The First Adventure (4 page)

Luthor was on them in an instant, hauling Logan and Ben at the end of his leash. The big Doberman jumped all over Savannah, deliriously happy to see her after his imprisonment in Logan's basement. Savannah was nearly as wild, planting kisses all over his huge head and snout, murmuring, “It's okay, sweetie. Everything's going to be fine.”

“He wrecked our basement, you know,” Logan said bitterly. “And my folks think
I
did it. You should see how it feels when your own parents believe you chewed up a beanbag chair! After camp, I have to go into therapy.”

“Let's hurry up and get Luthor in the bag,” Ben urged, Ferret Face peering out of his sleeve. “If you miss the bus, all this is for nothing.”

It took Savannah's renowned skill as a dog whisperer to coax Luthor into the giant duffel. But he went, and lay down obediently, and even shut his eyes when she told him it was time to sleep. He objected a little when Griffin closed the zipper over his head, but Savannah's constant soothing voice managed to calm him.

“Well, have a good time — I guess,” Ben said dubiously. “I'll text when I get to my camp.”

The friends said good-bye, and Griffin and Savannah dragged the duffel, now even heavier than before, toward their bus.

“Whoa! No way!” the driver exclaimed. “You're not taking that on board. Load it into the baggage compartment.”

“I can't,” Griffin explained. “It has my computer in it. I promised my mom I wouldn't let it out of my sight.”

“Fine. Take the computer out and stow that bag. We've got to get rolling. I swear — you kids bring more stuff every year! What have you got in there — a pool table?”

In resignation, Griffin and Savannah dragged their precious cargo around the side of the bus. Savannah opened the zipper a few inches, and leaned close.

“You're not going to like it, sweetie, but you have to be patient and stay calm.” From her backpack she produced a handful of dog biscuits and a plastic baby bottle filled with water. “Be a good boy, okay?” She kissed his nose and zipped him in again, leaving enough room for some air to get in.

They re-boarded and settled in for the three-hour ride. The driver shut the door and put the engine in gear. The bus was actually beginning to pull out into traffic when there was a pounding on the door, and a foghorn voice called, “Wait! There's one more!”

The driver opened up and a large, stocky boy panted aboard, dragging a brass-bound trunk.

“Thanks, mister!” His piggy eyes met Griffin's horrified ones. “Hey, Bing! You're going to this camp, too?”

Darren Vader was the last person you wanted around when there was a plan in progress. He was a cheater and a snitch, and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to get Griffin into trouble.

“Listen, Darren,” Griffin said reasonably. “Camp is supposed to be fun, so let's make a deal: I don't know you, and you don't know me, and we stay out of each other's way.”

The big boy flopped down in the seat in front of Griffin. “Not gonna happen,” he chortled with cruel satisfaction.

The howling began five minutes over the Whitestone Bridge.

“Man, does this bus ever need a tune-up!” complained the driver.

C
amp Ebony Lake was a breathtaking spot in the deep woods of New York's Catskill Mountains, a circle of log cabins and small buildings surrounded by playing fields reclaimed from the dense forest. The lake itself was a vast black mirror, usually dead calm. According to the scientists at the research installation on the opposite shore, it was deeper in some places than Scotland's famous Loch Ness.

The tires crunched the gravel of the roadway as the bus pulled up to the main building. “Last stop, you guys,” the driver announced. “Just give me a minute to pop open the cargo bay, and you can get your gear.” He jumped to the ground, walked around the side of the bus, released the catch, and rolled up the panel to the baggage compartment.

He never saw it coming. With a terrifying roar, a large animal exploded out of the hold, flattening him to the turf. Dazed, he was aware of a huge black-and-brown body passing over him. Then the beast was gone, disappearing into the woods. There was the crackle of breaking branches as the monster fled, followed by silence. Whatever had been there was gone.

Alarmed, the campers poured off the bus, coming to the aid of their fallen driver.

“What happened?” asked one girl.

The driver sat up, catching his breath. “I — I opened the door, and a bear attacked me and ran into the forest!”

Griffin and Savannah exchanged an agonized look. Griffin's eyes traveled into the compartment. His huge bag looked suspiciously flat, with a great ragged hole chewed into the side. He put out a hand to stop Savannah from running off into the woods.

“Later!” he hissed.

“But —”

“Later!”

“We closed that hatch in Long Island,” Darren Vader reasoned. “It couldn't have been a bear. Maybe a raccoon.”

“I know what a raccoon looks like, kid,” the driver retorted. “This was bigger.”

“What about a cougar?” suggested someone else.

“Or a deer.”

“Or a giant squirrel.”

“There's no such thing!”

Eventually, Cyrus, the head counselor, took charge of the situation. “Guys, I've been here for twelve years, and there are no bears, no cougars, and no giant squirrels. Frogs, birds, and mosquitoes are more our speed. And whatever it was, it's gone now. So get your bunk assignments off the list and stow your gear.”

Savannah sidled up to Griffin. “We have to find Luthor before he gets lost!”

“If we go now, we'll get caught,” Griffin reasoned. “Even if nobody sees us, our counselors will know that we never showed up in our cabins. The last thing we need is to attract attention, especially with Vader in camp. Later, when everybody's asleep, we'll go after Luthor. He'll come running when he hears your voice.”

“How can you be sure of that? A domestic animal won't do well in the wild!”

Griffin was exasperated. “Do you honestly think there's anything out there scarier than Luthor? You may be the animal expert, but I'm the planner. You've got to trust me. If we let on that Luthor's up here, we might as well just hand him to Swindle on a silver platter.”

It was that final argument that won her over. Somehow she would have to get through this day for Luthor's sake.

* * *

Griffin was in Cabin 14 with Darren Vader. In fact, they were bunkmates, with Griffin on the bottom.

“Hey, Bing, I hope you're a sound sleeper, because I snore.”

Griffin had discovered long ago that there was no way to deal with Darren. If you fought back, it only encouraged him. And if you ignored him, he just pumped up the volume. Resignedly, he began to unpack, finding in dismay that Luthor had chewed through his clothes in order to get to the side of the bag. Shorts, T-shirts, and bathing suits were all cut to ribbons and damp with drool. He had packed enough for a month, but now he had clothes to last for three days at the most.

Marty, the Cabin 14 counselor, sat down beside Griffin as he was holding up a pair of underwear that looked like it had been through an atomic blast. Quickly, Griffin tried to hide the evidence.

But Marty smiled. “Don't be embarrassed. I understand that money's tight for families these days.”

Griffin stared at him.
He thinks I packed clothes like shredded cobwebs because this is the best I've got?
The tricky part was that the guy could never be told the truth without revealing the whole story of Luthor in the luggage.

“There's a fund for campers in your situation,” Marty told him. “We'll get you some better stuff. Don't worry.”

“Thanks,” he said, and almost strangled on the word.

* * *

The day dragged. Griffin had been looking forward to camp. But every swing of a bat and kick of a ball, every swimming stroke or bite of food in the mess hall seemed like a colossal waste of important time. For him, there was no agony quite like a plan unfinished, with details left up in the air. Every time he caught sight of Savannah with the girls' group, he could tell she was thinking the exact same thing. And, like his, her eyes were following the sun in its path across the sky, waiting for the moment when they could spring into action and go after Luthor.

After dinner, there was a huge bonfire on the beach. And as they roasted marshmallows and sang songs, the counselors began to tell ghost stories, which were supposed to be scary, but really weren't.

“Boring!” called a voice that Griffin recognized as Darren's.

“Tell the real story!” piped up someone else. And a few of the older kids took up the cry.

“No way,” said Cyrus seriously. “These new campers aren't ready for — that kind of information.”

Well, that did it. A howl went up, demanding the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“All right,” Cyrus said finally. “But don't come crying to me if you have nightmares about — the mechanical monster of Ebony Lake.”

A shiver ran through the throng, but they hung in there, waiting for the story.

“You've all heard of the Loch Ness Monster. Well, Ebony Lake had a monster of its own — some sort of giant prehistoric fish that never evolved into a modern species because it lived in the inky depths of our lake, unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs.”

The head counselor went on to explain that, forty years ago, a famous scientist by the name of Randolph Zim became a hermit and built himself a cabin on the lake, perhaps three quarters of a mile from the spot where they now sat. Zim was crazy, but he was also a renowned genius who used his skills to communicate with the monster.

“A terrible winter came along,” Cyrus continued, “and the cabin was snowed in for months. The food ran out, and Zim knew that he would soon starve. There was only one source of food — the monster. So Zim took a sharp knife and cut off a fin, just enough to keep himself alive. But he felt sorry for his friend's pain, so he created a mechanical fin to replace the one he had eaten. As the winter went on and the deep freeze continued, Zim was forced to eat more and more of his only friend — until nothing remained except a great machine, a gleaming animatronic replica of the original monster. Now completely out of food, Zim starved to death. His frozen corpse was found in the cabin that spring.

“But the machine lives on. No one knows what it's thinking, or even if it thinks at all. Does it seek revenge for what a human did to it? Because it's now a machine, can it ever die? Are people in danger from it? We can't say. But every now and then, one of our campers sees it breaking the surface — the mechanical monster of Ebony Lake.”

The silence that greeted the end of this grisly tale was nearly total. Haunted eyes panned the black water, as if expecting the monster to menace the camp at any moment.

“Well,” said Cyrus, “you wanted to know.”

Out of this entire story, The Man With The Plan had taken only a single detail: There was an old cabin three-quarters of a mile down the shore.

What an excellent place to hide a dog on the lam.

S
avannah lay in her upper bunk, her eyes closed, trying to keep track of the steady breathing around her. Only when all seven cabinmates were comfortably asleep would she be able to sneak out and meet Griffin.

Hurry up!
she exhorted the lone holdout, probably that skinny girl from Boston.
Count sheep!
No doubt the poor kid was still shaking from that hideous story they'd all just heard. Under the covers, she clutched her flashlight a little tighter. She probably would have been scared herself if there weren't something ten thousand times more important going on.

Oh, please, let Luthor be okay.
Griffin may have been The Man With The Plan, but he didn't know much about animals. What if that sweet puppy had gotten it into his beautiful mind to try to navigate his way back to Cedarville? They'd never find him then. And even if he made it, he'd be delivering himself right into the clutches of S. Wendell Palomino!