Fabulous Creature (17 page)

“Ohh. Look,” Laurel whispered.

Very slowly Griffin raised the bowl higher and as she lifted her head, the heavy shawl of hair shifted and slid, gleaming palely in the rays of green-tinged sunlight. For a brief moment James found himself capable of a kind of Griffinesque double-vision—capable of seeing a kooky kid playing a fantastical game and, at the same time, watching in a kind of awe as some magical creature of the forest, something pure and free and beautiful, moved through a ritual of strange significance.

She knelt, then, and placing the bowl on the ground, she dipped her hands in it and lifted them to her face. As she bent over the bowl, the pale curtains of her hair swung down around it, and between the curtains, water fell in glistening drops and shone on her face as she rose to her feet. As she moved towards the children, James drew back among the tree trunks.

“Give me the talismans,” he heard her say.

She took something from each of them, small, oblong objects attached to long red ribbons, and turned to go.

“No wait,” she said as the children started to get to their feet. “Not yet. I’ll come back for you when it’s time.” She crossed the clearing and disappeared in the direction of the spring.

The wait seemed long, but it might have been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Woody fidgeted, stretched out at full length on the pine carpeted ground, and then sat up and put a pine cone down the back of Laurel’s blouse. Obviously making a valiant effort to maintain a faithful vigil, Laurel had managed to ignore Woody until the pine cone incident when, after fishing it out, she threw it at him, thumped him on the head with both fists and then went quickly back to her modified lotus position. Woody waved a fist in her general direction in an unconvincing threat of reprisal, and then settled for a less physical attack. “You’re not doing it right,” he said. “Your feet are on wrong.”

“I know it,” she said. “They just won’t bend that way. Yours aren’t right either.”

“They almost are. See. Mine are better than yours.” Woody was still trying to pull a sneaker-clad foot up onto his thigh when Griffin suddenly reappeared. Her face was glowing with a wild excitement.

Woody jumped to his feet. “Did you do it? Did he let you do it?”

She nodded hard, mouth tight, eyes blazing. “Quick,” she said. “Get the offering.”

Woody disappeared from James’ range of vision and returned a moment later with a large paper bag. Emptying the water from the silver bowl Griffin poured in the contents of the bag, which seemed to be some kind of grain. When she shook the bowl from side to side, the grain made a soft sifting noise.

“Now,” she said. “Hurry.” They sat again, all three of them now, at the base of the tree—cross-legged, arms extended, palms upward, eyes tightly closed. “Send for him. Send the invocation,” Griffin said.

Woody’s lips began to move in exaggerated slow motion as he mouthed the words of what was obviously some kind of ritual chant. Watching him, James was beginning to grin when a sudden sound drew his attention and he looked up to see something so amazing that he forgot not only about Woody, but also what he was doing, himself. Without knowing how he got there, he found himself standing next to Griffin, staring in amazement as the deer entered the clearing. Pausing only for a moment, he came on to the silver bowl and then lowered his crowned head—a crown that was now decorated with fluttering red ribbons.

T
HERE FOLLOWED SEVERAL
days during which James spent a great deal of time thinking. Actually, there wasn’t much else to do. He’d finally finished the da Vinci essay and sent it off to Mr. Johnson, and he suddenly wasn’t spending nearly as much time with Diane.

He wasn’t entirely sure just why. When he did see her, things were just as great, or almost as great, as ever. The only difference was that they spent a lot more time in public places—at the tennis courts, or swimming pool, or anyplace where people tended to congregate—and a lot less time on hikes in secluded places. But other times when he called up she said she couldn’t see him right then. Usually there was some good reason, or at least some reason that sounded reasonable. Like for instance, she had to go in to Tahoe with her mother to shop for a new bathing suit, which, in spite of the fact that she already owned at least a dozen, sounded like something you’d expect a girl to do. And she always sounded as if she were sorry about not being able to see him.

A couple of times when they’d finally gotten together after several unsuccessful attempts on his part, he’d come right out and asked her if there was anything wrong, and if she still felt the same way about him. Her answers had always been extremely reassuring.

“Jamesy,” she’d say, “how can you ask such a silly question? Can’t you tell how I feel about you? Come here and let me show you.” And she would drag him off (not that he ever resisted much) around a corner or behind the nearest tree, and they would mess around until he’d forgotten his worries completely. At least his worries about Diane. After such sessions behind the corner of the Commissary or the big sycamore on the Parade Grounds, his problems tended to be more physical than anything else. Physical and embarrassing. Not that it ever seemed to embarrass her. In fact she seemed to think it was all pretty amusing, particularly the time he’d had to sit down quickly at a picnic table because some people were coming along the path right toward where they were. That time he hadn’t thought it was all that funny. However the next time Diane wanted to mess around in a semi-public place, he hadn’t exactly refused. And later, during one of the long periods when he had nothing to do but think, he’d gotten over feeling irritated at her for laughing at him.

He’d also had time to do quite a bit of thinking about Griffin and the deer and what had been going on in the hidden valley. He still hadn’t quite gotten over the shock of finding out that Griffin was able to go right up to him, touch him, and even tie things on his antlers. After weeks of careful and patient and maddeningly slow progress, he had earned the right to come to within approximately twenty feet, but no closer, and now in a period of a few days she’d actually been able to put her hands on his wild deer. He still found it hard to believe, although she’d told him all about how she’d done it that day on their way home from the valley.

After they had safely gotten past the cliff trail, which Woody and Laurel had crossed with surprising skill and fearlessness, Griffin had made them run on ahead so she and James could talk.

“How did you get him to let you do it?” he’d asked her. “I’m really amazed.”

“I don’t know exactly.” Griffin looked worried as if she were afraid he was really upset, which of course, he wasn’t, or at least not very much. “I guess it was just that you’d already tamed him so much that he wasn’t really all that much afraid any more. So it was easier for me.”

He shrugged. “Well maybe. But I still can’t understand it. In less than two weeks he lets you walk right up and touch him. You and two noisy little kids.”

“Oh no,” Griffin said. “I can’t do it when the kids are around. He always keeps his distance when they’re with me. I have to be all alone, and everything has to be just right.”

James grinned. “So that’s it. That’s what I was lacking. No olive wreath and Grecian toga.”

She looked embarrassed. “It wasn’t really. Just bay leaves and Wes’ old tee shirt. See.” She indicated the oversized tee shirt that was now tucked into her jeans. “But the rest of it was real. The ceremony was the important part, and that was real.”

“The ceremony?”

She nodded. “The Ceremony of the Talismans Against Evil. It was Laurel’s idea, at least at first. After I told them what you said about how all the hunters would want to shoot the stag if they knew about him, she started to worry like crazy.”

“Laurel does everything like crazy,” James said.

Griffin smiled. “I know. But she was really nervous about the stag, so we decided to have a ceremony to give him magical protection from hunters, or anyone who might want to hurt him. We made the amulets and did a lot of ceremonies to make them powerful, but I didn’t know if he’d really let me tie them to his antlers. I’d touched him before, though just barely. But the ceremony worked. Do you want to hear about the ceremony?”

James said he did, so she’d gone into the whole thing in great detail. There had been a fast, necessitating elaborate maneuvers to keep Cynthia from realizing her charges weren’t eating. And then, after having reached the valley, a ritual had been performed that would bring down a curse on anyone who planned to harm the stag. Then the kids had been stationed where he’d found them, while Griffin had gone off alone to prepare for her part in the final ceremony. The part James had witnessed had been the Purification of the High Priestess.

“I thought it was something like that,” he said. “That was very impressive. Why don’t you leave your hair loose like that all the time?”

“My hair?” They were walking along a narrow stretch of trail at the time, with Griffin in the lead, and he saw her hand go back to touch her hair, a single braid again hanging down the middle of her back. She stopped suddenly and turned back, looking puzzled. “Why did you say that? About my hair?”

“Why? Because I like the way it looked. You have beautiful hair.”

To his surprise her cheeks actually got red and her dark brows drew together in a frown that looked almost painful. Whirling around, she began to run on the rocky, treacherous trail. He watched in amazement as she ran like a frightened deer on the narrow path, the long braid whipping behind her. She slowed down finally, but for a long time she maintained the distance between them.

Kooky kid, he thought. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but not enough to run after her on terrain like that. There were, in fact, several more things concerning Griffin that he wanted to know more about. Things like why she reacted as she did to any mention of her home life, particularly if her mother was concerned. He had some theories about it. There was obviously a lot of anger involved. One of those love-hate things, no doubt: fascinated by her gorgeous mother, and at the same time hating her for spending all her time with her jet-set friends and neglecting her family. Perhaps hating her for a lot of other reasons, too. Given some of the off-beat things he’d heard about the Westmorelands, he could imagine a lot of reasons why Griffin might resent her mother and stepfather. But most of his ideas were based on imagination, without much definite proof. It would be interesting to discuss it with Griffin and find out how many of his guesses were correct. But it wasn’t likely that he’d be able to, not while she went on freezing up at any mention of her mother. He decided however that if the opportunity arose, he would try again. And not just to satisfy his own curiosity. It would probably be a good thing for her. Get all that pent-up anger and hatred out in the open.

It was on a Saturday morning, only one week before the Fieldings were due to leave New Moon Lake, that James arrived at the snack bar phone booth a little earlier than usual. It was the last Saturday in August, and in the town of New Moon there was to be a Farewell Festival. A farewell to the summer and all the summer tourists. There was to be a parade, all kinds of craft and game booths and even a fun house, which local craftsmen had constructed in an abandoned hardware store. Just three days earlier, when he had last seen Diane, she had said the fair sounded like fun in a corny hick-town way, and would James like to hike over with her on Saturday morning? Except for the fact that there were other more private places he’d prefer to visit with her, there was, of course, nothing he’d like better. And he said so, as far as he could remember, in perfectly straightforward, unambiguous, one syllable words. But when Diane answered the phone that morning, she did it again—pulled the same old routine about not knowing they’d made it definite.

“Oh, we didn’t say for sure did we? I thought you said you thought it would be too corny.”

“You were the one who said it would be corny,” he said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice until he knew for certain how things were going to turn out, because he knew from experience that one sarcastic comment and he would have blown it for sure.

“Oh, really? Are you certain? Because the way I remember it, you said you thought the whole thing would be pretty dumb. But anyway, Jamesy, the thing is, my dad just arrived for the weekend and he wants the whole family to go to the big event together. There’s going to be some big deal ceremony that my dad has to go to. The city fathers are going to give Dad and old T.J. the keys to the city or some dumb thing like that, because of all the extra business since they built The Camp. You know, one of those, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. It gives me great honor to present…’ sort of things. It’ll be really dumb, but you know how parents are about things like that.”

James knew, he guessed, but he wasn’t happy about it.

“It’s going to be an absolutely petrifying bore,” Diane went on, “and besides, it’s going to be too hot to hike all that way today, anyway. So why don’t you just call me tomorrow morning and we’ll do something then. Okay? Could you maybe call me again tomorrow?”

Glumly he agreed that
maybe
he could call her tomorrow.
Maybe,
he said, but he knew of course that there wasn’t any
maybe
about it. Not the ghost of a paper-thin shred of a particle of a maybe. If there was any chance at all of seeing her, he’d call, and the trouble was—she knew it.

He hung up the phone, thought about going into the snack bar for a chat with Fiona and decided against it. He was in no mood to talk to anyone. With no definite destination in mind, he drifted across the Parade Grounds and out towards the big trees in the bivouac area. It was going to be hot, all right. Hot and bright and dry, and he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to do. Diane was gone, for the day at least; and when he thought about the valley and the deer, it occurred to him that some things were gone there, too. The secret was gone and the exclusiveness and solitude. If he’d only kept his stupid mouth shut, he could go there now and stretch out on the boulder and let the clean blue silence seep into him and wash away the fiery whirlpools that seemed to be churning around in various parts of his anatomy. But he hadn’t kept his mouth shut, and as a result he probably couldn’t stretch out anywhere in the whole valley without being stepped on by little kids, or a skinny little kook in a tee shirt toga, leading his stag around on a red ribbon.