For stryck‘s prompt

Finnegan is a character in Addergoole. Efrosin, who was meant to have more lines in this, is a character in Addergoole: Year Nine, coming in September.

Summer between years six and Seven of the Addergoole School (2001)

Summer Camp was, Finnegan decided, one of the best ideas he’d ever had.

When Doug had offered him the job last year, he’d needed something to do that wasn’t think about Allyse or their tiny baby daughter Bailey. Two months hip-deep in other people’s kids had done a good job of that.

This year, he came for the fun, and because he was good at it; he brought Efrosin, because the kid needed to clear his own head.

Camp Red Oak Hill might have a higher percentage of future Addergoole students attending it than any normal camp, but that was a fact known only to the staff and the parents; normal kids came here, too, and the children of fae who weren’t part of Regine’s master plan. It made for a wild, rambunctious mass of children, much like camps he remembered from his own earlier years.

And tonight, looking around the fire at fifty-seven kids, Finnegan felt a dreadful sense of responsibility. He was supposed to look after them. He was supposed to teach them.

He was supposed to send them home, knowing maybe fifteen of them would eventually end up in the halls of Addergoole.

He cleared his throat. “Tonight’s story isn’t quite a ghost story…”

He waited out the obligatory “awwws” and other complaints.

“It’s a monster story instead. You see, when I was coming here, I spoke to the old Indian…”

“The old Native American,” eight-year-old Talitha interrupted.

Two could play at that game. “The old Tuscarora who lives down at the bottom of the hill. And he told me of a monster who used to roam these parts.”

He dropped his voice. “She was a nightmare, they say, the kind of creature that could chill your blood. She ate little children’s hearts for breakfast, and for dinner, she had lady fingers, real lady fingers. Those she didn’t eat, she’d enslave.”

He was really getting into it. “And she was a terror, a real slave-driver. She made her captive work all day without anything at all to eat, and then at night, when she let them rest, she fed them cold bean mush over broccoli.“

Even Efrosin joined in on the collective “Ewwwwwwww.”

“She walked these very hills, living in a cabin up just past the fence-line, where the old stones still sit. And she would come down here, when this camp was first started, and she would steal. Little boys. And little girls, one by one.” He dropped his voice down to a faint whisper.

“What happened to her?” Yuriko was a little old to be getting into the stories this much, but she was leaning forward nearly off of her log. “Did the camp people stop her?”

“Now, that’s the thing. Some people say that she died a natural death. Some people say that her slaves rose up and killed her dead, and buried her body at the crossroads.

“But some people say she never died, and sometimes she walks the paths around the camp, looking for a way in, looking for children to steal.”

And if that didn’t give them nightmares…

“Some people say, she looks just like we do.”

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