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I knew things were getting weird when I saw my best friend’s face in the campfire. I didn’t realize how weird until the campfire followed me home.
Yeah, I know how that sounds. I can hear your mom whispering right now, “Back away slowly from the crazy girl, and when I give the signal, run for dear life!”
Probably that’s what I should have done. Run for dear life. Or at least closed my blinds and hidden under the covers. But instead, when I saw that flicker of flame in the woods behind the barn, I sneaked downstairs, shoved on some shoes, put a poncho over my pyjamas, and went out into the rain to get a closer look.
My name is Samantha Anastasia MacReady: Sam for short. I’m thirteen years old and am in Grade 8 at Engelmann Middle School in the not-so-thriving metropolis of Limberpine, Alberta. And honest, I promise I’m not a crazy girl. Sure, I was a little freaked out the night my friend’s face showed up in the fire—but I was freaked out anyway.
See, school was supposed to start in a few days, and that meant I would be taking Dr. Ballard’s Grade 8 science class, and that felt seriously weird because I was one of only two survivors of Dr. Ballard’s Grade 7 science class.
The grown-ups called it “The Tragedy,” complete with capital letters, in a whisper, at least when I was around—they seemed to think if they didn’t talk about “The Tragedy” out loud, I might not remember that a bunch of my friends—including my best friend—had vanished into thin air.
It happened last May. While I was spending some quality time in the bathroom puking up everything I’d eaten since Grade 3, courtesy of a bad burrito, the other twenty members of my Grade 7 science class piled into a small school bus and headed up Mount Mollard for an overnight camping-trip-and-astronomy-adventure.
But they never reached the campground. The police found the bus lying on its side ten metres off the road. Dr. Ballard, still buckled into the driver’s seat, was out cold. So was Meg Leblanc, who had only started at the school after Christmas and I’d hardly ever said two words to. She turned up at the back of the bus, buried in sleeping bags.
Every other kid had disappeared without a trace. Literally. Not so much as a footprint—weird because the ground was muddy. Even weirder, all their stuff was still in the bus—even their cellphones, and since most of them took their cellphones everywhere, including into the bathroom, that seemed a sure sign of foul play.
A busload of kids vanishing under mysterious circumstances is like catnip to cable news. It had everything! Pathetic parents. Sobbing siblings. Valiant volunteers. Hovering helicopters. For days, Limberpine crawled with camera crews from CBC and Global and CTV and Fox and CNN and ABC and NBC and networks I’d never heard of. I think the Home Shopping Network turned up at one point.
Anchorpersons in heavy makeup prowled the streets like bears trawling a mountain path for unwary hikers. I don’t think anybody in town escaped being interviewed—not even me, but after I said a bunch of words thirteen-year-old girls aren’t supposed to say on television and tried to kick the anchor-thing, they left me alone. (Meg Leblanc didn’t kick anybody, as far as I know, but all they ever got out of her were grunts and monosyllables, so pretty soon they left her alone, too.)
After about ten days, the media frenzy fizzled out. Some celebrity announced she was either marrying or divorcing another celebrity—I forget which—and just like that, we were Old News.
The rest of the world moved on. We couldn’t. We were stuck with what had happened and had to try to deal with it. I mostly dealt with it by moping and throwing things and binge-watching anime. That’s probably why Dad decided he needed to get us both out of the house.
“We’ll go camping,” he said. “Up at Lake Stickleback. It’ll be fun.”
So we went camping. It wasn’t fun. It was cold. It started raining before we even had our tents up. And the campground didn’t even have an outhouse.
Did I mention it was cold? And raining? Nothing says “having a good time” like trying to pee behind a bush in the woods when your goosebumps have goosebumps, and there’s something rustling in the bushes.
I was tempted to steal Dad’s truck, figure out how to drive it (how hard could it be?), and head home the minute we got there, but apparently, the great province of Alberta thinks twelve-almost-thirteen is too young to drive. (How unfair is that?) So I was stuck until Dad agreed we should go home. Which he didn’t. He thought we would bond through shared misery. I don’t know if we bonded, but we definitely mildewed.
Thankfully, it was only for two nights. The second day, it stopped raining, at least, although since the sun didn’t come out and the fog lingered, it didn’t exactly warm up or dry out. Fortunately, even though the campground was an outhouse-free zone, it had dry firewood stored in a shed, so at least we were able to get a fire going. Sitting around it that second night roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, I almost convinced myself I was having fun . . . right up until I remembered that my friends had never gotten the chance to sit around theircampfire last spring. Suddenly, the marshmallows didn’t taste as sweet.
That night, I had trouble sleeping, like I had all summer. When I finally dozed off, I woke up almost right away because I thought I heard someone call my name.
Sam?
It was barely a whisper.
“Dad?” I said—softly because I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to wake him up if I’d just been dreaming.
I didn’t hear my name again. Instead, I heard something else—the crackle of fire. And I could see it, too, an orange, flickering glow through the thin nylon of my tent.
I scrambled out of my sleeping bag and stuck my head out through the tent flap.
Our campfire was blazing, flames jumping four feet in the air, and that was wrong because I’d seen Dad put it out and stir the ashes before we’d gone to bed.
And then I heard my name again, only this time I knew where it was coming from—not from the direction of Dad’s tent, but from the campfire.
It’s a dream, I thought.
But I could smell smoke and feel the heat on my face and the ground pressing into my knees. I crawled out, and when I stood up, the knees of my pyjamas were wet, and my bare feet were cold in the dewy grass.
Heart pounding, I approached the fire, step by slow step. The flames died down as I got closer. I looked down into the fire pit . . .
. . . and that’s when I saw the face. It looked like a mask made of glass and filled with flames, but I recognized it instantly all the same.
It was the face of my best friend, Lorenzo.
There was no way I wouldn’t know his face. We used to live side by side on the same street. We’d known each other since we learned to walk. We played together in each other’s backyard. We started school together, did homework together, spent our summers together.
Then, when I was eight, Mom got sick, and she never got better. She died when I was nine, and Dad moved us out to a new house (new to us, it’s at least a hundred years old) right on the edge of town because he couldn’t bear to keep living in the old house anymore.
Neither could I.
Even after we moved, though, I saw Lorenzo all the time because Limberpine isn’t big. As in really not big. You can bicycle anywhere in ten minutes, and of course, we were still in the same school and the same grade. So we kept being best friends, right through elementary school, and into middle school, and . . .
. . . and he had been on the bus last May.
I stared at his fiery face. He stared back. His lips moved, and I thought I heard my name again, but I couldn’t make out anything else, just the crackle and whisper of flame.
Then his eyes got wide, and his mouth opened wide, and he screamed, a high-pitched hissing sound, like the sound of sap sizzling in a log in the fire, and I screamed, too. “Lorenzo!”
And then, suddenly, Dad was beside me, pouring a bucket of water on the fire, and Lorenzo’s face disappeared with the rest of the campfire in a cloud of steam . . . but I thought I heard him screaming a second or two longer in the hissing vapour.
Furious, I yelled at Dad, “Why’d you do that?”
He couldn’t figure out why I was upset. I stormed back into my tent, and I’m not ashamed to say I cried in my pillow, although, unfortunately, I didn’t cry myself to sleep. I stayed awake almost all the rest of the night, which didn’t help my mood in the morning. Especially since, by then, it had started raining again.
We drove home in surly silence and ate in grumpy gloom, and I went to bed early.
I was sure I’d fall asleep the minute I lay down. My bed’s way comfier than a sleeping bag on the ground, and the last two nights’ sleep had been lousy. But I couldn’t. In my head I kept seeing what I’d seen the night before, like I was watching a YouTube video over and over. Hearing my name. Leaving the tent. Lorenzo’s face in the fire. And then his terrible scream . . .
I dozed off at last, but every few minutes, I’d wake up and roll over. I’d hit my pillow with my fists to plump it up. Then I’d flip it over to get the cool side. Then I’d doze off, wake up, and do it again.
I was doing it for about the twelfth time when I suddenly realized that the wall of my room was flickering with orange light. Firelight. Just like the light that had flickered on my tent walls the night before.
I scrambled out of bed, caught my foot in the covers, fell with a thump, fought my way free, and finally reached the window. Flames danced in the woods, out past the old barn where Dad stores his beloved (but rusty) 1967 Mustang GT. A campfire, it looked like, but nobody camps in the thick woods at the base of Mount Mollard, and certainly not by our barn. Nothing should be burning out there unless the forest was on fire, and it clearly wasn’t.
For one thing, it was still drizzling rain.
Sam?
I yelped and spun toward the door, thinking Dad had heard me fall and come to check on me. But there was nobody there.
Sam?
The voice—Lorenzo’s voice—was only in my head.
Maybe last night’s voice had only been in my head, too.
I’m not crazy, I told myself fiercely.
Of course not, myself answered. Not crazy at all. Just seeing things and hearing things. And talking to yourself.
I told myself to shut up.
Maybe if I’d been smart enough to tell myself it was a dream, smart enough to jump back into bed, I would have fallen asleep. If I had, I probably never would have seen the fire again . . . or heard Lorenzo’s voice again.
Instead, two minutes later, I was heading out the back door, the rain pattering on my poncho, that impossible fire still flickering in the woods ahead of me . . . and still calling my name.
Sam . . . Sam!
