Follow The White Rabbit
Ivy On The Trail: Episode Two
Ivy On The Trail is a supernatural adventure novella, serialized in ten projected parts. This is Episode Two.
Click HERE to start at Episode One, or click HERE to head back to the Navigation Page.
Previously, Ivy arrived at camp and got settled in while things were still quiet…for now.
In this episode, the counselors show up for orientation, and a ghost story is told.
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Ivy slept fitfully that first night, simply too excited to relax.
Around her, the little old house on The Row stretched its elbows and knees in the cooling summer dark, a snap and thunk like bones and joints. Ivy lay awake for a long time after Bailey had slipped off to sleep in the upper bunk. The night noises, no less familiar than the ones she heard every evening outside her own bedroom window, felt closer here: a benevolent surrounding of frog-songs and rustling passage of prey-animals through the brush.
Before saying goodnight, Maia had given the girls their marching orders. They were to report to the groundskeeper at the cabins by eight-thirty in the morning to help with last-minute cleaning before the counselors arrived for lunch to kick off orientation. Ivy always griped about doing her chores at home, but something about being entrusted to clean the camp, to prepare it for campers, felt different. It felt important.
In the dark, staring up at the underside of Bailey’s bunk, Ivy’s mind flitted from thought to thought until she landed on the rabbit, stumbling away into the woods after she had freed it from the wire. The way it screamed, and the way it calmed under her touch. Normally she felt she had an affinity with animals, but something about the way the rabbit had looked at her chilled her.
It had calmed because it wanted to, not because of anything she had done.
Caroline up at the General Store always told Ivy that Ferris Island was alive in a way that other islands in Puget Sound chose not to be, that it was awake and aware and needed to be respected, or it would lash out in unexpected ways. Caroline knew that firsthand; she had made it her life’s mission to learn about the island’s hidden corners and help other people who live on it understand it, too.
Ivy wished she could ask Caroline what she would make of the situation with the rabbit. Was there something else Ivy could have done? Something else she should have done?
It doesn’t matter. Just stop thinking about it.
She tried to put it out of her mind. She tried to think about something else. She thought about Jake, but found herself tangled up in the look in his eyes when he was daydreaming, the feel of his knee beside hers when they sat next to each other on the bus, the soft smile he gave her sometimes when he thought she wasn’t looking…
Ugh. Nope. Stop.
Round and round her thoughts went for hours, fluttering but never landing, until she was fatigued enough to slide backward into sleep.
She woke only once more that night, sometime before dawn, when the sound of shuffling footsteps outside skirted the house. Heavy-footed and purposeful, the footsteps parted the bushes and paused just short of the window.
Groggy and unsure, still wrapped in the lingering fragrance of a dream, Ivy lifted her head and craned her neck to look across the room and out of the window, but the darkness beyond the curtains was absolute.
She waited.
Then, the steps continued on under the window and away.
Probably a deer, she thought, and eased herself back onto the pillow. She fell back to sleep, wondering idly why the cadence of the footsteps had sounded odd, arrhythmic.
Like a limp.
*******
The next morning dawned perfect as blue porcelain: soft, warm, glinting with possibility.
Ivy and Bailey got up, dressed, ate a quick breakfast of whatever they could find in Maia’s kitchen—all the cereal in the cupboard had bran in it, much to their disgust and dismay—and tumbled out of the little house down the hill to the cabins.
The camp’s groundskeeper was a wiry old man called Mr. Grant. He had the kind of face that’s accustomed to spending all day outdoors, squinting in the maritime’s low diffused sunlight to the point that it’s frozen in place, eyes narrowed in a permanent skeptical glare.
He turned this glare on the girls as they approached the work truck parked on the lawn in the middle of the rough square of girls’ cabins. A handful of other people were already there, temporary grounds staff for the summer, along with one or two temp rangers from the State Park pitching in to help. The buzzing of activity was infectious, the air alive with the sound of lawnmowers and leafblowers, the hum of vacuums seeping out of the propped-open cabin doors.
“Hi, Mr. Grant,” Ivy said, as they got closer to the truck.
He nodded curtly. “You pitchin’ in?”
Bailey stifled a yawn. “Where do you want us?”
The old man cleared his throat, glanced up at the sky like he was looking for inspiration, then unfolded his arms. A hay-like waft of stale cut-grass smell rose from his shirt. He turned to reach into the back of the truck’s pickup bed. He rummaged, grunted, then pulled out what he was fishing for: two big black garbage bags and two trash pickers.
He handed each girl a bag and a picker.
“Be thorough,” he said, and that was all before he walked off to check on a staff member struggling to start up the weed whacker.
Bailey turned to Ivy, held up her garbage bag. “Seriously?”
Ivy shrugged. “Hey, someone has to do it, right?”
She was disappointed, too, but wasn’t going to show it.
Bailey rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I guess. Where do you want to start?”
“Let’s separate,” Ivy replied. “We’ll make a circle around the cabins and meet back up in the middle, then we’ll head across to the boys’ side. What do you think?”
“Sounds like a plan, boss,” Bailey said. And even though she was kidding, Ivy felt a little shiver of joy.
I can make plans. Sure, it’s a plan to pick up trash, but still…it’s a plan!
The girls got started, walking away from each other in a circle around the cabins. Ivy wondered initially how there could possibly be that much litter to clean up. After all, the cabins had sat unused for months. But it soon became clear that the combination of off-season guests and day-campers had left a motley assortment of candy wrappers, Q-Tips, used tissues, old soda cans, and other refuse behind.
Despite a bit of impatience at the start, Ivy soon lost herself in the task. It was strangely meditative. Soon enough she and Bailey reunited at the opposite end of the square of cabins, compared trash hauls, and then walked over to the boys’ side.
Neither Ivy nor Bailey had been over to this side of the road, before. They had heard stories about campers playing pranks on each other, girls against boys, but neither of the girls had ever been invited to participate in those shenanigans.
This side was laid out similarly to its counterpart, the four cabins arranged in a rough square with a central lawn in the middle. But here, unlike the girls’ side, one of the cabins—Cabin Three—was pushed into the square a bit to accommodate the edge of a large grove of trees bulging out from the woods. It threw off the symmetry ever so slightly, made the open space feel awkward.
There were no other workers on this side. Judging by how clipped the lawn looked, most of the work had already been done. But Ivy and Bailey started in with the same plan on this side, separating to walk around the square, picking up litter from around the cabin porches and landscaped edges.
In her slow stroll, Ivy soon found herself at the edge of the grove of trees behind Cabin Three, picking up a little nest of old faded aluminum soda cans.
The back of her scalp tingled, traveled part of the way down her spine.
She threw a can into the garbage bag and stood, facing the grove of trees. It was just a small corner of the larger woods, nothing extraordinary. But as she stared into it, she realized she could see something through the branches, a straight-sided shape…a building?
She stole a quick glance over her shoulder—Bailey was too far across the grounds to call to—and decided to push into the woods, not too far, just to take a look.
It was only a stone’s throw into the thick trees, a straight line through thick salal, and it didn’t take long for Ivy to find herself standing beside another cabin.
The building was identical in size and shape and style to the others out in the square, but clearly had not been used in a long, long time. So long, in fact, that the woods had been allowed to reclaim it; the windows were cracked thanks to stress from the shifting ground beneath, the exterior walls were speckled with mildew and peeled paint, and the roof was encrusted with moss and opportunistic ferns reaching for the light.
Ivy rounded to the front of the mouldering building and walked up to the door, the front porch creaking under her feet. The door was locked tight with a heavy padlock to keep curious campers out. The old sign over the doorpost said CABIN THREE.
Puzzled, Ivy tried to peek through the front window rimed with spiderwebs, but it was too dark inside to see anything, as if the cabin sat hovering over a floorless void.
The porch shifted dangerously under her feet and Ivy backed away, then startled with a whimper as a rabbit—bright and eerie white against the decrepit building—flashed like a slice of bright fire around the corner of the cabin, paused to look at Ivy, nose twitching, and then squirmed its way through a hole beneath the porch and vanished under the house.
Thoroughly spooked, though she could hardly think why, Ivy turned on her heel and ran back through the grove, not daring to breathe until she reached the light. As soon as she stepped out of the trees she bumped hard into Bailey, the two of them lurching, trash bags flying.
“Geez!” Bailey’s eyes were wide as she scrambled to pick up the trash that spilled out of her bag. “Where the heck did you go? I turned around and you were gone!”
Ivy looked over her shoulder at the grove. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just…did you know there’s another cabin in there?”
True to form, Bailey was not satisfied without seeing it for herself. So Ivy led the way back into the trees, ears keen to listen for any movement as they neared the old building. It was a little less spooky with someone standing beside her, but the cabin sat squatting in the woods like an old creature, some bruised god of resentment and neglect.
Ivy pointed to the sign over the door. “See? Cabin Three.”
Bailey nodded, and a dawning of understanding spread across her face. “Yeah. See? That’s why the cabin out there is in a weird spot. This was the original Cabin Three, and for some reason they stopped using it and built a new one.”
Ivy frowned. “Why would they leave it here? Why wouldn’t they tear it down?”
Bailey shrugged. “I dunno, I’m just telling you that’s what makes the most sense. Because this is where the fourth corner of the square would be.”
She drew a square in the air with her fingers. “Get it?”
Ivy sighed. “Yeah, Bails. I know what a square is.”
Bailey rolled her eyes and they both laughed.
Truthfully, it still didn’t make much sense to Ivy—why leave the old cabin to rot away in the woods, instead of getting rid of it when the new one was built? But at least Bailey’s theory explained why there would be two cabins marked as Three.
“Come on,” Bailey said, raising her trash picker and brandishing it like a weapon ready for duel. “We should finish up. The counselors will get here soon and I don’t want to spend all day spearing garbage.”
*******
After finishing their work and getting the thumbs-up from Mr. Grant, Ivy and Bailey had taken refuge from the sun under the shade of the main building’s awning when a car pulled into the parking lot. The two people who climbed out—a man and a woman, both in their early twenties—looked vaguely familiar to Ivy; she recognized them as having worked here before, when she was a camper.
They approached the building with the ease of old-timers, smiled at Ivy and Bailey.
“Hey,” said the guy. “You counselors, too?”
Ivy shook her head. “No, we’re staff in training.”
“Too young to counsel,” Bailey added, shrugging, snapping her gum.
The girl laughed. “I’m Sabrina,” she said. “This is Turtle.”
Ivy was briefly confused, and then remembered: the counselors used camp names, nicknames they picked based on their hobbies or an inside joke or something. It was supposed to be a fun way for them to lose themselves in the camp experience, play a role. It was going to take some getting used to, calling a grown man “Turtle.”
“I’m Ivy,” she said.
“Bailey,” said Bailey.
“Colfax’s little sister, right?” Turtle said. “So spooky, you look just like her.”
Bailey shrugged again. “She’s inside, if you guys want to go check in or something.”
“Good idea. See you around!” Sabrina said, as the two of them entered the main building, a cold breath of A/C seeping out before the door closed. Ivy noticed that the two of them held hands as they entered the building. Her heart squeezed for no reason she could name.
“You look just like her. So spooky!” Bailey murmured, pulling a pinched face and making her voice sound nasal and strained, mocking. “I hate it when people do that.”
“It’s a compliment,” Ivy said.
“No, it’s not,” Bailey said. “It’s a thing people say when they don’t know what else to say. Because Maia is…I mean, she’s Maia. Perfect Maia. And I’m not.”
“I don’t think anyone wants you to be her or anything,” Ivy said, but she could quickly feel herself slipping out of her depth. She didn’t have any siblings and had never had to deal with the feeling of following in someone else’s footsteps.
Bailey shrugged again—Ivy suspected it was becoming a habit, the shrugging—just as a short caravan of three cars pulled into the parking lot all at once, windows rolled down, whooping to one another. More counselors.
In stark contrast to the two who had emerged from their car in serene familiarity, these new arrivals tumbled out of their cars like dogs pulling up to the beach. They all seemed to be around twenty, two guys and two girls—the pair of girls having ridden together in the same car—and they all hugged and chattered loudly as they approached the building. They barely paid any attention to Ivy and Bailey, although one of the guys reached out for a friendly fist bump from each of them as he passed by.
With that, Ivy and Bailey followed the group into the main building where lunch was about to be served in the meeting hall.
Ivy didn’t think of herself as a shy person, but suddenly sitting at a family-style table with a group of enthusiastic young adults tied her tongue. She simply listened as they swapped life updates, since some of them hadn’t seen each other since the previous summer. They asked Maia about how it felt to be Camp Director and told funny stories about her time as a counselor, pranks they pulled on each other. The camp names sped past her, dizzying: French, Peppa, Buck, Turtle, Circus, Sabrina…she wasn’t sure she would be able to keep track of them all.
The last two counselors trickled in a bit late. The final guy took a seat at the end of the table, next to Maia. The other one, a girl about eighteen, came and sat in the empty space next to Ivy, her cheeks flushed from hurry.
“I hate being late,” she said, settling herself on the bench seat, addressing the table. “I’m so sorry, everyone.”
She fixed her long hair up into a ponytail, sighed, and then smiled at Ivy.
“I’m Willow,” she said.
“Ivy,” said Ivy.
“Another plant name! I think that means we need to be friends.” Willow reached for the salad bowl. “It’s my first time here. What about you?”
“Oh, um…I’ve been a camper here before,” Ivy said. “But this is my first time on staff. Me and Bailey are staff in training.”
“Since you’ve been a camper here you know more than I do,” Willow said. She had an unusual accent, a clipped way of speaking. Ivy couldn’t quite place it, especially with the din of the other conversations happening around the table. “I may have to pick your brain for help sometimes. Is that okay?”
Ivy dipped her head. She figured Willow was just being nice, but she said, “Sure. What made you decide to work here this summer, if you’ve never been a camper before?”
“It seemed like a perfect fit,” Willow said. “I love nature, and I love working with kids, so I figured, why not? There are far worse ways to spend a summer, right?”
Ivy nodded. She could only agree.
Maia stood suddenly at the head of the table. Ivy had never seen her so relaxed and casual, smiling so easily; this role seemed to suit her down to the ground.
“Okay, everyone,” she said, “now that we’re all here…I want to welcome you to Fort Ferris Summer Camp 2025!”
Applause and hollering from the counselors. One of the guys pounded the table.
“For those who don’t know me, yet: I’m Colfax,” Maia said. “This is my first year as Camp Director, and I’m so jazzed to spend the next few weeks with you.
“Some of you already know the drill, but after lunch we’ll jump right into orientation. We’ve got some forms to sign this afternoon, some training to do, all the usual regulation stuff. Tomorrow we’ll get outside and make sure everyone is on the same page about the activities and games and safety procedures, and you’ll get your cabin assignments so you can start decorating your space ahead of Sunday afternoon when the kids get here.”
Willow clearly liked this idea; she shifted beside Ivy and folded her hands under her chin, beaming up at Maia.
“But before we jump into the fun, I just want to remind everyone why we’re here.” Maia paused for a moment, and even though she was still smiling, a depth of meaning flickered across her face, through her dark eyes. “Some of the kids coming to see us this summer are Ferris Island residents, and to them the beauty of this place is normal and mundane. But some of the kids on their way to see us come from other places. They might live in the city, or in a suburb. This might be their one time every summer when they get to play in the woods, meet new friends, and just be a kid. And every kid deserves that opportunity. And we’re here to make that happen.
“So let’s make sure we give them—all of them, every single camper—the best damn summer ever.”
The excitement boiled over into a new round of cheers and table-pounding. Turtle raised his cup like a toast and the rest of the counselors followed suit, plastic cups tapping, punctuating the cheers.
Inspired by the thrill of it all, Ivy raised her cup, too, and Bailey tapped it with hers, and Willow laughed beside her, a musical sound.
Yes! Yes! To the best damn summer ever!
*******
The afternoon was a blur of training, permission forms, and icebreaker activities. But after dinner, after the dark drew in, the counselors gathered for a fire at the firepit—a stone circle surrounded with logs for sitting on, a short distance from the cabins—and invited Ivy and Bailey to tag along.
Maia left them to it, wisely deducing that the group needed time to bond without their boss hanging around. She left Turtle and Sabrina in charge of putting out the fire and gave Ivy and Bailey the stern curfew of eleven.
After the makings for s’mores had been passed around, along with a bottle of soda and cups that someone had already snagged from the kitchen, it was Buck who pointed at Ivy and Bailey across the flickering circle of firelight and said, “Hey, since this is your first time as staff, you two haven’t heard the Woodmother story yet!”
The girl named Peppa said, “Ooooo!”
Willow, sitting with Ivy and Bailey, frowned. “The Woodmother? What’s that?”
Ivy laughed to cover a nervous groan. “It’s a story the counselors tell the kids to keep them from wandering off alone. Don’t let the Woodmother catch you! That kind of thing.”
“We’ve heard it,” Bailey said, mock-yawning. “Every camper’s heard it.”
Buck shook his head. “Not the real story. You’ve only heard the version we dumb down for the little kids to give ‘em a spook. If you’re staff, you need to hear the real story. It’s like, a requirement.”
He stole a surreptitious glance at Turtle, as if looking for affirmation, but the eldest counselor was just staring at the marshmallow that he was slowly, carefully toasting on a stick.
Bailey shrugged. “We don’t scare easy. Tell us if you want.”
Another guy called French—who seemed to be Buck’s best friend—barked out a laugh at this. Peppa said, “Ooooooo!” again.
“Sabrina,” Buck said. “You should tell it. You tell it best.”
Sabrina was sitting next to Turtle, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Don’t drag me into this. This is your hazing thing.”
“Please? You tell it so good. If I tell it you’re just going to spend the whole time correcting me, anyway.”
“Fine, fine.” Sabrina groaned, but sat up and set her cup on the ground so she could fold her hands in her lap, adopting a storyteller’s posture. The light from the fire shivered along the lines of her face, cast fierce shadows under her eyes. Behind her was a curtain of black, the woods surrounding the firepit standing tall like a solemn audience.
“Okay,” she began. “It was the 1870s, and Ferris Island was still pretty young. This whole State Park was just deep, dark woods, and there were only a few houses here and there, tucked into the trees. People would walk through here so they could get to the beach and catch fish and gather clams and oysters, but the only people who lived here in the woods were the ones who didn’t want to be found. And She was one of those people.”
The word “she” sent a shiver of goosebumps along Ivy’s skin, embossed pinpricks under her hoodie sleeves. Ivy glanced over at Bailey, but her face was unreadable.
Sabrina continued, “No one remembers her name. Not anymore. But she lived in these woods in a little hovel, far away from anyone else, and she raised rabbits for meat and fur. Her whole property was crawling with them, and the woods around her property were, too, because the ones who escaped from her yard would breed and multiply.
“The one thing she wanted was the one thing she couldn’t have: her own children. She wanted a family. And she was crazed with bitterness that she couldn’t have one. So when the people traveled back and forth through the woods to the beach, she would hide in the trees and try to lure the kids off the path, back to her home. She would carry one of her rabbits under her arm as bait and try to get the kids to follow her to see the rest. But she never succeeded in holding them for long. They would get wise and run away from her, or they would be retrieved by their families before they got too far, and she got more and more angry.”
Above them, a cackling sound. Ivy jumped.
“Just an owl,” Willow whispered, kindly. And while Ivy was grateful, she felt her cheeks flush in shame. It was hard to feel brave when normal night-sounds were enough to spook her.
Sabrina kept going. “One day, she did succeed. She managed to steal a little girl off the path and bring her back to her home. The little girl’s family was beside themselves with worry, and when they realized that the rabbit-farmer had stolen their child, they gathered a posse and laid siege to her house. They managed to retrieve the little girl, safe and sound, but in the anger and chaos they killed the woman and buried her in a shallow grave on her property. The townsfolk took some of the rabbits for themselves and the rest they left to the woods and the coyotes.
“That was in 1875. Then, exactly one hundred years later, after the State Park had been operational on this property for a good while, they decided to build a camp here in 1975. When they bulldozed a patch of the woods to start building they found the largest underground warren of rabbits anyone had ever seen. And they say, at its heart, was the skeleton of a woman. And that’s when the disappearances started.”
There was a gleam in Sabrina’s eye. Even Buck had gone quiet.
Ivy didn’t dare to breathe.
“It started with four kids, that first summer in 1975,” Sabrina explained. “Vanished into the trees, never to be seen again. But it seemed like every year a camper would go missing. A coincidence, right? Could be, for sure. Or…it could be the disturbed ghost of the Woodmother, surrounded by her rabbits, trying from beyond the grave to create the family of children she never had. Even if she has to steal them.”
The words died away on the air, rising to the stars with the smoke from the campfire.
Ivy shivered.
Buck suddenly clapped and everyone startled. “Awesome!” he said.
Sabrina dipped her head, a humble bow. “Putting my Theater degree to good use.”
“That’s not true, is it?” Bailey said. Over the course of the story she had gotten more and more fidgety, and now she was sitting with her arms folded, eyes steely. “Some of that wasn’t true. There hasn’t been a disappearance from the State Park in years.”
Sabrina shrugged. “Yeah, I took some creative license. It’s not a good ghost story if you don’t exaggerate a little. But the woman in the woods trying to steal kids and getting murdered? That’s real. You can look that up. That’s island history.”
Ivy felt a bit nauseous from the fire’s heat on her front, the cold night air on her back, and the way her soda had gone tinny and fizzless in the plastic cup.
The Woodmother story was infamous at camp; it was a rite of passage when your counselor felt you were old enough and brave enough to hear it. But the “camper-safe” version had nothing to do with a real woman stealing real children and getting murdered for it. Instead, it was just a simple folktale, a ghost story with no roots, something to keep kids from wandering off. Don’t go anywhere alone, or the Woodmother will get you! And the counselor would let out this long, low whistling sound that was supposedly the sound she made when she was hunting for children.
The counselors would then spend the rest of the week taking turns, scaring the living daylights out of the kids by hiding in the trees and letting out that long, low whistle at random, inspiring shrieks of terror and not a few nightmares. Just good, clean camp fun.
But this story was not fun. It was bloody, and it was real. The scream of the rabbit trapped in the wire came back to her again, only it was a chorus of rabbits raised for meat, groaning in terror and pain, burrowing a home around the rotting skeleton of their former keeper—
“I’m going to bed,” Ivy said, standing up.
“Me too. That story was lame.” Bailey stood up and glared at Buck. “I told you that we don’t scare easy.”
Buck held up his hands in good-humored surrender.
Ivy and Bailey said goodnight and left the circle, clicking on their flashlights and walking back up the road to The Row.
“You okay?” Bailey asked, when they were out of earshot. “That story didn’t scare you, did it? It’s not true, Ives. They’re just trying to freak us out.”
Ivy nodded. “I know, you’re right. I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
In the dark, all the sounds distorted and the shadows stretched. The white rabbit darted through her memory, disappearing into the dark space under the old cabin, a bottomless grave. Shapes stretched their bony limbs out at the two girls from either side of the road, just out of reach of the bright beams of their flashlights, but Bailey didn’t seem to notice.
Even though she kept her flashlight level and walked steadily beside Bailey, playacting courage, Ivy’s heart didn’t resume a normal pace until the cheery lights in the windows of The Row winked into view, a sentinel glow on the watchful hill.
Thank you for reading! 🐇
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I'm reading this from the air-conditioned indoors of the Midwest in daylight and I'm still unnerved. This is awesome.
Also, on a different note, I wonder if the Woodmother is related to Sayblood? Hm.
This is a good read!