by Baen Books
“Yes, I know that you have to be imaginary. A talking bear of your size defies everything, but I’m learning a great deal about photography. Somehow.” Since he was simply talking to himself, he decided to be totally honest. “The thing is that this might be crazy but it works. I need it to work. As an orphan, I only get Social Security until I’m eighteen. I won’t be able to get a job around here. In grade school, we did a field trip into a coal mine. That didn’t go well. There’s not much else in West Virginia. I thought that I could bake wedding cakes and such for a living. Mail order cookies or whatever. I did research and that’s not going to fly. It’s still a fall back plan. I looked into woodworking but that takes a lot of expensive power tools. I don’t have the money for that.”
“There’s scholarships for bright kids who are disadvantaged.”
Dugan shook his head. “I was thinking about going to college. My guidance counselor Mr. Durham said he could get me a full scholarship based on my grades and the fact I’m an orphan. Then I went to Charlottesville on a field trip to tour the University of Virginia. I kept seeing wolves. No one else did. Just me.”
That had been a huge turning point for him in so many ways. All his life, people had told him that everyone in his family was insane. Up to that day, he was sure that they were wrong. He didn’t feel crazy. The wolves all pretending to be people made him realize that he couldn’t trust his own perception of reality. The day ended with a trip to the emergency room.
“I don’t think I can do college,” he told the bear. “The wolves made me realize that.”
“Yes, Charlottesville is thick with wolves but they’re not feral. They’re actually surprisingly academic. That said, there are colleges that don’t have wolves.”
“Says the talking bear.”
The bear looked away. “Fine. I’ll teach you. I don’t want you taking any pictures of me though.”
“I figured that was coming. Self-referential. No pictures mean no proof that you’re just my imagination.”
“Stop with the self-referential bullshit. Who taught you that anyhow?”
“My school is making me see a shrink. I had the panic attack at Charlottesville after being stuck in an elevator with two wolves. I tried to pass it off as just being claustrophobic, but then I made the mistake of talking about my diet. Apparently it triggered all sorts of alarms with the wrong people. I was seeing Dr. Metzer, the school psychologist. He was okay. He started me thinking maybe I was crazy. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Life is easier when you think its everyone else is wrong. Dr. Creepy is the new psychologist. He freaks me out. I’ve been trying to bribe Principal Adkins with cookies to get out of therapy.”
“What the hell do you eat?”
“I’m a little OCD about the few things I can control in my life. I was just seeing if my diet would change anything.” His grandpa grumbled loudly at the “weird” food but ate it none the less. “You know paleo, gluten-free, vegetarian . . . ”
“They sent you to a shrink for turning vegetarian?”
“ . . . and fasting.”
“Ah, let me guess, it was the fasting that triggered all the concern.”
“Yeah.” Dugan waved to indicate the mess was over. “I’ll talk my way out of everything eventually. I’m good at that; I’ve had lots of practice. I had to do a lot of research, though, to deal with Doctor Creepy. What to say, and more importantly, what not to say.”
“What shouldn’t you say?”
“That I’m getting photography lessons from a giant talking bear.”
“I suppose that would be a little difficult to explain,” the bear said.
“It’s just that Doctor Creepy is—creepy. He scares me. I don’t want to tell him anything; I’m afraid of what he might do. I’m not sure what he can do. The laws seem to say not much but—I don’t know—it just seems like he could do something—evil.”
“He scares you and I don’t?”
“You’re—you’re not real. And I feel safe around you. Even when you had me pinned to the ground, I didn’t really think you were going to hurt me. I thought about it later, how crazy it was to offer you cookies and I realized it was because deep inside, I felt like—like—you were just in a bad mood because you were hungry.”
The bear snorted, blasting hot breath over Dugan’s face. “Does Dr. Creepy have a real name?”
“Doctor Robert Creagh. I meet with him every Monday morning, first thing. I’ll have to see him tomorrow. Why?”
“Curiosity. I didn’t think his real name was Creepy. Okay. Let’s tackle your Medusa complex."
"My what?"
"You walk up, see something you want to take a picture of, and turn to stone. You’ve got it into your head that ‘holding the camera steady’ means you can’t move at all. You need to move around more. Try different angles. Kneel down. Find something to stand on to get a higher perspective. What you want to do is find the lines in the picture and maximize them. Come on, pick something out—not me—and practice taking pictures of it. No, not a bird either, they move too much for you to learn on. Start with a rock.”
Dugan stood in the doorway into the receptionist area of the high school offices, stunned at the chaos around him. He had dropped his coat at his locker, stopped in at his homeroom to make sure he wasn’t marked absent, and then come up stairs to the offices for his appointment with Dr. Creagh.
The rooms looked like a tornado had touched down within the area. The door was torn from its frame and lay in the hallway. Desks and filing cabinets were overturned. Paper littered every surface. The office reeked. A solid wall of something pungent made his nose wrinkle and eyes water.
It explained the police cars that had been parked outside the building. They delayed the unloading of the school bus until the officer by the front door had gotten a message of “All clear.”
Clear of what? Dugan had noticed the police officers walking the edge of the parking lot, obviously looking for something, but he couldn’t tell what.
“What happened?” he asked the room at large.
“A bear broke in last night.” Mrs. Casto was gathering scraps of a torn donut box from the floor. She answered without looking up. “Someone left food in their desk. Bacon maple donuts. No one is admitting to bringing them in on the sly.” From the tone of her voice, the classroom rule “must have enough to share with everyone” applied to the office staff too. “The police think that’s what attracted the bear.”
“Bear?” Dugan echoed. “A black bear?”
“What other kind of bear would it be?” Mrs. Casto stopped to look up at him.
“The black bear is the state animal.” Dugan backed out of the conversation as gracefully as he could.
“We put an electric fence around our garbage cans to keep the bears out,” Mrs. Westfall said. “My youngest son keeps forgetting and shocks himself every time it’s his turn to take out the trash.”
Dugan scanned the damage. Deep scratches on the walls and woodwork left little doubt that a large animal had rampaged through the rooms. To Dugan, they seemed too big to be made by a black bear. The security camera mounted high on the wall seemed untouched.
“Did anyone look at the video?” Dugan asked.
“Come on in, Dugan!” Principal Adkins brushed past him. “Apparently bears don’t piss in the woods, they piss in schools.”
Dugan wanted to ask if they were sure if it was a black bear. To quote Mrs. Casto, what else would it be? Not his imaginary Kodiak. Right? “Did you get the animal on camera?”
“Who knows,” Principal Adkins said. “The bear did a number on the recording equipment. There’s nothing left of the recorder but little pieces everywhere. It also took out the printers, the phones, and the PA system.”
Dugan had spent enough time sitting and waiting in the offices to know that the recorder was in a secure little closet under lock and key. While most of the equipment was logical collateral damage, the security system wasn’t. Destroying it would be have
to be premeditated and deliberate. The wide path of destruction, though, would mask that fact.
“Self-referential,” he murmured to remind himself to beware neatly wrapped bundles of logic. That way lay true insanity. Yet he couldn’t help but wonder why would a bear destroy the recorder? Dugan resisted the idea that the bear knew that it was being filmed. That went against all logic. A bear was a bear and nothing more.
Unless it talked.
If it did talk, why would his bear show up at his school? To find out if he told Doctor Creagh about the photography lessons? Without supporting pictures, it wasn’t as if the psychologist would believe there was a brown bear. Dugan had searched all the local and state news feeds. There hadn’t been any escaped bears and no one was running a big game sanctuary within a hundred miles of the creek bottom.
Besides, he hadn’t considered continuing the photography lessons until Friday.
“Principal Adkins.” Dugan normally dealt with the man in his office. Adkins had a jacket in hand, apparently heading out to deal with the police again. Dugan held out a plastic butter container he’d filled with cookies. “Sir. I made chocolate chip cookies.” He said it quietly, screening the transaction with his body so the secretaries wouldn’t see. “I’ve been seeing the school psychologist for over a month. Can’t I stop? It was just one panic attack. There’s nothing wrong—seriously wrong—with me. I just don’t deal well with enclosed places on school field trips. It’s a weird combination of the two. I had the same thing happen at the Beckley exhibition coal mine.”
Principal Adkins took the container with a furtive glance toward his staff. He flipped his jacket over the cookies, hiding them. “I know, Dugan. We’re just being careful, what with your family history and all. You’ve had a rough time in life. I can’t just stop treatment on you.”
“Why not? I only had one attack brought on by stress. It could happen to anyone. I don’t need this. Dr. Metzer said I was fine. Can’t I just stop? Please?”
“It’s not up to me, Dugan. Dr. Metzer left us high and dry in terms of paperwork. Dr. Creagh needs to fill out the needed forms for you to stop. Until he does, my hands are tied.”
Dugan controlled the urge to take back the cookies. He’d used up all the flour, sugar, and eggs in the house to make them. Eggs he could get from the hen house, but the rest was money out of his pocket and required a trip to Marlinton to get.
“That’s the only way?” Dugan said.
“In theory you could go to an outside child psychologist. I don’t know of one in the area. Since you’re a minor, we’re not allow to get involved in your medical care beyond the school nurse or psychologist. Also, you’d have to pay the doctor yourself; the school wouldn’t cover it.”
The joy of living in the middle of nowhere. The entire county had a population of fewer than nine thousand. Dugan would have to go the whole way to Harrisonburg or Charlottesville to find one. Even if he had the money, he couldn’t get to either city without his grandpa driving him and that would never happen.
Principal Adkins waved toward the maze of narrow hallways that lead to the individual offices. “If Dr. Creagh agrees to sign off on your forms, then you can stop treatment. He’s in his office. There’s nowhere for you to sit out here. Go on back to his room.”
The pungent smell grew stronger as Dugan picked his way through the litter in the hallway. A left turn, a right and the doorway to Dr. Creagh’s office came into view, identified by the name plate that used to be mounted on the wall. It lay now on the floor along with the doorframe and door. The walls were ten foot tall. On either side of the opening, claw marks raked from ceiling to floor.
Had the bear marked his territory right at the entrance of Dr. Creagh’s?
Dr. Creagh’s room had been equally ransacked as the rest of the offices. If the bear had targeted the psychologist’s space, it was impossible to prove. There was only the lingering suspicion, urine and scat.
Dr. Creagh was brooding in the center of the chaos. As usual, the sight of him made Dugan’s skin crawl. He could never put his finger on why the man seemed so creepy. He was a thin, tall man of indeterminate age, somewhere between thirty and sixty. His flat-top hairstyle gave no hints as it was a color somewhere between white-blonde and gray. His eyes too were pale to colorless. There was something about his skin that made it seem as if it was too small for his frame and stretched tight over his bones. When he was still, he was far too still. When he moved it was in fast, precise motions that struck Dugan as inhuman even though they were all perfectly normal.
Like now, when Dr. Creagh suddenly turned his head to look at Dugan over his shoulder. “Do you know what did this, Dugan?”
“Mrs. Casto said it was a bear,” Dugan said.
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know—I don’t know what happened. I suppose it could have been a bear. I don’t know why a bear would have broken into a school though.” He was talking too much. He should shut up.
“It rifled my case notes and urinated on them,” Dr. Creagh said.
Self-referential.
“There’s no saving the notes,” Dr. Creagh continued. “The ink ran. The paper is a biohazard.”
Did the man never blink? Dugan’s eyes started to burn in sympathy although that might be the stench. If it was his bear, what the hell was it thinking? Peeing all over everything?
Dugan glanced down at the paper. The smeared ink made it seem that the pages were covered with weird pictures and scribbles. They were clearly unreadable. “Since your notes are ruined, can we just drop this?”
“You are keeping secrets from me. Until I know your secrets, we will not stop.” Dr. Creagh flicked out his hand, making Dugan jump back. “Go on. We can’t meet today. We’ll meet on Wednesday during your study hall.”
“What are you doing here?” Gin greeted Dugan when he flopped down at her secluded table in the library. He normally kept his distance while they were in school because he didn’t want anyone decide that she needed to be “warned.” He searched her out because he needed the comfort of someone else’s voice. Someone who didn’t think of him as crazy because at the moment, he wasn’t sure if he was or not. Had there been a real bear in Dr. Creagh’s office last night? Or had Dugan totally lost it and trashed the school so it just looked like a bear had been there? The second seemed nearly as reasonable as a talking bear giving him photography lessons.
She had her long legs up on the table, idling tapping her booted foot to the music playing over her headphones. She actually wanted to know why he was there; she’d tugged the headphones down so she could hear his answer. Babymetal rumbled through “Karate.”
“Ordering more books on photography.” He didn’t lie. The bear gave him a list of books to order via the interlibrary loan system. It represented the world’s best photographers. Ansel Adams. Dorothea Lange. Diane Arbus. Walker Evans. Josef Koudelka. Elliot Erwitt. The list went on and on.
(“You need to see through the eyes of an experienced artist to understand what you’re looking for,” the bear had explained. “Learn from the best. Let it seep in until it’s in your bones.” Dugan had copied down the list wondering how the bear knew the photographers’ names complete with correct spellings of Arbus and Koudelka and Erwitt.)
“You’re supposed to be in therapy.” Gin’s tone indicated that she was annoyed by his dodge. “It’s first period study hall on Monday.”
Dugan threw his hands up. “I-I-I have not a clue. Something trashed the offices so Doctor Creepy rescheduled to Wednesday.”
“It’s so bogus that the school is doing this because of what you eat.”
His diet, his epic panic attack in Charlottesville, what was written in his elementary school records, and his family history of suspicious deaths that were ruled as suicide. He’d never told Gin about his past. Her parents had moved back into the area after years of traveling the world. Unlike all the other kids in their class, she had no memories of the weirdness that was his first year
s at the century-old Green Bank Elementary. Gin didn’t fit in at Pocahontas High School. Her Mohawk haircut, Goth makeup, and weird mix of clothes from around the world made her stand out too much. The other girls favored long hair, blue jeans and hoodies bought at Walmart. He wasn’t sure if Gin was friends with him merely because she was desperate or her sense of honor insisted that she champion him. It could be both. He didn’t want to explore the depths of her friendship. He was afraid it was shallow waters.
“I need to go to the supermarket today,” he said. “Can you give me a ride?”
She guessed the reason why he wanted to restock. “You need to stop baking cookies for the people in the office. It’s their job to take care of you. You shouldn’t have to bribe them with sweets.”
“They do take care of me,” he said. The teachers and administrative staff might think he was crazy but they were all mindful that he had no parents. “Principal Adkins bullied grandpa through getting SNAP set up in ninth grade; it really made it possible for me to start baking in the first place. Mr. Durham is still trying to get me a full scholarship even though I changed my mind about college. Mrs. Westfall helped me buy my camera; I needed a credit card to order it online. Mrs. Costa gave me a hat last year when she realized I didn’t have one. Mr. Simpson is letting me do the yearbook pictures.” He lifted his camera as evidence. Normally he wouldn’t risk it at school but Mr. Simpson promised to replace it if one of the other students broke it. “I’ll have published pictures to start a portfolio with.”
“Published?” Gin snorted. “Simpson is using you. The yearbook staff all quit once they found out how much work it was. He’s trying to talk me into being the editor. He says it will make me more popular. As if. And that hat is butt ugly.”
Dugan decided not to continue with all the many kindnesses that the staff showed him over the years. Today proved that trying to bribe Adkins was a waste of time. “IGA is having a sale on collard greens, dried black eye peas and corn meal. I need flour and sugar but I’m not making cookies for them. We don’t even have school tomorrow; it’s an in-service day. I plan to spend the day taking pictures. There are basics I need to practice.”