by Mary McCoy
Gone were the scraps of t-shirt sleeves they’d used to staunch Shea’s bleeding the previous night, and in their place were fresh strips of gauze, expertly applied. She looked better, too, and Wallis noticed that she and the other girls were all carrying bottles of water. Hennie had a package of granola bars sticking out of her shorts pocket.
“Where’d you get all that stuff?” Wallis asked.
It was then that another party of girls rounded the bend in the trail. One was tall and spindly with dark bangs that covered her eyes. She was pushing a wheelbarrow that held a girl with a prominent upturned nose and the limp body of a girl wearing an orange hoodie. Behind them walked a girl with a fearsome puncture wound on her leg and more freckles than Wallis had ever seen on a person. The girl with thousands of freckles carried a raven on her shoulder.
Shea pointed down the trail to these new girls. “FROM THEM. THEY’RE FROM CABIN 3, AND WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM.”
There were only four of them, Wallis noticed. Was the fifth girl in Cabin 3 dead? Was she still out there?
The trail was getting crowded now, and though Hennie and Becca still hung back, suspicious of Wallis, and Corinne didn’t even bother hiding her resentment, the girls from Cabin 3 were eager to regale her with stories of their quest. At first, Wallis was skeptical that anything they’d faced could be worse than Abigail, but when she heard about the spider-snake monster and the murderous horse that had tried to drown them in the lake, she was forced to admit that, far-fetched as those terrors sounded, at least they were real.
The girl with thousands of freckles had the fang marks in her leg to prove it, though the contents of the kelpie’s vial had stopped the venom from killing her. The girl in the orange hoodie had been magically transported into the body of a raven, leaving her human body an empty shell. Wallis’s own troubles seemed almost mundane compared with that.
The raven’s name was Renata, and she caught Wallis up on what she’d already told the others. She told her about the quest, about the fate of Cabin 5, and about what she’d learned from Robin—how they were all actors in the middle of some woodland theatrical production.
So they knew about it too, Wallis thought, but before she could chime in to compare notes, Renata began to talk about some kind of prophecy.
All the girls from Cabin 3 could recite it by heart, and did. Even knowing what they knew, all four of the girls seemed to take it very seriously, which Wallis thought was odd. Most of it sounded like nonsense to her, except for one part that made her ears prick up:
First you must find the beast inside its lair
And then set free the one imprisoned there.
If the girls from Cabin 3 had already dispatched the beast, Wallis had a theory about the next line.
“I think I know who you’re supposed to set free,” she said.
“You do?” asked the girl with thousands of freckles.
“Eurydice Horne, author of the Isis Archimedes series, is chained to a bench in the cave. The same people who are putting on this ‘play’ are holding her prisoner there. She’s the narrator,” Wallis said, then added, when she saw the wary looks the girls were exchanging, “If you want, I can show you.”
The girls from Cabin 3 muttered amongst themselves, but it was Corinne who spoke up first.
“Why would we follow you anywhere?” she asked. “Are you going to abandon us in the cave, too?”
Wallis shoved her hands into the pockets of her overall shorts and looked at the tops of her shoes. It was clear that the girls from Cabin 3 were torn. Wallis could tell how badly they wanted to see what was inside the cave, but knew they also didn’t want to risk alienating their new allies by appearing to take Wallis’s side.
Finally, the sticklike goth girl could bear it no longer.
“I’m going,” she said, bold at first, but careful to avoid eye contact with Corinne.
“I’m going, too,” said the girl with thousands of freckles, who’d thought her quest was over once before and wasn’t about to let the chance slip away again.
“I THINK WE SHOULD ALL STICK TOGETHER,” Shea said.
At last, Corinne relented.
“Fine, then I’m coming, too,” she said.
As they made their way back to the cave, Wallis broke the hard truth about Abigail to them. After hearing everything that happened to Cabin 3, it was easier than it might have been to tell them. Still, she could tell it was little consolation for them to learn that the danger had been real even if Abigail wasn’t. Fleeing into the night with a psycho killer on your heels was one thing. It was as familiar as apple pie and televised football. But finding out you’d been pursued through the woods, driven half-mad with fear by a crew of stagehands? It was hard to know what to do with that.
While the information sank in, Wallis quickened her pace and fell in step with Corinne, who was leading the way. She knew an apology was unlikely to make a difference, and yet, she needed to do it anyway.
“I’m sorry I ran,” she said.
Corinne pressed her lips together tightly and said nothing.
“You kept them all alive, Corinne,” she added, admiring the girl for her cool head, her sheer nerve. “I wanted to say thank you.”
“For what?” Corinne said, looking her in the eye at last.
“For being braver than I was,” Wallis said. “I know I messed up, and I hope that someday I can make it up to you.”
“We’re on the same side. You don’t need to make anything up to me,” Corinne said unexpectedly. “Whoever did this to us, though, I’d like to even the score with them.”
Wallis felt the twisting guilt in her chest loosen its hold. If the rift between her and Corinne was not fully mended, it was at least patched.
When they reached the cave, Wallis took the lead. Wheelbarrow and all, the nine of them wound through passageways into the heart of the cave and, finally, into the chamber that held the thousands of mirrors and, of course, Eurydice Horne.
The sticklike goth girl pushed the wheelbarrow, and the girl with thousands of freckles held the raven on her shoulder. They rushed toward Eurydice Horne with their hatchets drawn, causing the author to shriek and hold her hands up to her face.
“Don’t worry,” said the sticklike goth girl. “We’re here to free you.”
Eurydice Horne did not seem to appreciate their efforts, however. She would not uncover her face. She would not look at them. She had been almost entirely alone for the past twelve years, this cave the only home she’d known, and suddenly, it was full of overwhelming girls, very loud, very insistent on changing things.
“Wait,” said the girl with the upturned nose, whose seat in the wheelbarrow gave her a better vantage point. “You don’t need the hatchets.”
The girl with the upturned nose reached out and pulled the chains off of Eurydice Horne. Every movement was agony for her with her torn flesh and broken leg, but she gritted her teeth and did it anyway. Link by link, the chain tumbled to the floor. Eurydice Horne’s hands dropped from her face as the girls from Cabin 3 stared at her, puzzled.
“These chains aren’t attached to anything,” said the girl with thousands of freckles.
A Note from the Narrator: If I wanted to drape my body in chains and hide in a cave for twelve years, that was my business, wasn’t it? But before I could open my mouth to explain, five more girls burst into my chamber.
Each one of their faces was streaked with sweat and ash. Their hair was singed; their clothes reeked of smoke.
Wallis stepped forward, stuck out her hand to one of the girls, and shook it.
“Cabin 5, I presume?” she asked.
The singed-haired girl looked a little taken aback, but nodded.
“You’re not dead!” cheered Renata, who’d last seen Cabin 5 a smoldering ruin.
“How did you know it was us?” asked one of the girls, wiping soot from her face with a bandanna.
Wallis pointed to a mirror on which she saw an empty tunnel about eight f
eet in diameter.
“I saw you coming through there a few minutes ago,” she said.
“But how did you know where they came from? And how did you know they were going to end up here?” Corinne asked.
Wallis looked to Eurydice Horne for help as she fumbled with her explanation, but the author said nothing.
“It’s something about the way the mirrors are connected,” Wallis explained. “It’s like they talk to each other, and if you look at them closely enough, they tell you where to look next.”
“What else do you see?” Corinne asked, looking up at the part of the ceiling that Wallis was studying. Like the rest of them, Corinne only saw her reflection.
Wallis pointed to one mirror, and told them about the All-Camp Sport & Follies and the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp. She pointed to another and told them about the imprisoned soul mates. She told them how the remains of Cabin 5 still smoldered and smoked and that no one had come to clean up despite Robin’s threats.
A Note from the Narrator: Some of the girls looked angry as they listened, some looked like they might cry, and a few looked as though they might like to take a swing at me.
But not Wallis.
I think that Wallis understood my position better than anyone. Wallis knew that even if you were a victim, a prisoner, or a sacrifice, you could still make terrible mistakes. You could fail to act. You could fail to do enough.
But that is where the similarities between us ended.
“This room would make a great battle station,” Wallis said, studying the tangle of mirrors and stories. “I can see where they are, where they’re going, which parts are undefended.”
“We can set traps of our own,” said the sticklike goth girl.
“And make sure the others are safe,” Renata added.
“We can make them pay for what they did to us,” Corinne said, setting her jaw.
“And when that’s done, we make for the theater,” Wallis said. “All the other cabins are starting to head that way. I can see it on the mirrors. We join forces, and together, we finish this.”
“We’ll need walkie-talkies,” said the sticklike goth girl, frowning. “Otherwise, I’m not sure how it can work.”
Wallis went quiet for a minute as she considered this.
“Can you find us a couple of those stagehands, Wallis?” Renata asked as she flew around the chamber, scanning the screens. “Preferably some who don’t look so spry.”
Wallis grasped the implications, and a slow smile spread across her face. She pointed to a screen that showed two stagehands napping in the rocks near the mouth of the cave.
“Corinne, would you like to do the honors?” she asked.
A Note from the Narrator: Wallis would have made a spectacular narrator, I am sure, but as I have pointed out, Wallis and I are different. She gathered together all these stray girls and led their charge, and I stayed behind to narrate and buy them some time.
That’s what I told them, anyway, and it’s half true. The other half is that I couldn’t quite give up that old need of mine to see what happened next—to see everything that happened next. It’s not a nice need. It’s not a healthy one. It’s the kind of need that keeps you trapped in a cave for twelve years.
When I first found I could pick out the stories on the screens, I was intoxicated by it, and I still am. But Wallis could look even deeper. She could see right away what I had not yet learned.
That this was a story that needed to be ended forever.
CABIN 3
THE HERO’S QUEST
[SCENE: After parting ways with the rest of her cabin, THE GIRL WITH BEADS IN HER HAIR casts her lot with ROBIN in the hopes of finishing their quest. However, while crossing the clearing, she feels the ground begin to give way beneath her.]
One of her legs plunged into the earth, and the other skidded after it into the hole. She reached out frantically, digging her fingertips into the crumbling dirt. Below, she could feel her legs dangling into nothing. She kicked out to the side, looking for a foothold, but could find nothing solid. Her arms wouldn’t hold her for much longer.
“Help!” she called out to Robin, wondering how the two of them could have missed a hole of this size in the middle of the clearing. It had been covered over by a cluster of blackened brambles, but still, the girl with beads in her hair felt as though she ought to have noticed.
Robin came running over, her face flooded with relief.
“Of course!” she said. She reached out to the girl with beads in her hair and took hold of her arms. Instead of pulling her to safety, though, she said, “Meet you at the bottom,” and let go.
It wasn’t a long drop, and the shock barely had time to register before the girl with beads in her hair landed with a thump and a grunt.
“Get out of the way,” came Robin’s voice from the top of the hole. “I’m coming down.”
The girl with beads in her hair pulled a flashlight from her backpack and turned it on. She wasn’t standing in the bottom of a hole at all. The hole she’d fallen into seemed to have punched through the ceiling of an enormous tunnel. She scooted off to the side just in time to see Robin fall through the hole and land on the dirt floor of the tunnel, graceful and sure-footed as a deer.
“Are you okay?” Robin asked. The girl with beads in her hair glowered at her, understandably cross after having been dropped into a pit without warning. She shone her flashlight in one direction down the passageway, then in the other. It continued farther than her beam in both directions, and aside from her and Robin, it was deserted.
“Is this where Cabin 5 ended up?” she asked.
“They must have dug the hole, then jumped in once they hit the tunnel,” Robin said. “I thought it was strange that there weren’t any bones up top.”
“Are we going after them?”
“Why would we?” Robin asked. “They’re fine. What do they need with us?”
The girl with beads in her hair shone her flashlight down the passageways again, then up the sides. The tunnel was perfectly round, like it had been made by a machine, but the girl could see no beams, joists, or supports keeping the earth above from crashing down on their heads.
“Then where are we going?”
“Across the lake,” Robin said. “Corporate headquarters, if you will.”
The girl with beads in her hair wondered what her role in this was to be. Was she just fooling herself into thinking that tagging along on this errand would somehow help the others?
One soul among you must hold it at bay, she thought, repeating it to herself a few more times as she followed along behind Robin.
“What did you mean when you said you had a mutiny on your hands?’” asked the girl with beads in her hair, thinking back to what Robin had said at Cabin 5.
With each step, Robin seemed to quicken her pace, and she sounded almost winded when she answered.
“Ordinarily, if something like what happened at Cabin 5 happened, a whole crew of my stagehands would have been there on the double. The fire would have been out before it started. Even more, it never should have happened in the first place. Those girls didn’t have binoculars when I searched their bags on the first day.”
“Is there a chance you just missed them?” asked the girl with beads in her hair.
Robin looked over her shoulder and gave her an icy look.
“No. There is not a chance I ‘just missed’ them,” she said. “And I didn’t ‘just miss’ the pocket watch that the girl from Cabin 1 smuggled in either, and I definitely didn’t ‘just miss’ the explosives wired to the gas tank of the truck.”
The girl with beads in her hair had no idea what she was talking about, but the way Robin talked about things like it had all just been some sort of glitch made her blood boil.
“It’s still wrong,” said the girl with beads in her hair. “Even though you didn’t kill anyone.”
“No one important anyway,” Robin muttered, but the girl with beads in her hair did n
ot hear her.
“Don’t you see that you can’t just do this to people?” she asked.
Robin stopped, looking genuinely puzzled.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not puppets. We’re not toys.”
Robin’s face was impassive and unmoved. The girl with beads in her hair sighed as she realized that this line of reasoning was getting her nowhere.
“Because someday, we might try to fight back,” said the girl with beads in her hair, trying again.
Robin shrugged. “You’d lose.”
The girl with beads in her hair shook her head.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not if you don’t know where all of us are. Not if your plans can be undone by a pocket watch or a pair of binoculars. Not if your underlings won’t even pick up their walkie-talkies when you call.”
Robin gasped.
“You’re right,” she said, and without further explanation, she broke into a sprint down the tunnel.
The girl with beads in her hair raced after her.
“Right about what?” she asked, panting.
“Now I know what she’s up to,” Robin said, grinning triumphantly. “Divide and conquer. She’s never liked me. This is her chance to put someone else in charge. She’ll use everything that went wrong this summer as an excuse to have me replaced.”
The girl with beads in her hair didn’t understand a word Robin had said, other than that there seemed to be someone else involved, someone Robin reported to, and as they continued along the tunnel (they were underneath Lake So-and-So by then, only ten minutes on foot from the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp), she worried whether she’d made the right choice in following the counselor-in-training. It seemed less and less likely that she’d be able to do anything to protect the other campers from Camp So-and-So from where she stood.
The whole time they ran, Robin muttered things under her breath about someone named Tania. How Tania was a diva, Tania was selfish. How Tania was irresponsible enough as it was, but that all of this marked a new low.
The girl with beads in her hair wondered: would it be worse if Robin were leading her somewhere actually dangerous, or if it turned out she was just tagging along to watch someone have a fight with her boss?