Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

  The girl with beads in her hair thought about the lines from the prophecy:

  Beware! The Knave who only speaks in lies!

  Beware! The Knight who plots out your demise!

  “It depends,” said the girl with beads in her hair. “Are you telling us the truth?”

  The kelpie’s eyes danced. “Are you a fan of puzzles?”

  The girl with beads in her hair nodded.

  “Do you know how to play Knights and Knaves?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said the girl with beads in her hair. It was an old riddle about a shipwrecked sailor who finds himself on an island of knights who can only tell the truth and knaves who can only lie. In the riddle, the sailor comes upon two paths, one that leads to certain death, the other to safety, and each one is guarded by a man.

  “Then I propose a game. You may ask me three questions, and if you are able to guess correctly whether I am the knight or the knave, I will give you the vial around my neck.”

  “And if we don’t?” asked the sticklike goth girl.

  The kelpie gave her a filthy look. “Then I will take you for another ride on my back.”

  The girl with beads in her hair tried to remember the trick to this logic puzzle. There was some question you could ask that would reveal which man was the knave and which was the knight.

  “Will whatever is in the vial around your neck save our friend?” blurted the sticklike goth girl.

  The kelpie polished off the lake weeds that the sticklike goth girl had pulled from her hair and began to graze on the spindly bulrushes at the water’s edge. Only after it had cleared a section the size of a beach towel did it answer the girl’s question.

  “In truth, child, the vial is as likely to contain a curse as a cure. But if you like, I could tell you where Robin fled after she gave it to me, or the name of the soul who delivered that prophecy to your cabin.”

  That didn’t help, thought the girl with beads in her hair. In fact, their first question to the kelpie had only confused the matter more. Now there were options to consider that they hadn’t even known existed. Proof that the counselor-in-training was involved in all of this. Information about who sent them on the quest in the first place.

  But only if the kelpie actually knew those things.

  Knights can only tell the truth. Knaves can only lie.

  The girl with beads in her hair combed through the recesses of her brain, trying to think of the question she could ask the kelpie that would reveal it as a truth-teller or a liar. A simple question would be best. Something direct, something the kelpie could only answer with yes or no.

  “If I knew what was in that vial, would I give it to my friend?” Now it was Renata who spoke up to ask the kelpie a question. The girl with beads in her hair let out a quiet groan. Once again, it was the wrong question.

  “No, you would not,” said the kelpie.

  The kelpie could still be the knight: the vial could be filled with rat poison or hydrochloric acid, and its answer could be the truth. Renata and the sticklike goth girl exchanged nervous glances and looked to the girl with beads in her hair. She was their last chance.

  There was one way through this that the girl with beads in her hair could see, and that was to ask a question she already knew the answer to. She laughed bitterly to herself as she thought about the prophecy, the beast, who’d sent them on this quest, why her friend had been turned into a raven.

  She didn’t have any answers. There was nothing she knew that would help her now.

  Except for one thing.

  The girl with beads in her hair lowered her eyes modestly. “I know a little bit about kelpies,” she said.

  “Oh, do you?” asked the kelpie, giving a little chuckle.

  “I know you usually take the form of a horse. You tend to crop up in the Scottish stories.” The girl with beads in her hair had read every book of fairy tales, folklore, and mythology in the library at least twice. She closed her eyes and thought about those books now, how the pages were yellow and water-stained and so brittle they threatened to disintegrate in her fingers when she turned them.

  “Luring people onto your back, then drowning them? That part always happens, but you’ve been known to mix things up. Sometimes you devour the people you’ve drowned, and let their entrails drift back to shore. Sometimes you’re a demon. In some of the stories, a bold fool will try to capture you and harness your powers, and you lay curses on their heads.”

  At first, the kelpie looked proud as the girl with beads in her hair listed off these stories, but then annoyance flickered across its face.

  “What are you driving at, girl?”

  That was when the girl with beads in her hair knew the question she was about to ask was the right one. “Since when do you go around asking riddles?”

  The kelpie looked away and, after a long moment, muttered, “Since always. Kelpies are great lovers of puzzles.”

  The girl with beads in her hair tried to keep a neutral face as she thought about all the lies and half-truths that the kelpie had told them: that they should feel lucky it hadn’t killed them; that their quest might be in service to an evil cause; that the vial around its neck would not save their friend’s life.

  “You’re the knave,” said the girl with beads in her hair.

  The implications of the prophecy dawned on the others as well.

  “You said you’d give us the vial if we guessed correctly,” said the sticklike goth girl.

  The kelpie tossed back its head and laughed.

  “Oh,” said the sticklike goth girl. “That part was a lie, too.”

  Still laughing, the kelpie turned and started to walk back into the lake. “Of course, you’re welcome to take it from me, if any of you fancies another ride on my back.”

  “Give us the vial,” said Renata, perched on the sticklike goth girl’s shoulder.

  “I owe you nothing,” said the kelpie.

  The two girls and one raven from Cabin 3 exchanged a wordless glance. Their friend’s life was at stake. They’d tamed the kelpie, then answered its riddles. They’d beaten it fair and square. The idea that it owed them nothing at this point was the biggest lie it had told yet.

  At once, all three of them were swarming around the kelpie.

  “If there’s one thing we know, it’s how these stories work,” said the girl with beads in her hair, standing between the kelpie and the lake with her arms outstretched. “And if you’re the knave, and everything you say is a lie, and you say you owe us nothing . . .”

  “Drop it on the ground, or I will peck your eyes out,” said Renata.

  “No funny stuff,” added the sticklike goth girl, linking arms with the girl with beads in her hair.

  “You owe us,” said the girl with beads in her hair.

  The kelpie rolled its eyes, but lowered its head so the cord slipped off of its neck and the vial fell into the sand with a plop. When it had done this, the kelpie waded into the water up to its haunches before it turned around and said, “This is why I always drown the humans I meet. So I don’t have to talk to them.”

  With that, the kelpie snorted out a laugh, then lowered its head beneath the lake’s surface and disappeared.

  The girl with beads in her hair picked up the vial and inspected it. She had no idea what it was, but she hoped it would save her friend’s life.

  “Let’s go,” she said to the others, starting back across the meadow toward the pony trail in the woods that would lead them back to their friends. From a distance, she could see the wheelbarrow by the side of the road where they’d left it.

  The two fell in line behind her, Renata fluttering overhead, but when they reached the road, the sticklike goth girl’s face was troubled.

  “All of us?” she asked.

  “Where else would we go?” asked the girl with beads in her hair.

  “What about the quest?”

  The girl with beads in her hair stared incredulously at her cabinmate. “Who cares about the que
st now?” she asked.

  Even if the antidote worked, they’d still have to wheel the girl with the upturned nose, with the broken leg, down the long, unnecessarily winding road until they reached help, civilization, or cell phone reception, whichever came first.

  “I don’t think we really have a choice about it,” said the sticklike goth girl.

  The girl with beads in her hair looked to Renata for help. The raven landed on a fence post, pecked a grub from the rotting wood, and nodded. “She’s right.”

  “That’s insane,” said the girl with beads in her hair.

  Renata took flight from her perch on the fence post, landing at the feet of the girl with beads in her hair.

  “You can turn back if you want to. You can quit, you can leave, you can do whatever you want to do. But look at me,” Renata said, spreading her wings and looking down at her feathered body. “I can’t.”

  “Maybe there was a moment when we could have turned back, but it’s long past now,” said the sticklike goth girl.

  Renata cawed and recited the prophecy they’d found in their cabin. “‘Beware! For you will lose before it’s done! First five, then four, then three, then two, then one.’”

  The sticklike goth girl reached out her hand and took the vial from the girl with beads in her hair.

  “This is where I go,” she said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said the girl with beads in her hair. “We’ll go back to the cave together and see if the antidote even works. We’ll go to the hospital, and then after that, we can come back here and continue the quest.”

  The sticklike goth girl had tears in her eyes as she put her arms around the girl with beads in her hair.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, hugging her good-bye.

  Suddenly, a strange gust of wind blew down from the north. They turned toward it just in time to hear a sound like a wave crashing and to see a column of fire erupt from the treetops just past the mess hall.

  “Our cabins,” said Renata.

  “We have to go help,” said the girl with beads in her hair.

  But when she turned around, only Renata was there, flapping her wings to steady herself against the foul-smelling wind.

  The wheelbarrow, the antidote, and the sticklike goth girl were gone, and the girl with beads in her hair knew she could run toward the cave or the fire, but she couldn’t do both.

  INTERMISSION

  At the end of a hallway in a wing of the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp that was forbidden to most, Robin stood in front of a dressing room door. She didn’t have time for the usual niceties that generally accompanied a visit like this one.

  Typically, she would knock and be told to go away. She would apologize and attempt to justify the necessity of her interruption. She would grovel and beg until she was admitted to the room, where she would find Tania sitting at her vanity, arranging her hair. She would be in an ill temper and, before Robin could get a word in edgewise, would subject her to a long treatise about how she suffered and toiled and was surrounded by idiots. Following her humiliation in the All-Camp Sport & Follies, Robin knew she could expect this to go on even longer than usual.

  So she did not knock. Instead, she cupped her hand to the door and shouted, “Tania, Cabin 5 is on fire.”

  From inside, there was a long pause, followed by the sound of a glass being smashed.

  “Let them burn.”

  “But two of the campers from Cabin 3 are heading toward the fire.”

  “If they’re that idiotic, they deserve to burn.”

  It was worse than Robin had feared. She should have done a better job checking the girls for contraband, but honestly, Dora was the last one she would have suspected of smuggling in that steel pocket watch. If she hadn’t been spread quite so thin, it might have occurred to her to cancel the feast honoring Cabin 1 in the wake of their second victory in the All-Camp Sport & Follies. Robin knew how much Tania hated a fair fight, and feared that in her boss’s current mood, the girls from Cabin 1 might not be altogether safe at the feast.

  Not that it would come as any great shock to her, the way things were going so far this summer. Ordinarily, her productions ran like well-oiled Rube Goldberg machines, like gorgeous little jewel boxes with all the surprises on the inside. This year, though, things kept getting away from her. Damage she should have been able to curb raged unabated. Maybe she was slipping. In any case, it couldn’t hurt to remind Tania of the rules.

  “Tania, these girls are under your protection,” she said.

  From behind the door, Robin heard Tania let out a snort.

  “Tell it to Inge F. Yancey IV. It’s his name on the letterhead, not mine,” she said.

  CABIN 4

  SOUL MATES

  [SCENE: Out from under the watchful eye of Pam, VERITY, ADDISON, ANNIKA, ALIX, and AMBER venture into the woods in search of their soul mates.]

  Together, they crept around to the back of the cabin where the trail started, and just as it had before, the mysterious force tugged at them and drew them into the dense woods.

  While Amber and Alix carried on an effervescent flurry of conversation as they walked, and Annika listened graciously, chiming in every now and again, Verity noticed that Addison wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to any of them. She’d pulled ahead of the group, but even from a distance, Verity could see that something was wrong. Once again, she looked awful, like she’d had the flu for a week. Rivulets of sweat ran down her face and neck, and her eyes looked sunken and dark.

  “Are you okay?” Verity asked, trotting ahead to catch up with her.

  “Fine,” Addison muttered.

  She took something out of the back pocket of her shorts, and in a flash, her eyes brightened, her cheeks flushed, and the sweat dried from her brow.

  “Okay, what was that?” Verity asked.

  Addison feigned wide-eyed ignorance. “What was what?”

  “You know what. I saw you do the same thing last night outside the latrine. You’ve been doing it all afternoon in the cabin. One minute you look like you’re going to die, the next minute you pull something out of your pocket and you’re fine. So tell me, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on.”

  Ordinarily, Verity wouldn’t have pushed the matter, not with someone she barely knew, especially not with someone who radiated popularity like Addison did. But Verity worried that if she didn’t speak up now, something truly terrible might happen.

  Magic was a curious thing, and Verity was sure that it was at least partly responsible for what had been happening to them. She didn’t like admitting it to herself because it sounded crazy, but Pam was gone, the camp was deserted, something was wrong with Addison, and they were currently following an invisible current through the woods to find their soul mates, who had no business being there. There was no other explanation Verity could think of that made sense.

  Of course, if that was the truth, what were they supposed to do about it? In Isis Archimedes, magic was always a thing that had to be acknowledged. It wasn’t a thing to be played with or controlled, and it certainly wasn’t a thing to be ignored. The best you could hope for was to understand it, and pray it didn’t lay waste to you.

  She took Addison by the arm.

  “What do you have in your hand?” she asked.

  Addison yelped like she’d been burned and wrenched free from Verity’s grasp. As she did, Verity saw a button pop out of her hand, land on the path, and bounce into the underbrush. At once, Addison fell to her knees and began combing through the brush without regard for any poisonous spiders, snakes, or thorns she might find there.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” she said, tossing handfuls of dead leaves over her shoulders. “Where is it? Where did it go?”

  Verity dropped down next to her on the path.

  “I’ll help you look,” she said, reaching into the brush.

  Addison slapped her hand away and shouted, “No!”

  “I�
�m sorry,” Verity said, clutching her stinging knuckles. “I didn’t mean to make you drop it.”

  Addison sat down on the path, suddenly looking exhausted. She leaned back on her elbows, then actually lay down flat on her back right there in the dirt.

  “It’s not that,” Addison said, her voice scarcely a whisper. “If you see it, don’t pick it up. Don’t even touch it.”

  It was then that Verity realized Annika, Alix, and Amber should have caught up with them by now. She looked back the way they’d come, but the path was perfectly empty. She called out to them, but the woods were perfectly silent. It was as if the other three girls had been lifted right off the path.

  A Note from the Narrator: It is perhaps more accurate to say they had been diverted by the stagehands.

  This was bad. This was very bad. Verity closed her eyes and allowed herself a pointless moment of wishing that they’d all gone to town in the truck with Pam, but that being off the table, she set about the business of getting Addison upright. Verity pulled her up to a sitting position, then dragged her to her feet.

  “Come on,” Verity said. “We’re going back. We’re going to find them.”

  The woods were different now. The invisible, magnetic current that had ushered them along was gone, and without it, the path seemed less distinct. Verity looked ahead and saw a mossy boulder she felt sure they’d already passed. She looked back the way they had come and saw nothing she recognized. It was as though someone had swept in while she and Addison were distracted by their search for the button and moved all the identifying landmarks around.

  Even the path itself had changed. It was treacherous in a way it hadn’t been before, paved with slippery stones and gnarled roots at every step. And on top of everything else, now it was dark.

  Verity and Addison linked elbows and shuffled their feet along the path like elderly widows on an icy sidewalk. Careful though they were, after a few minutes, Addison tripped on a rock and fell to the ground, clutching her scraped shin.