Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

  “It’s broken,” said the girl with the upturned nose, shuddering as she pointed to her leg.

  “How can you tell?” asked the sticklike goth girl.

  “Because the bone’s supposed to be on the inside.”

  The sticklike goth girl focused the beam of the flashlight on the leg, and when she saw what the girl was talking about, she ran off and was sick behind a boulder.

  As gently as she could, the girl with beads in her hair helped the girl to lie down and then straightened the leg out in front of her. The girl with the upturned nose bit down on a belt to keep from screaming or biting off her tongue.

  She was brave, but the girl with beads in her hair watched her shoulders quake and convulse, and she knew being brave wasn’t enough. Her pulse fluttered like a hummingbird’s; her breath was shallow. She turned a pale gray. The girl with the upturned nose was going into shock.

  How did you treat shock? She tried to remember, but the only thing she could think of from her first-aid training was that you were supposed to get the person to a doctor. A fat lot of help that was now.

  Keep them warm, she thought. You’re supposed to keep them warm.

  She ran over to the spot where Renata’s human body had fallen and unzipped the orange hoodie. It wasn’t like Renata needed it now. Still, as the girl with beads in her hair pulled Renata’s arms out of the sleeves, she noticed that the body didn’t seem to be dead like she’d originally feared. It was still warm and breathing, but that was all. The limbs were limp, the eyes still gaping open—no sign of life in them. No pupils, either. No whites. No irises. Nothing but solid black. It made the girl with beads in her hair shudder to look in them for very long.

  She took the orange hoodie and ran back to the spot where the girl with the upturned nose rested. The sticklike goth girl had recovered from her queasy spell and now sat by the girl’s side, clutching her hand.

  “Can you stay with her?” asked the girl with beads in her hair, tucking the orange hoodie around the girl’s chest and shoulders.

  The sticklike goth girl nodded.

  “I’ll be right back,” said the girl with beads in her hair. “Try to make her as comfortable as possible.”

  Then she got up and ran across the clearing again. A compound fracture was deadly serious, but it was the girl with thousands of freckles whose wound needed the most tending.

  The raven was perched on a boulder near the girl’s head, whispering soothing words in her ear. Her head slumped to one side, but as the girl with beads in her hair approached, she lifted it and said with as much strength as she could muster, “Can you carry me?”

  The girl with beads in her hair felt her heart sink. She doubted she could carry even one of the girls out of the forest to safety, not even if the sticklike goth girl helped. Not without doing more harm than good.

  “Not all the way. Just across the clearing,” said the girl with thousands of freckles. She nodded toward the girl with the upturned nose. “That way she won’t be alone.”

  When I go for help, thought the girl with beads in her hair, then looked over toward the sticklike goth girl. When we go for help. After what they’d seen, going anywhere alone in these woods was out of the question.

  She slid one arm under the knees of the girl with thousands of freckles, the other behind her back, and hoisted the girl up in her arms. She carried her past the mouth of the cave to the other side of the rocky embankment and set her down next to the girl with the upturned nose, who was clutching her broken leg. Renata followed along behind them. She seemed to have gotten the hang of her wings already, gliding back to earth without even a stumble.

  It was the witching hour by the time they’d done all of this. The injured rested, but they’d all resigned themselves to the fact that none of them would be sleeping that night.

  “What do we do now?” asked the sticklike goth girl, once all five of them were together again.

  “There’s a nurse’s station above the mess hall,” said the girl with beads in her hair. “We should go see if they have a snakebite kit and a stretcher.”

  The sticklike goth girl nodded gravely.

  “A phone, too,” she said. “We have to get them out of here or . . .”

  “I’ll go, too,” Renata said, interrupting that morbid thought with one of her own. “If something goes wrong, I can fly back here and let you know. No matter what happens, I’ll come back. I promise. We won’t leave you here.”

  “I know you won’t,” said the girl with thousands of freckles. She turned to the girl with beads in her hair and held out her hand. “But leave one of the hatchets.”

  The girl with beads in her hair handed it over, hoping her friend wouldn’t have to use it.

  “We’ll come back for you,” she said.

  The girl with thousands of freckles managed a pained smile.

  “You’d better.”

  And then they were three, setting off down the path toward safety and help.

  Or were they? The girl with beads in her hair thought about the girls on horseback. Were they still out here, and what had they been running from? If the girls from Cabin 3 had met a beast in the middle of a well-maintained pony trail, maybe the rest of Camp So-and-So was no safer.

  According to the map, if they continued on the pony trail, it would spit them out of the woods near the meadow and not far from the mess hall and the nurse’s station. However, when they were half a mile past the cave, the trail became overgrown and gnarled with roots. They picked their way along, mindful of snakes and other perils with each step. At first, Renata flew ahead of them acting as a lookout, but eventually, they realized they felt safer traveling close together.

  “Are you all right?” the girl with beads in her hair asked the raven. She felt strange asking, but it seemed like someone ought to. On the one hand, Renata was the same as she’d ever been, so wholly herself that you could almost forget she had turned into a raven.

  And then on the other hand, she’d turned into a raven.

  “I’m okay,” Renata said after thinking about it for a minute. “Better than okay, actually. I just think about what happened to the other girls, and I guess I feel like I got off lucky.”

  “Broken legs heal,” said the girl with beads in her hair, frowning. “What if this isn’t like that?”

  “That’s the thing,” Renata said, stretching her wings. “I don’t mind that much.”

  Before the girl with beads in her hair had a chance to consider what she might have meant, they came upon a pile of foliage that seemed not to belong in the middle of the trail. When they cleared away the brush, they uncovered a pit ten feet deep and a yard across.

  It was unsettling to find a thing like that without knowing who had dug it and for what purpose. It was hard not to take a thing like that personally. They dragged the branches and leaves that had been used to conceal the pit away from the trail so that it was perfectly visible to anyone who might come that way. At least the girls on horseback seemed to have avoided it, though the girl with beads in her hair couldn’t help but wonder how.

  Between the cave and the road, they sniffed out other lures and traps and tripwires strung across the path. They were primitive, but abundant, and suggested a hunter whose appetite for prey was limitless. They walked (or flew) with their weapons (or talons) drawn, their eyes searching the trees for any sign of movement, scanning the ground for any lurking holes.

  Another thought nagged at the girl with beads in her hair.

  “Where did Robin go?” she asked.

  They compared notes and agreed that none of them had seen the counselor-in-training after the beast first attacked.

  “It was like she just vanished,” said the sticklike goth girl.

  Renata cocked her head to the side. “Abandoned us, is more like it.”

  They hiked mile after mile until finally, small patches of sunshine began to shine through the thinning trees, and they permitted themselves a quiet cheer. There was little cause for cele
bration, though, as they walked into the meadow. They might have made it through the night and out of the woods, but none of them had slept or eaten a proper meal, and none of them knew if it was too late to save the girl with thousands of freckles from the venom in her veins.

  And so, as they walked through the meadow back toward the place where they’d started, it was with heavy hearts and troubled minds. When they’d first found the prophecy, they’d only seen the glory in it, thought the girl with beads in her hair.

  But know the path you walk is thick with traps

  All custom-made to hasten your collapse.

  They’d ignored its more menacing parts, and so far, all of those things had been accurate. There had been a beast. There had been traps. If they’d known the quest was going to turn out like this, would they ever have agreed to go?

  What they found in the mess hall turned the doubts of the girl with beads in her hair to something far more urgent. The nurse’s station had been ransacked, the cabinets emptied of everything except for two rolls of gauze and a tube of baby aspirin. The phones were dead, the power was out, and the kitchen was barely stocked. The oddest thing of all was that they did not see a single soul there, neither campers nor staff. The trip was not wholly fruitless, as they found and took a wheelbarrow from behind the mess hall before starting back toward the forest. They were returning without medicine (unless you counted the gauze and baby aspirin), without help, without anything but a dirt-crusted wheelbarrow to transport two gravely wounded girls from the forest.

  The darkest possibilities of this escaped none of them.

  So troubled were their thoughts as they walked that they almost failed to see the enormous black horse that appeared on the road before them. It was unsaddled and wore around its neck a small, glowing crystal vial on a cord. As soon as it spotted them, the horse whinnied and stamped its hooves. It shook its head so the crystal vial swung from side to side, and they could not help but notice it. Once the horse was sure it had gotten their attention, it raced across the meadow.

  The girls and the raven exchanged glances.

  “Is it just me, or do you think we’re supposed to follow that horse?” asked the sticklike goth girl.

  They abandoned the wheelbarrow by the side of the road and took off after the horse, following its crashing path through the meadow until it ended abruptly at Lake So-and-So. The horse stood on the gravelly shore as though it had been waiting to greet them there. It strode up to the girl with beads in her hair until it was close enough to nudge her shoulder with its nose. The girl with beads in her hair smiled, and it nudged her again. Then it dropped its majestic head low so the vial dangled loosely from its neck.

  “Should I take it?” asked the girl with beads in her hair.

  The horse knelt on one foreleg and nudged the girl with beads in her hair again, snuffling into her hand.

  The same thought occurred to all of them: that perhaps the contents of the vial were an antidote to the venom now coursing through their friend’s body. It seemed possible. The way things had gone so far, it seemed almost likely.

  Of course, it seemed equally likely that the whole thing was a trap, though the girl with beads in her hair couldn’t see how. If the vial didn’t contain an antidote, what could it possibly do? Poison their friend more? And as closely as she scanned the shoreline, the girl with beads in her hair could see no tripwires, snares, or triggers. There wasn’t so much as a shrub where an assailant could hide and wait to strike. If it was a trap, the girl with beads in her hair decided, she would have to risk it. For her friend’s sake. And because they were otherwise out of choices. She gave a little bow in return, then put her hands around the horse’s neck to slip the vial over its head.

  What happened next happened in an instant.

  The horse lifted its head and with enormous strength, shook its great neck and slung the girl with beads in her hair onto its back. She struggled to get off, but she was stuck—her hands were so tangled in the horse’s mane, she might as well have been tied to the creature’s back. When the horse reared up, Renata and the sticklike goth girl saw that its eyes had turned red as hot coals. They screamed as it galloped out into the lake, diving beneath the surface, the girl with beads in her hair still clinging to its back.

  Renata flew back and forth along the shoreline, hoping that the horse and her friend would resurface. The sticklike goth girl, though, did not wait. She unlaced her boots and plunged into the lake after them. As she disappeared beneath the surface, Renata stopped hoping and began to count. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. A minute and a half passed, but there was still no sign of the sticklike goth girl. Renata trembled, and she thought about having to return to the cave to tell her friends that there was no help coming, that everyone else was dead.

  Before she could begin to think about what she would do if the worst happened, she heard a splash from the center of the lake, and a plume of water arched through the air, bearing a tangle of arms, legs, hooves, and hair. It cannonballed back toward the water, then shot up again twenty yards closer to shore. This time, in the foam, Renata could see the horse with its flared nostrils and wild, red eyes. The sticklike goth girl sat astride the beast, one hand clutching its mane, the other wrapped around the waist of the girl with beads in her hair. Again, they plunged into the water, disappearing for such a long time that the riot of bubbles rising to the surface slowed to a weak protest.

  Then all three of them hurtled to the surface again, this time galloping up onto the shore. The sticklike goth girl’s hair was dripping and knotted with water weeds. Yet she sat triumphant upon the back of the horse, which had stopped trying to twist away from her grasp and now lowered its head and whinnied meekly.

  The sticklike goth girl leapt down and pulled the girl with beads in her hair from the horse’s back, stretching her out on the rocky strip of beach. She listened for breath, and finding none, pinched the girl’s nose closed and began to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a tense minute, the girl with beads in her hair coughed, tilted her head to the side, and choked up a stream of water.

  Then the sticklike goth girl got to her feet and glared at the animal.

  “You could have killed us,” she said.

  “Then you should feel lucky that I didn’t,” said the horse.

  None of them was terribly shocked that the horse spoke. It was the animal’s candor that surprised them.

  The sticklike goth girl wrung out a hank of her hair, and began to pick out the water weeds. “What kind of horse are you anyway?”

  The horse reared up, kicking its forelegs inches from the sticklike goth girl’s head. She gasped and stumbled backwards, landing hard in the stony sand.

  “Idiot girl,” it said, towering over her. “Do you really take me for a common horse?”

  She scrambled to sit up and raised her arms over her face to shield it. “I beg your pardon,” she said, then added, “What are you really, then?”

  The horse—for that is exactly what it resembled, and excepting its remarkable underwater feats and murderous tendencies, that is what any person who saw it standing on the shore would take it for—seemed placated by the girl’s apology, and put its forelegs down.

  “I am the last of the proud and ancient race of kelpie. For five hundred years I have lured wretched humans onto my back and dragged them to the depths of this lake, and in all that time, not one has ever survived.” The kelpie hung its head until its muzzle touched the ground. “Today is a sad and shameful day for the kelpie. Bested by a human. Worse, by an idiot girl who cannot even tell me from a horse.”

  Caught up in its mournful soliloquy, the kelpie did not notice the looks the girls from Cabin 3 exchanged.

  At last, Renata spoke. “Forgive us, noble kelpie. Our ignorance blinded us to your true nature. We did not see you for what you were, for we did not know to look.”

  “Now that your majesty is revealed to us, O impressive beast, I curse mine own eyes for failing to see it from the firs
t,” the sticklike goth girl chimed in. “Your coat gleams like onyx polished by the sun’s own rays.”

  “Your eyes could burn a thousand villages,” said the girl with beads in her hair, coughing up another stream of lake water from her lungs as she sat up.

  “And how great your wisdom that you chose to spare us so that we might complete our quest and save this land from ruin, chaos, and darkness,” said the sticklike goth girl.

  The kelpie snorted with disdain, but it also stopped visibly sulking.

  “Tell me, girls, what has brought you to my shores? What is it that you seek?”

  They described the quest they’d set out on, and the beast in the cave, and the prophecy, and the one they were supposed to free, and what had become of their other friends. With every syllable, the kelpie grew more agitated and began to pace on the rocks. When they finished, it gave a long, low whinny.

  “I fear any advice I can give will be unequal to the task before you. When first you beheld me, all you saw was a horse. All I see before me now is a pack of fools. Have you even the slightest idea who sent you out on this quest? No, you do not. You found a message written on your ceiling, and that was all the encouragement you required. Has it not occurred to you that your entire quest might be in service to some dark and wicked cause?”

  Cabin 3 murmured amongst themselves, admitting that they had no assurance the message in their cabin was sent by someone or something that wished them well.

  “But what about the beast?” asked the girl with beads in her hair. “It was definitely evil. It nearly killed us all.”

  “I also nearly killed you all. Do you think me evil?” asked the kelpie.

  The simple answer to this was “yes,” but none of the girls dared say that to the kelpie. Besides, it was more complicated than that. Five hundred years of self-admitted human drowning aside, the kelpie was as good as its word. Since the sticklike goth girl had bested it, the creature had not so much as nipped at them. In fact, it seemed inclined to help them. What remained to be seen was whether or not the kelpie’s advice could be believed.