Count Off

Before I start, I need to know how many of us are here.

No, really. Humor me. Go around the fire and count off. Out loud. One number each. Start with you.

Good. Remember that number. It's going to matter.

The summer I was seventeen, I was a junior counselor at a camp in the mountains. Small place. A lake, a dining hall, twelve cabins, and a fire circle at the end of a dirt path that ran down through the pines to the water. The kind of camp where the same families sent their kids for thirty years.

They gave me a cabin of nine boys. Twelve and thirteen years old. Loud, sunburned, funny. Good kids.

On my first day, the camp director pulled me aside. Old man. Mr. Haskell. He'd run the place since before my parents were born. He had a voice like a gravel road, and he didn't waste it.

He said, "You'll do a fire every night with your cabin. That's fine. Have fun. Tell your stories. One rule."

I said okay.

He said, "Don't count off after dark."

I laughed. I thought it was a joke, like a camp tradition, like don't say the name of the lake three times. He didn't laugh.

"You count your boys before the sun goes down," he said. "You count them again after breakfast. Not in between. Not at the fire. Not ever at the fire."

I said, what if I need to know everybody's there?

He looked at me for a long time.

"Then look at their faces," he said. "Don't count them."

So of course, the first night, we counted.

I didn't even think about it. It was a habit. We'd walked down the path in the dark with flashlights, the boys were shoving each other, somebody's flashlight went in the lake, and when we got to the fire circle I said, without thinking, "Okay, count off."

And they did. Around the fire, left to right. Fast. Laughing.

"One."

"Two."

"Three."

All the way around.

"Eight."

"Nine."

And then, from the dark, from the trees behind the circle, a quiet voice said, "Ten."

Everybody screamed. Then everybody laughed. That's what you do when you're twelve. Somebody said it was Kyle. Kyle said it wasn't him. Somebody said it was a counselor from another cabin, messing with us. I went up into the trees with my flashlight and looked.

Nobody.

Pine needles. A stump. The lake slapping at the rocks down below.

I came back and said, "Okay, very funny," to the dark, the way you do. And we did s'mores and I told a story about a hook on a car door, and we went to bed.

I didn't think about it again until the next night.

The next night, I didn't say "count off." I swear I didn't. One of the boys did. Danny. Danny was the funny one, the one who did voices, who sat next to me every night because he said I was the only counselor who laughed at his jokes. Danny said, "Let's count off and see if the ghost comes back."

And everybody thought that was hilarious.

"One."

"Two."

"Three."

Around the fire. Slower this time. Everybody grinning, waiting for it.

"Eight."

"Nine."

Silence. The fire popping.

Nothing.

And everybody laughed, and somebody booed, and Danny said, "Boo, ghost, you suck."

And from the dark, closer this time, not in the trees but at the edge of the circle, just past where the firelight stopped, the same quiet voice said:

"Ten."

Nobody laughed that time.

I stood up with my flashlight and I walked the whole edge of that circle. There's a big log back there, where people sit when there's a crowd. There's a woodpile. I looked behind the log. I looked behind the woodpile. I shined the light up into the branches.

Nothing. No footprints in the dirt but ours.

I walked my boys back up to the cabin and I made them hold hands in a line, like little kids, and I counted them at the door. Before I could stop myself.

Nine.

I lay awake all night.

In the morning I went to Mr. Haskell's office. I told him. I thought he'd yell at me. He didn't. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes like a man who'd heard this story before and had hoped he never would again.

"How close was it?" he said.

I didn't understand.

"The first night. Where'd the voice come from?"

The trees, I said. Up the hill.

"And last night?"

The edge of the circle. Just outside the light.

He nodded. He put his glasses back on.

"It's coming in," he said. "Every time you count, it counts too. And every time it counts, it gets a little closer to the fire. It wants a number. It wants to be counted. That's all it's ever wanted."

What happens, I said, when it gets to the fire?

He said, "It sits down."

And then?

"And then you count off," he said, "and you get the right number. And everybody's there. And nobody's missing. And you go home."

He looked out the window at the lake.

"And one family," he said, "never had a son."

I said that was crazy. I said I was calling my parents. I said a lot of things.

He let me finish. Then he said, "It's your last night tonight. Don't go down to the fire. Don't count. Keep them in the cabin, play cards, go to bed. In the morning, the buses come, and it's over, and next summer it'll be somebody else's cabin."

So that's what I decided to do.

But you know how it is. That afternoon there was a storm. A real one. The kind that comes over a mountain all at once, black and green, with hail. The boys were down at the lake for swimming when it hit, and everybody ran, every direction, screaming, laughing, soaking wet. Kids everywhere. Lightning cracking down on the water.

And when I got back to the cabin, I had to know they were all there.

It was after dark by then. The storm had brought the night early.

And I did the thing you always do. I stood at the door, and I said, "Okay. Count off."

"One."

"Two."

"Three."

It was dark in the cabin. The power was out. Just the lightning, every few seconds, showing their faces. White. Wet. Scared.

"Four."

"Five."

"Six."

"Seven."

"Eight."

"Nine."

And from right beside me, from inside the cabin, from so close that I felt the breath on my ear, a quiet voice said:

"Ten."

The lightning came.

And I saw them. Every face. Every one of my boys. Nine of them, in the doorway and on the bunks, dripping, shaking.

And beside me, where the voice had come from, there was nobody.

Just the wall.

The buses came in the morning. I counted my boys onto bus three. I counted them in daylight, like Mr. Haskell said. Nine. Everybody there. Nobody missing. I watched the bus go down the mountain road, and I felt better than I'd felt in days.

I went back to the cabin to sweep it out. And I was halfway through, pushing dirt and pine needles across the floor, before I noticed that there were ten bunks made up.

Ten.

I had nine boys.

I stood there with the broom, and I counted the bunks four times.

There was a sleeping bag on the tenth bunk. Blue. A flashlight on the pillow. A notebook. I opened it, and it was full of drawings. Cartoons. Really good ones. Of the other boys. Of me. Of the fire circle. Somebody had drawn the whole week. Funny little pictures, the kind a funny kid draws.

On the first page, in kid handwriting, it said: Property of Danny.

I need you to understand something.

I remembered Danny. I'm telling you about him right now. Danny, who did voices. Danny, who sat next to me at the fire every night. Danny, who said, "Let's count off and see if the ghost comes back."

But when I ran up to the office with that notebook, Mr. Haskell looked at the roster, and he showed it to me.

Nine names. My cabin had nine boys. It always had.

I called the other counselors. Nobody knew a Danny. I called the boys' parents, later, every one of them, and I asked their sons about the funny kid in our cabin. They were polite. They said they didn't know what I meant. There were nine of them. There had always been nine of them.

There's a Danny on the camp sign-up sheet from that spring. Same handwriting as the notebook. I found it in a box in the office, crossed out. The phone number on the sheet belongs to a couple in the next valley. They're nice people. They don't have children. They told me they never have.

The voice didn't add itself to our count.

It took a number. And everybody who had that number forgot it ever belonged to somebody.

Everybody except the one who was counting.

I asked Mr. Haskell before I left that summer how long this had been going on. He said longer than him. He said it happens in some camps and not others, and nobody knows why. He said he'd lost two boys in forty years, and he remembered both of their names, and nobody else on Earth did.

He said, "You'll remember Danny for the rest of your life. That's what happens to the one who counts. You keep them."

He said, "That's the only grave they get."

So that's why I'm telling you this. Because somebody should know his name. It was Danny. He did voices. He was funny. He sat next to me.

And because there's one more thing.

At the start of tonight, I asked you to count off. Remember?

I asked you to remember your number.

So let's do it one more time. Just to be sure. Just so we all know everybody's still here.

Go ahead. Start with you.