Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

“So you’re saying it was supposed to be special for me?”

  “I’m saying it would be very, very sad if you were terminating this long and mutually beneficial partnership, putting innocent people at risk, jeopardizing everything your family name stands for, just because you’d been holding a grudge for twelve years.”

  As Inge F. Yancey’s jaw tightened and the tips of his ears turned red, Tania clapped a hand to her mouth.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s exactly why you’re doing it.”

  “I always swore I’d shut this place down if I ever had the chance.”

  Her hand still outstretched, Tania took another step toward Inge F. Yancey.

  “I’m sorry, Inge,” she said, “sorry we hurt you in any way.”

  As Tania reached out to touch the sleeve of his coat, the girl with beads in her hair saw Inge F. Yancey’s flinch, saw his eyes flicker toward the pistol in his hand and set his intention. Before reason got the better of her, before Robin could reach out and catch her by the heel, the girl with beads in her hair sprang up from the stage and took a running leap toward the two of them.

  Inge F. Yancey had flinched away from Tania’s touch when the girl stood up, had just drawn the pistol when her feet left the ground. The first shot, which had been meant to strike Tania in the heart, instead grazed the outstretched fingers of the girl with beads in her hair. The second flew wild, as the girl with beads in her hair threw an elbow into Inge F. Yancey’s stomach, causing him to misfire. The musket ball burrowed a hole through the velvet curtains before lodging in the wall.

  It was an incredibly brave and incredibly risky thing to do. The girl with beads in her hair intervened on behalf of someone who was not even on her side, but she had made her choice.

  In evil times when darkness threatens day . . .

  It wasn’t even a difficult decision. She knew this much, and it was the only thing she needed to know: Inge F. Yancey was holding a gun and Tania wasn’t.

  She landed and rolled into a crouch, then stood up. When she looked down at her hand, the girl with beads in her hair saw that the musket ball had blown off the tip of her right index finger. It was gruesome, but not terribly serious if she could staunch the bleeding. More serious at that moment was the question of how many shots Inge F. Yancey had left in his pistol, and if any of his minions had come to his aid.

  “What have you done?” she heard Robin whisper from the center of the stage.

  When she spun around to look at her, the girl with beads in her hair staggered backwards and fell down. Panic flooded her as she struggled to sit up, but her body would not respond, would not do what she wanted it to do. She looked down at her hand again, and saw that her finger was no longer bloody.

  It had turned to stone.

  Of course, Inge F. Yancey wouldn’t have used an ordinary musket ball against Tania and Robin. She should have known it. She should have expected the danger. The stone spread down her hand and started up her arm. Fingers of it began to spread along her throat. The girl with beads in her hair choked out a cry for help, but no one was there to help her.

  She thought about the last part of the prophecy, the part she hadn’t thought of once, not since the first time she read it.

  This quest is not a summer’s game.

  It is not safe, it is not tame.

  Consider this before you pack—

  Some of you may not come back.

  She was not coming back. She felt it in her heart, and she knew that it was true.

  She tried not to cry. She kept her eyes open.

  Even if this was how it ended, she didn’t want to miss it.

  It was her life, after all.

  She’d been proud of it.

  CABIN 5

  SURVIVAL

  [SCENE: The girls from Cabin 5 burst in through the back door of the theater, with Cabins 2 and 3 following on their heels.]

  They came through the door just as the shots rang out. Even if Wallis’s warning had gotten through, nothing could have prepared them for the sight of the girl with beads in her hair. Even from a distance, they could see the confusion in her eyes as her legs gave way beneath her and she tumbled to the ground, holding her wounded hand aloft. One second it was covered in blood; the next, it was stone.

  “Stop it.”

  It was only when they heard the powerful baritone voice that they turned their attention to Inge F. Yancey IV. He stood on the stage surrounded by a half dozen of the stagehands, all of them dressed entirely in black. It was to them he turned after he’d shot the girl from Cabin 3.

  The stagehand who stood to his right, a young man with a shock of wavy black hair and unsettlingly white teeth, shrugged.

  “I can’t,” he said. The rest of the stagehands sent up a murmur of agreement.

  Inge F. Yancey IV set the pistol down on the stage and backed away from it, as though that could erase what he’d done. He looked to Tania as the stone spread up the girl’s arm.

  “Make it stop,” he said.

  “There isn’t anything that can make it stop,” Tania said.

  The members of the audience who had come for the All-Camp Sport & Follies got up and quietly filed out of the theater. They had come for music and drama, for kissing and fight scenes. They had come to be entertained. But a dying girl? This was the time to slip out discreetly, to hide in the woods for a few days, the way they generally did when something messy happened to one of the humans.

  The girls from Cabin 5 waited no longer. They ran down the center aisle of the theater and vaulted onto the stage with purpose. They surrounded the girl with beads in her hair and knelt by her side. One of them picked up her good hand and squeezed it. Another patted her shoulder. The rest spoke soothing words to her as the stone snaked down her side and up her neck. They avoided one another’s eyes as they told the girl lies, like “It’s not so bad” and “Everything is going to be all right.”

  They were girls who had battled the elements and stayed alive on sheer nerve.

  They were girls who faced fire, burrowed through the earth, and came out in one piece on the other side.

  They had rescued a camp counselor from the brink of death with nothing but a rope and a hook and the strength of their arms.

  They had found out the truth, taken a stand, and fought to make things right again.

  They did all of those things.

  But there was nothing they could do about this.

  CABIN 3

  THE HERO’S QUEST

  [SCENE: Behind Cabin 5, the girls from Cabin 3 stream into the theater.]

  There was no blood, but right away, they knew something was terribly wrong. The sticklike goth girl and the girl with thousands of freckles burst into the theater and ran toward the stage, but Renata flew ahead of them both. She flapped her wings so hard they ached, but when she reached the stage, a voice called out and stopped her like a tether.

  “Renata,” it said.

  She looked down and saw Robin, the counselor-in-training, lying on her back on the stage. Her lips were cracked and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. Her arms and legs were sticks, all the muscle and fat leached out of them, as though she’d been suffering from a wasting illness for months rather than minutes.

  “Help me,” she called out.

  The raven was torn. What she wanted was to be at her friend’s side, to give her what comfort she could as she faced death. Renata wanted a chance to say good-bye. Robin could wait at least that long. But then a cry of pain tore loose from Robin’s throat, and Renata wondered if maybe she couldn’t wait after all.

  Renata landed next to her head and asked, “What can I do?”

  “Your beak,” Robin gasped. “Dig out the bullet. Please.”

  Robin pointed to her leg and Renata hopped down the length of her body until she spotted the hole that had been left by Inge F. Yancey’s musket ball.

  “Please get it out,” she said.

  Renata felt ill at the prospect of performing surgery like this, but
she bent her head and placed her beak on the wound. As Robin screamed in agony, Renata closed her eyes and went to the deepest corners of her mind, to the knowledge that had been in the raven before she even got there. She imagined she was pecking a stump for a grub or burrowing at the ground to uncover something shiny. There was a clinking sound as her beak hit the musket ball. She clamped down on it, pulled it out of Robin’s leg, and spat it out. The ball rolled off the stage and landed in the orchestra pit.

  Robin looked better at once. As she sat up, the color returned to her cheeks and her eyes brightened.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Renata shrugged, then looked back over her shoulder to the spot where the girl with beads in her hair lay dying.

  “Is there anything you can do for her?” Renata asked.

  Robin looked down at her knees and let out a long sigh.

  “Seven breaths,” she said.

  Renata felt a surge of hope. “What do you mean, ‘seven breaths’?”

  “That’s how long before her lungs turn to stone.”

  Renata’s heart sank. A throng of campers surrounded the girl with beads in her hair. Some of the girls tried to make her comfortable. Some talked to her, some stood in reverent silence, and some knelt by her side weeping, but all of them knew that she was dying.

  On the first breath, Renata saw Inge F. Yancey IV s turn his back as though he’d had nothing to do with this. She felt her entire body go hot with rage, and fought the urge to go peck out his eyes.

  On the second breath, she flew across the stage and descended in the middle of the circle that had formed around the girl with beads in her hair. The stone almost covered her face now, and though her eyes were still open, there was fear in them.

  On the third breath, Renata thought about how she’d become a raven. They’d done it to her, they’d changed her, and it seemed profoundly wrong and unfair that they couldn’t change this.

  Or could they?

  Before she’d been a raven, she’d been a girl in an orange hoodie. Her imperfect, but perfectly good body, was still back at the cave. Last she’d seen it, it had been comatose, but breathing and alive. Her cabinmates had propped it up in the chamber next to Shea and the girl with the upturned nose.

  On the fourth breath, Renata said, “Don’t give up. This isn’t over. Breathe slowly.” From across the stage, Robin shook her head and said, “Her body will be stone in seconds.”

  On the fifth breath, Renata rose up on her wings and called out to Robin, “Then give her mine!”

  On the sixth breath, Robin looked puzzled and asked, “Are you sure?” and Renata said, “Of course I am.”

  Renata liked being a raven, and if she never changed back, it was a small price to pay for keeping her friend alive. Her spirit soared. There was a way out of this after all, and the girl with beads in her hair would not have to die.

  On the seventh breath, Renata drew back her head and screamed at Robin, “Do it!”

  As the girl with beads in her hair exhaled the last breath she would ever take, several things happened at once.

  Call it a spirit, call it a soul—whatever it was that made Renata herself fled the raven’s body. It traveled across Lake So-and-So, over the meadow, through the forest, into the cave, and rejoined the orange-hoodied body that lay in Eurydice Horne’s chamber.

  The raven dropped out of the air like a stone and landed motionless on the stage.

  As it did, whatever it was that made the girl with beads in her hair herself fled into the bird. Her eyes flickered open, and she staggered to her feet, cawing hysterically, one wing dragging behind her on the floor. She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t made of stone, but still, this wasn’t where she was supposed to be. This wasn’t right.

  She looked down at herself, at the girl she used to be, now a solid block of stone. Her arms were folded across her chest so that she looked like the burial effigy placed atop the tomb of some medieval queen.

  The girl she used to be was gone, she told herself, trying not to hyperventilate, but she was alive. She was here. It wasn’t over.

  She recognized some of the girls from Cabin 2 and from Cabin 5. The sticklike goth girl and the girl with thousands of freckles were still by her side.

  Of Robin, however, there was no sign. She’d abandoned them at the cave when the beast attacked, and now she’d done it again. At least this time, the girl with beads in her hair wasn’t surprised.

  There was no sign of Renata either, and the girl with beads in her hair forgot about her own considerable troubles to be afraid for her friend. When her soul had entered the raven’s body, had it crushed Renata’s? Had it pushed it out? Where was she?

  “Where’s Renata?” The girl with beads in her hair cried out urgently through her raven’s beak.

  Before anyone could answer her, Inge F. Yancey IV spoke up. While she had been dying, he had been calculating his next move, and now, it seemed, he had arrived at it.

  “Are you ready for your first assignment as employees of Yancey Corp.?” he asked the creatures dressed in black that surrounded him onstage.

  As one, they nodded.

  “Then kill these witnesses.”

  CABIN 2

  KILLER IN THE WOODS

  [SCENE: The NARRATOR’s cave]

  As it all unfolded, Wallis did not speak until the walkie-talkie in her pocket crackled to life. When Corinne’s voice came through, it was faint and staticky, but its urgency was not lost. The girls from Cabins 2, 3, and 5 had watched the girl with beads in her hair turn to stone, heard Inge F. Yancey’s directive to his minions who were once Tania’s.

  “How does it end, Wallis?” Corinne asked, her voice as close to panicked and pleading as Wallis had ever heard it. “You have to tell us how it ends.”

  Wallis’s thoughts were tangled as her eyes darted from scene to scene in the mirrors. She needed more time. Time to sift through each of the stories—the All-Camp Sport & Follies, the hero’s quest, the soul mates, the tale of wilderness survival, and of course, her own cabin’s story.

  She felt sure that somewhere in all of this, there would be something that would enable them to defeat Inge F. Yancey IV. Some nugget from the legend of Abigail or the kelpie’s riddle would stop him from carrying out his plan, and would shut down Camp So-and-So for good.

  She’d read enough stories in her life to know that this was how they worked.

  The only problem was, she didn’t know where to start looking. She’d had days of stories, but only minutes to make a decision.

  “Cabins 1 and 4 are locked in the prop room,” Wallis said. “Get them out of there. And be careful. There are stagehands guarding the doors. You’ll need to create a distraction to lure them away.”

  As Wallis barked her instructions into the walkie-talkie, she knew it wasn’t the answer Corinne was looking for, but it needed to be done, and maybe it would buy her time. By the time they’d rescued the others, maybe Wallis would know what they needed to do.

  Wallis turned to Eurydice Horne. “Tell me where to look,” she said.

  Eurydice Horne looked up at the screens sadly and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  One of the minions picked up the pistol that Inge F. Yancey IV had dropped on the stage. He pointed it at Hennie, who dove over two rows of seats and fled the theater before he could shoot. He turned and aimed at Corinne.

  “Help me!” Wallis shrieked at Eurydice Horne in frustration. She couldn’t bear to watch, but did so anyway as Corinne ran for the exit, holding the walkie-talkie in one hand and dragging Becca with the other.

  “I don’t know how to stop it. I’m not a storyteller anymore,” said Eurydice Horne. “I’m just the narrator.”

  “You were never a storyteller,” Wallis said, narrowing her eyes as she towered over Eurydice Horne, who had still not moved from her bench. “You were a quitter. If I’d had twelve years to think about it, I could have come up with at least five ways to bring Isis Archimedes back from the dead. I can think
of five ways right now. Instead, you decided to sit in a cave for almost as long as I’ve been alive, telling stories to yourself, and the instant one of those stories might be useful and save some lives, you clam up and say you don’t know where to look or what to do. So as far as I’m concerned, you’re not just a quitter; you’re a coward, too.”

  Wallis was understandably upset. She was worried about the other girls across the lake, worried she’d sent them into grave danger, and now she had no way to get them out of it. She didn’t say any of it to be cruel, but still, Shea, who had been quietly listening, touched Wallis’s arm and said, “THEY HURT HER, TOO, WALLIS.”

  Wallis jerked away from Shea and folded her arms across her chest.

  “Tell me,” said Eurydice Horne after a long silence. “How would you do it? How would you bring Isis Archimedes back from the dead?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Wallis cried, looking at Eurydice Horne in disbelief. “We don’t have time for that right now.”

  Wallis stalked from one side of the chamber to the other, looking for answers on the screens, so upset she could no longer follow anything at all.

  Eurydice Horne stood up for the first time any of them had seen. Eurydice Horne herself could not quite remember the last time it had happened. Her back hunched, her legs quaking, she crossed the room and laid her hands on Wallis’s shoulders. They looked like the hands of a much older woman, Eurydice Horne noticed, gnarled from years of clutching the seat of her bench in suspense and anticipation, waiting to see what would happen next. Eurydice Horne wondered why she’d cared so much all those years, unless it was to bring her here, to this moment, to this sentence:

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “But—”

  “You said you could think of five ways to save Isis Archimedes. What are they?”

  Wallis took a deep breath and looked into the author’s eyes.

  “One: you could reveal that someone had tampered with S’ulla’s memories so he believed that he’d killed her even though he hadn’t.