Camp Arcanum Read online

  CAMP

  ARCANUM

  JOSEF MATULICH

  Post Mortem Press

  Cincinnati

  Copyright © 2014 Josef Matulich

  Cover Art copyright © Philip Rogers

  www.philiprrogers.com

  All rights reserved.

  Post Mortem Press - Cincinnati, OH

  www.postmortem-press.com

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  SMASHWORDS Edition

  To the real Brenwyn,

  who still lives in the broom closet.

  She loaned me her name and so much more for the last two and a half decades. This book would never have happened without her.

  Chapter 1

  Serial Killers Enter in Rear

  MARC SINDRI AWOKE IN WHAT HE ASSUMED to be the ICU, marinating in morphine, sterile saline, and hopefully Resperidone that would keep the little monsters away. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t recall what he’d done to put him there. Words of the nurses and doctors, overheard in a drug-induced haze, came back to him: skull fracture, cervical spine fracture, ruptured spleen.

  There had been something large and unpleasant and invisible, at least until Michael painted parts of it white. Of course, there was a woman, too, one with grey-violet eyes. There always was a woman involved when he came to connected to tubes and wires. The rest of the recent past was a screaming, throbbing blur. His long-term memory, the time when he arrived in Arcanum two months ago, was much clearer

  It seemed pretty nice when I got here.

  * * * * *

  “Right turn coming up at the mailbox,” Marc said into the radio headset. “We’re almost there.” After four and a half hours behind the wheel of Mr. Fixit, the words were the most wonderful a weary toolguy could imagine.

  Marc tapped the brakes to alert Michael and Eleazar behind him and then signaled for a right turn. A quick glance in the mirror showed that Michael’s dark green Volvo station wagon remained where it had been the entire way from Pittsburgh: at least five car lengths back and no more than three miles an hour over the speed limit. Eleazar’s gypsy wagon drove too closely behind the Volvo, just short of physically pushing it forward. As usual, Eleazar was trying to annoy Michael into doing what he wanted.

  “Back it off, Eleazar,” Marc warned. “You run up his ass and that’ll ruin your fancy paint job.”

  The gypsy wagon, a Nissan pick-up with camper, had the borders of every surface festooned with red, green, and gold acanthus and filigree like an illuminated manuscript on wheels. The camper’s sides, and its leading edge in mirror script, announced the owner as “Eleazar the Jongleur, Master of Speed and Motion.” All the work had been hand-painted by the irritable artist in the Volvo.

  “You scratch the paint on either car and you’re on your own,” Michael snapped over the radio.

  “Oh, but you could nae bear to see your work driving around damaged,” replied Eleazar. “Now, could you, sirrah?”

  “I’ll just cover it all over with a new coat of white paint,” Michael sniped back.

  Marc realized it was a good thing that he had packed away his AR-15 in his Pittsburgh storage locker. The inspiration to shoot either of these two might be too much to resist after a few months of togetherness. He double-clicked the talk button on his radio, squelching the argument in a blast of static.

  Blessed peace ruled over the airwaves.

  The convoy crunched through the gravel of another curve and passed a hand-lettered plywood sign mounted on an old fencepost. “Camp Arcanum. Serial killers enter in rear,” it read in paint the color of dried blood.

  “You really know how to set the mood, Marc,” said Michael as they passed. “Though, I might have done more on the distressing the sign. It looks too new.”

  “If you liked that,” Eleazar chimed in, “wait until you see the fetid swamp with alligators. We set it up special for you, right behind your trailer, milord.”

  “Let’s not start out squabbling like children again, okay?” Marc said. He was a general contractor, even an occasional miracle worker. He hadn’t signed on as a daycare attendant.

  “I can act like a grown-up.” Michael said in the tone of a disapproving sibling. Eleazar made no reply.

  The convoy turned back on itself as it followed the gravel track along the far edge of the fallow pasture. The path followed the tree-lined creek that ran through the property. The late afternoon sun glinted off the water and through the leaves, which were just beginning to change to red and gold. Marc felt a moment of pastoral peace, like his childhood visits to Uncle John’s farm, back before his brother had gotten sick. Eleazar, his voice coming over the radio as a singsong lament, broke the moment:

  “Are we there yet?”

  * * * * *

  Marc guided the black Ford Explorer into the gravel circle known as Camp Arcanum. Three bright silver Airstream trailers gleamed in the sun like Flash Gordon’s spaceship and looked as if they were awaiting launch on the filled-in foundation of the Edwards’ condemned farm house. An old wooden barn with a tin roof hunkered down at the far side of the circle. Its planks were so old they had gone black beneath the few flecks of red paint that still stuck to them. A few smaller outbuildings huddled close to it.

  The Volvo and the gypsy wagon followed him past the barn. Like a well-trained flying circus, the three vehicles came to a halt in adjacent parking spots on the far side of the gravel drive.

  Marc leaned against his old Ford Explorer as Eleazar and Michael got out and inspected their new surroundings. Michael Caravaggio was a slight, sandy-haired man in his mid-twenties. Though he had every right to be artistic and flamboyant, he dressed like someone’s office manager in an argyle sweater, Dockers, and loafers. He looked over the compound as if checking for booby traps.

  Eleazar, no known name outside his nom de stage, had enough flamboyance for the both of them. He wore a new orange and flame-red vest that matched his long hair and goatee and a blue satin pair of pantaloons that would have been appropriate for either a Turkish court or an old rap video. As always, he carried a rubber chicken hitched on his hip, though it did not sport the lace neck ruff reserved for fancy dress occasions. Eleazar made a more relaxed scan of the area since Marc had warned him there were to be no women and no opportunities for street theater. Neither of his lackeys was taller than five-ten or heavy enough to prevent Marc from picking up one to use as a club on another. That had always helped to maintain discipline on the job site.

  When Eleazar finally saw the Bobcat in the tractor shed, his eyes glowed with excitement. It was a hybrid six-wheeled contraption, half miniature bulldozer, half pick-up truck. He dashed over to it and leaped behind the controls.

  “You got us another Bobcat! A Toolcat 5600, with cargo bed and all-wheel steering, too.” He lovingly ran his hands over the controls and wriggled his buttocks to make an impression in the seat. “I think I’ll name this one Theodora.”

  “I assume that was another woman in history that caused a great deal of trouble?” Eleazar spent almost all of his waking moments thinking about women, historical and otherwise. The Bobcat at their last ren faire had been named “Boadicea” and decorated in Celtic knotwork by Michael.

  “Marc, all women are a great deal of trouble,” Eleazar said as if to a toddler, “but trust me, milord, they are worth it.”

  “I’m supposed to pull off another friggin’ miracle,” Marc grumbled. “I do
n’t have time for trouble.”

  “No time for the Fairer Sex?” Eleazar shuddered theatrically as he stepped out of the Bobcat. “Milord, thou speakest unnaturally.”

  “I worketh my ass off.” Deciding the matter to be finished, Marc led the tour towards the barn.

  “Each of us gets a trailer,” he said, pointing as he spoke. “Michael, yours is the one closest to the shop. You, Eleazar, are on the other end. I’ll be in between the two of you, just like the DMZ.”

  “Does that mean that you’ll force Eleazar to behave himself?” Michael didn’t sound hopeful.

  “Misbehave? I?” Eleazar asked innocently. “Yes, I may sometimes engage in high-spirited antics, drinking deeply from the cup of life without toweling off—”

  “How about lubricating every doorknob in my apartment with Vaseline,” Michael asked, “and then leaving an inflatable woman in my bed?”

  “You didn’t like her?”

  “I tried rolling her over and thinking of Jake Gyllenhall,” Michael said, “but it wasn’t the same. I’m not converting.”

  Eleazar shrugged, acting as if he didn’t care at all. Since the moment Eleazar had discovered that Michael was gay, he had tried his best to change Michael’s sexual point of view. Not that Eleazar thought it was unnatural or a sin, as he had declared many times, simply that Michael was making a terrible oversight to not appreciate women for the miraculous creatures they were.

  “Well, Michael, I have something to help you get past that trauma,” Marc interjected as he pulled the barn doors open wide.

  Though the barn was unpainted wood outside, Marc had made it a handyman’s paradise inside. The workbenches were stocked with tools for welding, heavy woodworking, or metal work. The revered names of Ryobi, DeWalt, and Bosch were everywhere. Each tool had its outline marked on their pegboard roosts.

  “So,” said Michael, “this is what Heaven looks like for you.”

  “Damned straight,” Marc beamed as Michael and Eleazar stepped inside and immersed themselves in the spectacle. “We’ve got almost any tool that you can imagine. Even a full Shopsmith system. I convinced Steve that we needed the right tools to do this job as quickly as he wanted it.” It was early October and Steve had made plans for an opening on the first of May.

  “My God, you can fix anything,” Eleazar sounded almost reverent. “Even a cheap, spastic boss.”

  “We’ll see,” said Marc sourly.

  He had tried to fix Steve earlier that year, just after the boss’s girlfriend/site manager had finally had enough of the yelling, complaining, and neurotic whining. Jennifer left him without notice and with two live pigs awaiting the evening’s hog roast. Marc had dispatched the pork on the hoof with two well-placed rounds from his AR-15 and then convinced Steve they would be ruined without a proper set of block and tackles to suspend the carcasses. As Steve had careened around the ren faire looking for rope and pulleys, Marc, Eleazar, and assorted lackeys finished the butcher’s work. In the end, they convinced Steve it had all been done by elves.

  Only through surrendering three of his “Get Out of Firing Free Cards” did Marc save his job, along with Eleazar’s and Michael’s. This new project was not so much an opportunity as a forced exile.

  “You’ll also be very happy to hear, Michael, that our first project is a foundry shed. Steve wants bronzes, cast iron, carved wood, the whole nine yards.”

  “Do I get an unlimited budget to go with the requests?” Michael didn’t sound hopeful.

  Eleazar snorted at the thought.

  “That would take an executive order from God Himself,” said Marc. “The best I could do was guarantee limited interference from Steve. You’ll have to be . . . creative otherwise.”

  “I’ve got a few ideas already sketched out,” Michael shrugged off the disappointment quickly. “They’re in the car.”

  Michael trotted back out. The opportunity to have free rein in this big a project seemed to lighten his steps. Marc knew if Michael was this happy, an attack from Eleazar was not far behind.

  “Okay Eleazar,” Marc grumbled, “what kind of mischief do you have planned?”

  “Nothing, I figured I’d improvise,” Eleazar said airily. “It’s what I am best at. Two years Viola Spolin Method, Chicago.”

  “We are on a short deadline and I don’t want to be wasting time keeping you two apart,” Marc replied. “Seventeen street fights, downtown Pittsburgh.”

  Eleazar acted as if inspecting the drill press was far more interesting than this conversation. Marc considered that a victory.

  Michael soon returned with a black leather artist’s portfolio filled to bursting. He unzipped it on the worktable and pulled out sketch after sketch.

  “First off,” Michael said, “every renaissance faire in the world is some variation of Tudor England. Architecturally, very boring.”

  The topmost sketches, showing familiar thatched stucco buildings with exposed cross beams, were cast behind Michael on the floor. A strange new landscape unfolded in the papers below.

  While Michael spoke, Marc saw Eleazar take up his rubber chicken, a chisel, and a hammer and begin juggling. The pattern became more involved as Michael lectured.

  “Now that we’ve got over three hundred acres here,” Michael pointed out on a map of the site, “most of it heavily wooded, and we’ll have to clear some of it anyway for the faire. Even clearing off this fraction of the total area, we would have more than enough resources to create medieval structures that the average faire-goer has never seen.”

  “So, instead of just bulldozing everything into a pile,” Marc observed, “you want to harvest the trees with chainsaws first.”

  In the drive up, Marc had unconsciously catalogued the types of trees on the property. Useless cottonwoods were abundant, mostly along the creek bed, but the upper slopes had a dozen more useful species: red maples, hard as rock and excellent for carvings; oaks and ash would make durable planks and timbers. There was a huge population of black walnut trees that could be either milled for their own use or sold for outrageous prices to cabinetmakers.

  This could work.

  And if they did pull off another miracle, Marc might be able to get Steve to sign another “Get Out of Firing Free Card.”

  “Exactly.” Michael began to wind up. “Now here is a design based on a stave church in Uppsala, which stylistically dates back to the Viking era.”

  “So, you’re talking about Viking world at Disney?” Marc asked. He caught a glimpse of Eleazar’s reflection in the Plexiglas shield of a tile saw. “I hope this isn’t boring you too much, Eleazar?”

  Eleazar had been pounding himself in the head with the rubber chicken while feigning great agony. He quickly turned to using it as a backscratcher.

  “R-r-r-rubber chicken,” he trilled, “one thousand and one uses!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Michael. “I was using words with more than two syllables.”

  “Enough, children,” Marc said. He directed the attention back to Michael. “You have the designs for the maze yet?”

  Michael brightened at the chance to speak on that subject.

  “Actually, I have several options. Almost every medieval cathedral like Chartres or Notre Dame had a labyrinth design inlaid on the floor. Symbolically, these were representations of the journey through the afterlife . . .”

  Michael interrupted his lecture to glance back at Eleazar, who innocently strummed his rubber chicken like a ukulele.

  “Anyway, we have several layout designs,” Michael summed up. “I’d like to have the walls made like log palisades. We could set things like gargoyles and dragons in the dead ends.”

  Marc looked over the sheer mass of Michael’s presentation. He’d fleshed out enough ideas to fill a thousand acres, on enough paper to choke a horse.

  “Looks like a lot of work,” Marc sighed. “Let’s get settled in here and tomorrow we’ll go into town and see if we can recruit a whole bunch of strong backs and weak minds. Michael, can you make up
some flyers for us real quick?”

  Michael pulled more papers out of his portfolio.

  “I already have some designs,” the artist said.

  * * * * *

  Eleazar had cajoled the Washer Wenches down to the pond and somehow the lot of them had fallen in. Wet chemises, naked limbs, and eager mouths were everywhere. Being a flexible man, Eleazar took what liberties he could. The wenches, as always, were willing and able and gallant with their charms. Something distracted the women, though. A ghastly metal behemoth loomed over the horizon. Its smoke smeared a dark smudge across the blue sky that drew their eyes away, and its ill-tuned motor drowned out the far more pleasant sound of feminine laughter. It approached, crashing through the trees with the sound of skulls and bones crushing beneath its iron wheels.

  Eleazar’s subconscious, that reptile brain that never slept, recognized that sound as a car pulling into the gravel drive outside the trailer. That primal portion of his mind knew that trouble in the form of jealous boyfriends and murderous husbands often arrived in cars, and it shut down the happy dream. Eleazar’s eyes snapped open and he was instantly awake, prepared for flight or fight. He quickly checked the clock upon his window sill and found it to be six o’clock ante meridian, a time when only invading armies and scoundrels went out visiting.

  He slipped out of bed and quickly pulled on a utili-kilt and white fencer’s shirt that laid across his bedside table. He hopped across the cluttered trailer as he pulled on his soft leather boots. On his way, he hid the pictures of Megan, Joyce, and Monica beneath the bedding and put his bag of juggling props over that.

  Eleazar popped out of his trailer, straightened his clothes, and tried to be nonchalant about the blackthorn club he leaned on as a walking stick.

  A faded green Impala, something from the nineteen-sixties, had just parked outside the trailer. Its driver was stepping out just as he did. She was a stunningly beautiful woman who stood at a perfect height to slip under his arm. She was obviously no girl but a woman who had achieved full ripeness. Her pale grey or violet eyes seemed to glow against the olive skin of her face. She wore a gold-embroidered saffron peasant blouse and red skirts with gold magpie baubles hanging down from her belt. She threw a black and gold crocheted wrap over shoulders for warmth. The figure beneath the clothes was exquisite, all flesh and curves with nary a bone protruding. Her dark complexion, clothing, and the wavy dark hair that flowed down past her breasts gave her the look of a New Age Gypsy Princess. Eleazar wondered if he might convince her to run away with him in his gypsy wagon.