Illustrations by Alison Berry
Guest art by Basia Konczarek
Episode 12: Dan Druff
Hana’s parents decided to spring a surprise camping trip on their daughters. Hana was slightly disappointed that she had to cancel some plans with her friends, but otherwise she was glad for the surprise, unlike her sister who was only excited about being able to abandon her homework for a weekend. Her sister was not all that big a fan of camping while Hana could not get enough of it, loving it for all the same reasons that fed her sister’s dislike: braving the mosquitoes and other insects and bugs, toughing out the rocks and uneven ground, picking and eating wild berries, and cooking food on sticks over an open fire were just some of the experiences on which their opinions differed greatly.
They were told about the trip on Thursday, and they packed their things and piled into the car after they came home from school the next day. The car trunk could barely close with all of the camping equipment that had been stuffed into it, forcing the sisters to share the backseat with their pillows and bags full of personal effects, something they really did not mind at all.
‘So you guys remembered to pack everything?’ their father asked before he started the car.
‘Yes, Dad,’ the sisters sang out in unison.
‘Are you guys ready for the best camping trip ever?’
‘Yeah!’ Hana called out. Her sister instead mumbled something unprintable.
As the car drove out of the driveway Hana’s sister gazed wistfully at the tv, which was still viewable through the living room window. She even gave it a sad little wave which caused Hana to roll her eyes.
‘There’s going to be a lot more exciting things to do than watch tv, Sara,’ Hana said to her sister.
‘Woah, where’d this “Sara” come from?’ her sister asked.
‘It’s what James and I decided to call you from now on,’ Hana explained. ‘You can’t go forever without a name, you know.’
‘I guess it’s not bad,’ Sara said. ‘Can’t be any worse than camping, anyway.’
‘I’ll show you how awesome camping can be,’ Hana promised her.
Their father tuned the radio to a dinosaur rock station, one that played nothing but jam bands, so Hana and Sara tried to escape through sleep. Even though it was only mid-afternoon, the sisters managed to conk out thanks to their soft and fluffy pillows. When they awoke it was to the large wooden sign that welcomed them to the campground.
As the campground was situated in a transitional area between coniferous and deciduous forest, they were surrounded by trees of all types, and were both in awe of such a dense and green contrast to their open and grey city. It did not matter that they came up here every single year as they felt that immediate awe every single time, even Sara who was supposed to dislike all aspects of the adventure. The experience was like waking up to a dream; one that, for Hana at least, always seemed to last the entire weekend.
Their father pulled up to the toll booth and paid the entrance fee, which lifted the wooden board that had been preventing them from venturing any further. Hana and Sara peered out their open windows to see if they could spot any rabbits or other adorable forms of forest life as they continued along, but they only saw insects dancing around. Sara sighed and rolled up her window.
‘I guess this is Dad’s attempt to make men out of us,’ she said.
‘This is Dad’s attempt to treat you to something nice and relaxing,’ their father said from the front seat.
They drove up to the main office and their father got out of the car to register a campsite. While the rest of them waited in the car, Sara tried to count the number of mosquitoes flying around but gave up at about a million. Hana wanted to pull out a dandruff mallet and smack her with it.
After about five minutes of what was most likely haggling their father came back out of the office, grinning as he waved around a wooden block that had their campsite number: it was the number 13, which Hana considered to be lucky. Their father slid back into the car and tried to moderate his excitement as he carefully drove them over the bumpy roads that led to their site.
The sun leaking through the many leaves overhead cast fleeting spots of gold into the car, little bits of magic that one rarely saw in the city. This was when Hana knew she was truly going to enjoy herself, and Sara could not help but smile as well.
Sara’s smile soon fell off, however, for once they had found their site and got out, her father immediately had her help set up the tents. She complained that she had simply left her home chores behind for brutal manly-man work instead, but nobody paid her any attention. The entire family went to work on the tents, with Sara in charge of connecting together the metal bits that held them in place. She secretly hoped that her tears would rust them apart, thus cancelling the camping trip and sending them back to the cold glow of the tv, but instead her tears acted as a lubricant that made fitting together the metal bits even easier. She cursed fate and continued, quite bitterly, with her slave labour.
Her father wiped away one of his own tears as he gazed proudly at the twin tents they had put together as a family. When he turned back to see the other’s reactions, he found both his wife and Hana smiling widely, while Sara was sitting in the backseat of the car with her seatbelt on.
‘You need to ease her into things, Dad,’ Hana suggested. ‘I’ll try to lure her back out with some marshmallows and then maybe we should have an early dinner at the picnic table. Everyone likes early dinners.’
Her father decided to take her advice and pulled their campsite’s picnic table into the shade of a large tree. Her mother got out the cooler and a backpack full of food and began setting up the picnic table for their meal, pulling a clean sheet over its shoddy wooden boards and brushing dead bugs from the seats.
From the backpack Hana pulled out a bag full of marshmallows and shook it in front of Sara’s window. Sara rolled her window down and reached for the marshmallows but Hana pulled the bag away, shaking it loudly as she did so. Whimpering, Sara unbuckled her seatbelt and opened the car door, and then finally set a hesitant foot back onto the unsullied grass. Hana danced the marshmallows to the picnic table as Sara followed them in a hypnotised state, and once Sara was sitting down she made them vanish back into the backpack.
When Sara came to there was a freshly-prepared potato salad sandwich sitting on a paper plate in front of her. It tasted even better than marshmallows and gave Sara a chance to sit quietly as she looked at their surroundings. She always thought of the park as the city’s backyard. Hana ate her own sandwich beside her sister and looked around as well. Together they saw that, yes, there were a lot of mosquitoes, spiders and other such bugs and insects, but there were also tall, glorious trees, a cool breeze coming in from the nearby lake and rivers, the chittering of various woodland creatures, and overall an aura of peace that was not always available within the chaotic confines of the city. In lieu of electronic devices, bird songs became their radio. Sara finished her sandwich with a thoughtful expression on her face.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Hana asked her sister.
‘Anything that results in some of my favourite foods is beautiful to me,’ Sara admitted. ‘As long as we can save some marshmallows from being tortured in the fire, anyway. Poor, fluffy, tasty things like marshmallows should never be treated like that. Marshmallows.’
‘Okay, I get it,’ Hana said impatiently. ‘Stop saying “marshmallows”.’
‘But even the word is tasty,’ Sara told her sulkily.
Hana closed the backpack and the sound of the marshmallow bag crinkling inside could be heard. Sara whimpered and Hana squeezed the bag a little to emphasise the crinkling. ‘You’ll have to wait until tonight for them,’ she said. She hoped it would be enough incentive for Sara to behave herself until then.
Their parents finished setting up camp as they poked around the surrounding area, looking for broken sticks and fallen branches to use in the night’s fire. They managed to gather bundles that went up to their chins and set them down beside the fire pit; a clapping sounded from behind them and they turned to see their father applauding their efforts.
‘We might not even need firewood with the amount of sticks you guys brought,’ their father said proudly, though obviously they did in fact still need firewood and a lot of it at that. He got into the emptied car and started it up.
‘Where are you going, Dad?’ Hana asked.
‘Uh, I just need to get something,’ he said. ‘You guys guard the fort.’ He then drove off in the direction of the park’s sole general store.
‘Now what do we do?’ Sara asked her sister.
‘We’ll go exploring,’ Hana said. ‘We can sit around and sleep in tents in our backyard anytime we want, though we never do, while we can only really go exploring in the forest. I say we make the most of it. Guard the fort, Mom.’
Their mother nodded as she fluffed the pillows for the tents. They were sure she would have swept and vacuumed the area as well if it was possible.
‘Just be careful,’ their mother called after them. ‘Don’t go too far or stay out for too long.’
‘Yes, Mom!’ they called back to her. They had found a trail between two enormous trees and decided to follow it. Hana went on spider web duty, walking ahead of Sara and holding back branches so they did not scratch her sister’s skin. She wanted to do everything in her power to ensure that Sara enjoyed camping for once.
The further they went down the trail, the denser the foliage overhead seemed to become, effectively closing off the forest. The leaves had a warm, orange glow from the hidden sun, and some of the bugs seemed to glow as well. Soon they realised they could no longer hear the chirping of birds, and that was when they heard a low grunting coming from someplace nearby. Hana turned to Sara with her finger pressed to her lips, signifying silence. Together they followed after the sound, careful not to crunch too many of the twigs beneath their feet.
Eventually the sound led them to a clearing with something very large and very red lying in the middle. The sisters crouched down behind a rock and peered over it, waiting with rapidly beating hearts to see what this red thing was. Their mouths went dry when the red mound pushed itself onto its legs and sniffed the air, looking lazily all around it: it was one of the largest bears they had ever seen, bigger than any of the bears they had seen at the zoo at least, and its thick, full fur was more vividly red than fresh blood. They hoped it was not fresh blood that the bear was after.
‘Maybe we should go,’ Sara whispered to Hana.
‘Shh,’ Hana whispered back. She wanted to see what the bear was up to – it did not seem to be angry or frightened, just searching for something. She found out what that was when something even stranger entered the clearing: a very tall person who was entirely grey and green and blue. All of the person’s body parts were shiny and the only exposed skin was on the top half of his face. This gave the impression that he wore some type of ninja mask, and the person’s exposed grey hair seemed to let off snowflakes every now and then.
‘Who’s that?’ Sara asked, and then Hana immediately clasped her sister’s mouth shut with her hand.
The person appeared to look directly at them with cold, black eyes, and then he looked to the bear, placing a metallic green hand on its forehead. The bear let out a pleasant rumbling and then sat on the grass. The person then shushed the bear as Hana had done with her sister and leapt straight into the air, vanishing out of sight and leaving only a few fluttering leaves in his wake.
Sara started licking her sister’s hand to get her to remove it and Hana made a face as she did so.
‘Gross!’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
They both turned to run back down the path, but as soon as they did so the strange person came crashing down from above, bringing an avalanche of leaves with them. Frozen to their spots, the girls found that the only thing they could do was scream, so they screamed at the very top of their lungs. The strange person was obviously male up close and was even more noticeably metallic – in fact it was quite obvious that the person was mostly made out of colourful metal, at least with the exception of his ears, skin, eyes and hair. The robotic stranger calmly shushed the girls in the same manner he had shushed the bear, and they found that they quieted down despite themselves. He was very much the tallest man they had ever seen and he had to bend down to face them.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ the person said in a tinny and staticky voice. ‘I’m not one of the ones you should be afraid of.’
‘How can you talk when you don’t have a mouth?’ Sara asked the stranger. It was simply the first thing that popped into her head.
‘It’s because I’m mostly robot,’ the person said. ‘I don’t actually exist. And because I don’t actually exist, there’s no reason to tell anyone about me.’
Sara nodded while Hana shook in fright, sending dandruff flakes onto her shoulders in small piles. The person turned to her.
‘Are you Hana?’ he asked. She nearly jumped at the sound of her name.
‘Y-yes,’ she admitted, though she immediately wondered why. How did he – or perhaps it – know her name?
‘I’m Dan,’ the person said. ‘You may have heard of me before.’
There was a flash inside her head as her memory sprung into action. The first time she had heard of Dan was from the river monster, though she had not known it at the time, and then the second time was from the way king, who had explained the origin of her power. ‘Dan . . . Druff?’ she asked. The person nodded. That explained the supposed snowflakes that fell from his hair. ‘You’re the legendary Dan Druff?’ She gasped.
‘Yes,’ Dan said. ‘Or rather this is what’s left of me.’
‘I have so many things to ask you!’ she exclaimed.
Dan nodded. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid it’ll have to wait for another time. We’ll meet again soon, Hana. Farewell.’
With that he leapt back into the air, only this time he did not come crashing back down. The girls returned their gazes to the clearing but the bear was gone as well.
‘Am I dreaming?’ Sara asked.
‘Yes,’ Hana told her, and then they headed back to camp.
That night they had a fire, bright and hypnotic, created with the twigs and branches found by Hana and Sara and fed with the firewood their father had purchased at the general store. Hana sent her skewered marshmallows into the fire and pulled them back out as soon as they made signs of blackening, while Sara merely reached into the bag and popped the sticky and gooey confections into her mouth. Their sticky fingers picked up the dirt on everything they touched and everything they said came with the ghastly sight of crushed marshmallow.
‘This is how I plan on getting fat,’ Sara said as she stuffed her face. She puffed out her cheeks in imitation of a fat person.
‘There are better ways of getting fat,’ their father said as he cooked a hot dog on a stick. His strategy was to find a spot with a deep red glow, far from the actual flames of the fire, and slowly cook his treat to perfection.
In addition to being pure, delicious balls of sweetness, the marshmallows served to make Sara forget about Dan Druff and the red bear as if they really were nothing but a dream, while for Hana the unexpected encounter was still all she could think about. When she looked into the deep red of the fire she thought she could see the face of the bear staring back at her. She thrust a marshmallow into the face to make it go away, but the marshmallow got caught on a piece of wood and began mutating into a large, blackened parody of its former self. The end result was oddly bear-shaped. She sighed.
‘Why are you sighing now, Sara?’ her mother asked, and then Sara looked up at her mother with a mouthful of marshmallow, having stopped in mid-chew. ‘How can you even sigh with an entire marshmallow in your mouth?’
Sara swallowed the marshmallow and wiped her mouth. ‘I didn’t sigh,’ she said.
‘Oh. I guess I just expected you to for some reason.’ Her mother then turned to Hana. ‘What’s wrong, Hana?’
Hana did not answer since she was lost in the fire. It took a lot of clapping on her mother’s part to gain her attention.
‘What’s wrong?’ her mother asked again.
‘Oh. Uh. Nothing,’ Hana replied. Her mother obviously did not believe her but they left it at that.
Hana looked up at the sky and was happy to see that the stars were actually stars and not airplanes like they were in the city. Sometimes she forgot that stars even existed outside of books and movies, so to see a sky that was more star than space and to see it in person was a yearly revelation for her, something that only lasted for two nights but was made all the more powerful and special because of it. Yes, it made her happy to see the stars, so she was definitely not happy to see a shiny silhouette leaping across them. She tried not to wonder what Dan Druff was up to and hoped that whatever it was did not involve her. The camping trip was supposed to be a vacation from work for her parents, a vacation from homework for her sister, and for herself she had secretly considered it a vacation from the unrelenting onslaught of strangeness in her life. That had been quickly dashed by a great red claw, one ordered by a metallic hand. Now they were even trying to take the stars from her. She sighed inwardly.
Her sister’s laughter broke her free from her musing and she looked to see what it had been directed at: apparently their father’s hot dog, the one he had been cooking so carefully, had split and fell off the stick. He was desperately trying to stab it back on but it was a lost cause – it soon became a crunchy black cylinder in the middle of the fire, so pathetic-looking that it made Sara laugh even harder.
‘See?’ she gloated. ‘See? This is why cooking on a fire is a bad idea.’
Their father was too busy mourning the loss of his hot dog to listen to her. He cleaned the end of his stick and went to work on another one.
Eventually the mosquitoes came out in full swing and forced everyone into their tents. Hana and Sara raced into their tent while their parents fled into the other, and the separated pairs bid each other a good night. Sara tried to count the number of mosquito bites on her arms but was once again forced to give up due to sheer volume; after complaining loudly for several minutes she finally cocooned herself in her sleeping bag and grumbled off to sleep.
Hana sat on her sleeping bag and listened to all the night sounds: the clicking of insects and minor rustling of leaves mingled together to create a natural lullaby, and she felt like she could have slept sitting up. That was when she heard the sound of metal scraping against stone. The sound seemed to last for less than a second but it was more than enough to jolt Hana awake, especially as it seemed to have come from just outside their tent. Giving herself a choice between asking what was out there and not saying a word, she opted to remain completely silent in the hopes that whatever had made the sound would continue on its merry way.
It did not. Dan Druff’s off-channel radio voice whispered out to her: ‘Follow me.’ His voice seemed to pick up a far-off radio station when he spoke, for Hana heard a familiar song hiding behind his words. It helped alleviate the creepiness of his robotic whispering.
‘Right now?’ she whispered back, but there was no answer. She checked to make sure Sara really was sleeping and then she snuck out of the tent.
A thin wisp of smoke was trailing upwards from the extinguished campfire. She followed its trail to the sky, to see if it led to Dan Druff flying through the air, bouncing from star to star; she thought she saw him out of the corner of her eye but it turned out to be a small grey cloud passing across the moon. Then she heard a polite, electronic coughing coming from behind her and turned to see Dan Druff’s moonlit silhouette, entirely unmoving, standing in the leafy entrance to the path she and her sister had taken before. His eyes glowed just as brightly as the fireflies that surrounded him.
‘Do you know how creepy you are?’ Hana whispered to him.
Dan Druff nodded. She had yet to take a single step towards him.
‘I’ll only follow you if you prove you’re Daniel Druff first.’
He nodded again, and then he reached into his grey hair and pulled out a tricorne that Hana knew was made entirely out of dandruff. He placed it on his head and in that moment she saw Dan Druff, not as he was now but how he must have been when he was younger, more than a hundred years younger, fresh off the dandruff boat he had made with his own hands. Hana took a few steps forwards and then followed him as he delved into the forest.
He led her back to the clearing she had come across before. There the great red bear was sleeping peacefully, with a few small animals and birds sleeping on its back. The moon and stars filled the clearing with a soft light and fireflies flashed along its edges. Hana stepped into the clearing for the first time, her foot glowing in the light, followed by her leg and then the rest of her body. Dan stood by the bear, looking more majestic than the intimidating giant she had originally met, and she stood before him, wondering, like her sister had, if this was all just a dream.
‘Did you have something to tell me?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is all just a dream.’
‘What?!’ Hana exclaimed. ‘Really?!’ She felt nearly angry at the revelation.
‘No,’ Dan Druff said. ‘I’m joking. This is all very real.’
Hana looked at him in open-mouthed disbelief. ‘How can you joke at a time like this?’ she asked. ‘When you just leap robotically into my life with a giant red bear and scare my sister and scare me . . . How can you do that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Dan Druff apologised. ‘I’ve been away from humans for so long that I no longer know how to behave around them. See, this bear here ate my body many years ago. While inside of him we became telepathically linked, conversing until we reached an understanding wherein he would try to bring me back into the realm of the living as long as I ensured he would never go hungry again. I had him take me to a mad doctor, or rather a mad scientist, who lived on the outskirts of the city, and there the bear regurgitated as much of me as he could. The mad doctor recognised my mangled face right away, don’t ask me how, and quickly set to work on encasing my brain inside an unbreakable container filled with special fluid. He then made the body you see before you and put me together, hoping that this tremendous achievement would earn him instant fame and his own immortality. Unfortunately it was not to be, for the bear ate him as well. What the bear did not realise, however, was that the doctor had performed many experiments on himself over the years, drinking many vials with many warnings on them, as he could not afford or find any willing guinea pigs. So when the bear ate the doctor, the bear itself changed, becoming the large red beast you see sleeping beside me. The doctor’s poisoned meat also did something to the bear’s stomach, making it so that the bear is never hungry and never has to go to the washroom. The bear then decided to follow me out of gratitude. This was more than a hundred years ago. We are now perfect, imperfect creatures thanks to that poor, crazy man, and his ghost lives on eternally through us.’
‘How could somebody make a robotic body over a hundred years ago?’ Hana asked. ‘Were there even cars back then?’
‘We had mad scientists,’ Dan Druff said, ‘and that was good enough.’ Hana imagined she had no choice but to accept this answer.
‘So you and Mr. Bear have been living out in the forest all this time?’ she asked.
‘We have been all around the city,’ Dan Druff explained, ‘but never inside it. We have been protecting it from intruders just as you have been.’
‘Intruders?’
‘Yes. I will not say anymore for they have sharp ears. Just know that you have been born into an incredible destiny.’
‘That sucks!’
Dan Druff nodded. ‘I know, Hana. I felt the same way.’
‘What do you expect me to do?’ She felt an incredible, invisible weight on her shoulders and nearly collapsed because of it.
‘Continue on as you have been,’ Dan told her. ‘Do not worry if things look grim, for I will always be watching you.’
‘Wow, you really know how to hit home the creepiness.’
He nodded yet again. ‘Go back to your camp, Hana,’ he said. ‘Use your time to relax. Nothing will come after you here except for the mosquitoes.’
She thanked him and left. The fireflies lit the path back to her tent, and when she looked back at the path entrance it was completely dark. She shivered, thinking that those cold, glowing eyes were out there somewhere watching her. It was a strange feeling to have regarding someone who was supposed to be her ally.
The next day the family went swimming at the lake. It was a good day to swim, with the sun seeming like it was about to burst with how hot it was and the cool water serving as a refreshing, immediate respite. Hana stubbed her big toe on an underwater rock, and it bled through the broken nail, but that did not hamper her enjoyment. She tended to stub her big toe whenever she went swimming in a lake, so for her it was part of the whole experience, like putting up with mosquitoes. There was no question that her sister was a better swimmer than she was, and in fact she was swimming laps between their mother and a buoy, with their mother timing her on her underwater watch.
Their father watched them from the beach as his insatiable hunger for hot dogs had resulted in him bringing a portable barbecue. Every once in a while he would wade through the water, but it only ever lasted as long as he needed to digest however many hot dogs he had eaten. This loop repeated itself ad nauseam.
There were other beachgoers as well, other families who had fled the city for some temporary relaxation. Only one person seemed to have come alone, a strange man lying on a beach chair and holding up a newspaper with reflective green fingers. Hana seemed to have been the only person to notice him. Sara kept distracting her with playful splashing as she tried to spy the man’s face, wanting to brag about how fast she had swam. So Hana let her sister brag and smiled as she did so, for Sara was having legitimate, unabashed fun.
‘You know, I think I really like camping,’ Sara said as they walked onto the hot sand.
Hana was about to agree, but then she saw the strange man’s face – or rather half of it – when he folded the newspaper together to reach the next page. For some reason she was the only person to notice that there was a robotic man with grey hair lying in the middle of the beach, his shiny body reflecting the sun like the face of an enormous digital watch. Hana shielded her eyes.
‘I think I’m starting to hate it,’ she said.
To Be Continued In Episode 13: Chewing the Fat
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13
Episode 14
Episode 15
Volume 2
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