Camp Games

Close your eyes. You are asleep. Everyone is asleep.

Imagine you live in a village. Maybe it has little buildings with little thatched roofs. If you’re a girl, you wear skirts and blouses, and if you’re a boy, sturdy handmade pants. Your village has werewolves. It was always going to have werewolves, if that makes you feel better.

Werewolves, wake up.

Look at each other. Coordinate. Werewolves work together.

Everyone else, no peeking.

Close your eyes once more. Wake up with your fellow villagers, and mingle.

The sun crests the horizon and illuminates the corpses of eight cows, their entrails spread in tangles, intestine kissing intestine. Their eyes bulge white with fear that will be preserved until their filmy surface rots. Farmer Maxwell goes to gather the village, and the village agrees: We have werewolves. We didn’t have werewolves yesterday, or last week. But we have them today.

Tiffany, sweet Tiffany, had plans to sneak out to visit her boyfriend, the goatherd. Instead she boards her windows. As she hammers, she thinks guiltily, At least I don’t have to wear the satin thing. The werewolves will strike within the village walls next. This is the way of all werewolf attacks. They are creatures of predictable ritual.

Luckily, one villager is always given the gift of prophecy. A flimsy defense against claws, but Mercy, the baker’s wife, is glad to have it anyway.

*

Everyone, close your eyes.

It could almost be real, listening to the arrhythmic tapping of your hands on knees, each slap of palm to skin the call of a cricket outside a village house or a creaky shutter. Nights always have noise.

I’ll explain: You have to tap your hands so you don’t hear the werewolves gesturing. For us it’s so you don’t cheat, but for the villagers it’s because they don’t want to know. If it’s me, they think, let it be drowned out by crickets.

Werewolves, have you decided who to kill? Noted. Close your eyes.

There is a seer among us. Open your eyes and, like me, see this game from the outside.

Who do you think is a werewolf?

Bad start. Seer, go back to sleep.

The sun sings out and the villagers shoulder open their doors, pry nails from their windows to fling the shutters wide, and look down their stoops to the square. It is the blacksmith who has been peeled, plucked, deboned. Worse still, the blacksmith just sold his last sword. His shed is empty but for a single brass cup.

“He was chosen to weaken our defenses!” the deacon cries. “To ensure we cannot arm ourselves!”

Some villagers nod. This is a strong point.

“The werewolf had insider knowledge—it must be someone who knew the blacksmith!” says the goatherd, Tiffany’s boyfriend, who might only get one chance to command a crowd. He’s been waiting his whole life for the power to shift.

“What I don’t get,” says Tiffany, “is why no one here has a weapon in the first place.”

The villagers proceed to the square. The carpenter is already rigging a noose. A suspect must be identified and hanged after every killing. A body for a body is a kind of justice, right?

The villagers do all the expected things: They look each other in the eye and say, “I am not a werewolf.” They do this in the face of the blacksmith’s body, the noose, and while holding the deacon’s silver cross, as tests. Tiffany follows Tabitha, the milkmaid, who barely talks to Tiffany, in the lineup.

Then, the deacon steps onto the stage.

“The werewolves are among us. Some of you had eyes that dilated or voices that caught when you claimed innocence. This can be chalked up to grief or falsehood. I propose we air our suspicions democratically.”

Farmer Maxwell leaps to his feet.

“The deacon is quick to control this situation! How about we air our suspicions whenever we damn well please?”

“Farmer Maxwell is just annoyed about his cows,” the deacon retorts. “Someone has to lead the village, and I am a woman of God.”

“Being a woman of God doesn’t mean you couldn’t be infected,” Mercy says uncertainly. At some point, she’ll have to admit that she is the seer, which is a lot of responsibility.

“I heard of a village where the priest and all of his altar boys were werewolves,” says Tabitha.

“The deacon was crying when we found the body this morning,” says Tiffany, just to disagree with Tabitha. What Tabitha did happened years ago, but when they cross paths, Tiffany’s heart hardens with such distrust and longing that it may as well have been yesterday.

“Out of fear we’d catch her—or guilt!” roars Farmer Maxwell.

A body for a body is a kind of justice, right?

The crowd roars back. The goatherd sighs and hopes to live a little longer so as to experience the thrill of turning this crowd against someone himself.

The deacon is bundled up to the stage, the noose slipped around her neck. The village shades their eyes in respect. The carpenter puts the final nails in the gallows as everyone quiets to hear the deacon’s final words.

“You’re all idiots,” she says.

The sun fades as she is dropped. The last rays of dying light are punctuated by the nailing of every door shut. Tiffany sighs, half in relief, half in disappointment. There will be no goatherd visits for a while.

*

Close your eyes.

It must be so tempting to squeak your pupils open. But you can’t. How would you feel if you were one of them and were suddenly looking sideways out of your body to a mess of teenagers in jeans, buzzed-drunk on bug juice? Sitting in a circle and laughing while they kill or spare you? That’s what I thought. If you think you can’t be trusted, put a hand over your eyes.

Werewolves, you unscathed bastards, open your eyes and decide who to kill. Okay. Now wipe your mouths of blood and sleep.

Seer, wake up. Who do you think is a werewolf?

I hate to watch you fail, I do. Seer, go back to sleep.

The sun sighs into wakefulness, and Tiffany’s cuticles bleed as she yanks planks from her window. The goatherd is already in the square, waiting for her.

“I’ve been up all night and I’ve figured some things out,” he says. His voice is quick, boyish, and it fills Tiffany with affection.

“You know who the werewolves are?”

“No, no,” the goatherd flaps his hand. “But I know how to capitalize on this situation. I must form a voting block. That minimizes the number of individuals I need to maintain power and influence over.”

His plan is interrupted by a scream.

The villagers rush to the house of the baker and his wife, Mercy. Her arms are full of guts. It must have happened in the early hours, at his stove, the loaf he baked now burned. Tiffany puts her arms around Mercy and kisses her temple. Guardsmen Stephens and the apothecary remove their hats as a sign of respect.

Tabitha clears her throat. “Well, I hate to break the silence, but maybe you could tell us if anyone hated your husband?”

“If I recall,” Guardsman Stephens answers with a sneer, “you hated him ever since a maggot fell out of your biscuit.”

Tabitha’s history with Guardsman Stephens isn’t complicated. It’s this: Tabitha screams at Stephens, and Stephens beats Tabitha. One worse than the other, but how about that enduring sympathy for menfolk? Sometimes the men mutter things like, “I couldn’t stand to be talked to like that,” and the women seethe with jealousy that Tabitha has the guts to say what they all think, so everyone agrees: Let her take her lumps. Don’t be so scandalized. It has nothing to do with werewolf attacks, but we all know how it works.

“You know, that’s right,” says the goatherd, who sees the value in a voting block and is sympathetic to Stephens to boot. “I heard you didn’t like the blacksmith either.”

“Do you idiots have brains? You always fall on the first person to talk!” cries Tabitha.

“It’s always the first person to talk, though,” says the goatherd, sensing a slight ambivalence from the crowd. “I’ve heard that.”

“It wasn’t when it was the deacon,” says the carpenter.

“That’s not a large-enough sample size to say for sure,” the goatherd argues. “It could have been an anomalous point of data.”

“Enough!” roars Farmer Maxwell, and the villagers relax or stiffen in turn. “We’ve tried one strategy; now it’s time for another. I have heard of villages wherein the quietest soul acts as such to avoid attention.”

He lays an accusing finger at the apothecary.

“Wait, what?” the apothecary has not even returned his hat to his head, busy shaking crumbs out of the brim.

“See how disinterested he is in discussions of our survivals! Our deaths don’t even register! He is the werewolf!”

“C’mon, man,” the apothecary says, but the villagers are already raising their hands. The goatherd joins them, defeated. Only Mercy and Tiffany don’t vote, because they are busy with the pile of entrails, but majority rules as it always does.

As the trapdoor is dropped and the rough-hewn rope pulled tight around the apothecary’s neck, Tabitha glances at Tiffany, something in her expression accusing in a way that has nothing to do with werewolves and everything to do with women. You have never been kind to me, Tiffany thinks. You always pulled my hair. Her insides squelch with guilt.

And she remembers the thing that happened between them: Tabitha pulled her behind a shed and kissed her first gently, then hard, with a bite that drew blood from Tiffany’s lips, then grew up without speaking about it once. I owe Tabitha nothing, she decides, though as she hammers in the boards on her windows, Tiffany replays that kiss again like the submersion of chapped skin into cold water.

*

Keep your eyes closed. Is it just me, or is there a chill in the air? Maybe it’s that so many seats are now empty, and where their occupants have gone, who knows? Over the walls to different villages, maybe. Or to the other room where the mixers and the cups are. Hold your hands over your ears so you can’t hear their merriment. Isn’t it funny, how they revel? Are there souls hovering over our shoulders while we drink and kiss?

Werewolves, wake up. Kill someone fast. Kill someone extraneous to the story. Now go to sleep; nuzzle into your beds unburdened.

Isn’t it funny, how they revel? Are there souls hovering over our shoulders while we drink and kiss?

Seer, wake up. Point to who you think is a werewolf.

Oh, lovely seer, celebrate this victory. Now go to sleep. You’ve earned it.

The sun oozes over the horizon, burning off a layer of fog. A check of each resident is underway as soon as the light bends morning-blueish. It is led by Guardsman Stephens and the goatherd, who winks at Tiffany as she lifts the boards away from her windows. Stephens winks too, but Tiffany pretends not to see.

When everyone is assembled and eating pastries, Guardsman Stephens and the goatherd return with the news: The tailor has had the marrow sucked from his bones like juice through a straw. It’s a grisly scene, but Farmer Maxwell just has to check for himself.

“It’s a grisly scene,” he confirms. “They weren’t lying. His fingers have been absconded with. I think eaten.”

The goatherd takes Tiffany’s elbow, pulling her aside.

“I’m going to accuse the carpenter, officially, I think, and Guardsman Stephens is on board, and I need you to be too.”

“Why do you think he did it?”

“Who cares?” The goatherd smiles with his teeth. “But you have to vote with us, so that we’re a block. We’ll have majority power.”

“I don’t know,” Tiffany begins, but before she can finish, the goatherd has stepped on an overturned crate, pointing a finger at the carpenter.

“All evidence suggests that this man is the werewolf! Stephens and Tiffany are with me, and the rest of the village better get . . . on . . . board!”

With this he sweeps his arm in a theatrical, punctuating circle.

Silence reigns for a moment.

“Why him?” Tabitha asks Stephens. That’s another reason no one says anything about the hitting: Sometimes they seem normal together. Guardsman Stephens shrugs.

“It’s just what the goatherd was thinking,” Stephens says. “He brought it up over breakfast.”

“No . . .” The goatherd casts around for a following but finds the cold skepticism of raised eyebrows. “Come on, Stephens! You said why was it that the carpenter knew how to build the gallows so quickly. Remember?”

“I’m a carpenter,” says the carpenter, wounded. “I know how to build a gallows.”

“Sorry, dude,” Guardsman Stephens says. “I just think we should talk it over more. Like as a group.”

The village square erupts in voiced chaos, the goatherd still stubbornly on the overturned crate, stooping and yelling so as to be heard. Tiffany’s heart squeezes. Why do men do this to themselves? They stumble into any room, any town square, and say whatever they like.

“I just think it’s suspicious,” says Farmer Maxwell, ostensibly to the carpenter but with his voice pitched for a battlefield, “that the goatherd has taken such an active role, lynching after lynching—what kind of heartless beast would use this situation to his advantage?”

The village mutters assent.

Farmer Maxwell turns his body center stage. “Would an innocent person kill a man to advance his own social status?”

“No!” the village roars back.

“I doubt he’s a werewolf,” says Tiffany, but even she has to admit that she’s a little tired of him. What is the point of a boyfriend if he gets to pick all the opinions you’d share?

Mercy lays a hand on Tiffany’s shoulder. As if it were screamed in her ear, Tiffany knows that Mercy is the seer and that the seer knows at least one werewolf among them.

“You should do something,” says Tiffany.

“Ehn,” says Mercy. She’s been somewhat detached since the baker was ripped up. The seer may reveal herself and be believed, but loud seers tend, in werewolf attacks, to be dead seers.

Farmer Maxwell and the carpenter—all too enthusiastic after his brush with mob justice—haul the goatherd up the gallows. They pause for Tiffany to lift her skirts and mount the platform, leaning forward to give the goatherd a little kiss.

“This is bullshit,” he says.

“You just flew too close to the sun,” Tiffany says, a little regretful, a little relieved.

Farmer Maxwell breaks a keg, and as he winches the trapdoor, the carpenter laughs, saying, “This is it, folks! And if it’s not, we’ll kill Maxwell next!” A joke, but probably his last.

The goatherd’s neck snaps as he drops.

The villagers drink until the sun starts to go, glowing with the distant light of gloaming, then flee to their houses. Tiffany doesn’t bother to board the windows.

*

Close your eyes. I want you to block out the party and your friends, and wake-up tomorrow, and be in this moment. You’ve made it so far. The wolves—so dominantly alive. The villagers, hanging in there. Shouldn’t I want to abandon this doomed ship? I don’t know what keeps me in this chair tonight. Maybe it’s that I can’t tear myself away until I know where the hammer falls.

Wolves, wake up and choose your next meal. Punish your old friend for his jokes. Gorge, and then sleep.

Seer, wake up.

These odds get thinner with each wrong guess. I don’t know how you keep so quiet.

Seer, go to sleep.

The sun screeches to a noontime point above the carpenter, who evidently tried to fight back against the wolves but has been left eviscerated in the town square. On this full-moon morning, no one has the appetite for breakfast, and so Mercy’s spread, slathered in red, gooey jam, remains untouched.

Punish your old friend for his jokes. Gorge, and then sleep.

Tiffany thinks about the village walls, as high as three men, and the terrible wilderness beyond. She knows there are other villages out there, somewhere, and she fantasizes climbing out and walking until she finds them. But this has never been done during a werewolf attack, and, anyway, she has a duty to quarantine until the wolves are cleansed.

How did it get down to so few? Only Mercy, Tiffany, Tabitha, Guardsman Stephens, and Farmer Maxwell are left. Where once was a crowd is now a collection. They glance sidelong at Farmer Maxwell. On cue, he mounts the gallows.

“My fellow villagers, the time has come—”

“Stop,” says Mercy, and Maxwell stops.

“I think that you should let him finish,” Guardsman Stephens says.

“Shut up, Stephens,” says Tabitha. “As if anyone asked for your opinion.”

“Good thing, because my opinion is that you’re a crazy bitch.”

Tiffany reaches for Tabitha’s shoulder to settle her but meets a violent, dislodging shrug.

“My fellow—” Farmer Maxwell tries again.

“No,” says Mercy. “I divined Farmer Maxwell’s intent last full moon. I wanted to find his accomplice before I revealed him, but I’m tired, and I don’t care if I die next. Tiffany’s not a werewolf, by the by. I thought she might be, but no. I thought I should say because I’ll probably be eaten next.”

She sighs, long and resigned.

“Okay, we can vote now.”

The sun hangs overhead. Hands go up, silently.

Farmer Maxwell doesn’t fight back, not really. Just growls a little as the rope is looped around his neck. Gnashes at the air as he falls, and his feet kick as he dies. The remaining turn in early.

*

Close your eyes.

This is the last night the villagers will sleep in their beds before the reckoning comes. Imagine yourself, not on a scratchy cot, not listening to the loons out on the lake, and not wondering what to do about the creepy counselor from bunk eight, but in a village, and right outside your door are cobblestones seeped in the blood of your neighbors.

Within these walls, everyone is so important. Our lives have narrowed to a single point and a single community. Everything that matters right now is inside this house. Do you get it? At the end of the summer, we leave. But for a part of us, all that is out there is wilderness. I won’t bother to ask the werewolf who to kill or the seer who to divine. We all already know how this night goes.

The seer is dead, and this is your last chance to get it right.

The sun rages over the horizon. In the night, Mercy was interrupted during her divinations. Prophecy doesn’t protect against evisceration. There is no spread of pastries this morning, only the dregs of cold coffee.

“That’s so romantic,” says Tabitha the milkmaid. “She knew she’d be next. She must have missed the baker.”

“It’s only romantic if you believe in the Eurocentric conception of afterlife,” Tiffany says. “Otherwise it’s just stupid. We probably would have lynched Maxwell anyway, given half the chance to talk about it.”

They sip their coffee in silence, contemplating the sky’s movement from pockmarked sunrise to fluffy midmorning. Guardsman Stephens is still abed. They are the last three left. The way werewolf attacks go, when there are three left, the next on the gallows must be a wolf, or all is lost.

“It’s not me,” Tabitha says abruptly. “I know you might not believe it, but it’s not.”

Tiffany shrugs. Tabitha is tall, buxom, pretty, with dark hair and sharp eyes and a wicked mean streak. What would Tiffany do if only they were left, waiting for a merchant caravan or a passing guide to take them through the wild? Maybe they would become friends. Maybe, once again, Tabitha would pin her arms against a wall and kiss her. Maybe she would just pull Tiffany’s hair. There’s a certain thrill that runs through Tiffany, knowing that alone together, they would have to really talk.

“Of course it’s you that has to choose. You’re such a bitch. You’ve always hated me,” Tabitha says.

“You’ve always hated me,” Tiffany says. “Besides, now I’m indifferent.”

But she knows it’s not true.

Guardsman Stephens’s door opens down the row of houses, close to the village walls. He emerges with a stretch, a slouch to his shoulders that compellingly suggests confidence. The girls watch as he climbs the ramparts to his normal morning patrol.

“I’d give anything to string him up,” Tabitha says. “Be rid of him forever.”

“He’s not a good partner.”

“More like that he’s an abusive piece of shit. He takes whatever he wants, whenever he wants. If anyone ever asked me what I thought, I could have told them. It’s always been him.”

Tiffany looks at Stephens, and she doesn’t see just Stephens, but a line, an endless line of men just like him, occupying every village and every wilderness in the world. How does hanging just one make a difference? Guardsman Stephens will still be at a staff party in a cabin in the woods someday, boxing a girl like Tabitha into a corner. He exists in every moment in history, taking and eating and hungering.

And Tiffany will always exist too, watching, passive, because the girl in the corner is mean, or she’s loud, or she keeps going back, and so gets what she deserves. If Tiffany chooses wrong on this day, then in the night Stephens will come to her, rip out her insides, nuzzle into the cavity of her stomach, and release her from all of this. Then, she can blink away the periphery and die in one single moment, with some small hope that the next life will be different.

She looks at Tabitha and knows that Tabitha isn’t looking sideways. She is looking straight on at one man who hurts her.

Guardsman Stephens finally arrives and pours himself a cup of coffee. Though it seems they just woke up, the shadows get longer. The sun gets lower. Tiffany’s head feels full and light, and how good would it be to not be stranded here, the only hand around to hold attached to someone cold and beautiful and offering something more terrifying, maybe, than death by evisceration?

She can blink away the periphery and die in one single moment, with some small hope that the next life will be different.

How cleanly life imitates art. Even here, in this room, hazy-tipsy and warm, half of us live in some kind of danger, and half have teeth as long as fingers. I wish I could have given Tiffany and Tabitha the wolf cards. How different a world that would be.

You have to choose. After all, when you do, we can play again. We can leave and grow up and move on and live in cities and countrysides and ride trains and drive cars and tame the oblivion of all we don’t know, and still be playing. We’ll still be vigilant; we’ll still be watching to see who is wolf and who is dinner.

Tiffany and Tabitha take Guardsman Stephens’s shoulders and haul him to the gallows, and Tiffany lets Tabitha pull the lever that drops the life from him, and then they sit on the edge of the stage while he dies slowly behind them.

Is some kind of cycle broken? Tiffany wonders. Or have we just started again?

The dark approaches and the girls close their eyes and lean their heads together, and they know in the morning the best they’ll think of will be to move on to another village and survive another werewolf epidemic. The way of werewolf attacks is that they are inevitable. Sometimes, the village wins quickly. Sometimes, the loss is minimal. And sometimes, at the bloody end, two girls choose to go forward into an uncertain wilderness.

They stay until long after Stephens’s gurgling has stopped and the sun slips away entirely. The dark feels full and safe, all around them; they’d forgotten how different a breeze feels under moonlight. When the light returns pink and peaceful, Tiffany and Tabitha open their eyes once more and find, nose to nose, each other.

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