Camp Pleasant by Richard Matheson Read Free Book Online

characters ranging from Miss Mousy (who, it is noted, spurned his marital advances) and so on up all the way to The Rat That Sat on a Big Black Rock.
    There was another song too but I didn’t like that one. It started:
    One night I heard an awful noise
I looked up on the wall
The bedbugs and the cockroaches
Was havin’ a game o’ ball
.
    It was a song Tony had picked up at the mental institution; a song that was based upon actuality. That song gave me a hideous feeling. For there is something infinitely more terrible about a child being lost than an adult; and that song kept reminding me that, unless someone intervened, Tony might well be lost.
    I was only going to be with him for two months and what were two months in a lifetime? All the harm that had been done before he came to Camp Pleasant I couldn’t hope to undo in such a short time. All the things that had scarred and stained his mind could only be cleared away by a long-range miracle. Sometimes I visualized his probable future and it didn’t make me smile or want to smile.
    Little Tony. Needing someone so desperately, yet never finding that someone. Always with that unconscious look of hungry yearning on his face—yearning for a hope that kept moving ahead of him, flitting like a cruel shadow, always mocking, always unattainable.
5.
    We sat in a small clearing in the woods, a thin wisp of fire smoke climbing toward the sky like a gray snake elevating to a fakir’s fluting. Merv, the boys and I sat absorbed in beans and frankfurters which had been burned to a turn by Chef Wickerly.
    “On the surface I agree with you,” Merv was telling me. “To come back here and be exposed year after year to Ed Nolan
is
idiocy. However, as I told you, I do like the camp, always have. I like my position in it. I’m not responsible for anything but hikes and I like hiking.
    “Of course,” he admitted, “if it gets much worse, even
I
won’t be able to stand it any more. It’s a pity, really. Pleasant is a fine camp; its personnel isn’t so bad; but that gluttonous fascist louses up the whole deal.”
    “What do you know about Nolan’s wife?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake.
    “A very strange young woman,” he said, chewing reflectively. “I’ve been here five years and I still don’t know her. Not that I’ve had much contact with her of course. The first year or so I spoke to her. We talked about music, books, plays, all sorts of things. Things which she’s starved for as the wife of we know who.”
    I nodded.
    “Naturally, as soon as said Ed grew aware of the talks, he squelched them.” Merv tossed the paper plate of beans onto the fire. “She was quite pleasant too,” he said.
    “I know.”
    We were silent a moment, then I asked him if he knew how old she was.
    “Let’s see, I think she told me. Oh….” He tapped his teeth with one long nail. “I think she’s about twenty-six.”
    “She doesn’t look it.”
    “Hadn’t noticed,” said Merv.
    “Is there anything wrong with her?”
    “Just a massive neurotic depression bordering on psychosis,” Merv said, casually. “Who can blame her, married to that pig?”
    “Why in hell did she marry him then?” I heard myself asking in more than normal irritation.
    “The details aren’t important,” Merv said. “The basic reason seems obvious enough, however. She couldn’t do any better.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “She’s a lovely girl.”
    Merv looked at me with quick curiosity which was, just as quickly, repressed.
    “Well,” was all he said, “she’s still married to him.”
    “Yes, she is,” I said.
    “What about you?” Merv changed the subject. “What brings you here?”
    “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I suppose I came for lack of anything better to do. Bob’s been after me for years to try it.”
    “You knew him in college, didn’t you?” Merv asked.
    “That’s right,” I said. “We’ve seen each other off and on since we