DYLAN’S CAMPFIRE TALE

FEATURED ON EP #59

UP NORTH

by Jordan Miller

The idea was just to get away for a few weeks. Get away from the nervous bustling of the University campus. Get away from the constant group assemblies to discuss and reaffirm the student body’s collective grief and fear. Get away from the place that had felt so much like home and now felt so alien. The criers cried, the huggers hugged and the angry used their fists and screamed relentlessly into the void. The University counselors were up to their eyeballs, as were the police. Four dead in a month at the hands of some brutal phantom. The River Falls Ripper, as he was known, had taken normal life in their happy Wisconsin University town, turned it upside down and smashed open it on a rock. 

The body of the fifth victim, sophomore Leslie Gail, was found nude in the woods behind the athletic building. Forensics estimated she had been dumped eight hours before. It had been a cold night and when they pulled her body up the leaves stuck to it, making a sound like wet paper when they fell off. She was similar to the other victims only because she was a student at the University. No two were the same, with victims crossing gender, economic and racial boundaries, all with their own cause of death. This gave the police very little to go on. The only reason they suspected one killer was their specific brand of post mortem mutilation. It was his signature and it was different each time.

After they were killed, each victim was subjected to some bizarre, experimental surgery.  The press called them surgeries because that was the closest thing you could call them, even if none of them had any sort of medical purpose, at least on this planet. Each one was different but also the same.  They felt the same, the cops might say.  There was a creative cruelty about them that was impossible to ignore. Leslie Gail, for instance, was found with her eyes, ears, nose, teeth, and tongue removed.  There was a long vertical cut down her torso that had been stitched up before her body was dumped. Upon opening her up, they found the parts of her face sewn inside her stomach, wrapped in a piece of skin. The skin belonged to the previous victim, junior track star Raymond Hall. 

After that the University shut down classes all together. The group assemblies stopped and the counselors packed their things as students fled the campus like rats from a plague ship.  Dylan was a senior at the University but unlike everyone else, had lived in River Falls his entire life. He was a townie, as the other students liked to tease.  Dylan watched as the campus emptied out, everyone but him headed for higher ground.  

There was a knock at Dylan’s door where he found his three friends Reggie, Mila and Grace. “What are you guys doing here?” Dylan asked.

“It didn’t feel right just going home” Grace said.

“Yeah, we just thought we should be with you, only just not here.” Mila added. Dylan smiled at this. He had friends as a kid in this town, but many of them went off to college in other places or just drifted away. He had gotten used to the idea that was what all friends do, until he started school in his own backyard and met Mila, Grace and Reggie. For the first time he felt like he had friends that meant something--people that might actually stick by him. Here they were, standing at his door, proving the point. Grace with her long curled hair pulled back and draped over the back of her River Falls University sweatshirt, stained with paints of all colors. Reggie with his coke bottle glasses, tall and lean, with his arm around Mila’s shoulders. Mila stood a foot and a half shorter than Reggie, her skin a rich caramel color against the black clothes that made up the entirety of her wardrobe. These were his friends and he loved them.

“School’s out man, Grace has a spot we can go and just get away from all of this. We need a distraction. You especially, being an honest-to-god townie and all. You in?” Reggie asked with a grin. 

Dylan smiled and looked at Grace. “Where’s the place?”  He had liked Grace from the beginning. Now it was basically an obsession. Her smile was brilliant, like staring into the sun. He would wake in the middle of the night to find its afterimage burned into the backs of his eyelids. He was studying the hard sciences, always charting data, and she was in the arts, painting and developing a style in mixed media collage. Thinking of them together he imagined them as the two opposite sides of the brain--he the logical left, and her the whimsical right. Opposites that fit perfectly together. Infatuated as he was, he had never told her how he felt. They had settled into the same close friend group and that was good, it was just nice to spend so much time close to her and the idea of a weekend away was certainly appealing.

“It’s Up North” Reggie interjected “now get your things and let’s go”. In Wisconsin when somebody says they are going somewhere they always say they are going “up north”, no matter where they are going.  Didn’t matter if they were driving compass west directly into the pink sunset of the pacific, they were really headed up north.  This was a bit of regional quirk that Reggie had picked up on and loved to toss around whenever he could.  Dylan didn’t mind. 

Dylan’s parents required little convincing. Their town wasn’t safe anymore and they were grateful he could ride this out somewhere else. Dylan threw some things into a travel bag and the four of them left River Falls and its growing river of blood behind them. For the rest of them to go home to their parents felt too much like running. Like surrender. This wasn’t surrender.  This was together, and together was power. So, the idea was just to get away for a few weeks, to disappear, and Wisconsin is a great state to do that.

The drive was long and easy and they passed the time taking turns choosing music.  There was little conversation. Talking would eventually lead to the topic of the Ripper, and more than anything they wanted to leave that subject behind. Every mile they put between themselves and their campus was a blessing and Dylan didn’t care if they kept on driving forever. Dylan was sure each of them was doing the same thing he was; silently sifting over the Ripper’s crimes in their head, trying to understand the incomprehensible. Dylan sat with his head against the passenger window and thought about how it had all started. 

All of them had known the first victim, Dennis Taylor. Even if none of them considered him a close friend or part of their group, he was always around and a nice enough guy.  He played sports but also took art classes with Grace, and was usually showing up at the same parties they went to, most of the time with a couple hand rolled joints in an empty cigarette pack.  They had smoked a few of those joints together but never talked about anything deeper than which classes they were taking and what music they were listening to. He was just one of many countless faces swirling about their happy campus, not quite a friend but more than a stranger. That is, until they found him dead on the soccer field. Then everybody knew his face. Suddenly he had been everyone’s best friend. 

Dennis’s skin had been peeled back from his torso, stretched tight around his arms and stapled to his back. His body resembled a red, fleshy cocoon with a human head peeking out from the top. His eyes had been removed and the sockets filled with small bouquets of roses from the campus rose garden. That was how it started, the overnight metamorphosis of their college campus into a killing field. As Dylan worked over Dennis’s murder for the hundredth time, his thoughts returned, as they so often did, to the pigs. 

Dylan had shown an aptitude for science as a boy and was now well on his way down the pre-med track. He was, like his classmates, no stranger to animal dissections in his biology labs. They had taken apart frogs, rabbits, even a cow’s eye, but the way Dennis’s skin had been pulled back had always reminded him of how they had started with the pigs -- sliding a scalpel down the middle in order to pull back those two large flaps of skin. There were over thirty people in his bio lab and there were other lab groups just as large.  All of them with the same experiences, learning to cut and then to peel. It was the belief of the police that the killer had some anatomical knowledge or interests, and Dylan tended to agree with this. The similarities were just too obvious.  When you thought that way, it was almost too easy to imagine almost anybody from his classes as the killer. For two weeks after they found Dennis, Dylan had recurring nightmares about pigs with roses in their eyes.

“We’re here” Grace said as she turned down the radio.  The car turned down a long driveway stopping in front of a small cabin tucked away on a private six acres backing up against the forest. “My parents are being chill for once and letting us use the place, so try not to fuck it up too bad”.

It wasn’t the typical night of college students away for a weekend. There was drinking, sure, but the tone was somber. Being so far away from their school and finally feeling safe, the group let themselves talk about the Ripper openly for the first time.  They talked about the murders, of course, but quickly found themselves moving to more adjacent topics. The time they had all gotten high and hit golf balls into the river with Dennis Taylor, before he had been turned into the human cocoon of course. The way certain professors wouldn’t discuss the slayings with students, forbidding the subject harshly as if the students were a group of troublesome toddlers who refused to stay out of the mud. 

“I heard it could be a group of killers, considering how many different things have been done to the victims, and the fact that none of them fit the same sex or race demographic” Mila said, holding Reggie’s hand in her lap. “We brought it up in my psychology class one time and I thought it made some sense”. The group considered it. Dylan thought of the pigs.

“They would all have to be pretty good with a knife” Dylan said.

“Yeah. That’s why so many people think it’s a doctor or a medical student or something. Plus the styles are just too fucked up to be a group of people. You already have to be batshit to wanna turn somebody inside out or whatever. I personally find it hard to believe that person is going to be able to round up a group of like minded individuals and start some new sorta extracurricular” Reggie said and the group agreed silently. Mila gave him a light playful jab with her elbow. “Sorry, babe! I calls ‘em like I see ‘em!”

Grace picked at a spot of paint on her sweatshirt, then spoke up with a playful smile “well, how about it Dylan? You’re our resident med head, you think it could be another medical student or maybe one of the professors?”.

Dylan thought for a moment. “Based on the ages and physical shape of many of our science faculty I doubt it was a professor. Think of Dennis, I mean he was in good shape.  It would take some strength or cunning to bring him down. I just don’t see that coming from one of the professors.” 

“Not to mention that psychological breaks with crimes this violent usually occur before the age of 25.” Mila interjected. “Someone with this kind of rage inside of them would have a hard time keeping it hidden long enough to get tenure.” 

“I didn’t know I was dating Sigmund Fuckin Frued” Reggie said

“Shut up! It’s true!” Mila retorted.

Dylan nodded. “She’s right. This person is experimenting, trying new things. When I think about what the Ripper has done to his victims, I can’t help but think about some of the illustrations in our medical textbooks. The cuts are supposedly very clean, and what he does takes time and a meticulous nature, so yeah, I guess to answer your question Grace, I could see it being a medical student. Totally.” He frowned. “I’ve probably had a lab with the guy for all I know”. Mila squeezed Reggie’s hand tighter. 

They finished off a few more beers each before calling it a night.  Mila and Reggie left first, sharing one of the guest rooms, leaving open the master bedroom and one more small guest room.  Dylan and Grace sat together finishing their beers and trying to steer conversation towards lighter memories. Parties, pranks, projects, anything. Nothing worked. Every new topic was like trying to hang a painting over a wall covered thick with shit. It could distract the eye for a moment, maybe, but the stench was always there. They couldn’t escape, not even all the way out here, it was almost as if the Ripper had followed them, and Dylan hated him even more for that. 

“There’s some whiskey we haven’t even opened. Wanna crack into it with me?” Dylan asked with a smile. “Might help us forget… everything… for a while”. He tried to smile at her, tried to say with his eyes what he had never been able to tell her with his voice. Grace smiled back and met his eyes for a moment, then moved them away.

“I don’t know. I think I should probably just go to sleep too. I’m so tired.” She said. “Tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah, tomorrow.” Dylan agreed. They finished their drinks, said goodnight and went into their separate rooms. Grace in the master and Dylan in the remaining guest room. That night Dylan dreamed of the pigs again. They had flowers in their empty eye sockets and squealed in pain as their torso’s opened up like a cocoon splitting down the middle. A buzzing rose up as he saw the inside the pigs were hearts made from beehives, writhing and furious. Instead of honey they oozed with thick red blood.. Each heartbeat forced out another spout of blood and a cloud of angry bees. 

He awoke to uncontrollable screaming, but not his own.  It was Grace, out in the living room. He forgot the dream in an instant, jumped to his feet and ran out into the main area and stopped when he saw what was sitting on the loveseat. Grace was backed into the corner, still screaming.  In the center of the room, on the loveseat were the bodies of Reggie and Mila, nude and sewn together in a lover’s embrace.  Their lips and faces stitched together into one. Dylan looked from the ghastly tableau to Grace, hysterical and cowering.  When she finally saw Dylan she only screamed harder.  He tried to approach her, to comfort her, but she jumped to her feet and moved across the room, deliberately putting the couch between herself and Dylan. 

“Grace, it’s me! You’re okay, let’s just get out of here now!” But Grace wouldn’t hear any of it. She only screamed more and pointed at him. Dylan looked down and realized there was blood on his clothes. 

“Stay away from me!” Grace pleaded. 

“It wasn’t me! Grace, you have to believe me!” She wouldn’t listen. She continued to keep her distance.

“What the fuck is that?!” Grace motioned towards the wall behind Dylan. He turned and found his travel bag unzipped and open. Inside were several blue plastic boxes marked with the words “RIVER FALLS UNIVERSITY - BIOLOGY DEPT”. He recognized the blue boxes immediately. He should, he had handled them countless times. He approached the bag and leaned down, opening one of the boxes and finding exactly what he expected--several surgical scalpels and tools used in basic dissections. They were caked with dried blood. He tried to understand how they had gotten in his bag but he couldn’t.  Students were only allowed to use these tools in the lab areas, so he would have had to sneak them out. Surely he hadn’t done that… had he? As his mind reeled for a logical answer he felt the pinch of something else that surely had come from the school science lab, a hypodermic needle.  It pressed into his neck, and he felt a calming cool sensation spread out from around it. Then sleep.

Dylan awoke an unknowable amount of time later, finding himself sitting in the kitchen chair.  He tried to pull himself loose but discovered two things. A zip tie has been fastened around his wrists and his arms had been stitched together from the elbow down. His arms had been fastened behind the chair and any attempt to pull them apart brought excruciating pain.  He looked up and saw Grace sitting across from him, the open blue box of dissection tools open on her lap. She was smiling. Dylan’s mind fought itself, refusing to believe what his brain was telling him to be true.  He tried to ignore the evidence, but he was a student of the hard sciences and it was not in his nature. 

“How… could…” Dylan started but Grace stopped him.

“I wouldn’t talk too much if I were you. I put something sharp down your throat and it’s hard to tell where it stopped. I don’t want you to cut yourself yet”. 

Dylan’s whole body flooded with terror but his eyes stayed locked on Grace. Grace, with her smile as blinding as the sun. A smile that he now knew had probably blinded so many others. Others like Dennis Taylor. Grace, who was developing a style in mixed media collage. Very mixed, recent enlightenments considered. She played with the tools in the blue box before pulling one of the scalpels free and marveling at its glinting edge.

“The press called what I did surgeries because they have no imagination. Always chasing the idea of the disgruntled medical student. The cliched psychotic doctor.” Grace rose to her feet and approached him with the scalpel outstretched. “I know you’ve always liked me. That’s okay, it’s good actually. It makes all that blood pumping through your heart special. Maybe it’s even what’s been missing from my work. If you can help me get this piece right, maybe they will understand what you already know.” She made her first cut across his chest with the speed and confidence of a painter guiding their brush across a canvas. “I’m an art major.”