Mist
Book One of the Campground Series
A Novel By JD Jones
Copyright 2013 by JD Jones
License Notes:
All characters, events and places in this novel are fictitious. This is purely a work of fiction, and as such, any resemblance to actual living persons or real places is unintentional.
Chapter One
My name is John Allen Corwin. My mother says I am the spitting image of my father at my age. She says he was a handsome man with dark hair, dark eyes and medium complexion. Not overly tall but better than average in height. He also had an air of authority about him and a mature spirit that guided him in all things with a sense of humility that bordered on meekness. She says I am like him in almost every way. I guess that helps her deal with the fact that he is now deceased. A man worn out by a thankless job, consumed of endless tasks. He was a minister in a small church.
I grew up in a minister's house and learned the ways of the Christian life. They have always governed my decisions and in some ways driven me to succeed. But when I graduated college and started my new life as a man on his own, I was in for a surprise. All I knew. All I believed, was about to change with the appearance of the figure of a man walking in the mist of the night.
The first time I saw him I was taking out the garbage. That was a Friday night. I had to walk up a small incline to the dumpster and I noticed the figure standing in the roadway ahead of me on the second rise. The moon was out and a slight fog had rolled in but still he was easily visible, outlined against the night sky as he was. I say he because the figure seemed tall and the shape suggested that of a man more than a woman. I was about to call out and ask which one of my workers had returned when a swirling, rush of wind blew through the figure and dispersed it in a million pieces until nothingness stared down on me from the rise. Surprised at the disappearance of the man I thought I saw, I started to question whether I had actually seen anything to begin with. After all, the figure had not spoken or moved. Maybe it had been a strange collection of dust particles moving on the breeze.
I moved over the rise in the road and saw a thick mist rolling in from the rise on the other side of the worker's campers. It moved fast and rolled into its place, filling the little valley created by the two small rises cutting across my property. Thick and shimmering in the moonlight, the mist or fog or whatever it was settled in place like it was covering something from my view. I could not shake the idea that the fog was for my sake. An obstruction. An unnatural cover to hide something. I had seen fog before, but never anything like this. It moved and swirled in the moonlight in a pattern that suggested air currents different from that of any breeze blowing through.
By the time I tossed my bag of garbage into the dumpster I had almost convinced myself that I had not seen anything. Maybe some shadows thrown by the trees near the roadway. Still, if one of my workers had returned it was unusual for them not to check in with me. They knew I liked to keep track of who was on the property. One of my quirks. Protect what's yours.
With my trash disposed of, I decided to walk down to the worker's campers I had placed on the other side of the campground. We had pulled in two campers not so much so that the workers could stay there as to provide a place for them to get out of the cold occasionally and to use the bathroom in a warm environment. A couple of them had stayed a night or two, but mostly they went home each night because it was not that far to drive back into town.
It was two weeks from Christmas and there was a definite chill in the night air that made me wish I had grabbed my coat rather than just a sweater. I was not dressed for exploring. The moonlight provided more than enough light for me to navigate the dirt roads across the camp. Still, I picked my way carefully through the many roots which we still had yet to remove in this area. The shadows made by the trees gave me more than one start as they swayed with the wind. I was not afraid of the dark. Neither was I totally comfortable with it, believing as I now did, that someone else might be on the property. It's an eerie thing to be wandering in the dark, not totally seeing everything clearly, glimpsing movement in the shadows around me and believing I was not alone.
I had purchased the campground property only three months before after graduating college with a degree in business. I had no illusions that my degree made me an expert in business and my personal opinion was that a campground was not the best business investment anyway. I had bought the place because the price of the land was right and I had always wanted to own and manage a campground. No other reason.
Ever since I was a child and my parents had taken me camping, I had been enamored of the camping lifestyle. My father was usually so busy he did not have time for family things. Camping was something I related to good family memories. I remember thinking that the owners of the campground where we stayed were the luckiest people on earth. They got to go camping every day. That thought had stayed in my head in one form or another over the years. When my aunt, my mother's unmarried sister, passed away and left me a bit of money because she said I was always her favorite, I told myself that a man with a business degree should be able to make a business out of anything he loved. I knew I was going against everything I had learned in business school but for once in my life, I was going to follow my heart.
As with most things in life, my dreams and reality were at odds with each other. I was discovering the world of politics by way of zoning laws and arbitrary, local inspectors who always seemed to be stepping on each others toes and taking it out on me in the process. Every time I got one part of my campground within proper specs for one inspector another one comes by and makes further demands that always seem to require backtracking over the first one. I was learning to deal with frustration at a whole new level.
The property I had purchased was a large wooded section along a deserted stretch of road only two miles from the main road into town. From the front gate of the campground I could be on Main St. in town in less than ten minutes. The realtor had gotten me all the permits for a campground necessary to begin the construction process even before I had signed the papers. She had told me the town was eager to help any business prosper and breathe new life into the community. I guess the easy entry I had in getting started had lulled me into thinking the rest of the process would follow suit. The realtor's help had made me believe the town really wanted me to build this campground. Like I was doing them a favor. The reality was a little more harsh. Like buying a used car. Everything to get you into it but when it breaks down or needs something it's your car, deal with it.
I had asked the realtor several times about the price of the place, which seemed very low to me, even in a depressed economy. She explained that most of the construction in the area was on the other side of town, closer to the shopping areas and the beaches. No one wanted to build out my way until they had first used up all the land on the other side of town. The other side of town being the “place to be.” She also disclosed that someone had died on the property a few years back and the locals did not want anything to do with the place. Local superstition, she called it. It made sense in a way that allowed me to justify the low cost so, I bought the place and made plans to realize my dream.
I bought a camper and placed it on the west side of the property so I could get started creating my campground. I then bought a tractor and spent the first month laying out roadways and clearing off about one hundred and thirty lots on the east side of the campground about five hundred yards back from the roadway. At the front gates, which were two telephone pole sized logs buried upright in the ground with another pole across the top, I placed a mobile office where I had a telephone and internet brought in. It was also hooked to the town water and sewer system that went by on the road. At the suggestion of the realtor, I also installed a full sized shower in the mobile o
ffice so I could clean up in the days before there was water running around the campground. It turned out to be a good suggestion.
The second month I spent haggling with the town officials about what I could and could not do on my own property. At one point I threatened to enlist the aid of a lawyer because I felt the town had issued me permits to build a campground and were now purposefully stalling the process in order to elicit more money from me after getting me invested in the community. While they assured me nothing could be further from the truth they did little to relieve my frustrations except make some phone calls to the local and regional inspectors with which I had to deal. Far from being helpful, I became somewhat convinced that their phone calls served more to anger the inspectors than to sway them into making the process go quicker or with less obstruction. Hence, all the delays and demands I was experiencing.
To begin December I hired three men to help me as I actually began to lay the water lines, sewer lines and electrical lines throughout the campground. Two weeks into the work and we were finally making good progress with minimal delays from the inspectors who helpfully suggested their choices for the skilled professionals I needed to wire my electrical equipment and properly sign off on my water and sewer lines. Interestingly, they all seemed to have similar last names to the inspectors. I was fast learning the peccadillos and intrigues of a small town.
Now, with the frustrations of a slow start still lingering in my head and the frigid wind stirring the darkness, I walked down to the worker's campers on what we had come to call the lower side, I wondered which of the three men the figure on the hill had looked more like. Enrico Torres was too small to have been the man I saw. He was a hard working Mexican who I had come to trust because of his extensive work laying water lines for a local landscaper. He had come to work for me because I was paying a dollar an hour more. When I had suggested that the landscaper would be there later and that my work would end someday, he just smiled at me and said he believed I would always need him for something. He knew a little bit about everything including maintenance on the tractor, which I was totally ignorant of. He had spent the first Saturday he worked for me going over the tractor reversing all the neglect I had been giving it for my first two months.
Enrico had a friend named Juan Sanchez who was just as hard a worker if not as well versed in all the things that Enrico could do. He was taller than Enrico but still his build was not as large as the man I saw looking down on me from the rise. But I knew that light could play tricks on the eyes at night. The figure did have that solid, immovable stance that I had often noted about Juan. Still, it wasn't quite a Juan stance.
Dave Morgan was an out of work construction laborer who had a problem working with my two Mexican employees at first but had quickly come around when he saw that they did their part. He had proven to be a great asset when the electrician was here because he got the man to allow us to do more of the work before he came in and signed off on it. I had no idea that I could do most of the electrical work myself and then just allow the electrician to actually hook the power up. That really cut my costs as far as the electrician's time. Dave is plenty big like the man I saw on the hill but something about the figure I saw on the hill did not remind me totally of Dave, either. The way he stood was all wrong. I never saw Dave stand with such a front lean to him that he seemed almost ready to topple over. The figure seemed older, too, somehow. I just couldn't explain the things I thought I saw in the brief encounter. But I saw something that was different. Of that I was sure.
By the time I got down to the lower side, I was convinced I had an intruder on the property. Nothing else made sense. But why had the man stood and watched me and not tried to hide? That made no sense. Suddenly I had my first sense of being totally alone out here in the woods. I walked the last few yards to the worker's campers looking over my shoulder and behind every tree for someone who did not belong there. The blackness of the night hindered my vision any deeper than a few feet off the roadway, through the trees. A whole army could have been hiding in those trees for all I could see.
I checked the campers but they were dark and empty. I turned on the lights in each as I checked it just so I could feel the assurance of light in all the darkness around me. I was getting spooked by the darkness and being alone out here in the woods. Thinking I had seen someone who was also hiding from me for some reason was not helping at all.
As I turned off the lights in the last camper, I closed the door and thought I heard a sound in the woods back towards my camper. I wondered if maybe a homeless man had found my campground and was trying to take up residence when I wasn't looking. As I walked back to my camper, I had to smile to myself at all the thoughts of intruders that floated across my imagination. I was getting paranoid, I told myself. Still, I pulled the sleeves of my sweater down further onto my hands against the cold of the night air aware that it was not only the night air that sent that chill up my spine.
Back in my camper, I turned up the electric heater and poured myself another cup of coffee. The workers would not be back until Monday morning and I planned on catching up on some reading I had been putting off. I told myself that with all the work I needed to do, reading was unproductive. Well, this weekend I was going to be very unproductive. All I planned to do was read, eat and drink coffee to ward off the cold. I knew I would wander the campground a couple times, but I was determined to not do any work this weekend. It was time I stopped making excuses for working and get back to assembling a normal life for myself. I had not really relaxed since I got here.
My dad had passed away while I was in college. A hard working minister in our local church, what I remember most about him was how he was always doing something for someone else. My mom, afraid that I would become rootless after college and because my dad was not around anymore, now saw it as her duty to find me a wife to spend my life with and put down roots of my own. She kept quoting the scripture that it is not good for man to be alone. Like that was all that needed to be said. It was another of the reasons I moved to my current location, to distance myself from my mother's overshadowing presence. She means well but sometimes a man just wants some freedom. I lived at home with my parents and then I lived in a dorm with a hundred other guys. I wanted a little time to live by myself. I had that now.
I had gone to a religious university because my dad was a minister and the costs were lower for minister's kids. The education was first rate but I had purposely gotten a degree in business to separate myself from any thought of a ministerial line of work. I was not going to be a preacher. I had seen how my dad had struggled year after year. I was not going to give my life to people who just kept taking more and more until there is nothing left.
That's how I viewed my dad's death. It wasn't the cancer that got him. It was the giving of himself. In the end he gave away so much of himself that he had nothing left for himself. So he died. He had been a big man but every year I had watched as his minister's life ate away at him. Between the cancer and the ministry, he barely weighed a hundred pounds when he died. Every time I thought of my dad, I remembered the scripture that said, 'no greater love could a man show than to give his life for another.' Well, he loved them to death. His.
I sipped my coffee and opened my book putting the paranoid adventure of my evening out of my mind as best I could. If it was a homeless guy, I hoped he had the sense to turn the heater on in the camper. I had left them unlocked. We never locked them. It was too cold out tonight for anyone to sleep outside.
As I read my book, I thought someone else was in the room but when I looked up I saw nothing. It was not anything solid that I saw. No shape on the periphery of my vision. Just a sense that I was not alone. I began wondering if my senses were getting jammed with all my paranoia. Maybe I had heard something that made me think I was not alone. I put the book down and went to the door. I threw the door wide despite the escaping heat and looked around outside but could see nothing in the darkness. The moon had gone behind some clouds and e
verything was dark and black now. I turned on the camper outside lights and walked around the camper. When I completed my circuit I climbed back up on my deck. That was when I noticed it.
There at the edge of the deck was a definite lump of something just far enough from the light to make it indistinguishable. It was small and blob like. No real form. Just a blob. I half expected it to get up and run away. I have no idea what I was thinking because my brain had stopped processing rational information. My deck had been clean earlier. I had not left anything on it. I could not remember anything I did that might have left something on it. Something in my brain told me that the thing on my deck had no reason for being there. Like the figure in the roadway that had no reason for being there and then suddenly blowing away with the wind, this blob on my deck had no reason for being there and I expected it to blow away any minute, too.
But it didn't. It just sat there. I moved toward it and stared at it. The dim light from my camper's outside lighting system barely pierced the darkness and made it hard to see anything more than its outline. As I approached it, my shadow obscured it even more. When I was sure it was inanimate, I reached down to touch it. Tentatively at first. In case it was an animal or something. When it didn't move I allowed more of my fingers to make contact with whatever it was. It was cold and damp. I felt something adhere to my fingers like sticky mud. I was becoming more and more confused by the minute. There was no reason for this cold, wet lump of whatever to be on my deck. I would certainly never have left anything like it there. Someone had to have put it there. I remembered the feeling moments before that I was not alone.
I looked around me again, looking for a figure through the trees but there was not enough light to see anything, let alone a person who might be hiding. I thought again of that whole regiment of soldiers who could have been hiding in the woods just fifty feet from my camper and I would not have known it. I returned my attention to whatever it was someone had left.
As I picked up the wet, sticky lump from my deck, I realized I had already come to the conclusion I was not alone and whoever was out there had left this thing for me. I was curious and confused. Who would be out here and what was this thing they had left for me. Why? It didn't make sense. The logic of my mind could not wrap itself around the events of my evening.
That was the first time I felt worry seep into my thoughts. Logic. Maybe whoever was out there did not operate on logic. Maybe their mind was warped or damaged somehow. My mind raced into hyper drive and I started imagining some deranged killer stalking me in my woods. I grabbed the thing on the deck and hurried back into my camper, all the while telling myself I was being unreasonable, yet hurrying all the more, like when I turned off the light and jumped into bed when I was a kid.
I closed the door but did not lock it to prove to myself that I did not believe a deranged killer was stalking me. But I kept my eye on the door nonetheless. Once in the light, I could see that the thing I had retrieved was cloth of some kind. It was dirty and crusted over with black mud and leaves stuck to it. As I brushed away the mud and leaves I saw that it was a sock. Someone had left a dirty sock on my deck. Now I was sure that it was not something I had inadvertently left there. I was just as sure that I had not imagined a figure on the rise but had actually seen someone. And that someone had felt it necessary to leave a dirty sock on my deck. Now I knew that whoever was out there was not thinking in any rational way. A dirty sock is not a proper calling card. But obviously it meant something to someone.
I threw the sock into my trash and washed my hands in the sink. The mud washed off easily enough with a faint trace of red in it as the residue rinsed away down the drain. I imagined that under all that dirt was probably a red sock.
I gave the area around my camper another quick look and then retired for the night, locking my door this time. I turned off all the lights except the one I was reading by. I read until close to midnight and finally drifted off to sleep where I sat. Around two in the morning I woke up with a slight chill and undressed, climbing into my bed and under the warm comforter. I passed the rest of the night without incident or dreams.