Stella, a pretty young brunette, looked around at the other university students surrounding the campfire with her that night and asked, “So, does anybody know any good ghost stories?”

Cory, a blond, clean-shaven young man in a T-shirt and jean shorts, said, “Well, I once heard a claim some of the people living near here insist is true.”

“And what claim is that?” she asked.

“That a witch lives in the woods surrounding this camp,” he said.

Everyone other than him let out a big “Ooh!”

One of them said, imitating Burt Ward, “Holy Blair Witch Project, Batman!”

The others laughed.

“Allegedly, a witch has haunted these woods for many decades,” he went on. “She pulls her victims into a deathtrap slowly, insidiously, the victims being people who have come here for camping.”

His listeners let out another “Ooh!”

“If this story is true,” Stella asked, “then why hasn’t anybody heard any reports of missing persons leading to this camp, with police investigating? If people have spoken about a witch here, why haven’t any of us, or anyone else, for all we know, heard about it?”

“Because,” he said, “the witch uses her magic to throw off the scent anyone trying to find the missing people, so no one suspects that there’s any evil in these woods. Police and anyone else investigating are led to believe the victims went missing somewhere else, and only the locals here know about the witch.”

“Oh, what a cheap cop-out!” one of the listeners said, amid a chorus of boos and groans from the others. 

“I suppose so, but that’s the story I heard,” Cory went on. “Anyway, they say that the witch gets you, actually, right when you hear a story about another group going missing here. The listeners get sucked right up into the story and join its victims in the same fate.”

The listeners let out a third “Ooh!”

“If that’s so,” Stella asked, “then how did you come to know this story about a group of the witch’s victims?”

“How do you know I’m about to tell such a story?” Cory asked.

“I just assumed you were about to,” she said.

“Look, I just told you a fact that the locals here believe in,” he said. “I wasn’t about to tell an actual ghost story. Anyway, do you all remember the Daltons? That family, all of them blonds, remember? They went on vacation in Europe three years ago.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember them,” Manny said, a man with short black hair. All the other listeners nodded, having remembered the Dalton family. “What happened to them? I haven’t heard from them since they left.”

“Well,” Cory began, “they were going in their car on the way to the airport, and their car broke down on the highway not too far from here.”

“Not too far from here?” Manny said with a sneer.

“Well, yeah,” Cory said. “As you’ll recall, we’re all not too far from here, in our hometown just a mile or so from this forest, as the Daltons were, and as the airport is, too, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to you.”

“Very well,” Stella said. “Go on.”

“Anyway, they tried calling someone for help, but they must have had a bad connection, so they eventually gave up trying. Looking around there on the side of the road, Mr. Dalton found the trees and the scenery really beautiful, really charming, and since the family had packed tents and stuff like that, and it was getting late, he thought they could pitch their tents for the night and try to get help the next morning.”

“Why?” Manny asked, sneering again in disbelief. “They’d have missed their flight by then, wouldn’t they have?”

“Wasn’t anybody else driving up that road at the time, someone who could have helped them?” Stella asked. “Surely there was somebody driving around there.”

“Apparently, next to nobody else was driving around at the time, or else they would have simply gotten the help, gone to the airport on time, flown off to Europe, and come back to tell us all what happened to them.”

“Why aren’t they back home?” Manny asked. “Since they’d disappeared, how do you know what happened to them?”

“I met someone recently who found out, and she told me the whole story,” Cory said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get back to who she was later. Anyway, the Daltons felt really enamoured of the beauty of the place, so they went in among the trees, pitched their tents, and went to sleep.”

“And what happened the next morning?” Stella asked.

“Oh, we haven’t finished with what happened that night,” he said.

“We all know,” she said with a sneer of her own. “The witch got them, right?”

Everyone laughed, even Cory.

“Yeah, and the witch is gonna get us, too, for hearing this story here,” Manny said. “Ooh!”

Everyone, including Cory, laughed even louder.

“C’mon, no,” he said with continued laughing. “This isn’t that kind of story, really. This is a normal one, nothing supernatural, but still interesting—just what really happened to them, according to what this woman told me a little while back.”

“I’m guessing they made it to Europe, found they liked it there, and decided to stay there,” she said.

“And they were such jerks, they never said goodbye to any of their neighbours in town,” Manny said.

More laughs.

“Well, anyway, let me carry on with what happened that night,” Cory said. “They were all lying there in their tents—Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, and their three kids, two boys and a girl around their pre-teen years—just dozing off, and the grating, rasping noise of some bird just outside was heard, rousing all five of them.”

“Oh, how annoying,” Anna, a woman with long, wavy red hair, said.

“Yeah,” Cory went on. “Mr. Dalton was really angry. All of the family got out of their tents to see what was making the noise. It was pitch black out, but they got out their flashlights, and Mr. Dalton had a baseball bat to swat at the bird with.”

“Silly thing to do,” Trevor, a man with long, dark brown hair, said.

“Oww!” Stella grunted. Everybody looked at her. “Some horsefly or something bit me.”

“Will you be OK?” Anna asked.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Stella said. “Carry one with your story, Cory.”

“Anyway, yeah, sure, Mr. Dalton was being silly, but he was mad, and angry people do foolish things, don’t they? The family pointed their flashlights at the animal to get a decent look at it, which was hard, since it was flying about and dodging the light. Mr. Dalton was swinging his bat in a fury. What they did see of the bird, though, was that it was one they couldn’t recognize as being one they, or anyone else, had ever seen before.”

“What did it look like?” Anna asked. 

Stella looked over at her and saw blonde hair in the flickering light of the campfire. Her eyes widened. Isn’t she a redhead? she asked herself.

“Oww!” Anna groaned. “That horsefly just got me.” Like Stella, she was rubbing the bite mark. The other listeners looked around, but couldn’t see any insect.

“The bird was brightly feathered, a bit like a toucan,” Cory went on. “A lot of blue, purple, and yellow feathers. It had a long, sharp beak. It flew around really fast, darting here and there, back and forth, up and down. Mr. Dalton was getting really frustrated, and his family was telling him to stop swinging the bat, because of course what he was doing was pointless. Still, he wouldn’t stop trying to hit the bird; he was getting obsessive about it, like a madman.”

“Wow, you seem to know this story in the most minute detail,” Trevor said. Anna looked over at him and saw short blond hair on him. 

Surprised, she thought, Blond now? When did he get a haircut?

“Yeah, I really know a lot of detail,” Cory said with a chuckle. “The woman who told me the story remembered all the details so well, and I found the story so compelling that I managed to remember all of them. Anyway, at one point, after Mr. Dalton had been swinging that bat for a while, I guess the bird got tired of dodging it, and it swooped down and pecked him hard on the head. He groaned in pain, dropped the bat, and fell on the ground. His wife and kids went over to see if he was OK. He had blood coming out of his head. Mrs. Dalton put a flashlight to it to see it better, and she saw a mix of red and green pouring out of the wound.”

Now his listeners gave an “Ooh” that was serious. Stella and Anna also noticed something strange about Cory: no longer in a T-shirt and jean shorts, he was now wearing a dark brown robe, like that of a monk. The women shook their heads and looked again: yes, a robe was on him.

He continued: “As the family was looking with alarm at the red and green liquid, assuming the bird put the green there, it swooped down and pecked the wife and kids on the head, too, in one fell swoop. They all screamed in pain and fell to the ground beside Mr. Dalton.”

“I’m guessing they all had a mix of blood and green coming out of their heads, too,” Manny said. Stella looked at him and saw blond hair; her eyes and mouth widened at the sight.

“Yeah, presumably,” Cory said, “because I’ll tell you another thing: all of the family started to feel woozy. It was as if that green stuff was a drug injected into their bloodstreams, for the five of them were now getting up and staggering about, bumping into each other and into trees. They’d dropped all their flashlights, and they were wandering into the forest aimlessly.”

“Oww!” Manny said, then rubbed his neck.

“That horsefly seems to be getting us all,” Trevor said. “Oww! I got that right.”

Everyone except Cory looked around to try to find the ‘horsefly,’ but instead they saw a little glowing ball of changing colours—yellow, blue, and purple. 

“Strange colours for a firefly,”Manny said. “Is that what bit us?”

“I don’t see anything,” Cory said, looking away and frowning in annoyance at all these interruptions. “Shall I continue with my story? You don’t want to miss the ending.”

“Sure, of course,” Trevor said in a slurred voice. “Carry on.”

“As I was saying,” Cory said, “the Daltons were stumbling about in the dark, bumping into each other and into trees, falling down, getting back up, and stumbling about further into the forest.”

“Am I high?” Stella asked, looking about and seeing a blur.

“I feel stoned, too,” Manny slurred.

“My head is swimming,” Anna said.

All three of them, as well as Trevor, looked at Cory, who not only looked even more annoyed at their continued interrupting of his story, but who also had brown hair and a mustache and goatee connected in a circle around his mouth. Everything was getting blurrier and blurrier for them after that moment. The flames of the campfire were moving like ocean waves.

The four bitten listeners looked around at each other, straining to see detail. Instead of seeing, apart from Cory, the original people they’d come to camp with, they saw what seemed to be a blond family: a father, a mother, and three pre-teen kids—two boys, and a girl. Yes, one campfire member, a bald man, had been there but said nothing the whole time…or had he been there? Were the four hallucinating him before? None of them could remember for sure. In any case, he, if he’d been there originally, was one of this new family now…or a family member just appeared out of thin air.

“I’ll continue,” Cory said after a sigh of annoyance. “The Daltons continued blundering their way through the woods until they came close to a cliff.”

Stella looked up to her right and saw what looked like two black holes in the sky, just above the forest trees behind the campers’ tents. The holes seemed vaguely like eyes. 

“The Daltons all looked out of a clearing in the woods, past the cliff and out into the night sky,” Cory went on. “They looked out at the glowing stars. They were all mesmerized by the glow, staring stupidly at it.”

His listeners could hear the raspy squawking of some bird flying in circles over their heads. They felt compelled to stand up, watching the brightly coloured bird. It started flying away from the campfire, and they all followed it mindlessly.

“All right,” Cory said with a scowl. “I guess I’ll just have to get up and go along with all of you, if this is the only way I’ll be able to finish telling this story.” He got up and walked behind them.

As they were walking, following the bird and heading towards the trees behind their tents, Stella looked up and noticed those eye-like black holes following them, too, hovering up high in the air, darker than the shadows all around them.

She and the other listeners also looked at each other at one point, finding each other’s inexplicable change of appearance the oddest of blond. There was something vaguely familiar about how all five of them looked, but they at first couldn’t put their fingers on it.

They had come into the woods by now, going up a hill. They could hear Cory behind them, continuing to tell his story.

“Anyway,” he said, “as the family continued staring up at the stars in their state of rapt hypnotism, they began to see, in the blackness between the stars, what looked like the eyes, nostrils, and mouth of a face. These were all just holes, though each a distinct, darker black than that of the night sky.”

Stella looked down at herself and saw what she was wearing. What? she thought. I wasn’t wearing this! How and when did I change my clothes? Then she looked out at the blond others. The ‘father’ of the group…she remembered his face from somewhere. Is that Mr. Dalton? No, it couldn’t be!

That bird could still be heard making that grating call from up above them, obscured among the leaves in the trees. None of them could see its blue, yellow, and purple feathers at all.

“The face in the night sky began to talk to the Daltons,” Cory said from behind the group. He could have stopped talking, though, for his would-be listeners were too disoriented from the bites they’d gotten to be paying attention. They just kept walking up the incline in the woods, following the squawking of the hiding bird. He continued his story, all the same, though: “The face said, in the scratchy voice of an old crone, ‘You are mine. Come into my mouth.’”

Stella, feeling as if she were on a bad drug trip, got a mirror out of her purse as well as a flashlight. She turned it on with a shaky hand, and with her other shaky hand, she put the mirror up to her face. 

She didn’t see herself.

She saw Mrs. Dalton.

She looked to her right and saw Mr. Dalton.

The would-be listeners stopped walking, for they’d come to a clearing in the forest, and a cliff looking down to a lake. They weren’t interested in it, though: they looked instead up at the starry sky.

Stella was the first to notice those black hole eyes among the stars. A mouth-like hole was beginning to form below the eyes, as she could make out with her own eyes squinted. She looked around at all the others: all Daltons, the father, herself as the mother, and the two sons and daughter instead of her adult friends.

Cory, in his dark robe and looking more like a sorcerer’s apprentice than a monk, concluded his story with these words: “And so, the Daltons fell, not off the cliff and into the lake below, but into the mouth in the sky, which flew right at them and ate them up.”

“And that’s the end of the story?” Stella asked him in a trembling, slurred voice. 

She looked back at him and saw him nodding with a malevolent smirk. 

“And who is the woman who told you this story?” she asked.

“She is my master,” he said. “Look in front of you, if you’d like to meet her.”

Stella turned her head back to her front with the slowest of reluctance. Her eyes turned away from Cory, then past the three kids, then past Mr. Dalton, and finally up to the night sky, dreading what was there. 

There she saw the blackest of eyes, nostrils, and a mouth. The other Daltons were staring at the face, too, but in a euphoric daze.

The face was moving at them all faster and faster.

“You are mine,” it said in that scratchy voice. “Come into my MOUTH!!!”

Before they knew it, they were already inside.