though we were larger, I felt outnumbered, like we couldn’t win in a fight.
They would have been cute if they were on another side of a fence, with their human–like paws, black eyes and twitchy little noses. But here they seemed like vicious predators wanting to attack. I had hoped the last of our “animal” encounters were behind us in Red Fox.
The raccoons made funny little noises and a few of them leaned back on their hindquarters to get a better look at us. Or perhaps to intimidate us. They stood like that for a bit, not moving forward or backward. They weren’t exactly in our way but gathering up our stuff with them there didn’t seem like a smart idea.
“Start filming,” Dex said softly through the corner of his mouth. I looked down at the Super 8, which was beside my backpack.
“Uh...”
“Just do it,” he hissed.
I eyed the raccoons and then made my way over to the backpack, lifting up my legs carefully, not wanting to scare or startle them. It was at that moment, when I sighted my backpack as I picked up the Super 8, that I realized we had no weapons with us. As far as I knew, we had no guns, no pepper spray, and probably nothing bigger than a kitchen knife. Even a baseball bat would have been something.
I picked up the Super 8 and pressed record. I didn’t know what to shoot, but I just aimed it at the raccoons and heard the film spinning around the reel inside. I knew it was going to quickly run out.
“So we film them and then?” I asked, my voice low. “This is just more nature documentary?”