Camping

We were on Day Five of our camping trip when the first mysterious death occurred. It was Reginald, the butler. We figured he'd killed himself ironically and moved on. Frankly, I think we were all surprised the trip had gone five days without a mysterious death.

I was sharing a tent with Sir Nigel Simsbury, of an old family with no money but landed out the wazoo. They owned estates all over the countryside, all of which had been cursed. The northern ones had all been done in one go by a belligerent tribe of Picts sometime in the early centuries of the first millennium. No one knew why.

The southern estates were more varied. A great uncle of Sir Nigel's had angered a hedge wizard, who had in turn hexed Sir Nigel's ancestor, resulting in a patch of the estate where the anger had taken place being forever shrouded in gloom. The family rented it to thrill-seekers with migraines. Another estate was cursed by some divine being or other. Just what heresy or act of blasphemy had occurred was kept secret by the family, but the whole place was lousy with fleas.

At any rate, all of the Simsbury estates were cursed, and Sir Nigel didn't like to spend time in or on them, hence the camping trip. When Lord Warman Viscount De Moline invited him, he'd jumped at the chance. And we all figured he'd be the one to die mysteriously. No one bet on Reginald in the pool.

After that, people kept dying off. The cook bought it falling down a flight of stairs, and as you may be aware, stairs are in pretty short supply in the woods on camping trips. Lord Warman Viscount De Moline accidentally cut off his own head with a tent stake. Our guide, Peter, a pleasant peasant, was brutally disemboweled by a bar of soap while bathing in a stream. At that point, we would have gone home but we were totally lost.

Soon enough it was just me and Sir Nigel, and I was getting pretty tired of his stories about estate curses. When he died in a parachuting accident one afternoon as he was coming out of the tent, I knew I was for it. Alone in the wilderness, no food (it had all been burned when Matron spontaneously combusted), no map (ditto), and no hope at all. I sat down in the tent and waited for the inevitable.

I had made my peace with my maker and was right with the world when I was rescued in the nick of time by a party of wood cutters from a nearby estate who had heard my frantic pleas for mercy from the divine as part of my maker-peace-making. I'm sad to say that when I exploded competely unexpectedly, some of them may have been injured.

Now I'm in little pieces, spread out through the foliage and seeping slowly into the loam. I think you could probably get an estate from Sir Nigel's heirs at a bargain-basement price. I'd recommend the northern ones. Ancient Picts were fierce warriors, but they didn't curse land terribly effectively. For that, you've really got to use human viscera.