Enchanted Forests (44 page)

tually got to climb a waterfall!

Behind them, Morris' Buick crunched over the gravel to a

stop. He had the big campers, who'd probably want to go off and

play baseball. If those were senior campers, Marty was glad she

was a kid. What good was a game when you had a chance to

hear a story and climb a waterfall?

Mark even let them sit and eat on the damp ground. That, too,

was neat. It meant that mud and grass stains were going to soak

through their Bermudas, and they'd have to ride home sitting on

their beach towels and change their clothes outside the house.

The limp sandwiches and milk, smelling of old Thermos bottle,

tasted good. They left their spare carrots and lettuce for the

squirrels, then lounged against the mossy trunks of the trees;

they'd get green stuff all over their blouses and T-shirts, too, and

Mom would really have a fit—and waited for Mark to tell about

the Monster of Flaboongie.

He pointed to the edge of the pool. "You see that moss?"

They nodded yes at Mark and at the moss.

"You see that mud, how red it is?"

Again, the six campers from Mark's car nodded, big-eyed and

solemn.

"Well, that isn't just any moss, I'll have you know. And that

isn't just any mud. Long ago, there was a creature called the

Monster of Flaboongie."

Oooooh went that drip Beth Herman. She liked Annette in the

Mouseketeers. She even liked Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.

Marty hugged her grimy knees and stared up at the roof of

leaves overhead. Here in the deepest part of Mill Creek,

"Flaboongie" sounded weird, not stupid.

"How did he get here, you ask?"

The kids all nodded.

"The Indians think he followed the rivers and wandered down

by Lake Newport, down and down and down ..." Mark dropped

his voice. Marty could see a monster, following the water, catch-

THE MONSTERS OF MILL CREEK PARK   293

ing and eating catfish, maybe eating them raw because everyone

knew monsters didn't cook.

"Until he came HERE!"

Everybody jumped and screamed. Marty laughed, but she was

mad at Mark, who shouldn't have taken them in with such a

baby trick.

"After a while, people who came in here started never coming

out. The place got a bad name. Everyone knew a monster lived

here."

Now that made sense. Slippery Rock was a strange place, with

its stinky water (you weren't supposed to say stink, but it was

the only word that fit), its pool, its long, stringy moss and roots,

and its waterfall with the caves along the shore, heaped up by

rocks dumped off the ice from long, long ago,

Maybe there was something here. Maybe they'd find fossils.

Marty had found fossils in the park by the school, maybe not a

dinosaur, but a little shell. Last fall, she had organized her class

into heaping up rocks mat were pitted like craters. "We're build-

ing a meteorite," she'd told her second-grade teacher. When the

teacher called Marty's home, her father had laughed and laughed,

then opened a bottle from the cabinet Marty never opened. Marty

had "pushed" again, and she had been wrong. Now she knew

better: meteorites were mostly iron. Limestone, like the rocks she

carried, would have melted in the air.

Marty jolted upright as Lisa nudged her. Listen to Mark,

she hissed. Marty listened,

"... the Indians got tired of losing their boys and girls in the

woods—they had to come into the woods lo leam to hunt, you

know, and if they went away from their group, the monster got

them—so finally the chief prayed to the father of all the

Indians—"

"His name is Manitou," Marty blurted. The other kids whis-

pered behind their hands. Marty flushed worse than sunburn. /

didn't mean to push! she wailed silently. She thought she had

read that in Classics Illustrated. Hadn't she? She knew she

had read Last of the Mohicans.

"That's right, Marty," said Mark. "His name is Manitou, and

the Indians prayed to him. And do you know what happened?"

Marty knew what happened. Mark had saved her from being

laughed at again. Mark was wonderful. Maybe she would marry

him after all.

"Manitou came down to earth."

"How did you know his name was Manitou?" someone whis-

294 Susan Snwartz

pered to Marty. She managed to look mysterious and held up her

silver and turquoise ring, her utility ring from outer space. Ran-

dy's eyes went round.

Moms, who was very old, maybe fifty, with his graying hair

and blue shirt, came up and stood behind Mark where he sat on

the ground in the center of the circle of kids. Mark started to get

up. A hand on his shoulder kept Mark where he was.

"Go on," said Morris.

"Anyhow," Mark said, drawing their attention back to him,

"Manitou traced the monster of Flaboongie to this place and to

one of those caves over there." He gestured toward the pool and

the lazy waterfall, more a tumble of a stream down some rocks

than an actual falls. "He made himself real small and went into

the Monster's cave, and what do you think he saw?"

"Bones," whispered Randy.

"That's right. All over the floor. Oh, the monster of

Flaboongie was a messy eater. Manitou saw the bones of boys

and girls who got lost in the woods because they wandered off.

He saw the bones of old people. And he saw the bones of ani-

mals."

"Eeeuw," Beth went again.

"But not many animals," Mark put in rapidly. "The monster of

Baboongie liked the taste of people better.

"Anyhow, Manitou said, 'Oh Monster of Flaboongie, you have

been eating my people.' And the Monster went chomp! on an-

other bone. Manitou said, 'Monster, you must leave this place.'

The monster threw his bone away and laughed, showing all these

awful green teeth—he never went to the dentist—and said 'I will

never leave this place because the hunting is so good. And now

you never will either, because—' " Mark leaned out, hands like

catchers' mitts opening wide, "'—I'm going to eat you too!'

And he reached for Manitou like this!"

Everyone laughed and screamed. Bern tumbled onto her side.

Morris picked her back up.

"And do you know what Manitou did?"

Better not say, Marty warned herself.

"Manitou let himself grow to his full height. His head broke

through the roof of the cave. And he grabbed the Monster of

Flaboongie, picked him up, and threw him into that part of the

lake. He threw him so hard that he sank all the way to China,

and the ground closed up behind him."

It would have had to, Marty thought. Or lava would have

THE MONSTERS OF MILL CREEK PARK   295

come up through the hole, and anyway, Morris wouldn 't let them

come here.

"Even after all these years," Mark was finishing his story,

"you can still see traces of the Monster if you know where to

look. See those roots and that moss and mud? You only think

those are roots and moss and mud. That's really the Monster of

Flaboongie's hair and blood you see—all that's left of him, just

like bones were all that's left of the children—just like you!"

He lunged forward, and the boys jumped him, screaming and

laughing. Morris tapped him on the shoulder.

"Coming, Morris. Kids, you clean up, and then we're going to

beat the Senior Campers in baseball."

"Awwwww," whined Randy. "They'll skunk us."

"Not if you've got me on your side, and Morris promises to

strike out to handicap the Seniors," said Mark. "The game'U start

just as soon as Morris and I finish our talk. So don't wander off

anywhere or ..."

"The Monster of Flaboongie!" Randy, Beth, and Marty

screamed.

Marty wadded up the wax paper and tin foil from her lunch in

disgust and threw it away in the trash bin. It wasn't fair to come

all the way here and then not get to wade in the pool and climb

the rocks, maybe even go into one of those caves by the water's

edge. Who cared about an old Monster of Flaboongie, anyway?

She shut her lunch box—a real workman's box with leather

straps, not one of those tin things the other kids had with stupid

pictures of Lassie on them—and trotted back to the car to put it

away. Morris and Mark were talking low by the Buick and didn't

see her.

"If we keep the kids busy and together, we can finish out the

day without scaring them," Marty heard Morris say. She went

quiet. Make like a tree and he won't see you. Her parents called

that "eavesdropping." It was a you-rotten-kid thing to do, but

she'd always heard a lot by just being quiet

"Do the police definitely think it's a prowler?" Mark asked.

He sounded angry, though he never was. "That's why I told them

a 'don't-stray-from-the-group' story...."

"Your monster from ... what kind of Indian is 'Flaboongie'?"

"Schmohawk, Professor," said Mark. Both men laughed.

"For this, you had to study psychology?" asked Morris.

Grownups talked so much! What was this 'professor' busi-

ness? Morris was a teacher. It was always a problem to figure

out what they actually meant. She usually knew all the words

296 Susan Shwartz

they used, but sometimes she worried about how they used them,

even after she'd looked up the hard ones.

"They found the girl. She lives around here. She was more

scared than hurt, but do you want him touching one of our kids?

Aside from the damage to the child, think of the parents ..."

"What do you want me to do?" Mark asked.

"Keep 'em busy. Keep 'em out in the open and together. To-

morrow, maybe it'll rain. If it does, we go to the Unitarian

Church and there's no problem. If it doesn't, too bad it's not the

day we go to Packard Park in Warren. We'll have to go to the

tennis courts at Crandall Park. That's safe. For now."

Marty nodded to herself. They were making sense again. Usu-

ally, if you waited long enough, grownups did.

So all the Monster of Flaboongie meant was don't-go-with-

strangers. When you were carefully brought up, you already

knew that. You didn't talk to strangers (she'd had to tell that to

a man outside the Court House. He'd turned out to be a Judge-

call-him-Your-Honor and she'd been ashamed, but Daddy said

she'd done the right thing). You didn't take candy from them.

And you never never never went anywhere with them. Not into

cars. Or caves.

She set her lunch box softly down and went back to the clear-

ing. Most of the other campers had already run toward the soft-

ball field. Some of the girls hung back, looking as bored as she'd

be in a few minutes. Hmmmm, maybe -..

"I don't want to play ball," she announced to the other girls.

'They'll stick me in the outfield, and I'll never catch a ball.

Even if I do, they'll laugh and say I throw like a girl."

"That's silly," said Bern. "We are girls. But I want to stay

with Mark." She was almost whining. Sometimes she got like

that when she didn't get her way.

"I want to wade and climb the rocks, don't you?" Marty

asked.

"We're supposed to stay close," said the third girl, Lisa, who

didn't say much, ever.

"Well, if we all went, we'd be together, wouldn't we? Like

buddies in swimming?" Marty pointed out. A natural leader.

she'd heard a teacher call her. In-sti-ga-tor, she had also heard;

which didn't sound as nice. "We all know all about strangers. So

we stick together real close, and if we see anyone strange, we

can scream for help."

"I don't know," Lisa said. "The rocks are slishy. All that green

stuff. Moss. Whatever. Last time, I sat down in the water and had

THE MONSTERS OF MILL CREEK PARK   297

to wear my bathing suit home. Mom had to throw out my shorts.

She was really mad." Lisa's mouth turned up in a smile at the

memory. "I caught a lot of tadpoles."

She and Marty looked at Beth. If she said she wanted to go

play ball, she'd spoil it for the others. She knew that. She also

knew that if she tattled, no one would ever, ever tell her things

again. Lisa sighed.

"Okay," she said. "But I get to ask Mark if I can sit by him

going home."

She could ask. Asking was free. But it was Marty's turn, and

Mark knew that

The three girls headed for the pool. They sat and took off their

sneakers on a bank of what Mark had described as hair from the

Monster of Flaboongie. It was damp on Marty's backside.

Eeeuw.

The three girls waded in. Marty held a long stick. Maybe it

would help her not to fall.

"You look like you wet yourself," Beth said.

"Did not."

"Did too."

"Oh, come on," said Lisa- She gave Beth a shove, and she sat

down in the water. Her eyes widened as if she were going to cry.

Then she giggled.

"Let's all sit down in the water," she suggested. So they did.

Marty got up and headed toward the pile of rocks. Some were

cut and some weren't. Streams of water flowed down them and

swirled into smaller ponds like Uttle sinks. The mud between her

toes felt, like Lisa said, slishy. Like the bottom of Lake Erie,