davidhinder.com

‘So. Who’s next?’

The boys were gathered around the campfire, which spluttered against the cold night air. They had been trading ghost stories for a while, enough that they were all beginning to feel a little on edge. None of them would ever admit it out loud to anyone else in the group, but he could see they were unsettled. Scared, even.

The darkness had grown steadily around them, but no one had noticed as they’d been too enraptured by the stories. One of the boys had just finished telling a tale about an old woman who likes to appear in the darkness at your bedside. She waits for you to notice her outline, waits for you to reach over to turn the light on. Then you see her monstrous face, and the last thing you see is her jaw unhinge as she prepares to feed on you.

The anxious energy passed through the group like a ball being tossed back and forth between them. One boy would look at another and the giddy fear would jump between the two, showing in every nervous smile, every uncertain twitch.

They’d had enough.

But they wanted more.

‘I think it’s getting a bit late, boys. Maybe we should head to bed.’

A chorus of objections were thrown at him, and then: ‘Come on, Ryan. I’m know you’ve got a story you can tell us. Just one more!’

He liked that they called him Ryan. Some of them had called him ‘Mister’ at the start of camp, but that had felt weird to him. It reminded him of how people had spoken to his father. So he had convinced them to call him by his first name. It felt more like he was their friend that way, and it was nice to have friends for once.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, raising his hands in mock defeat. The boys fell silent at once, looking at him expectantly. ‘Has anyone heard of the Whistling Man?’

A few shook their heads; some of the boys looked intrigued, others apprehensive.

‘Well, I first heard about him when I went to camp here four years ago. He haunts the campgrounds, and only comes out after the last fires have been put out. He doesn’t like the flames, you see.’

He paused for effect, and was pleased to see that the boys were watching with rapt attention. It made him think of the time his teacher had praised one of his stories. You could be a writer, Ryan. A real storyteller. Unfortunately, his parents hadn’t considered that a realistic career, and had kept pushing him to focus on more practical options, ones that could have given him a chance at life away from their farm. Medicine, his mother had wanted; his father had favoured law. But here, in the face of an audience hungry for a good story, he knew this was what he wanted to do.

‘The Whistling Man used to be a farmer, and lived a few k’s downriver. Everyone said he used to be a happy man, always quick to say a friendly hello to anyone he passed on the street when he was in town. And he was always whistling a little tune. People said the tune reminded them of a song they’d once heard, but no one ever figured out what it was.

‘Anyway, one day the man returned home from the town to find his wife on the ground at the front of their house, a pool of blood near her head. Some boys from this camp had been playing a prank on her when it went… wrong. She’d fallen down the front steps of the porch and landed badly, smashing her head on the stones in the garden. She died a few hours later in the hospital.

‘That night, not long after the doctors had pronounced the woman dead, the man went back home. His son had seen everything, and described to him the boys who had caused his wife to fall. Insane with grief and rage, the man snuck into the camp. He found the three boys sitting around a campfire. They looked up at him as he approached, but they didn’t see the axe until it was too late.

‘Their screams brought everyone in the camp to their fire, where they saw a horrible sight: the boys had been decapitated, their headless corpses still twitching, and the man stood whistling that strange tune, covered in their blood. Then, before anyone had time to process what they were seeing, the man stepped calmly into the campfire and began to burn.

‘Even as the flames consumed his clothes and cooked his flesh, he never screamed. He just kept whistling until his lips melted to his teeth and he collapsed, his body burning to a crisp.’

The boys were silent. One of them had pulled his shirt up to just below his eyes, trying to hide from the story but unable to look away. Another was furiously biting his nails.

‘But that wasn’t the end. He still visits this camp every now and then, looking for boys who remind him of the ones that killed his poor wife. But he only comes after the campfires have been put out. I guess the memory of burning alive isn’t something he wants to be reminded about.

‘You’ll hear him before you see him, though. You’ll hear him whistling.’

He sat back, basking in the silence that had descended over the group. A cold wind blew around them, making the fire splutter again.

‘Fuck,’ one of the boys whispered. Nervous laughter ran through the group.

‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ Ryan said. ‘But in exchange, you’ll all need to go to bed without complaining.’ When they didn’t move, he clapped his hands and said, ‘Come on—chop chop!’

It was an oddly subdued group of boys that trundled off to their cabins. Ryan wondered whether he had embellished the story too much, made it too gory. The part about the decapitations had come to him in the moment, and he hadn’t wanted to leave it out once he’d thought of it. His father would be disappointed if he heard Ryan tell the story, but, well, his father wasn’t here right now. Anyway, he thought, campfires are made for this kind of gory story.

One by one, the lights in the cabins went out, and he started getting ready for bed himself. These camps were fun, and he loved doing them but they exhausted him. After brushing his teeth, he fell into bed and began drifting off almost at once.

He was in that strange place between consciousness and unconsciousness, when he suddenly sat upright, heart pounding and adrenaline flaring. After a few moments, he realised that a sound had woken him. He was sure he’d heard a faint scream.

He pushed back the blanket and rushed to the door of his cabin. As he touched the handle, something made him step back and move to look out the window first.

It was dark. The fires had all been extinguished, but the moon behind the clouds gave a weak light just bright enough to see vague shapes and outlines. The camp was empty. He was about to turn around and go back to bed, but then he saw a shadow moving in the pale light. It was coming out of one of the boys’ cabins. But the movement was off, somehow wrong. As if the figure was bent over struggling to walk.

Then the clouds shifted, and the light of the moon revealed a nightmare. The figure looked like a blackened corpse, but there were dark red stains over its arms, chest, and face. Like it had bathed in blood. It shuffled a few steps more, pausing near the remnants of the campfire. After a moment, it turned its face to look directly at Ryan as he stared from the window. It smiled, white teeth blazing in the moonlight, stark against the melted lips.

Ryan opened the door and stepped out into the night. After a moment, he smiled too.

‘Hey, dad,’ he said, as the man began to move away and the sounds of whistling filled the night.