Blue Wolfe and Friends presents: Camp Here and There.

Episode Fifty Three: Itself Swallowed

[CLICK]

SYDNEY
Hi, ghost… [SNIFF] 00:00AM. [COUGHING] 00:00AM reporting. [SNIFF] God, it’s— It’s so hot in here. This office is like a… [LABORED BREATHING] Can’t even… The rain’ s been… all day, just… [COUGHING FIT] Sorry. My chest hurts. Everything outside is just… fog. Thick fog. Can’ t see… anything. [CHUFF] Perfect night for… for ghosts, right?

My joints ache something severe from the fever, but I can’t rest now…

[SICK NOISES] I think I caught whatever Adam had. Maybe. Turns out acting nurse to a bedraggled, bilious demon wasn’t the smartest move… But, I mean… he needed my help…

Just like I need his, huh? The past few days have been hazy. I— Uh. We’ve been… working some more by that river.

It’s my forearms. Both of them. Long cuts parallel like railroad tracks. He insists on a blade because he says it’s cleaner than his teeth. Less risk of infection and all that. As if that’s what I should be worried about…

He’s very good at what he does. It started with my arms. He grips just above the elbow, fingers cold, and he pulls until the muscle starts to separate. I can feel each fiber snapping, one by one, like guitar strings. The tender, fall-off-the-bone quality to my flesh… reminds me of pulled pork, haha.

The wounds must be deep enough to ensure the blood flows. Dark and thick and warm. And he catches it in his palms, or sometimes he just— he just laps from the source. For all that talk of infection, huh?

My legs too, now. My inner thighs. He says the blood there is richer and more vital or whatever. The lacerations there sting more; must be more nerve endings or something. And when he drinks from those, I do feel like a pig being slaughtered for meat. Or maybe a chicken? I kinda like chickens better anyways. My thighs do sorta look like chicken breasts, don’t they? They feel like chicken breasts.

The practice can’t be helping my body.

These days, I catch my reflection in a window and barely recognize myself; my eyes are sunken, hair lank and greasy against my skull. When did I become this gaunt, grey animal?

But also… [PAUSE] when it’s over, there’s this moment where everything just… I don’t know how to explain. It’s like finally scratching an itch that’s been driving you crazy. It’s healing. [QUIET LAUGH] God, listen to me. I sound insane. But I can’ t… I can’t just stop now.

…

One day at a time.

But I don’t like the optics. And I… we’re doing better, but I haven’t been sleeping with Jedidiah. I can’t let him see the scars. And I know he’s worried about me. He can tell something is wrong, but I keep telling him it’s fine because, I mean, it is fine. I’m fine. I’m figuring out how to deal with things on my own, and that’s not his business. He didn’t want it to be his business. I tried.

Better put, I’m figuring out how to deal with what he did to me on my own. I’ve been trying to make sense of all this, but my head feels like mush. Every thought gets tangled up in the next one, and before I know it, I’m lost in a labyrinthine web of questions that have no answers.

He’s lucky I don’t…

[AHEM]

The sickness is concerning. [SNIFF] And I’m supposed to be the one resting. I mean, Jedidiah’s been on his own with the sick children up to this point, but he finally collapsed earlier from the exhaustion. I’ve got to let him sleep.

[SOUND OF RETCHING IN BACKGROUND]

Hold on. [FOOTSTEPS, RUSTLING] It’s okay, Micah. Just—just get it in the bucket. There you go.

[SOUND OF RETCHING IN BACKGROUND]

That’s the third time in twenty minutes. They’re all like this; drooling, shaking, can’t even keep water down. [QUIETER] Their eyes, though… that’s what’s freaking me out.

But I can’t let my kids down.

[SIGH] It’s going to be a long night.

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

SYDNEY

At this point, I don’t think the rain will ever let up. It’s 3 AM, and it’s still coming down in sheets. [CHUFF] I’m starting to feel like Noah. But Noah had an ark.

[THUNDER OUTSIDE]

It’s so hot and stuffy in here, like breathing through a wet cloth. I really wish the rain would stop. The constant drumming is making it hard to focus.

But I can’t afford to be distracted. This… this is something else. Their eyes are glazed over and glassy. They wretch over the water and drool onto the floor. It’s frightening.

… God, I can see his face, pale and gaunt. Those hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. He was just a kid. I’ll never forgive myself. The thought of him wasted away to nothing. I see him in every camper’s chubby face, in every shivering body and feverish brow. His smile is so like… I can’t… I…

The symptoms… are terrifying. Now their limbs are going stiff. They’re going through rigor mortis while still breathing. I watched Micah’s leg seize up, the muscles constricting so tightly it looked like his calf was trying to crawl up inside his thigh. I had to hold him down and force his leg to stay still until the spasm passed. And even then, his limb stayed contorted at that broken, backwards angle, stiff as a board.

And the constant drooling… I’ve got towels stuffed under their chins, but it’s not enough. The sheets are soaked, and the pillows are damp. I change them out as fast as I can, but it feels neverending.

I keep thinking about how quickly it’s spreading. One camper goes down, and within hours, three more are showing symptoms. It’s like a wildfire, leaping from bed to bed. They’re all terrified, and it’s breaking my heart. I can’t keep up. I can’t—

[HE STRUGGLES]

No. No, I have to. I have to do this for him. No matter how bad I feel, I must… I must… Oh, my dear campers. My sweet, miserable campers. I know you’re all in pain, but I promise you, I am here for you.

I will heal you. I will not fail. I will not fail.

I have to figure out the extent of this demonic illness and its causes. I can’t just sit on my thumbs and wait for them to die of dehydration or seizure. There’s one camper, one of the older kids from Magpie Moth, that’s… especially disturbing me.

She was the first to show the more severe symptoms this morning, and her transformation was… Jesus. Her face contorted with a wet, meaty sound; cheek bones liquefying beneath her sagging skin. Her jaw unhinged with a pop that made my stomach heave, mandible cracking as it stretched to accommodate her tongue, which swelled and darkened to a gangrenous purple, veins bulging across its surface like bloated worms.

Her arms… Geeze. They elongated with a series of nauseating snaps, marrow spraying in a pink mist as jagged bone fragments punched through her flesh. Her fingers splayed with audible pops, tendons snapping like rubber bands, knuckles inverting until each digit writhed independently like pale, blood-slicked maggots.

Her knees… I nearly fainted when I saw them, reversed with a snap like a celery stick. Her ankles dislocated with hollow pops, skin splitting as bones rearranged. It was as if her body had become some sort of twisted jigsaw.

And through it all, she didn’t make a sound. Just stared, drooling.

Then her arm began to shimmer, flesh vibrating so rapidly it blurred. I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at, until what remained wasn’t an arm anymore, but a puckered, inverted cavity of glistening red tissue, pulsating obscenely with each breath she took.

She’s still alive. And she didn’t even look pained, instead gazing blankly forward with that glassy stare. But I quickly gave her the most potent sedative I had anyways, and she’s sleeping now.

I’m so scared, ghost. I can’t do this again. Though it doesn’t feel like the laughing sickness… There’s something… very eerily familiar in the ways those limbs contort.

Check back later.

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

SYDNEY

I think the worst part is the waiting. It’s not the damp, feverish hours hunched over the cot, or the constant ooze of mucus from every hole, or even the sticky, endless choreography of wringing towels and dumping stinking buckets. It’s that there are no new ideas, only the anticipation of the next malady, the next disaster, like the world is just a snowglobe of rot and, every hour, I have to flip it and watch all the flakes settle in new and painfully interesting ways.

Triage, hydration, repeat. Triage, hydration, sedate. I’m running out of sedatives. I’m running out of blankets, too. By around 4AM, all the heat drained from the building; every muscle in me is seized up with cold and aches of wet frost. The kids are even worse. They shiver violently in their cots.

The younger ones cry. They try to stifle it, but they’re little, and they can’t help it. You see their faces screw up, the ghost of a wail twitching in their throats, and then it slips into a ragged, feverish groan. I try to tend to them with warm linens and glasses of ginger ale. My sleeves are always soaked through. My hands, at this point, are pruny beyond recognition.

Micah’s growing worse, displaying symptoms similar to his cabin-mate. I sit on the edge of his cot and hold his hand. Count his breaths with him.

When he finally passes out, I let myself slump next to his bed. Well, not really let. My knees buckle. I study the grain of the plywood floor, watch the parade of miniature ants marching between the cracks. It’s a relief to have something so friendly to stare at.

Then the lights go out.

I fish a candlestub from the utility cabinet in the corner of the sickroom, casting shadows across the cots.

It’s so lonely. There’s only me, and the sick, and the dripping ceiling. I patch a cold compress for a girl whose skin is erupting with purpling blisters. I push fluids. I mop vomit. My joints are firing down my bones, pulling each nerve taut like a tightrope. I can feel every vertebra and muscle twitching and grinding against each other, and the hours pass like kidney stones.

When the lightning comes, it’s a dazzling flash of diamond-white. Outside the window, I see her dark shape in the momentary flicker, standing just at the tree line. Her blank, pulp of a face stares at us. The thunder that follows shakes the windows in their frames.

I try not to notice her.

But the deer waits. When the next flash comes, she’s closer. Standing at the lip of the field, her legs too long, her hide stretched and mottled with tumors, her hooves splayed and gleaming with something like tar.

When the third bolt cracks, the deer is pressed full against the glass door. Her head is canted at a gentle, knowing angle. Her body is steaming in the rain. Inside the darkness of her face, something twitches, a bundle of nerves shifting into bulging, ramshackle eyes just under her skin.

And then the door opens with a whimpering creak.

It shouldn’t have opened. The lock was set; the latch drawn by the white plastic lever. But with a slow, languid drift, the door slides inward, and the deer enters as the dank mist clouds around her legs. She tilts her neck.

It feels like the world shrinks. There is only me, in the center of the sickroom, and the deer, approaching through a corridor of fevered children. The campers see her, and they don’t react. They return to their drooling, their limb bending, their silent, dull stares.

I back up. The deer drags her legs with a loping, jerky gait, her jagged bones visible in each stretch of oily hide. She moves toward the cots, pausing at the foot of each lying child, lowering her molding face, and inhaling. Her head pulses with each labored breath, like a swelling balloon.

She approaches me. The deer towers, shivers, and then bends her head so close that the bulge of her face touches my own.

And then she speaks, a low, resonating hum: “I fix them.”

I feel it in my teeth, in my fingertips.

“They are broken, and with my gift, they are healed.”

I can hear the bones pop and arms stretch around us. The children writhe, but in relief. Their jaws relax, their fingers uncurl. Some laugh, quiet and high, like a ringing bell, as their limbs lengthen twice the distance and their tendons split like coiled violin strings.

“You are broken. I can put you back together.”

I think of the river, the blades, Adam’s hands on my forearm, squeezing gently as he carves along the track of a vein.

“I reconstruct you.”

The deer leans in, closer. She opens her not-face; literally opens into darkness. A glossy, thick black tongue lollops out, long and coiling, dripping clear and oily slobber onto the floor.

She was waiting for me to answer.

I keep backing up. She follows towards me. Her greasy hooves click the floor in disjointed clacks.

“It is healthy. I shape you. It is a natural process of the body.”

My back hits the wall, and her gangling neck angles down towards me. I sink to the floor to avoid her sharp, piercing antlers.

“You are the illness.”

She had me boxed in, looming with that terrible stench. Her tongue lolled over my face. It was massive, lacquered with a slime that smelled like bleach and wet pennies. She flicked a spiral of drool against my cheek. I retched. Her stinking tongue continued to hover just above me, dripping, the edge as soft as a rotten peach and twice as wet.

“I fix you.”

My ribs buzzed in my chest. I reached for whatever was next to me on the counter: a half-full glass bottle of isopropyl or some old methylated spirit, couldn’t tell you. My brain lagged behind my hand, and I only realized what I was doing when I’d already slammed the bottle straight into the mushed-up bulge where her muzzle should be.

And for a split second the whole sickroom was flashbulb-white. The bottle split open, a hundred thousand razor-bright fragments, and most of them went straight into the deer’s face.

She recoiled, tongue whip-snapping back through the seam of her face. She arched up and smashed against the medicine cabinet, spraying the counter with stinking, dark blood. The smell was bizarre: tar, bleach, and the wet reek of medicine, like the inside of a dissected frog.

The deer righted herself, staggered forward with a slither-shuffle, and made a sound I’ve never heard an animal make. It resonated right through the enamel of my teeth until my vision turned to oil-slick, swirling static.

In the beds, the kids started contorting again, more extreme this time, in grotesque mockeries of anatomy. Arms reversed and twisted, two necks doubled in length, a single branch of finger-bones sprouted out of one girl’s shin. Someone’s tongue appeared to migrate, worming its way out of the mouth and down the side of the chin.

I was focused on them. But then the deer was beating its hoof, clearly belligerent.

“I HELP YOU! I HELP YOU! I HELP YOU!”

She began to charge. I scrambled for the tool cart at the other side of the room. It took an eternity to open, but when I finally got my grip on the rusty crowbar, I barely registered its weight before I was swinging it.

I hit her jaw. Hard. The wet crunch rang through the room. She let out a hissing groan and staggered back in a wild, near-human reel. Her lower jaw came off at a hinge. She reared up and bled over the floor, then shot her forelegs through an empty cot, smashing it.

Then she stilled herself for a breath. The power came back on, illuminating her ruddy pelt in the green fluorescence. She raised her neck. Tilted her head in… in amusement? Recognition? Disappointment, maybe?

I expected her to say something. But the Deer with No Face just pulled herself together, flicked her tongue across the blood on my cheek, and turned to walk out into the rain.

[HE BREATHES]

I collapsed. I am not brave. I am not strong.

When I finally wiped my face on my coat and dragged myself upright, the sickroom was quiet. The children weren’t groaning anymore, but they weren’t asleep either. Even as the fever broke, I could see it: fingers just a little too long, shoulders hunched, a patchwork of bruises and calluses running in odd, branching patterns beneath their skin. Some of them giggle at nothing, and it makes my skin crawl.

The Deer is gone, but she’s left them all… “Reconstructed.” I think about writing it all down, cataloguing every new fracture and twist, but the thoughts slip through my grip like slippery fish. I am not strong.

Instead, I clean the floor.

[SIGH]

I’m gonna wake Jedidiah now.

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

FENNEL

Hey, Sydney? Were you asleep? I know Jedidiah told me to let you rest, but—

SYDNEY

[SHUFFLING] No, it’s okay. Come in. I was just taking a nap.

FENNEL

Ah. Uhm—

SYDNEY

Oh, hey, Fennel. What can I do for you?

FENNEL

I… Well. You know, Rowan’s gone missing and—

SYDNEY

Rowan’s missing!?

FENNEL

Juniper says he disappeared two days ago.

SYDNEY

Geeze. And we’re sure he’s not out… like… buying snacks… or gravel… or something…

FENNEL

It’s been two days.

SYDNEY

Oh gosh. What’s Juniper doing?

FENNEL

He’s concerned, but he’s not doing anything right now.

SYDNEY

Hm.

FENNEL

It’s worrying. But I just— I’m so worried about Soren.

SYDNEY

Why?

FENNEL

He’s getting worse. He barely talks to anyone but me, and even then it’s all… nonsense. Everyone laughs at him and his shenanigans or whatever but I, uhm. I think he’s going to really hurt himself.

SYDNEY

You know him better than me. [FLATLY] What do you want me to do?

FENNEL

You’re a healer, right? No one cares, but I just thought—I don’t know. Maybe, like, you had a sort of medicine o-or treatment plan.

SYDNEY

There’s nothing wrong with him. Medically, that is.

FENNEL

He’s—he’s suffering.

SYDNEY

What? You want me to prescribe him a bottle of Don’t Be a Freak? There’s no ointment for being terminally weird, Fennel.

FENNEL

[EXASPERATED] That’s not what I—I just thought— Soren pays attention to you. He listens to you, sometimes. You’re a nurse, for goodness sake! I thought you might actually try to help.

SYDNEY

I—

FENNEL

I’m really lost.

SYDNEY

I—I don’t know how to help you, I’m sorry. Soren’s just a weirdo with an ego. No cure for that…

FENNEL

Wow. Have some empathy, Sydney.

SYDNEY

Why? He’s cruel.

FENNEL

He’s suffering!

SYDNEY

I don’t owe him anything!

FENNEL

Wow, no wonder no one likes you. You are so mean. I hope you never have a loved one hurt the way he is! Forget I asked!

[DOOR SLAM]

Today’s episode of Camp Here & There was written and directed by Blue Wolfe.

The role of Sydney Sargent was performed by Blue Wolfe.

The role of Fennel Marlborough was performed by Izzy Sarrows.

With original music composed by Will Wood and produced by Jonathon Maisto. 

Additional music composed by Kyle Gabler, and Another You.

 Dialogue editing by The Leo!

 Sound design by Blue Wolfe and Another You.

And a special thanks to Patrons for making this possible! 

Special thanks to Jedidiah’s Secret Project, Sparkledrone, and Just a Lemon.

To join them, and to get behind-the-scenes content like bloopers, development notes, early access to episodes, interactive events, and more, visit the Patreon at patreon.com/bluewolfe.

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 Thank you for listening to Camp Here & There! And remember: Why do this?