Amazed, Clay looked around at the others. They seemed amused more than anything else. It wasn’t the first time they’d seen Flint’s pyrotechnics.
Buzz’s eyes narrowed. “This was supposed to be a teaching moment, Flint, not a fireworks display.”
Flint laughed. “Just trying to lend a helping hand.”
“I was going to invite you to stay for roasted mush-mallows, but maybe you should just go,” said Buzz, visibly irritated.
“Sure, I hate those things anyway.” Flint sauntered away, fire crackling behind him.
“I told you he was a pyro,” Jonah whispered to Clay.
How did he do it, Clay wondered, watching Flint go. Did he have gunpowder on his fingers? A lighter up his sleeve? For the second time, Clay was stumped by one of Flint’s magic tricks. As much as he disliked Flint, Clay couldn’t help being impressed by his skill.
The mush-mallows were not mushy marshmallows, as Clay had hoped, but rather mushrooms roasted on sticks, marshmallow-style. Buzz claimed that the mushrooms, which were a very rare species found only on Price Island, had a marshmallow-like sweetness, but to Clay they tasted like dirt. About this one subject, he agreed with Flint. When Buzz wasn’t looking, Clay spit his mushroom into his hand and discreetly dropped it to the ground.
While the others roasted more mushrooms, Clay sat on a log, gazing into the campfire, unable to get the mysterious reading girl out of his head. He kept seeing her in the tower window, her red hair seeming to engulf her head in flames.
Who was she? Why was she hiding? What was her secret?
Finally, when he couldn’t bear it any longer, Clay pointed in the library’s direction. “Hey, what’s up with that tower over there—you know, the one past the ruins?” he asked, hoping that his breezy tone would keep Buzz from suspecting that he had crossed the Wall of Trust. “I saw it from a distance when I was walking Como, and I wondered what was inside.”
“Ah, the Price Public Library,” said Buzz, his expression not giving much away. “One of the world’s biggest rare book collections, that’s what’s inside.”
“You ever go in?” Clay asked, trying to hide his eagerness.
Buzz shook his head. “It’s outside the Wall of Trust.”
“You’re a counselor!” said Pablo.
“Nobody is supposed to go in,” said Buzz. “Price left strict instructions in his will.”
“And nobody’s ever tried?” asked Clay.
“Oh, a few have tried,” said Buzz, looking hard at Clay. “We moved the Wall of Trust because of what happened.”
“Why? What happened?” Clay’s leg started to jiggle. Did Buzz know he’d been there? It almost seemed like it.
“A ghost!” joked Kwan. “That’s what Jonah thinks.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Jonah.
“Actually, you’re not too far off.” Buzz glanced around the group. “You guys want to hear a ghost story?”
“This is a campfire, isn’t it?” said Kwan.
“Just make sure there’s lots of blood,” said Pablo.
“Only a little blood, but lots of gold,” said Buzz.
“Like gold gold?” asked Kwan. “Or like money?”
“Both,” said Buzz. “Do you all know what alchemy is?”
“Kind of like magical chemistry, right?” said Jonah. “Like from the Middle Ages?”
“More or less,” said Buzz. “Among other things, the alchemists believed that with the right recipe, they could turn lead into gold.”*
He threw a big log onto the fire. It blazed high in the night.
“As the legend goes, Randolph Price was a poor street kid when he stumbled on the lost secrets of the alchemists. Where and how, he never revealed, naturally. But he brought their ancient magic into the modern world. He performed tricks on street corners. Predicted future headlines. Cured sick pets. Turned lead pencils into gold pens.”
“That sounds pretty lucrative,” said Kwan.
“Magicians fake that stuff all the time,” said Clay, thinking of Leira and her theory about magicians being thieves. “If he had any gold, it’s because he stole it.”
“Maybe so. I’m just telling you the story as it was told to me,” said Buzz. “When Price was sixteen, he turned his talents to stocks and bonds, and soon he had more money than he knew what to do with. People called him ‘the Wizard of Wall Street,’ not guessing that he might really be one.”
“Wait, so you do think he did magic! Like real magic?” said Kwan.
“Then came the crash of 1929…” said Buzz, ignoring him.
“What crash is that?” asked Jonah. Clay remembered that it was a car crash that had brought Jonah to Earth Ranch.
“Stock market crash.” Buzz poked at the fire with a stick. It blazed high again. “Everybody went broke. Except Price. The crash only made him richer. He started traveling the world, buying stuff on the cheap.”
“Profiting off the misery of the poor. I knew it!” said Pablo.
“Paintings. Statues. Gold. Silver. He bought everything,” said Buzz. “But mostly books. Old books. Rare books. The more books he got, the more he worried they would be taken from him. To keep them safe, he bought his own private island—this island—and he began building a palace for himself and a tower for his books.”
“No more books,” said Kwan. “I thought this was a ghost story. We want dead hands reaching out of graves.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Buzz. “Just when work on the island was about to end, his brother and sister-in-law died in a crash—a real crash, a car crash. I’m sure it was very gory.”
“Cool,” said Kwan. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Suddenly, Price had to take care of a three-year-old niece he’d never met. He brought her here, and she grew up with nobody for company but her uncle and thousands of books. You can imagine how lonely she was. It was her idea to make the library public. So there would be visitors on the island. But then Mount Forge erupted and Price Palace caught on fire. The entire place burned down, along with everything in it. Price was in the library at the time, and it was barely touched.”
“But the niece was in the palace?” asked Jonah.
Buzz nodded, his eyes seeming to reflect not just the campfire in front of him but also the memory of the burning palace. “She was twelve years old. Price blamed himself—and his magic—for her death. Afterward, he became a hermit, locked up in his library. Never saw anybody but his caretaker. When he died, he left money for this camp, and strict instructions to keep the library closed. Forever.”
“What about the ghost part?” asked Pablo.
“Yeah, has anybody had any mysterious accidents?” asked Kwan. “Or heard spooky sounds at night?”
Buzz shook his head. “Nothing like that. But over the years, three campers have claimed to see a girl in a tower window reading a book.”
He looked so serious, nobody said anything for a second.
“What—what does she look like—the girl in the window?” stammered Clay. He’d had an uncomfortable tingling in the back of his neck ever since Buzz first mentioned the niece.
“The descriptions are sketchy,” said Buzz. “One camper said her hair was on fire; another that her hair was red with blood.”
Clay swallowed. There was no doubt Buzz was talking about the girl he saw.
“So what’s the big deal?” asked Pablo. “I mean, why did you have to move the Wall of Trust? Don’t tell me you really believe the niece’s ghost is haunting the library.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” said Buzz. “It matters what those three campers believe.…”
“What do you mean?” asked Clay, his throat dry.
“I don’t like using words like sane or insane,” said Buzz, his face solemn in the firelight. “Let’s just say that ever since seeing the girl in the tower, all three campers have had a little trouble dealing with what most of us call reality. One of them is now institutionalized. Another hasn’t said a word in five y
ears. The third… well, I’m hopeful that the third camper is going to be okay, but I keep a close watch on him.”
Clay coughed, avoiding Buzz’s eyes. Was this his way of saying he knew Clay had been to the library? Was he, Clay, the third camper? Or was there somebody else at camp who had also seen the girl in the window? Perhaps even somebody else in his cabin?
He looked around at his cabinmates, but he couldn’t read anything in their faces except that they were getting very sleepy.
Late that night, Clay was replaying Buzz’s ghost story in his mind when his attention was caught by the sound of Jonah murmuring in the bunk below. “Fire… fire…” he seemed to be saying.
Clay leaned over the bunk. Jonah was sitting up, but his eyes were glazed. He didn’t look quite awake.
“What’s wrong?” Clay whispered. “Do you smell fire or something?”
Jonah didn’t answer, just repeated, “Fire… Fire…”
“Jonah, can you hear me?”
There was no response. He was still asleep. Maybe he was dreaming about the Price Palace fire? Could Jonah be the third camper?
“Jonah, wake up!” Clay whispered a little more loudly.
But Jonah kept staring straight ahead. His expression never changing, he slipped out of his sleeping bag, got to his feet, and headed for the door. The rest of the cabin remained asleep.
Remembering the story about Jonah sleepwalking all the way into the lake, Clay climbed down to the floor and hurried after him. He didn’t want to have to fish a sleeping boy out of the water.
Clay stepped out of the cabin just in time to see somebody running away in the dark, and to see the bathroom shack burst into flames—sudden, roaring flames—as if it had been doused in kerosene, then lit with a match.
Clay stared for a second, paralyzed by surprise. Then he saw Jonah, still asleep, walking directly toward the fire.
“Jonah! Fire!” Clay screamed.
He ran and grabbed Jonah, startling him awake.
“Let go of me!” Jonah yelled. “What are you doing?”
“Saving you!”
Jonah looked at him in confusion. “From what?”
“What’s going on out there?” Buzz asked, leaning out of the cabin.
“Quick, get a hose or a fire extinguisher!” Clay shouted.
Kwan appeared behind Buzz. “Where’s the fire?”
“What do you mean? It’s right there—”
Clay turned back to the bathroom hut: The fire had gone out. Completely. There wasn’t a wisp of smoke left. Even stranger, there was no evidence that the fire had ever been there. Clay took a step closer. There was nothing burned, nothing charred.
“Jonah, do you know what this is about?” Buzz asked.
“No, I just woke up,” said Jonah. “This crazy kook dragged me outside in my sleep!”
“I did not! You were sleepwalking. And you were about to—”
Clay stopped in the middle of his sentence. While he was speaking, Flint had strolled up.
“Maybe you were the one sleepwalking, Worm,” he said to Clay.
“I wasn’t sleepwalking,” said Clay through gritted teeth.
So it had been Flint whose shadow he’d seen running away. Figures, thought Clay.
“Then maybe you saw a reflection of my flashlight and thought it was a fire,” said Flint, turning on his flashlight.
“I know what I saw,” said Clay. “What’re you doing out here, anyway?”
“I went out to take a leak. You got a problem with that, Worm?” Flint stepped right up to Clay and shined his flashlight in Clay’s face.
“Leave him alone, Flint. He made a mistake, that’s all,” said Buzz. “C’mon back inside, Clay.”
Confused and embarrassed, Clay followed his counselor back into the cabin—only to find sprinklers raining from the ceiling. Everything—and everyone—was drenched.
Clay pinched his nose. The sulfurous smell of the camp water was almost overpowering.
“We heard you yell ‘fire,’ ” said Pablo, water dripping from his chin. “So we set off the alarm.”
“Sorry,” Clay muttered.
From the furious looks on the faces of his cabinmates, he could tell he wouldn’t be forgiven anytime soon.
As he climbed onto his bunk, a crumpled piece of paper fell out of his pocket onto his wet sleeping bag. He unfolded it and found a short note scrawled inside.
STAY AWAY FROM HER, it read.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
THE SWIM TEST
I don’t know about you, but I heard a lot of scary stories about summer camp when I was growing up. Snakes in sleeping bags. Underwear raids. Hands put in warm water to make you wet your bed.
Clay had heard those stories, too, and for the next couple of days, he kept looking over his shoulder and checking his sleeping bag, never allowing himself to close his eyes for very long. He knew his cabinmates were sore about getting drenched with water, and he was sure they would take revenge on him in some terrible and humiliating way.
He experienced no retribution, however, except for a few dirty looks, and eventually he stopped worrying about the Worms. His thoughts kept turning back to his strange sighting at the U-BRARY. What was it that he—and three other campers—had seen? If not a ghost, then who or what was the girl in the window—a real girl in hiding? A mass hallucination brought on by the vog? More than anything else, she seemed like a figure from a dream. But then there was the crumpled warning he’d received. Why would somebody want him to stay away from her if she wasn’t real?
He assumed the note came from Flint; Clay was almost certain Flint was the mysterious third camper. The pyro-magician, as Clay thought of him, must have created the illusion that the bathroom was burning in order to scare Clay off. Clay told himself to be brave and confront the older boy, but the few times they crossed paths, Clay found himself looking down. Meanwhile, he waited for an opportunity to return to the U-BRARY.
He had to see the girl again. He had to know who she was. Or what.
Three nights after the false fire alarm, Clay awoke to a strange howling sound coming from across the cabin.
He looked over and saw someone—no, something—sitting up in Pablo’s bed. Something with stringy red hair, a lumpy gray face, and a tattered white gown. Clay gasped… then saw that it was just a doll—an ugly ghost doll—lit from below by a flashlight. It looked like a bad Halloween display.
“Very funny, guys,” said Clay. “It’s the ghost girl from the ruins. I get it.”
Scarier than the doll itself was the idea that they thought it would scare him; did that mean they knew he’d been to the library and that he’d seen the ghost?
“You can all stop pretending to sleep now. Pablo, where are you, anyway?”
Nobody moved. Either they were all really asleep or they were doing a good job pretending they were.
Suddenly, Clay started to feel nervous. Maybe the doll wasn’t a practical joke by his cabinmates; maybe it was another warning from Flint.
Cautiously, Clay climbed out of his bed. Expecting to find another note, he took a closer look at the doll.
The hair was made from Jonah’s red rope licorice, the head was a potato, and the girlie face was drawn with a pen. The doll couldn’t have been cruder, but it was frightening-looking nonetheless.
As Clay studied the doll, the howling began again, and—
“Aaack!” Clay screamed, and jumped backward.
—the doll started climbing out of bed. By itself.
About knee-high, the puppet-like creature had a paint-can body, and arms and legs made from rusty pipes and springs—all connected to its potato head by a jumble of wires. It looked like a cross between Mr. Potato Head and the Tin Man—with long red hair and lipstick.
It lurched toward Clay.
“What is that? Somebody, stop it!” Clay yelled, now truly terrified.
The others burst into laughter. They were all awake after all.
Clay exhaled,
relieved but deeply embarrassed.
“Dude, you should see your face right now!” said Kwan.
“Okay, very funny, what is that thing?” asked Clay as it teetered and finally fell over just before reaching him.
“That’s Pablo’s tater-bot,” said Jonah. “His potato-robot.”
Pablo, who had been crouching in the corner, picked up the tater-bot and set it lumbering in Clay’s direction again.
“We’re not supposed to have technology here, but they made an exception because Pablo made him all from recycled parts,” said Kwan.
“Well, except for the potato,” Pablo corrected. “I have to give him a new head every week or he starts to rot. That’s where his power comes from.”
“His power?” echoed Clay.
“Yeah, haven’t you ever made a potato battery? See those wires—they make it all happen,” said Pablo, pointing to the curling wires surrounding the tater-bot’s head.
“Uh, not really,” said Clay.* “Hey—”
The tater-bot was poking him with its extended exhaust-pipe arm.
“He wants to shake your hand.”
“Uh, okay.” Clay did his best. “Hi.”
“His name is Cal, short for Caliban,” said Pablo.
Clay looked at Pablo in surprise. “Caliban, like in The Tempest?”
“What? You think just ’cause I don’t go to school, I don’t know Shakespeare?”
“Sorry. It’s just—never mind.”
The tater-bot backed away from Clay a few paces, as if it were just as insulted as Pablo.
“So, all this time, you’ve been hiding him under your bed, waiting for the best time to freak me out?” Clay asked.
“Uh-huh. Pretty much,” said Pablo, grinning.
Well, here was one question answered: The tater-bot was the mystery object Clay had seen peeking out from Pablo’s sleeping bag.
“Look on the bright side,” said Kwan. “Now we got you back. We don’t have to hate you anymore.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Clay.
And it was.
A week later, Clay stood nervously on the dock next to the other Worms. It was time for their swim test.