Falling In (12 page)

Not much of a secret keeper, old Sam. Isabelle decided she liked that about him. In fact, she found him generally likeable. In fact, what if he came with her to the camp? If she liked him—she who liked very few boys, almost none she could think of,
certainly not Rat Face over there—then anybody would. If Isabelle surrounded herself with likeable people, then the children would listen to her. They would trust her. They’d be less likely to stone her to death when she told them the news.

“We’re on our way to the camp north of Greenan,” she said to Samuel. “I could use your help.”

As Isabelle explained, she could see the interest on Samuel’s face. Oh, sure, it was interest mixed with disbelief, a half cup of fear, a dash of confusion, but definitely interest.

Rat Face, on the other hand, laughed and rolled his eyes like yo-yos. “So you think your granny’s not a witch, then? She’s got you fooled, that one does.”

Isabelle ignored him. “The sooner people know the truth, the sooner they can lead normal lives again,” she told Samuel. “They won’t have to be afraid of a witch anymore.”

“
If
they believe you,” Samuel amended. “There’s no saying whether they will or won’t. But I suppose I believe you, so I’ll come. Quinn here, he’ll come too.”

Rat Face—Quinn—looked at his friend. “You believe her? You believe there’s no witch? Just like that?”

Samuel shrugged. “Never much believed in the witch in the first place. Well, I did for a time, but lately I’ve been wondering. It’s like she said”—he nodded toward Isabelle—“who do you know of that actually got killed? Always folks in the other villages, never Greenan.”

“The only reason I’m going is to fetch my brothers and sister and take them back home,” Hen declared. “That one”—she nodded toward Isabelle— “can do all the talking about witches she likes. I’ll be no part of it.”

Isabelle dropped back as the group began walking north. Why was Hen so stubborn? Why couldn’t she get with the program, get over it, get real? Fact: There was no child-eating witch. Fact: This was good news. Why couldn’t Hen accept it? Then she and Isabelle could go back to being friends. They could tell the news to the kids at the camp, drop off Hen’s various siblings at home, then head back to
Grete’s for a big “Everything’s Okay Now” celebration.

Yeah,
Isabelle thought.
Right
.

Catching up with the others, Isabelle was more than a little irritated to find Hen having a friendly conversation with Samuel (Hen, who had not said one friendly word to Isabelle all day), the two of them reminiscing about the different camps they’d been to over the years.

“You’ve been to the camps north of Greenan before, I suppose?” Samuel asked. “Too close to home for us during our season, of course, but I always snuck over there when the children came from other villages, watched ‘em swing on the ropes over the creek.”

“Aye, the ropes are good fun,” Hen agreed. “Bet we’ll find Jacob swinging on one when we get there. The only problem with the Greenan camp—no offense to you—is that the woods are frightening around the edges. You feel eyes peering in at you at night.”

“All the camps are like that, not just Greenan,”
Samuel said. “Anyone will tell you that the woods around the whole of the Five Villages are alive. We go to Aghadoc in our season, and the little ones won’t venture a foot from the campfire after darkness falls. When I was a wee boy, it didn’t matter if it were light or dark, I spent a whole day feeling spooked.”

“Then everyone will be even happier that there’s no witch,” Isabelle asserted. “We’ll be bringing them good news.”

Hen looked at Samuel. “You might want to be careful how you go about telling them about it,” she said, ignoring Isabelle completely. “You being a stranger, they won’t trust you much.”

Samuel nodded in agreement. “We might do well to act the traveler at first, like folks looking for a place to stay. When they get used to us a bit, then we’ll tell them. A day or two, and we’ll know the best way to go about it, don’t you think?”

“They’ll be wondering why you kept it a secret from them,” Rat Face pointed out. “They’ll think you’re not to be trusted.”

Really, it was hard for Isabelle—who believed herself to be a peaceable person, but like most people had her limits—not to reach out and give Rat Face a hard pinch. But Samuel seemed to take Rat Face’s idea seriously. “Let’s think about it while we walk,” he said. “And when we reach the camps, maybe the answer will set itself in front of us, in plain view.”

But when they reached the camps, what they found was not an answer.

What they found was chaos.

Maybe you’ve been to summer camp. Remember the cozy cabins with their slightly funky, mildewy smell, the well-tended paths you followed from this activity (archery!) to that (lanyard making!) over the course of a morning? How could you forget the sparkling lake, the noisy, joyful mess hall, the s’mores, the sing-alongs? Oh, Michael, row that boat ashore, yes, indeedy.

Even if you’ve never been to camp, this is what you imagine camp is like, isn’t it? Me too. The words that pop to mind are “idyllic,” “frolicsome,” “middle-of-the-night-giggles” (I know, I know, not a word, more a phrase, but you get my point). Happiness of the unfettered sort.

I want you to close your eyes and take your giant mental eraser and erase all those images. Can you do it? I know asking you to rid yourself of certain thoughts is almost as good as asking you to think those thoughts obsessively (whatever you do, don’t think of pink elephants!), but do your best.

Because here’s the thing: Your ideas of What Camp Is won’t work for this story, sorry to say. The camp we’re about to enter is of a different sort. It’s a camp where children are doing their best to survive without their parents, the whole time fearful of a witch popping out of nowhere to carry them off and eat them for supper. To say that the littlest children have constant stomachaches would be an understatement.

Under the best of circumstances, the Greenan camp wasn’t a wildly happy place, but because it was a camp filled with children, all was not gloom and doom. The Greenan camp was known especially for its three rope swings tied to trees at the edge of the creek, and on warm days the children flew over the water, shrieking and squealing, little sisters ignoring
their big sisters’ warnings, the tallest boys climbing as close to the tops of the ropes as they could.

And so it had been at the beginning of the witch’s season, when the children had started to make their way into the camp, first in a trickle, then in a great stream of chatter and commotion. But two days before Isabelle first met Hen on the path to Corrin, a girl named Lanny entered the Greenan camp feeling dizzy and slightly out of sorts. She was ten, and normally the picture of health, and on this particular day she couldn’t figure out why she felt so strange. Had the witch cast a spell on her? Or was it just the fear racing around her heart that caused the white dots to appear in front of her eyes?

No, not the witch, not the fear. It was influenza the girl carried with her into the camp, and it caused her to wobble on her feet and grab at branches to keep from falling. Within a day, half the children had caught it, and the other half were left to care for them. But how? Damp cloths on the forehead. Creek water boiled in a pot and dripped down their throats.

You know and I know those remedies couldn’t possibly work against the flu. Nothing worked. And every day more children got sick, and so there were fewer children to act as nurses and gather food and keep the fires going.

And then one day somebody came. They had been praying for this, the children who still had their wits about them, who weren’t roiling and writhing with fever and chills. They had been hoping for more than a week that somebody would come. Somebody who could save them.

And now, finally, they were here.

Isabelle felt it even before they walked into the camp. Not just felt it, but knew it, as in: A little piece of knowledge had somehow knit itself into her bones. She knew that they shouldn’t go in there. Something was wrong.

Rat Face agreed. “Smells funny,” he said at the edge of the clearing, from where they could see makeshift tents here and there, but not one single child. “Smells the way it did when Uncle Seth died. Like fever and rot.”

Hen turned pale. “The little ones are in there,” she said in a shaky voice. “Sugar, Artemis, Jacob, all of ‘em.”

“Then in we go.” Samuel put a reassuring hand
on Hen’s shoulder. “We’ll find your little ones first, and then see what’s to be seen about the others.”

“Yes, we must find them,” Hen agreed. She rubbed her hands hard against her arms, as though she were cold. “Oh, but won’t Mam be after me if a single hair of their heads is out of place!”

“What if they’re ill?” Rat Face moved so that he was blocking the way into the clearing. “What good will it do us to go near? We’ll only become ill ourselves. There are stories, you know, of fever sweeping through a camp and death following fast behind. If we were to die, who would tell the story of the witch?”

“So you believe us now, do you?” Samuel asked his friend. “Had a change of heart?”

Rat Face shrugged. “Remains to be seen what I believe the case to be. Not enough evidence either way. But something’s amiss here, no denying that.” He turned to Isabelle. “You feel it, don’t you?”

The strange thing: Not only did Isabelle feel it, she could hear it. Which is to say, she found one
voice in her head, then another, and another, that were not hers. They toppled over one another—

O I’m so cold o there is a black dog that bites please run I can’t run . . .

The coldest cup of water, Mother, if only you would . . .

I will sit up I will sit up and see about Mazie I will sit up in one more minute . . .

—in a jumble of nonsense that Isabelle recognized from the times she’d been sick with a fever, but the voices themselves were unfamiliar, kids’ voices, kids who needed help now. And on top of them, her own thoughts insisting that she help them.

But her feet wouldn’t move. She was supposed to help these kids and risk getting sick herself? Maybe even die? Was that fair? How would she get home if she died? Who would know what had happened to her?

A tiny voice wound its way above the others in Isabelle’s head, announced itself clearly:
Help
.

Odd: It was Hen’s voice. No, not exactly. More like Hen’s voice if Hen had been three or four, Hen’s voice made small and weak.

Sugar.

Isabelle sighed. She couldn’t let Sugar die, could she? The little sister of her best friend (even if her best friend didn’t want to be best friends with her)? She didn’t think so. She pushed past Rat Face and began walking toward the clearing.

“We won’t get sick if we wash our hands,” she yelled back to the others, who all looked at her like she was crazy.
Haven’t they ever heard of germs?
Isabelle thought irritably, and then realized that, no, they probably never had. “Washing cleans the sickness off you if you’ve touched it,” she explained. “It’s something we discovered back where I’m from. It’s not one hundred percent guaranteed, but it seems to help a lot.”

“And maybe if we dance around the mulberry tree three times, we’ll never catch a cold,” Rat Face replied.

“It does sound like foolishness,” agreed Hen halfheartedly.

“It’s science,” Isabelle insisted. “You’ll have to trust me on this one.”

Samuel looked doubtful. “Where’d you say you were from?”

Isabelle pointed vaguely northward. “Up there. From a place where we’ve made a lot of scientific advances. Like vaccinations.”

“Vaccinations?” Samuel asked, sounding interested.

Isabelle nodded, feeling very smart all of a sudden. “Vaccinations are medicine you take so you don’t get sick. And we’ve got antibiotics, which cure you when you do get sick. But one of the most amazing scientific discoveries we’ve made”—and she said “we’ve” as though she herself had been on the research team that made it—“is that if you wash your hands, you get rid of some of the stuff that makes you sick in the first place. Germs go right down the drain.”

“You’re right,” Samuel said, shaking his head. “We’ll just have to trust you.”

Hen took a deep breath. “Don’t have much of a choice, I suppose.”

Rat Face didn’t say anything, but he followed the
rest of them into the camp. As they reached the center of the clearing, the voices swarmed thick in Isabelle’s head, like she’d tuned into a hundred radio stations at once. She had to concentrate. Where was Sugar?

It came to her suddenly: near the big tree. Isabelle didn’t know how she knew this, but she did, and she looked around her for the tallest tree at the edge of the clearing. “Sugar’s in there!” she shouted, pointing to the tent beneath the tree.

They ran. It wasn’t much of a tent, a piece of canvas held up by sticks and string. Hen was first in. “Oh, she’s burning up!” she cried. “Sugar, I’m here. Hen is here.”

“Hen!” a little girl’s voice trembled. “I knew you’d come!”

Rat Face pushed Isabelle toward the tent. “Get in, then! See what it’s all about!”