What Happened to Marianne

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. "Put it on the table," one of the younger counselors said. "It's hardly doing any good over there."

"No. If one of the kids comes up and looks in, they won't see much past the candle. If I put it between us, they can see our faces. There's light enough. We're not writing a novel here."

"What are we doing?"

Kelly turned away from the window, heart pounding. None of the other six showed even a fraction of her anxiety. They had no idea. "Um...." She'd never hosted this before.

She'd never been the only returning counselor before.

She drew in the deepest breath her tightening chest would allow. "This is...every other year, we have to have a safety meeting. This is the safety meeting."

"In the middle of the woods?" Abby asked. "At midnight? Why?"

"This wasn't on the calendar," Sam added.

"We can't let them know. None of the campers can ever know that this happened, let alone what we're going to talk about. None of them can know that it keeps happening. If any of you are ever asked by anyone--campers, Mike and Jenny, parents, Mr. Paradis, police, anyone--this never happened. Not tonight, not ever."

The others stared at her. "I'm going to need to know why 'police' was in that list," Kevin said quietly.

"Right?"

"Okay. Okay, sorry." Kelly tried to settle. "I'm getting ahead of things. Move over." She squeezed past Abby's end of the bench and sat in the last open seat, the one at the head of the table. "There haven't been police involved yet, anyway. Not that I know of. I mean, well, sometimes. A couple of times. It's fine," she added at the looks several of them were giving her. "It'll be fine." No one responded.

Three men, three women. What would have been men and women in another time, anyway. Only Benji and Alex were old enough to vote, but the other four were at least old enough to drive. Maybe not adults now, but they would have been in His time.

Kelly was nineteen. This was her third safety meeting.

"Okay. Let's do this this way: what happened in '90?" A round of shrugs. "Two years ago here at this camp, what happened that made the news?"

Alex snapped his fingers. "The Dobson boy."

"Brandon. Yes, Brandon Dobson."

"He drowned," Abby said. "I read about it. They were going to close the camp down, but then...I don't know."

"It just sort of...went away," Kelly said with a wave of her hand. "That's the thing to keep in mind. It always just goes away. What happened in '88?"

A long pause. "I have nothing," Alex offered.

"The Red Fern incident."

Sam recoiled. "Nope. I don't want to talk about that. I wasn't here for that and I don't..."

"Oh, I was here. I saw it happen. I still have nightmares."

"What happened?" Abby whispered loudly to Kevin on the other side of the table.

"One of the older girls, Lisa Butler, was cutting wood. She fell. Did you ever read..."

"Oh my god," the fourth girl, Becky, breathed. "Oh, I'm going to be sick."

"Yeah. It was bad. What happened in '86?" Kelly demanded, pushing the memory of little blonde Lisa screaming, writhing in the dead pine needles as the dirt under them turned to deep red mud, out of her head again. No one knew this one either. She slapped a hand down on the table, somehow frustrated by their complete ignorance to the worst events of her life. "Brain-eating amoeba! Lenny Beckwith didn't die until three weeks after he got home, but he caught it in that lake out there. He breathed in through his nose after he fell off the pier and had no idea he was dead before he surfaced. By the time they figured out what he had, there was nothing any doctor could do."

"Okay," Benji soothed. "Okay, we get you. Every two years, something bad has happened."

"Not 'something bad'. Someone dies. One of the campers dies."

"Someone dies every other year," he allowed. "We have to be on guard. We have to make sure it doesn't happen this year. We can do that. We've got you."

"No, you don't. It's not...ugh...." Had she been this dense? How had Tommy started the first one? She tried to reach back to that meeting, but she was fighting through a head full of storm clouds. She couldn't think.

"We can only predict so much, though," Sam said. "One, this is a superstition. Sorry, but it is. There's literally zero reason to believe that it'll happen again this year. Two-"

Kelly couldn't help but laugh. Sam stopped, and Kelly wondered if they could all hear the panic she was beginning to feel. "I'm sorry," she finally said. "We don't have time for this. We'll be here all night if we sit and argue about if it's going to happen. I need you to just believe that it will and move on."

"Are you, like...okay?" Kevin asked.

"I'm really not. Tonight is a bad night. It can always get worse, though, and it will if you don't trust me."

"You know they won't," a voice from the shadows in the back corner said. Kelly jumped harder than any of the others even know she had known he was there from the moment they reached the clearing. Adrenaline flashed and burned along her nerves and back up into her brain. The clouds cleared.

"Holy shit," Alex muttered.

"Who the hell are you?" Sam asked.

He stepped into the candlelight. He was maybe thirteen, freckled, and unfamiliar, tall for the age in his smile and built like he was three years at most from breaking every heart in the room. His eyes were the color of honey.

"Kelly, babe. You tried so hard," he said gently. "I'm really proud of you."

She buried her face in her hands, hating the relief she felt at surrendering control of the meeting. "Why do we have to do this?" she whispered.

It was real again now. She got almost two years at a time to pretend this didn't happen, that it had never happened, but that was over now. He was here. Tonight was his now.

"It doesn't matter. You have to. I will say, though," he added, dragging a chair from the back of the room to the end of the table opposite her, spinning it backward, and throwing himself down into the seat with his arms draped across the back. "With a little practice, you'd make a hell of a tempter. It's the 'no, I mustn't' feel. Very girl next door."

"Shut up. Just shut up."

"You're not one of the campers," Sam pressed. "Who the hell are you?"

He spread his hands. "As an old, old friend of mine once said: where two or three are gathered in my name..."

There was a cold weight to the words. Kelly waited with her gaze fixed on the eye-shaped knot-patch in the tabletop for one of them, any of them, to ask him who he was. No one did. They knew.

"This is what I've been trying to tell you," she said quietly after a moment. "This is the safety meeting."

"What are we here to do?" There was a terrible resignation in Sam's voice. She wasn't afraid. Kelly simultaneously envied and pitied her; her own fear was nauseating, but she knew there was an element of rebellion in fear. Fear was still an act of protest.

"You seven get to pick who dies. All I need is a name. I'll do the rest."

"Or?" Benji asked.

"Hm?"

"Or what? You burn the place to the ground? We all get cholera? The Russians invade? What happens if we don't?"

It was always the same questions, Kelly thought. Always the same protests. Always just wasting time.

"I like your style, but no, nothing like that. Three days from now, one of those campers--those children--will die. That doesn't change. If you refuse, I don't take one of you. You can't volunteer. Nobody wins a million dollars if you do it, nobody gets bad luck forever if you don't. The camp won't close, and no twister's coming through. There's no noble sacrifice, there's no negotiating, and there's no opting out." He clasped his hands on the table before him. "One of them dies. You get to pick who, but you don't get to make it mean something."

"What's the point in picking, then?" Abby asked.

"What could the point possibly be?" the golden-eyed boy asked back. "What reason could I possibly give that would make you say 'oh, yeah, fair, that's worth it, let's kill a kid'? There isn't one. I don't want you to wrestle with whether or not you should choose, because if there's one thing I've learned about humans it's that they'll always pick the path of plausible deniability. I want you to do it. I want you to choose."

Kevin rounded on Kelly, eyes bright with horror. "How many?" he demanded.

She didn't look away. She knew what she had done to Lisa and Brandon. "This will be my third."

"No, it won't," Abby said. "We're not doing this."

"So, it's settled then?" The stranger stood. "You're choosing not to choose?" They were silent. Kelly bit her lip. It wasn't over.

"You gave me a whole list of what doesn't happen if we don't," Benji said. "What does happen, though?"

"Easy: if you don't pick, I will. You can say it's not your fault, and maybe you'll believe it. But at the end of the day, it's still a choice."

"If we don't pick," Kelly added quietly, but with force, "it can be anyone. Your younger siblings. Your friends. Anyone you kind of liked. He gets to pick. It's not even random."

In that moment, she felt a shift she never intended: this argument was no longer one against seven. It was two against six. I'm just explaining, she wanted to scream. I'm not helping him. I'd never help him. I just want this over.

"And even if we never chose them, we chose to not protect them," Sam said, angry. "God dammit."

"Hasn't stopped me yet," the boy said, smiling.

"How will they die?" Kevin asked. There's the shift, Kelly thought, stomach fluttering. Will. Not would.

He pretended to consider the question. "Riding accident this year, I think."

"He's lying," Kelly blurted out. "He says that every year."

He laughed at her little rebellion, folding his arms across his chest. "You know I can't have you trying to prevent it. You know this. I can't tell you what will happen."

"It doesn't matter how they go anyway," Abby said.

"I have one," Becky muttered, hands clenched in her lap.

The other five flinched, offered a chorus of protest, and then froze, waiting for his response. He'd said he only needed a name. Was it enough for her to have a suggestion?

Kelly let out a long, slow breath, her chest loosening. Somehow the hard part was over. They'd accepted that this was happening. They were all guilty from this point forward. Whatever else was said tonight, they were all damned like her. She could have laughed with relief.

The devil grinned broadly and bright. "It's always the youngest. Always." He sat back down. "Remember, Kelly?" he jabbed.

Kelly ignored him. "Make your case," she said. Becky looked panicked. "We have to agree. No petty grudges, no personal beef, and nobody gets out of this room able to say they were overruled. We decide together. Do you still have one?"

Becky hesitated, but nodded after the pause. "I think I know who you're thinking," Abby said.

"Probably."

"You two don't mean..."

"Yeah. It's what's best."