Camp Tossbridge
| Type | Summer camp |
|---|---|
| Notable inhabitants | Beatrice Tidal, Reagan Hideaway |
| Status | Two of its people never came back |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
Camp Tossbridge is a week-long summer camp in the woods on Earth, and the last place Beatrice Tidal and Reagan Hideaway stood before the cave portal took them into Eslura.[1][2] Bea was sent there against her will and Reagan was one of its counsellors. Neither of them has been back.[3]
The camp
Campers register at a table beside the bus at a community centre before they board, where a counsellor checks names off a list and hands out coloured stickers and name tags so that the counsellors know who belongs to which group. Bea was put in the pink group.[1] An arched sign over the entrance path once spelled the camp's name, but moss and overgrown vines have eaten most of the letters away, and the path beyond it is cratered with potholes that fill with mud after rain.[2]
Gwenlyn Field is where the campers spend most of their time: volleyball nets, horseshoe pits, basketball courts, picnic tables and a blackened firepit at its centre. On the far side of the field the ground slopes down to a clover-shaped pond, its brown water half covered in lily pads and cattails and overlooked by a large A-frame lodge with a wraparound porch. Campers swim in it.[2]
The cabins
Four rundown shacks stand around a grassy yard in a clearing off the field, strangled with overgrowth and roofed in moss under a canopy of pines. Bea was billeted in Black Oak Cabin, named on a wooden sign by its steps: half a dozen bunk beds with sagging mattresses against mouldy walls, a cubby to each bed, two of the windows boarded up and the rest darkened by the growth outside, and the one air conditioner taped over with an out-of-order sign. The counsellors have a room off the far side of it.[2]
The mess hall
The mess hall stands across Gwenlyn Field and is lit by fluorescent tubes, with handmade posters along the side walls and a mural of painted handprints covering most of the back one. Campers queue outside under an overhang, take a tray past the serving staff at the front of the room, and find a place among circular tables. There is a fire door in the back corner, and its alarm rings when it opens.[2]
The woods and the cave
Dense woodland stretches away from the clearing in every direction. Campers are asked not to go into it by themselves, on the grounds that the ground gets rocky further back. A game trail runs through it, and beyond a pair of birch trees there is a cave with a tunnel at the back of it. That tunnel is how Bea and Reagan left Earth.[2]
Staff
The camp runs on counsellors, most of them teenagers only a little older than the campers, working long hours for minimum wage. Reagan Hideaway has counselled there for years and works in the hiking department, which taught her always to test for stable ground before she puts weight on it; the camp also put her through safety training, which she later used on Aero Ellisvat's burns and cuts in Eslura.[2][3][4] The same three girls have been assigned to her group two years running.[2] Jamie, the blonde counsellor who checked Bea in at the registration table, shares Reagan's room in Black Oak Cabin.[1][2] The kitchen staff, the bus driver and the rest are not named.[1][2]
Notable events
- A colourful pamphlet with the words Camp Tossbridge on its cover turned up in Fran and Joe Dildecker's post box. They had missed the application deadline by four days, and a pleading phone call from Fran got Bea enrolled anyway.[1]
- Bea met Reagan on the bus. Reagan sat beside her for the whole journey, showed her the fantasy novel she was reading and told her she was one of her campers.[1]
- Three girls from Mountbridge High School cornered Bea in Black Oak Cabin, and again at her table in the mess hall, where they took her sketchbook and tore it in half in a tug of war. Bea went out through the fire door and ran into the woods in a thunderstorm.[2]
- She sheltered in the cave, cut her hand open on the rock, and followed a golden light and her mother's voice down the tunnel. Reagan came into the woods after her. Both of them went through the cave portal and neither returned.[2]
- Reagan expects trouble from the camp over it. She told Bea that Camp Tossbridge would throw the biggest fit ever if she brought her back injured, and later that they would pitch a fit at her having lost the same camper twice.[5][6] She does not know whether she will ever go back, or where a route home would begin, and part of her does not mind the thought of staying in Eslura. Asked what Tossbridge was, Aero Ellisvat had never heard of it, and Reagan told him it was a little off the beaten path.[3]