The Legend of Karl

It was meant to be spooky, of course it was. Going to an isolated cabin in the woods off the banks of Chamber Lake, with no electricity or indoor plumbing, over Halloween weekend—it was the recipe for spooky. Yet, neither of the leaders had expected him to show up. 

The Kingdom youth group went to the cabin every year, every Halloween, and nothing eventful would happen. Some of the youth would scare each other, some would get sick from their candy intake, occasionally a mouse would chew through someone’s bag—ordinary things. The youth leaders, Darryl and Curtis, would do a few biblical teachings, but the majority of the weekend would be spent playing games. This year would be different.

One of the youth, Luna, had decided to invite a friend of hers. His name was Karl. It wasn’t uncommon for the teenagers to invite friends outside of the group, though usually they would at least know the friends they brought. Darryl and Curtis quickly learned that Luna barely knew the boy who was tagging along, only answering their questions with vague, “He goes to my school,” and, “He’s an okay guy.” It was weird, sure, but not unnerving per se; Luna was a flighty girl to begin with, so the idea she might just invite a boy, one who she perhaps had a crush on, didn’t seem abnormal. 

He was a total ladies’ man. A jock with a deep voice and an ache to impress any female he came across. Sure, he never participated in any of the games they played, and obviously didn’t take their religious beliefs seriously, but the youth leaders’ jobs were to make every teen feel welcome and introduce them to the idea of a higher power. So, though they knew they would be turned down, they invited Karl to join games, cracked jokes to lighten the mood, and talked with him as much as they could, not that he was much of a talker.

The first truly strange occurrence happened early Saturday evening. Luna had needed to go to the bathroom, but no one liked going to the outhouses alone—not only were they a short distance away from the cabin, but it was pitch black and their games of Mafia put all the teenagers on edge—so she asked if anyone would accompany her. Karl immediately volunteered, puffing out his chest and swiping a flashlight from the table. Luna batted her eyelashes at him and they set off through the woods. 

Darryl had just been in the middle of a round of Dutch Blitz when Karl returned. There was nothing too peculiar about a boy returning from the outhouses, except for the fact that he had returned sans Luna. 

“Karl, where’s Luna?” Darryl asked, pausing his game briefly. A couple of the teens he was demolishing—sorry, playing against—groaned. 

“I dunno.”

Darryl's eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean you don’t know? You walked her out there, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” Karl seemed completely unaware of the bizarrity of the situation, merely slipping off his shoes and slumping into one of the armchairs around the fireplace. 

“And you didn’t bring her back?”

As if on cue, a scream rang out through the woods, growing ever neared, until the girl in question barrelled through the front door. Her face was as white as a sheet and she was panting and crying. Her friends and the two leaders immediately rushed over to calm her as she shook. 

“You ass!” she screamed, stomping over to Karl. “You left me out in the dark!”

Darryl and Curtis were too distracted to even call out her language. 

“Oh.” Karl seemed unperturbed. “Sorry.”

“Sorry? That’s all you have to say?”

Luna looked just about ready to kill, so the leaders decided it was time to step in. Darryl gently pulled Luna aside and Curtis announced the commencement of a new game of Mafia. That distracted the other teenagers and gave Luna some time to cool down. The youth leaders still exchanged confused looks throughout the game, as they tried to decipher Karl’s strange attitude.

After they had played two games of Mafia, the fire had begun to die down. Curtis and Darryl told the teens that they were going to go outside to grab some more fire wood and, to everyone’s surprise, Karl loudly said he would join them. They exchanged another set of expressions, but said nothing, merely trudging outside with the teenager in tow. 

It didn’t take long, gathering logs they had cut earlier in the day, and once the three men had their hands full, they trundled back to the cabin. However, a noise made them stop to listen. A car could be heard, lumbering slowly along the dirt road. They could barely see its headlights through the trees, but it was there.

Normally, that wouldn’t cause anyone to bat an eye. However, their cabin was another story. 

The road towards their cabin was completely ridden with potholes and had no barrier to separate the road, etched into the cliffside, from the lake below. It was a terrifying journey, though their youth group had driven the bus down there for as long as Darryl had been the youth pastor, so they were acclimated to it. Not only was the road bumpy and frightening to drive down, especially in the pitch black evenings of late October, but it wasn’t an obvious road and only lead to two places: their cabin or a dead end. No one drove down that road unless they knew where they were going. There would be the occasional fisher or hiker, but they never came at night and never drove far enough along to reach the cabin, which was a good forty-five minutes along. So any car approaching their cabin caused eyebrows to raise. 

“I’ll go check it out.”

Karl puffed out his chest, as if to impress any ladies who may be watching. But there was only Darryl and Curtis and the dark. No one to impress. No reason to volunteer. No reason he should be out here in the woods with them at all.

The men watched as he walked up to the gate, where the car had stopped, its headlights more visible now. They could hear the sounds of chatter, but couldn’t make out the words, and, as soon as it had started, it was over. The car was backing out and Karl was coming back towards them. 

“Who was it?” Curtis asked.

“Huh?” Karl seemed confused. “No one was there.”

Suspicions were turning into conspiracy theories and the air was thick with fear. 

“What do you mean?” Darryl asked cautiously. “We saw the car.”

“There was no car.”

Okay, now the men were really frightened. Without speaking a word, without any form of communication between them, they both began to surreptitiously back away from each other and the boy. Their only thoughts were of their wives and two young daughters and that if Karl attacked them, he could only run after one, while the other could go save the rest of the teenagers. 

“We saw the car, Karl,” Curtis said slowly. “We heard the car. We heard you talking.”

“There was no car, there was nobody there,” Karl insisted, having the audacity to roll his eyes, as if the leaders were stupid. 

“Karl, why won’t you tell us the truth?” Curtis asked, fumbling with his keyring to find his pocket knife. Just in case. 

“I am telling the truth. Jeez, I get you guys believe in some dumb god or whatever, but you don’t need to gaslight me into believing or something.”

They were gaslighting him? 

“I’m goin’ back inside!” Karl called over his shoulder, shoving his hands into his hoodie pocket as he walked back to the cabin. 

The men stared in bewilderment. Then they came to their senses and darted through the door behind him. 

For the rest of the evening, they kept a close eye on the boy. They weren’t sure what happened with the car, but they were certain the teen couldn’t be trusted. Perhaps it was an innocent thing, maybe a lost pedestrian or foreigner, but he had still lied to them about it, so they suspected it was something more. He didn’t act too suspicious again. He listened to music with his earbuds in, complaining when his battery was dying and there was no outlet to be found, and he tried to impress a few of the girls, who were fawning over his—honestly lackluster—muscles. He went to bed early—well, early for the retreat, where most people stayed up until two or three in the morning—and that was that. 

The next morning they woke up to find no one had been brutally murdered and Karl slept in until eleven, missing breakfast and their morning bible session. No one bothered to wake him. They had lunch, cleaned the cabin up, took a group picture, and loaded their suitcases into the bus. They drove back home without incident and Karl left in his mom’s car without saying goodbye. They never saw him again since, but they could never forget that feeling of dread, thinking about what could have happened with the car on that old dirt road.

“That’s how it ends?” Darryl's now-teenage daughter sounded incredulous, slumping back into the couch, shoulder to shoulder with her best friends. “You never found out what happened?”

Darryl shook his head. “It probably wasn’t that exciting anyways.”

“You made it sound exciting,” she pointed out. 

“That’s what makes it a good story,” Curtis said, “the mystery of it all. We’ll never know.”

“I do love a good mystery,” the girl conceded. “But usually I prefer it to have a conclusion! I need to know what happened! Whodunit!”

“Well, what’s your theory?” Darryl asked, smiling fondly at his daughter.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, before bursting out, “It was probably his drug dealer! Or, ooh! Maybe he was part of a murder gang cult and they needed a new hideout, so they were considering this cabin, so that’s was Karl joined the trip, to scout out the location, but then he learned that people rent the cabin out all year round, so when his gang buddies drove up, he told them this wasn’t a good place. Or maybe he was a serial killer and he was gonna kill everybody but then, uh, his serial killer buddy drove up and was like, ‘Don’t kill these people,’” she spoke quickly, adopting a comical voice as her interpretation of murderers, “‘because of... uh, some reason!’ OR—!”

“Oookay,” Darryl cut her off, laughing, “those are all great theories, but…”

“Not exactly plausible,” her friend finished, also with a giggle.

She gave a goofy grin. “I’m just trying to solve the mystery!”

“I think this tale will never have a solution,” Curtis said with a smile. “But it’s fun to imagine what might have happened with that kid.”

“He’s gonna burst through that cabin door and murder us,” the girl whispered, partially joking and partially scaring herself. 

“He won’t,” Darryl said. “Don’t worry. Now, who’s up for another game of Mafia?”

His daughter’s hand shot into the air like a bullet, waving around ecstatically, the story of her father’s past quickly forgotten. 

But Darryl never forgot. Some days, he would wake with a cold sweat, with the thought that Karl would be over his bed or over his children’s beds. He played it off as a joke, a silly story from years ago that he made more dramatic than needed, but every year, when they returned to the cabin, he and Curtis would exchange worried glances, unreasonably wondering whether Karl would ever return to finish whatever he had started. 

Perhaps the legend of Karl would forever remain just that—a legend. He prayed that it would.