by Mary McCoy
“Which failed to start,” added the second stagehand.
A Note from the Narrator: This was, of course, an incredibly loose interpretation of the truth, but being truthful with Robin did not seem to be a very high priority for the stagehands that summer.
“Now they’ve got the horses,” said the first stagehand in an effort to distract Robin from any further inquiry about the truck and the equipment shed.
“Excellent,” said Robin, picking up the spider-snake model from her desk. “And Cabin 3? How are they doing with the beast?”
“They dispatched it. With a little help from Cabin 2, as it happens.”
Robin frowned at the model, then crumpled it in her fist, just as the second stagehand added, “They opened one of the casks in the cave, and whatever was inside it turned one of the girls into a raven.”
Robin pursed her lips. Her eyes shifted to the left, considering the angles. Over the years a number of things had been locked up in the cave—so many that Robin had almost lost track of them. As to which the girls in Cabin 3 freed in their effort to fulfill the “prophecy,” almost any would have made for an interesting story. Some would have been grateful to be freed, while others had been sealed up in casks and crates and bottles for such a long time, they were liable to have worked up some dangerous, vengeful grudges.
And then there was the thing in the deepest recesses of the cave. When Robin had written the prophecy, she hadn’t worried about the girls finding it. The cave was too dark, too frightening, and no one had ever ventured in that far before. Of course, Robin considered, if they’d stumbled into that particular chamber of the cave, there was no denying things would’ve become interesting.
“Anything else?”
The stagehands exchanged glances before casting their eyes toward the ground. Neither of them wanted to share the next bit of news with Robin.
“Don’t tell me Tania’s already got her claws in one of them,” Robin said, practically baring her teeth as she spoke.
“Cabin 4,” said the first stagehand, daring to lift its eyes. “It was the one called Addison.”
“The girl picked up a button,” the other stagehand explained. “Right after it fell off the boy’s shirt.”
Robin made a fist and pounded it on her desk. “That is exactly what I warned you about, exactly the thing I told you to keep from happening.”
“It wasn’t like one of us could dash out and snatch it off the ground,” the second stagehand said with an insouciant shrug.
Robin rolled her eyes.
“An epic failure of imagination,” she said. “A puff of wind could have blown in a leaf to cover it up. You could have changed the color so it blended in with the dirt. And we have squirrels at this camp, don’t we? Last time I checked, there were squirrels, and it wouldn’t have been the hardest thing in the world to nudge one of them out into the clearing to pick up a stupid button and run off with it.”
The longer she spoke, the louder and angrier her voice grew. The stagehands inched backwards toward the door.
“And that’s just thinking off the top of my head,” she said. “Now go to the equipment shed and get that battery out of the truck. I’m going to find Pam and see if it’s not too late to get this mess straightened out.”
CABIN 4
SOUL MATES
[SCENE: ADDISON, ANNIKA, ALIX, AMBER, and VERITY prepare to sneak out and return to the woods in search of their soul mates.]
The girls from Cabins 2 and 3 would spend their first night at Camp So-and-So on the run and fighting for their lives. Cabin 4, however, would spend it plotting one of the most venerable and ageless camp traditions: sneaking out after dark.
From her bunk, Verity saw four pairs of eyes glittering in the dark, peering out from sleeping bags that concealed the fact that the girls from Cabin 4 were sleeping in their clothes and shoes, ready to spring out of bed the very instant they knew that Pam was asleep. Wind rippled through the tarps that hung from the cabin eaves in place of walls. They didn’t keep out bugs or forest creatures. They didn’t even keep out the moonlight.
As darkness fell, Pam had ushered them to the latrine with flashlights since the power seemed to be out. It happened all the time, Pam said. Something to do with old circuitry at the camp. Oscar, the groundskeeper, would have it taken care of by morning.
A Note from the Narrator: Except, of course, he wouldn’t.
Verity hoped that the moonlight would be bright enough to guide them through the woods, that the magnetic current they’d followed that afternoon would lead them back to the cabin again.
If only Pam would fall asleep. She was older than the other counselors Verity had seen at Camp So-and-So and had grown suspicious with age. She slept like a cat, and even though her eyes were closed, her breathing never turned slow and heavy. It was only when Amber started to snore lightly that it seemed to dawn on the others that they would have to act soon if there was to be any hope of making their journey that night.
Addison crawled out of bed first and stumbled up the path to the latrine, shaking Amber’s shoulder on her way out the door. After a discreet minute or two, Amber followed her. Then Alix. Then Annika.
And finally Verity. When she joined them, the four girls were all huddled together, shivering in their thin t-shirts and miniskirts. Verity felt underdressed—though warm—in her sweatshirt and jeans. If the others looked chilly, Addison looked positively miserable. Her teeth chattered as she clutched at her gooseflesh-covered arms, but she seemed to be sweating, too, Verity noticed. The honey-blonde curls near her forehead were damp with it.
“Are you okay?” Verity whispered.
Addison didn’t answer.
Verity knew they shouldn’t be doing this. Something about it wasn’t right. Not one thing about it was right, and they all had to have known it, yet Verity couldn’t quite bring herself to mention it.
And then Addison reached into her pocket and pulled out a button. It looked ordinary—round and white with four holes—but as she held it in the palm of her hand, a change came over her.
Verity saw the whole thing happen.
Addison had looked ready to collapse, but then instantaneously, the sweat evaporated from her skin, and the curl returned to her hair, and the pits faded from beneath her eyes, and she smiled.
What did I just see? Verity wondered, before deciding that she must have been mistaken, that what happened to Addison was just a trick of the starlight.
That was when she heard Amber ask, “What are we going to do when we get there?”
“We talk to them,” Annika said, looking at her friend as though this was the most obvious thing in the world.
Verity’s face drained of color. She didn’t know if she was ready to talk to the girl with the radiant smile, or if she was ready to have the others see her talk to the girl with the radiant smile. For a moment, she thought about going back to bed, and then it dawned on her.
She was about to go on a secret mission by moonlight, led by a supernatural force toward a mysterious destination, and if she balked at a chance like that, she might as well toss her Isis Archimedes books into the trash. She might as well go back to her bunk and stay there for the rest of the week.
“Then let’s go,” Verity said with resolve she didn’t know she had.
They crept down the path from the latrine, whispering and giggling a little more than Verity would have liked. None of the other cabins stirred, but Verity still cringed at the amount of noise they made. They cut behind their cabin and onto the path they’d found earlier that day. Except this time, they didn’t find the magnetic current waiting to lead them to their soul mates.
What they found was a very angry Pam.
“What on earth are you doing out at this hour?” she asked. She stood in the center of the path, blocking it, her arms folded across her chest. “And what in God’s name are you wearing? Get back to the cabin right now. Tomorrow morning, you’re all on kitchen duty.”
The morning after
their thwarted plot, Pam was chilly with them. She said nothing about the previous night, though judging by the dark circles under her eyes and the way she stifled one yawn after another, they knew she hadn’t gone back to sleep.
After they’d showered and dressed and made up their bunks, they walked to the eerily dark and deserted mess hall and through the swinging metal doors to the kitchen. There should have been a kitchen crew scraping trays and scrubbing pots, but the kitchen was as quiet as the rest of the mess hall. The stainless-steel countertops, the dishes and pans in the drying rack, the sink, the floors were all bone dry. No faucets dripped. No film of steam and dish soap hung in the air. Not so much as a piece of toast was laid out. If this was any cause for alarm, though, Pam gave no sign of it.
Annika peered over Verity’s shoulder and groaned. “What are we supposed to eat? I’m starving.”
Verity’s own belly rumbled. They’d had nothing to eat since the s’mores Pam had made the night before. She and Annika moved from the refrigerator to the cupboards, where they found a canister of powdered eggs and some instant coffee. They brought these to the others, who were examining the scanty contents of the wire baker’s rack.
“Good find, girls,” said Pam. “We’ll just mix these up with a little water and have ourselves a good, hot breakfast. Addison, put some water on to boil, why don’t you?”
Addison was looking unwell again this morning, sweaty and shivering, but she did as she was told, hefting the giant copper kettle from the stovetop and filling it to the brim. Meanwhile, Pam measured out the powdered eggs into a mixing bowl and stirred in a cup of water.
“Amber, find me a frying pan,” she said, testing the ropy texture of the reconstituted eggs. “Verity and Annika, you look for some cutlery and plates. And some coffee mugs while you’re at it.”
Kettles and skillets and cutlery were easy to come by. Food in the kitchen was scarcer, and meager as the available stores were, Verity could tell they had been picked over. Canned pie filling and green beans. A sack of rice. Half a cardboard flat of snack-sized raisin boxes.
“The stove isn’t working,” Addison said, fiddling with the knobs. Pam put down her whisk and went over to help.
“The pilot’s probably out,” she said. “Let me take a look. Annika, see if you can find me some kitchen matches.”
Verity wondered what the other girls in the other cabins had been doing for food. In fact, she wondered if anyone else was still here. Maybe they’d missed some kind of announcement while they’d been in the woods, and camp had been called off. Verity imagined a caravan of annoyed parents snaking up the long, unnecessarily winding road to collect the daughters they’d deposited there only a day before. The thought of the others being rescued, driving away, stopping for cheeseburgers and fries on the way home made Verity feel as though someone had poured concrete into her heart.
Don’t be an idiot, she thought. If your parents actually came for you and you weren’t there, they’d look for you. At the very least, they’d wait for you.
Pam propped up the top of the stove like she was looking beneath the hood of a car. “Yep, just like I thought.”
Annika handed the matches to Pam, who struck one and held it to the pilot. Nothing happened.
But if the other girls are gone, and their parents didn’t pick them up, where are they? Verity wondered.
“Huh, that’s strange,” said Pam. Undaunted, she went outside to test the gas line. The moment she was out of earshot, the girls erupted in a flurry of scheming. Addison and Annika thought they should sneak away to the cabin later that afternoon. Alix and Amber thought they should go now while Pam was checking the gas line.
If Verity thought about it for more than a few seconds, it was obvious that something was very wrong at this camp. They should have been going for help, or at least asking a few hard questions about why the entire camp was abandoned and the power and gas were shut off. Instead, they were trying to make instant coffee and planning to sneak into the woods to meet a cabinful of boys and one beautiful girl who were almost certainly dangerous, imaginary, or both.
The problem was, it was hard to think about it for more than a few seconds. Verity was aware of this, and yet, paying attention seemed to take so much more effort than ignoring it. Besides, they had Pam, a sensible adult charged with the responsibility of returning them safely to their parents. If they were really in any danger, Pam would have known it, wouldn’t she?
So when Pam came back, clapping the dust from her hands, and announced that the gas was indeed off, Verity helped her set up the propane camp stove.
“I’m going in to town,” Pam said, after they’d finished eating and cleaning the breakfast dishes. “We need more food and propane and a few other things. Who wants to come?”
The town lay at the foot of the long, unnecessarily winding road, and Verity and her family had passed through it on their way to Camp So-and So. There was a drugstore there and a hot-dog stand and mini-golf and air conditioning and no mosquitos and a change of scenery, and yet, no one volunteered to go.
“Come on,” Pam said. “I’ll buy you ice cream.”
“But we just got here,” Addison said.
Pam looked over her shoulder, then to the corners of the room, then peeked her head out the kitchen doors into the dining hall, and finally, went out back and checked the woodpile and the shed. When she was certain they were alone (but wrongly so), she returned to the kitchen and said, “I just want you girls to have a nice time at camp. Canoeing, sleeping out under the stars, s’mores, stuff like that.”
“We are having a nice time,” Alix said.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Pam said. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to town?”
“We’re sure,” said Amber.
“This might be your only chance to go.”
“We don’t mind,” Annika said.
“What I’m saying is—” Pam leaned in and lowered her voice. “This might be the only chance you get. Do you know what I mean?”
There was a pleading tone in her voice that made Verity suspect she was offering more than just a trip to town. Maybe that’s what had happened to the girls from the other cabins. They’d sensed the wrongness of it all and fled the first chance they got. But they didn’t have such strong, compelling, unsupervised reasons to stay at Camp So-and-So as did the girls from Cabin 4.
“It’ll be fun,” Pam insisted.
“No, thanks,” Verity said. “I think we’d rather stay here.”
Pam shook her head and left them to the breakfast dishes and straightening up, and by the time they’d finished, they heard the sound of wheels coming down the dirt road. They cut through the dining hall and went out onto the front porch to see Pam sitting behind the wheel of a 1989 Toyota 4Runner, windows rolled down, engine sputtering.
“Last chance,” she said, beckoning them toward the truck. “Plenty of room for everyone in the back.”
For half a second, Verity considered taking Pam up on her offer. All she had to do was get in the truck and things would be normal again.
But then she thought about Isis Archimedes. She thought about saying good-bye to the beautiful girl before they’d even met, and Verity found she couldn’t.
Pam waited a moment, and when no one hopped into the back of the truck, she lifted her hand and gave them a cheerless wave.
“Well, bye then,” she said. “Be careful. Don’t wander off. Watch out for each other. Take care of each other.”
It seemed like an overly serious thing to say, considering she was only going to be gone for a couple of hours, but they promised Pam that they would, waved good-bye to her, and watched the truck until it disappeared around a bend.
A Note from the Narrator: At this point, Pam leaves our story. What happens to her is not important, unless you are Pam. If you were, you might be interested to know that you were driving a truck that had recently been rigged to explode and hastily patched up by a crew of stagehands with a very long list of other thi
ngs to attend to. You would be interested to know about the trail of brake fluid leaking from the Toyota 4Runner’s undercarriage. You would drive more carefully, especially down a long, unnecessarily winding road.
Back at the cabin, while Amber gave Annika a manicure, Alix went through the clothes in Verity’s suitcase, tossing everything to one side except for a too-tight black tank top that Verity had only packed because she didn’t care if it got ruined in a cave or torn while rock climbing.
“This might work,” Alix said, burrowing through her own wardrobe until she came up with a pair of drapey pants made out of a soft, silky fabric.
“Cute,” Amber said, looking up from Annika’s nails.
Verity dressed in the clothes Alix had chosen for her, feeling silly about it until she saw the girls’ approving nods. She took the rubber band out of her hair and ran her fingers through it. As the ends of her hair brushed her bare shoulders, she felt a shiver pass up and down her arms. She felt confident. She felt excited. She felt cute.
Until she looked at Addison, who had been resting on her cot while the rest of them primped, and was looking worse than ever. She was soaked in sweat and burning with fever, and her eyes seemed to have sunken in her face.
At least, at first.
Addison reached into the pocket of her shorts, took out the white button again, and squeezed it in the palm of her hand. Again, the change was immediate. The sweat evaporated from her skin, and the curl returned to her hair, and the pits faded from beneath her eyes, and she smiled.
“Are you okay?” Verity asked.
“Of course I am,” Addison said.
Her eyes were glassy and her cheeks looked unnaturally flushed.
“Maybe we should go another time,” Verity said, “when you feel better.”
Addison leapt up from her cot, listed slightly, then sat back down.
“I’m just dehydrated or something,” she said.
“I’ll get you some water,” Verity said. “Maybe some aspirin, too, if I can find it.”
She had pulled back the tarp that covered the doorway when Annika got up and said, to Verity’s surprise, “I’ll go with you.”