by Mary McCoy
The applause began to fade and turned to grumbling as the rest of Cabin 1 failed to materialize.
Cressida took a deep breath, and when her pulse had steadied itself, she spoke:
“That’s not true,” she said, then looked down at the spot in the front row where Tania sat grimacing like the wicked queen in a fairy tale. “We are not friends. Not after what you did to us. Not after what you did to Kadie’s memory. Not after what you did to Erin.
“So, let us go now. Let all of us go, and promise not to do it again.”
Tania wrinkled her nose in displeasure.
A Note from the Narrator: This happened every now and again. A few of the campers would figure out what was happening to them. They always got so angry, so self-righteous, but humans were so easily distractible. It had never taken much effort for Tania to nudge their brains back into line. Still, she hated it when they figured things out. They always broke character.
“Or what?” Tania stood up and folded her arms across her chest.
“Or we’ll make you sorry.”
For a moment, Tania was silent. Her lips quivered, then split apart in an ugly smile, and she burst out laughing.
“You’ll make me sorry?”
She sat down, clutching the arm of the chair to hold herself upright while she shook with laughter, tears streaming down her cheeks.
They’d agreed to try diplomacy first—it would be less messy for everyone if it worked. Still, Cressida had known that it was a long shot.
“Now!” she called out, lifting her voice to the rafters of the theater.
From the catwalk above the stage, Dora tossed her grandfather’s pocket watch out into the audience where it landed in the lap of a still-cackling Tania.
Just crossing the path of the pocket watch on the steeplechase course had been enough to make Tania fall off her horse, and afterward, she’d had to lean on a fencepost to hold herself upright. They’d hoped direct contact would yield more drastic results, and they were not disappointed.
The change came over her at once. All the color drained from her face, and all the youth and beauty as well, leaving her gaunt and haggard, a creature who looked centuries old, not eternally seventeen. With enormous effort, she lifted the pocket watch from her lap and flung it onto the stage. The recovery began the moment the watch left her hand, but it did not happen at once. The rest of the audience sat stunned and motionless as they watched Tania gasp for breath as the color came back into her cheeks. Nobody made the slightest move to help her.
Now was the perfect moment for the next phase of their plan. From her perch on the catwalk, Dora tugged the ropes that she’d spent the afternoon rigging for this very moment. At once, the ceiling of the theater seemed to open up, and a shower of straw and compost and horse dung rained down on the first two rows.
Over the course of the afternoon, Kadie, Cressida, and Dora had spent fifteen minutes planning and rehearsing the number they would perform. The rest of the time they spent wheeling cartload after cartload from the Inge F. Yancey stables and compost piles, hefting them up to the tarps Dora had hidden in the rafters.
And now the fruits of their smelly labor were beginning to pay off.
The Inge F. Yancey campers in the front of the theater leapt from their seats and ran down the aisles, skidding on clods of greenish-brown manure as they fled. When they reached the back, they pulled on the doors to the lobby, only to find them bolted shut.
Cressida breathed a sigh of relief—she’d bought Kadie enough time to lock the doors and trap them all in here.
A loud panic erupted and spread row by row through the theater until everyone there was on their feet, climbing over the backs of chairs, running for the emergency exits, slipping in piles of horse dung.
Clumps of it stuck in Tania’s hair and soiled her white sundress. She howled and dragged herself toward the stage. She was still weak, but her fingernails sank into the stage like the claws of a mountain lion, and she hefted herself onto the boards.
Then Cressida’s relief curdled as she realized that their plan had worked—the problem was, there wasn’t enough of it. They’d thrown everything they had at Tania and her minions, and all it had done was make them angry. She hadn’t counted on Erin being here, much less the girls from Cabin 4 and their soul mates. So many people were in danger because she, Kadie, and Cressida had hatched this sticky, smelly, underdone plan.
The only thing she could do now was take advantage of the confusion and panic to slip all of the humans out the back. They’d lock the door behind them, row across Lake So-and-So in stolen boats, and when they made land, they’d run down the long, unnecessarily winding road, and they wouldn’t stop until they found a proper human adult.
“We left the back door open for ourselves,” Cressida whispered to Erin and Verity, pointing backstage. “Take your friends, and I’ll catch up with you.”
They ran, pulling the other girls from Cabin 4 and their soul mates along behind them, and they disappeared backstage. Cressida turned around just in time to see Tania advancing on her. She dropped to her knees and rolled off the stage as Tania delivered a punch that would have struck her in the face had she been at full strength. Still wobbly on her feet, though, Tania missed and went stumbling across the stage.
Without looking back, Cressida crawled through the orchestra pit to the front corner of the darkened theater, where she found Dora with Vivian and Kimber. The unassuming girl had made her way down from the rafters, crept out into the audience, found the two, and dragged them from their seats. Now, she had each one by the elbow.
“Are they okay?” Cressida asked. Back in the garden, Vivian and Kimber had been starry-eyed and giggling at the attention from Tania’s minions, but now they looked as though they’d just woken up from bad dreams.
“I think so,” Dora said. “They’re a little rattled, but I’m not sure that anything actually happened to them.”
“Get them out of here,” Cressida whispered to her. “We’ll meet at the docks.”
“What about Kadie?” Dora whispered back.
“I’ll find her. I’ll make sure she gets out,” Cressida said.
“We’ll wait for you.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Cressida said. “If we’re not out in ten minutes, start rowing across the lake without us.”
In the dark, Dora caught her hand and gave it a squeeze.
“We’re not going anywhere without you.”
Cressida squeezed Dora’s hand back. She’d held them together, been quietly brave and resourceful and clever, not at all the spineless sap Cressida had taken her for at first. She found herself wishing she’d been nicer to Dora from the beginning.
The moment she let go, Dora was gone, and Cressida found herself alone in the dim theater packed with screaming, dung-covered minions. They crowded near the doors and shoved at each other, their curses filling the air.
Only the three All-Camp Sport & Follies judges acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had just unfolded. They sat in their seats in the front row, covered in straw and manure, quietly scribbling notes on their scoresheets.
There was no sign of Kadie. Cressida ducked down low and inched her way toward the back of the theater to avoid being noticed. When one of Tania’s minions looked in her direction, she dived behind a marble bust in a recess. She began to despair of finding her friend, of escaping the theater, of ever leaving the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp, and then she heard Kadie’s voice in her ear.
“Where are the others?” Kadie asked. She’d huddled behind the marble bust as soon as the chaos broke out and had been waiting there until she could work up enough nerve to make a run for it.
“They got out,” Cressida whispered, not knowing whether this was true or not. “I came back to look for you.”
Kadie grumbled as they started inching back toward the stage, but Cressida could tell she was glad not to be the only human trapped in this theater with Tania and the rest of them.
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br /> They had just reached the stage and scrambled onto it when the locked double doors to the entrance of the theater began to rattle. There came a terrible sound of fingernails scraping against wood, then a clatter on the marble floor, and then the doors flew open, but in the dark, they all heard her before they saw her:
Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver and the other’s gold.
They craned their necks to see who was doing the singing, squinting against the darkness until they could just make out the shape of a young woman coming down the center aisle. She was hardly more than five feet tall, and she wore cargo shorts and athletic sandals. It was Robin, the counselor-in-training. Cressida realized they hadn’t seen her since the first event of the All-Camp Sport & Follies, and wondered where she’d been all that time.
Behind her walked a girl with vagabond eyes and beads in her hair.
What’s going on? Cressida thought.
All at once, every Inge F. Yancey camper froze and gaped at the center aisle, aware that they were about to see yet another showdown. They knew who Robin was, even if they looked down their noses at her. She was only the stage manager, after all; they were actors. They knew about her long-standing feud with their leader, known it would come to a head someday, but now? The timing was so bad it was almost tacky, not that they expected anything less of Robin.
If Robin was even aware of their presence, she didn’t let it show.
She began to sing again.
Make new friends, but keep the rest.
Old friends know just how to hurt you best.
In the dark, her teeth glittered like knives.
CABIN 2
KILLER IN THE WOODS
[SCENE: From her battle station in the NARRATOR’s cave, WALLIS lands upon the truth.]
One question had been nagging at Wallis ever since she sent the others out on rescue and reconnaissance missions around Camp So-and-So, and it was this: How did you do battle against a species of creatures that thought you were . . . amusing?
She and the other campers might as well have been a pod of trained seals to the true inhabitants of Camp So-and-So. Adorable, entertaining, and absolutely nothing to take seriously.
So we turn on them, Wallis had thought at first. We show them our teeth, advance on them as a pack, and teach them that we’re not so cute after all. And maybe they’ll decide we’re too much trouble. They’ll give up and let us leave.
That was the best-case scenario Wallis could think up, and it wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to escape from Camp So-and-So by the skin of her teeth, or even by wearing Tania down, and leave everything just as it was for the hapless campers who would show up next summer.
It wasn’t enough, and the more Wallis thought about it, the more certain she was that it never would be enough. Not if they burned the place to the ground. Not if they tore down every cabin, poisoned the lake, and dynamited the road. Wallis had no doubt it would all be rebuilt within a fortnight.
No, another batch of campers would have to go through the whole thing again. Only, the creatures in charge would be smarter about it next time. They’d find more docile campers and use stronger magics. They’d make sure there was never a revolt like this one again.
Until she’d found Eurydice Horne and the cave, Wallis had never seen this “they,” only the shape of the havoc they wreaked. But now she’d seen some of their faces in the screens. They didn’t look like particularly wicked faces, and Wallis began to wonder if they only acted this way because they didn’t understand the damage they did. Maybe if they knew, they’d stop.
Were they the ones who had located all the campers, researched them, mailed them letters, and offered them scholarships? Something about that didn’t feel right to Wallis.
There was something else behind this place, something petty and earthly and spiteful and human.
So when Wallis saw Inge F. Yancey IV appear on the screens a moment later, she understood.
Tania and her minions may have put the girls through these horrible paces and worked these horrible magics on them, but they did it because Inge F. Yancey IV enabled them to do so. Wallis remembered the brochure she’d received in the mail what seemed like a lifetime ago:
Welcome to Camp So-and-So! For over 75 years, the Yancey family has been proud to provide young people with opportunities for physical, mental, and social growth through independently directed study, wilderness activities, and cultural enrichment . . .
Maybe some version of this had been happening since the days of Inge F. Yancey IV’s father, when Eurydice had been invited to the camp.
And now, Inge F. Yancey IV was here, and Wallis didn’t know why, but she knew that he was not on their side, that he was not there to help them.
He walked through the rose garden and past the stable, stopping outside the theater. Wallis saw him open his suitcoat and reach in, giving something at his side two soft pats before buttoning the coat back up and smoothing the front, straightening the French cuffs on his dress shirt. Wallis did not get a good look, but she saw a quick glint inside the coat, and that was enough to make her pick up the walkie-talkie.
She took a deep breath before pressing the button. She didn’t want to have panic in her voice when she spoke to Corinne and the others, who were heading through the tunnel under Lake So-and-So. Wallis found them on the screens. They were just coming out of the windmill.
“Turn around,” Wallis said. “Come back to the cave now. Whatever you do, don’t go into the theater.”
But when they had entered the tunnel, Corinne had turned the walkie-talkie off so no sudden beeps and hisses of static would alert anyone to their presence. So nobody heard Wallis’s warning, and all she could do was watch on the screens as they marched toward the theater, into the worst kind of danger.
CABIN 3
THE HERO’S QUEST
[SCENE: ROBIN makes her grand entrance and prepares to confront TANIA. The others having fled to the wings, THE GIRL WITH BEADS IN HER HAIR is the only human left in the theater.]
Robin stood in the center aisle, every eye on her as she sang, every face in the room stunned by her audacity. However, it didn’t last.
The moment she had finished singing, Tania cocked her head to the side and regarded Robin with a cool smile.
“Old friends?” Tania asked, tossing her hair over one shoulder. Covered in filth and at less than her full strength, she was still imperious-looking. “I suppose I’ve never thought of us that way. I suppose I’ve never thought of us as friends at all.”
Even in the dark, the girl with beads in her hair could see that Tania’s words had struck their mark. Still, Robin recovered quickly, swallowing and setting her jaw. She sauntered the rest of the way down the aisle, shooting filthy looks at everyone she passed in the audience.
“Maybe not,” she said, surveying the filth flooding the aisles and Tania’s dung-smeared sundress, “but look what happens when I’m not around.”
Tania looked down at her dress, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, I bet you’re loving this. Acting like this is your show, like the whole thing would just fall apart without you.”
Robin’s resolve crumbled a little more. Well aware she’d find no support among the audience, she turned toward the girl with beads in her hair.
For her part, the girl with beads in her hair was surprised to find herself giving Robin a nod of encouragement. It wasn’t that she considered Robin an ally exactly, but in this room, without another fellow camper in sight, Robin might have been the best thing she had.
“You’re always undermining me,” Robin said, vaulting one-handed onto the stage and landing nimbly on her feet. “You’ve never appreciated what I do. Cleaning up your messes, fixing all the damage you do.”
Tania did not take kindly to criticism on the best of days, and certainly not on a day when she’d been bucked from a horse, showered with manure, and attacked with an item made of dreaded steel. She crossed the stage and snatched Robin b
y the wrist, gripping it so tightly that Robin winced in pain.
“First the singing, now this,” she muttered, then added loudly enough for the whole theater to hear, “You’re crew, Robin. Theatrics don’t become you.”
“Theatrics?” Robin said. Her wrist turned purple, then white, in Tania’s grip, and her eyes filled up with tears. “You’re lucky you didn’t kill half of the campers trying to bring me down a peg or whatever it was you were trying to do.”
Every creature in the audience sat perfectly still, perfectly quiet, their eyes fixed on Tania and Robin, waiting to see what would happen next. The girl with beads in her hair would not have been surprised if they’d started munching popcorn.
“First, you try to sabotage my camp,” Tania hissed, “make me look like a fool, and then you have the nerve to whine that I’m undermining you?”
As Tania spoke, little flecks of spit hit Robin’s cheek and glistened under the stage lights. Her anger was violent, dangerous, but for all that, the girl with beads in her hair saw that it was controlled, too.
“And now you’re all by yourself,” Tania said with a malicious grin as she squeezed Robin’s wrist tighter. “I guess your stagehands aren’t as loyal to you as you thought.”
The confusion registered on Robin’s face even through her pain.
“The truck, the pocket watch, the fire, you think I did those things to sabotage you?” Robin asked.
Tania seethed. “I know that you did.” Tania kept looking out into the audience as she spoke, like she was trying to gauge the reaction her words had on the audience. “This is what happens when you cross me, Robin.”
Suddenly Robin screamed as Tania crushed her wrist bones to powder. An ordinary person would have been capsized by the pain, but Robin retaliated.
“I never crossed you!” she snapped.
Then, gripping her walkie-talkie in her free hand, she clobbered Tania in the face. Tania staggered backwards, never letting go of Robin’s shattered wrist. Once she’d recovered her balance, she gave Robin’s injured arm a sharp tug and dislocated her shoulder from its socket. Robin’s head snapped back and she let out a howl of pain that echoed off the rafters.