“Will you please go home?” Milo sulked. “This is my cryptozoological creature, not yours.”
Lucy laughed. “Fat chance, fancy-pants.”
“How did you find me, anyway?”
“I saw your big red kayak.”
Milo slumped. “It was that easy?”
“I thought you were sneaking out here to feed a den of stranded bear cubs or something, but this…” Lucy laughed as the strange being nosed Milo’s pockets with its freaky face. “What is this magnificent weirdo? It looks like some kind of Egyptian god. Maybe it’s a sphinx…”
“A sphinx has a human head,” said Milo, “but with the body of a lion, not a deer.”
Lucy looked at him sideways. “How do you know that?”
“You’re not the only one well versed in mythical creatures.” Milo smugly lifted his chin.
“Is that so, Smarty McFly?” Lucy retrieved her notebook from her pocket and prepared to take notes. “So what is it, then?”
“I have no idea,” Milo admitted. “As far as I can tell, he’s unlike any known cryptozoological specimen.”
“He? How do you know the creature’s a boy?”
“Well, he’s got antlers, doesn’t he?”
“Fair enough.”
The child-faced deer nibbled at Milo’s pocket and nudged his shoulder with an antler.
“Ow.” Milo held up his hand. “Stop that.”
The creature stomped his hoof, as if asking Milo where the candy was and why wasn’t he giving him more candy right now.
“You need to be patient, Thingus,” said Milo, hands on his hips.
Huffily, the creature trotted over to the hot spring, shot an annoyed pout over his shoulder, then shuddered and jellified into a blob of black goo, draining his mass into the bubbling waters in a matter of seconds.
Lucy dropped her notebook. “He’s a shapeshifter!” she squealed. “Just like the others! This is— Wait,” she said. “You discovered a member of an entirely new species and you named him ‘Thingus’?”
“It was the only name I could— Others?” Milo’s mode switched from annoyance to intense interest. “What do you mean, others?”
Oh snap. Lucy couldn’t reveal what she knew about the Pretenders without putting them in danger, but she wanted to share the Truth so badly it hurt. Was she going to have to lie to Milo yet again? “I mean,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “like those people who turned into Bigwoofs.”
“That’s just what I was thinking!” Milo exclaimed, his cheeks rosy in the chill air. “But Thingus is different. His transformations aren’t happening to him. He decides how to change, and when. It’s totally incredible, isn’t it?”
“Totally.” Lucy picked her notebook up out of the mud, thoughts colliding in her brain a mile a minute. Thingus is a Pretender. He has to be!
She listened keenly as Milo described in detail how Thingus had morphed from a giant tentacled lake monster into a white stag, and the disgusting amount of slime his transformation entailed.
Slime is basically Pretender juice! “He had tentacles, you say?” Lucy jotted down a few key words: “Sharkosquidosaurus!?” “Stag”, “Doggydeerboy”. “Has Thingus ever turned into a human?” she asked.
“Not unless you count the strange face he had today.”
Lucy chewed the inside of her cheeks, thinking. “Can you get him to come back out of the spring?”
“I can try.”
Milo retrieved a bag of peanut brittle, tossed a few pieces into the burbling water and whistled. A moment later, a slimy tentacle emerged.
Lucy watched, hypnotised, as the slippery creature flubbered out of the spring. She felt a breeze as the gooey Thing doubled, then tripled in size, sucking in air as he grew. The formless being lengthened, its saggy middle rising and dividing to form a torso with four spindly legs. A protrusion at the top of his body stretched out and upwards into a mammalian neck and head, from which two bony antlers emerged. The shiny black creature turned matte and white fur flashed across the now solid surface of its skin. Once again, the Thing had adopted the form of a small stag, without the human features.
“Holy crudberries,” Lucy murmured.
Milo fed the Thing another piece of peanut brittle.
“Please tell me you have video footage of this,” said Lucy.
“No way,” said Milo. “I’m all out of cameras, and my phone’s not secure. I don’t want my dad to know about Thingus yet. He’s not ready.”
“You’re hiding this discovery from your dad?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Milo muttered.
“Wow,” said Lucy, impressed. She sketched a likeness of Milo’s description of the lake monster. “Is this what the tentacles looked like, or should they be ‘snakier’?” She held up her notebook to show Milo the drawing. For the first time Lucy noticed the graffiti-covered boulder behind him. No. Flippin. Way. “It’s the symbols!”
Running over to the massive rock, she looked past the spray-painted names and profanities and focused on the markings carved into the stone itself. She ran her fingers across time-worn rows of engraved shapes, dots, lines and squiggles. How long have these been here? Decades? Centuries?
Milo peered over her shoulder as Thingus danced in circles, begging for more candy.
“Just a minute, Thingus,” said Milo. “What is it?” he asked Lucy.
She showed him the glyphs in Willow’s notebook. “I’ve seen symbols like these before, under the Nu Co. factory.”
“Under?” Milo ran his fingers along the boulder’s engraved surface. “What language is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucy, “but I’m pretty sure I know someone who does.”
“Who?”
Thingus snorted to get their attention to no avail.
Lucy squinched her face. “You’re not gonna like it.” A gust of cold air sent a shiver down her spine.
Milo’s eyes narrowed with understanding. “You mean my father, don’t you?”
“Well, I— Sufferin’ slugspit!” Lucy pointed behind Milo.
“What?” He spun round.
The stag had mutated again. His body now glittered with silver opalescence. A flowing mane, every colour of the rainbow, ran along his head and neck. Instead of antlers, there was a single horn on his forehead that glowed with soft white light.
Lucy looked down at the cover of Willow’s notebook, which featured a metallic illustration of a unicorn. “It’s just like the picture.” She gazed, awestruck, at
