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Order this writing in the collection book Bending the Curve available for only 1495 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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The Death of the H-man
L. Burrow
“Tell us about the H-man,” the boy snapped giddily in his Long Island accent. He was still chewing his cheeseburger and gnawing the mash with his retainer. This kid wore his swim trunks pulled up to his solar plexus.
“Naaahhh,” I replied, stoking the campfire. “The H-man is lame, that trash isn’t even scary anymore. You know why we tell you that story?”
“Why?” The boy asked, a bit of burger falling from his lips.
“Because we know you can handle it.”
Around the fire a small group of five kids and three counselors gathered for the final festivities of the night: the ghost stories. The H-man legend was thoroughly ingrained in camp lore---every kid knew the story and wanted to hear it on every overnight camping trip. It was the tradition of our expedition: paddle the kids out to Hinckley Island, stuff them full of burgers and hot dogs, then lay down the myth so thick that they cry themselves to sleep, huddled in their sleeping bags with flashlights on and at the ready. Surviving the night was an honorary badge to wear the next day; a prideful, heartfelt bonding experience between the campers.
“Look, what does the H-man really do anyway?” I addressed the group. “Leave H’s carved on trees to freak kids out” What’s up with that?”
“Well, actually, he used to live in the Pine cabin,” another boy began in a scholarly tone. He had glasses thicker than triple pane windows, and smiled at his own authority on the subject before another boy interjected.
“Yeah, and, uh, there was a fire, and he, uh, uh?” This kid gasped and wheezed with the thrill; his hands shook at the wrist with nervous energy. He persistently scratched his bug bites, awaiting the story.
“He died, his body is horribly burnt to a crisp, he blames it all on a camper,” I recited. “Then he comes back every summer and leaves his mark all over camp. H’s here, H’s there. But he never does anything.”
Grim tales were frowned upon since there was a thick history of kids going home at the end of the summer, staying up all night long, dripping cold sweats and gripped in terror, screaming, “Mommy, mommy! Daddy, Daddy! Make the fear go away. The H-man! The H-man is coming to get me!” But the H-man lived at camp, and unless a counselor was willing and creative enough to spin a wild yarn involving the H-man side-stroking his horribly mangled body across a quarter-mile expanse of water, the story was, in effect, null and void. Essentially the island was a pure sanctuary, a place the H-man couldn’t get to, a late-night copout when the trouble came too close. “Don’t worry. The H-man is afraid of water; he can’t get you here. It’s safe.”
Being a native of the Adirondack region, I found the myth bland and generic; it contained no local color. The H-man could exist in any number of forms in any number of camps all across the country. He was a bit player; a former counselor bent on revenge, a mild spinoff of the psycho-killer who cannot die. Through yearly revisions and remodeling attempts, his origins were so unkempt, so unstable, that it was impossible to decipher who told what to whom; the story was spread entirely too thin. The veteran campers knew this and became experts on the subject, so that they might be able to catch a green counselor in the process of fabrication. For that the myth of the H-man had to die, and I, a counselor bent on revenge, had to do it. From burnt remains of the H-man came the foundation for Old Hinckley Prison.
“We all know you couldn’t handle the story of Old Hinckley Prison,” I introduced.
“Old Hinckley Prison? What”s Old Hinckley Prison?”
“Nothing. Go to bed.”
“Come on. Please!”
“Nope, nope. Bedtime! Fire’s out!” I jumped up and directed them to their tents.
“Come on! Come on! Please! Please!” they chimed in chorus.
“All right, then, listen up!” I yelled then continued. “I’ll tell the story, but if I gotta hear about this when we get back, you’re on my list. Nobody wants to be on my list. Now, you all know that this lake is man-made, right” It’s a reservoir. The dam is over there to your right. This island here used to be a hill before the dam was built and there used to be a town at the base of it. Now, old town Hinckley was a thriving mill town; loggers chopped down trees up in the forests over there, dropped the logs into the West Canada creek and rode them right down to the town, where they were milled into lumber or firewood.
“Now you gotta understand that lumberjacks are a rowdy bunch, especially after a night of drinking at Hinckley Tavern---fights, brawls, rapes, murders; you name it. The whole area was plagued with crimes of all sorts. So they built a prison that served the whole North Country area. They stocked it with the meanest of the mean, the cruelest of the cruel; every wild hellion that fought the law and lost. I mean the place was just bars and cement, holding back the worst humankind could offer.
“So when the milling business began to slow and the city of Utica began to boom with industry, the call came for a reservoir to bring water to the city. The logical place to start this was in Hinckley. They started drafting up plans, but there was one problem: where would the town go? Since people were already moving down to the city in search of factory work, there wasn’t a great population to move. So Niagara Mohawk bought out the rights to the property, moved the town to higher ground and began constructing the dam.
“However, nobody made plans to move the inmates at the prison, and let me tell you, the prison was packed to the gills. I mean, they were living on top of each other, ten of them to a ten foot square cell, ten cells in all, beating the crud out of each other and eating nothing but rats. After the dam was built and the town moved, there was no money left over until the dam started generating utility revenues. So what do they do?”
“What?” asked a boy bundled up in a Pokemon towel.
“They start letting the water rise; they start creating the reservoir, leaving the inmates in the prison. It took days, weeks almost, and the water started slowly rising over the foundation, then filtering into the cells, just rising and rising. And the prisoners are screaming and crawling all over each other, beating on the doors and yanking on the bars, trying anything to get out. But nobody did, and the water kept rising and just covered them up.”
I looked up from the fire, and caught the eyes of the campers; each a glimmering orange reflection of the heat. Their mouths hung open, exposing grisly, silver braces; bits of potato chips hung in their teeth. They stared, keeping quiet, pulling at the cuffs of their over-sized sweatshirt sleeves, anticipating a climax.
“Supposedly, if you listen real close on a quiet night, you can hear their muffled screams from below the water. I’ve never heard it, but I know people who have. They say it sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard in your whole entire life.”
“HAAAAYYYYY BAAAYYYYBEEE!!!!BRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!”
Everyone’s head shot towards the waterline, trying to decipher what could be hidden in that distance, in that darkness. The shriek seemed to disseminate from below the depths, shrill yet stout, a dampened and muddled jumble of incoherent and unintelligible words. In reality, it was not a time for horror; it was a time to party. From across the lake, someone was lit, stumbling down the beach, beer in hand, gesticulating his elation to the world, not knowing the trauma he caused.
“It sounds kind of like that,” I brooded. “Now, go to bed.”
