Fabulous Creature

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  James said he did, so she’d gone into the whole thing in great detail. There had been a fast, necessitating elaborate maneuvers to keep Cynthia from realizing her charges weren’t eating. And then, after having reached the valley, a ritual had been performed that would bring down a curse on anyone who planned to harm the stag. Then the kids had been stationed where he’d found them, while Griffin had gone off alone to prepare for her part in the final ceremony. The part James had witnessed had been the Purification of the High Priestess.

  “I thought it was something like that,” he said. “That was very impressive. Why don’t you leave your hair loose like that all the time?”

  “My hair?” They were walking along a narrow stretch of trail at the time, with Griffin in the lead, and he saw her hand go back to touch her hair, a single braid again hanging down the middle of her back. She stopped suddenly and turned back, looking puzzled. “Why did you say that? About my hair?”

  “Why? Because I like the way it looked. You have beautiful hair.”

  To his surprise her cheeks actually got red and her dark brows drew together in a frown that looked almost painful. Whirling around, she began to run on the rocky, treacherous trail. He watched in amazement as she ran like a frightened deer on the narrow path, the long braid whipping behind her. She slowed down finally, but for a long time she maintained the distance between them.

  Kooky kid, he thought. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but not enough to run after her on terrain like that. There were, in fact, several more things concerning Griffin that he wanted to know more about. Things like why she reacted as she did to any mention of her home life, particularly if her mother was concerned. He had some theories about it. There was obviously a lot of anger involved. One of those love-hate things, no doubt: fascinated by her gorgeous mother, and at the same time hating her for spending all her time with her jet-set friends and neglecting her family. Perhaps hating her for a lot of other reasons, too. Given some of the off-beat things he’d heard about the Westmorelands, he could imagine a lot of reasons why Griffin might resent her mother and stepfather. But most of his ideas were based on imagination, without much definite proof. It would be interesting to discuss it with Griffin and find out how many of his guesses were correct. But it wasn’t likely that he’d be able to, not while she went on freezing up at any mention of her mother. He decided however that if the opportunity arose, he would try again. And not just to satisfy his own curiosity. It would probably be a good thing for her. Get all that pent-up anger and hatred out in the open.

  It was on a Saturday morning, only one week before the Fieldings were due to leave New Moon Lake, that James arrived at the snack bar phone booth a little earlier than usual. It was the last Saturday in August, and in the town of New Moon there was to be a Farewell Festival. A farewell to the summer and all the summer tourists. There was to be a parade, all kinds of craft and game booths and even a fun house, which local craftsmen had constructed in an abandoned hardware store. Just three days earlier, when he had last seen Diane, she had said the fair sounded like fun in a corny hick-town way, and would James like to hike over with her on Saturday morning? Except for the fact that there were other more private places he’d prefer to visit with her, there was, of course, nothing he’d like better. And he said so, as far as he could remember, in perfectly straightforward, unambiguous, one syllable words. But when Diane answered the phone that morning, she did it again—pulled the same old routine about not knowing they’d made it definite.

  “Oh, we didn’t say for sure did we? I thought you said you thought it would be too corny.”

  “You were the one who said it would be corny,” he said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice until he knew for certain how things were going to turn out, because he knew from experience that one sarcastic comment and he would have blown it for sure.

  “Oh, really? Are you certain? Because the way I remember it, you said you thought the whole thing would be pretty dumb. But anyway, Jamesy, the thing is, my dad just arrived for the weekend and he wants the whole family to go to the big event together. There’s going to be some big deal ceremony that my dad has to go to. The city fathers are going to give Dad and old T.J. the keys to the city or some dumb thing like that, because of all the extra business since they built The Camp. You know, one of those, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. It gives me great honor to present…’ sort of things. It’ll be really dumb, but you know how parents are about things like that.”

  James knew, he guessed, but he wasn’t happy about it.

  “It’s going to be an absolutely petrifying bore,” Diane went on, “and besides, it’s going to be too hot to hike all that way today, anyway. So why don’t you just call me tomorrow morning and we’ll do something then. Okay? Could you maybe call me again tomorrow?”

  Glumly he agreed that maybe he could call her tomorrow. Maybe, he said, but he knew of course that there wasn’t any maybe about it. Not the ghost of a paper-thin shred of a particle of a maybe. If there was any chance at all of seeing her, he’d call, and the trouble was—she knew it.

  He hung up the phone, thought about going into the snack bar for a chat with Fiona and decided against it. He was in no mood to talk to anyone. With no definite destination in mind, he drifted across the Parade Grounds and out towards the big trees in the bivouac area. It was going to be hot, all right. Hot and bright and dry, and he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to do. Diane was gone, for the day at least; and when he thought about the valley and the deer, it occurred to him that some things were gone there, too. The secret was gone and the exclusiveness and solitude. If he’d only kept his stupid mouth shut, he could go there now and stretch out on the boulder and let the clean blue silence seep into him and wash away the fiery whirlpools that seemed to be churning around in various parts of his anatomy. But he hadn’t kept his mouth shut, and as a result he probably couldn’t stretch out anywhere in the whole valley without being stepped on by little kids, or a skinny little kook in a tee shirt toga, leading his stag around on a red ribbon.

  Realizing that he was hot, seething, boiling hot, in fact, he drifted towards the nearest tree, the big sycamore with the circular picnic table around its trunk. He climbed up onto the table and sat down, with his back against the trunk and his legs stretched out in front of him. It was somewhat cooler under the huge tent of overhanging limbs, but it didn’t seem as if his internal temperature was dropping much.

  Making an effort to get his mind off the things that were driving him up the wall, he started looking around for something to put it on instead. He watched a chubby kid in plaid shorts tearing around the soccer field on a red Motocross bicycle with knobby tires and rabbit-ear handlebars, and two typically well-groomed Camp matrons on their way to the tennis courts. Then a couple of cars approached on the road to the main gate, which crossed the bivouac area only a few yards from where he was sitting. The first car was a very slow moving station wagon with two women in the front seat and a swarm of little kids in the back—probably on their way to the New Moon Fair; and the next car, which was obviously being held to a crawl by the station wagon, was Lance Richardson’s Porsche with the top down. And sitting so close to Lance that she was practically in his lap was Diane.

  The strange thing was that it didn’t make him angry, at least not right away. He wasn’t angry, and he wasn’t hot anymore, either. In fact what he felt right at first was cold and numb and a little like something had just hit him hard in the pit of the stomach. He got down off the picnic table very slowly and carefully, as if he were afraid a jolt of any kind might fracture something that had suddenly gone thin and brittle somewhere in his interior, and started walking slowly back toward the center.

  He was passing the snack bar when he realized his throat felt strange, tight and dry, so he ordered a Dr. Pepper at the sidewalk window and sat down at one of the outdoor tables. He stayed there thinking for a long time. What he was thinking about was how it might have happened. How Diane might n
ot really have been lying to him, even though at first glance it seemed as if she had been. There were several possibilities. Perhaps, for instance, Lance had just happened to drop by the Jarretts’ just as they were all getting ready to go to the fair, and Diane had suddenly decided to ride over with him, since she had to go anyway. That seemed the best explanation, and the one he kept coming back to over and over again.

  He’d been sitting there long enough for the shade from the metal umbrella to have moved without his noticing, when somebody said, “Hey, you trying to get sunstroke or something?”

  Mike Jarrett, in swimming trunks and a beach towel, was standing beside him drinking a Coke. Putting his Coke on the table, he pulled up a chair and sat down. James moved out of the sun.

  Conversation wasn’t as difficult as he would have expected and actually was a kind of relief. They talked about the hot weather, the fact that Mike was on his way to the swimming pool, and then James brought up the subject of the fair in New Moon.

  “I hear your father’s going to be given the keys to the city or something like that,” he heard himself saying coolly. “Aren’t you going to be there to watch?”

  Mike grimaced. “I’ll be there all right, if I know what’s good for me. By special invitation of my old man. An offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Well aren’t you going to be late?”

  “Late? It doesn’t start until three-thirty this afternoon.”

  “Oh? I got the impression it was going to be earlier. Diane said she had to be there for the presentation, and I just happened to notice her leaving a little while ago.”

  Mike looked at him for quite a long time before he said anything. “You did, huh? You saw her leaving—with Lance?”

  James nodded. He felt certain his face didn’t show anything, but he wasn’t sure what his voice would be like.

  “Look, kid,” Mike said, which fortunately irked James enough to burn out whatever it was that was threatening his vocal chords. More than irked, actually. He happened to know that Mike was barely seventeen. “Look, kid. Don’t worry about that jerk and his Porsche. It won’t last. For one thing, Richardson goes through dames like a chain smoker through a pack of Kools. And he’s not really interested in Di. She’s been after him and his cars for years, and he’s always treated her like a little kid. Which really drives her crazy.” He grinned in a way that he probably meant to be sympathetic but which made James want to hit him in the mouth. Which was a feeling he couldn’t remember ever having had before, at least not since he was about ten years old. “It won’t last,” Mike said again. “I know what I’m talking about.”

  Afterwards, thinking back about the whole scene, James could remember smiling coolly and reminding himself not to hit his head on the metal umbrella when he stood up, which he usually did and which, under the circumstances, would have been just about the last straw. But after that he couldn’t remember a thing about leaving The Camp and getting back to the Willowby cabin.

  The period that followed was unlike any he had ever known. He went through all the routines—getting up, eating, going out into the woods at least far enough to get away from Charlotte’s worried gaze, coming back to sit holding an unread book—with a curiously detached feeling, as if some important part of him was missing.

  For the first time in his life he found himself feeling nostalgic. He found himself, lying in bed, twenty-three days before his sixteenth birthday, looking back wistfully on the days of his youth. On a time when a wakeful period meant leading an army of elephants over the alps, or attacking the sheriff in Sherwood Forest, instead of providing a forum for an idiotic debate over whether Diane was a clever, sneaky cheat, or a beautiful, reckless, exciting person.

  And then one morning, when his defenses had been weakened by a particularly sleepless night, Charlotte struck. She waited until William had gone down to the lake for his morning dip, and then she started making gentle sympathetic hints about what he was going through, and it worked. He broke down and told her all about it—all of it, right down to the Porsche and the things Mike had said at the snack bar, and how he didn’t need to be told he was being an imbecile because he knew it, and that knowing it didn’t help a bit.

  She waited until he was all through before she said anything and then, instead of saying anything useful, all she did was start telling him a long story that had nothing to do with him at all. The story was about how, when she was in college, she’d fallen in love with the quarterback of the football team—a handsome, macho, charismatic guy with whom she had absolutely nothing in common, but whom she would probably have married if he hadn’t had the good sense to jilt her for another girl.

  “We couldn’t have been more wrong for each other,” she said, “and in a way I knew it, and yet I was absolutely mindlessly in love with him.”

  She stared out the window for a minute without saying anything, and then she sighed and went on. “Being in love!” she said. “It’s something that happens to almost everyone at one time or other, and the strange thing is, it often seems to have very little to do with any personal qualities the love object might have that would make them a good lover or companion or even friend. But James—there is one thing that I can tell you that is true and important.”

  He dropped his eyes because he didn’t want her to see that he didn’t believe her. She couldn’t possibly know what was true for him because she couldn’t possibly understand how he felt about Diane and how he was feeling now.

  “You won’t believe me,” Charlotte said, “because when you’re in love, particularly if it’s the first time and even more so if you’re quite young, you’re absolutely positive that nobody ever felt the way you do. But I’ll tell you anyway. The truth is—you’ll get over it. You don’t believe me, but you will. Everyone always does. It either turns into real love, which is something quite different, or it goes away. But in the meantime there are a couple of things you could do about it—and it doesn’t seem to me that you’re doing either one.”

  “Like what?” he muttered without looking up.

  “You could do something to get her back, or you could put your mind on other things and start getting over her.”

  So in a way, what happened was Charlotte’s fault—at least to the extent that it happened because he decided to take her advice. He decided, at first, to get over Diane—to put her out of his mind once and for all. He really tried, but after he’d been trying all the rest of that day and halfway through the next night, he gave up. He couldn’t forget her, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to, so there was nothing left except the other possibility, which was trying to do something—anything at all—that might help to get her back.

  The first step had to be to simply get her to see him. To see him and really talk to him for more than just a few minutes. He had to do something to really get her attention…

  He suddenly stopped tossing and turning, and for a long time lay very still. Then he turned on the light and went straight to his desk and opened the shoebox that held his da Vinci file. He found what he was looking for right where he had filed it several weeks before—under S for stag. It was a photograph that he had taken early in July.

  CHAPTER 14

  AFTER HE’D DECIDED to show Diane the picture of the deer, he felt better than he had in a long time. His plan was to show her the picture and simply tell her that he’d taken it somewhere in the general area of New Moon Lake. And of course, he wouldn’t even do that until she’d promised not to tell anyone else.

  He knew how fascinated she’d be. There wasn’t the slightest doubt about that. There was sure to be a long debate on whether he was going to tell her exactly where he took the picture—and why he really couldn’t. That part, as he saw it, would be especially important. Perhaps he would even be able to make her understand the deer’s unique importance. His importance not just as an extraordinarily beautiful specimen, but also as a symbol of the past when, under the rule of natural selection, other magnificent specimens such as he live
d into their prime and passed on their superior size and strength and intelligence to many descendants.

  And perhaps, if things were going well enough and she seemed to be understanding, he could try to make her see what the deer had meant to him personally—a creature triumphantly wild and free that had accepted and trusted him and by doing so had made him a part of something mysterious and indescribable, but somehow totally important. And if he could make her understand that, it would prove that Charlotte was wrong, and that her story really didn’t relate to his situation at all.

  The phone conversation was very difficult, as he had feared it would be. Although he was careful to keep his voice very calm and unemotional, Diane immediately went on the offensive.

  “Well, I thought you must have gone back to Berkeley or something, without even saying good-by.”

  “No,” he said evenly. “We’re not going until Friday. I’ve just been very busy. And I heard you were, too.”

  There was a pause. “Oh yeah?” she said at last. “Like, what did you hear, exactly?”

  “What I heard isn’t important, at least not now. That’s not what I called about. What I called about is just that I’d like to come over to say good-by and—”

  “Well,” she interrupted, “in just a few minutes I’ve got to—”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Just let me finish. There’s another reason why I want to see you. There’s something I have to show you.”

  “Show me?”

  “Yes. Something you’ve never seen anything like in your whole life, and probably never will again. Something you have a particular interest in—”

  “Well, what is it? Why can’t you just tell me what it is?”

  “No. I can’t do that. For one thing, before I show you, you have to promise not to tell anyone. Not anyone, not ever.”