by Edward Lee
“That’s right, hon. Because lakes can be dangerous. You could fall in, plus, you know, it could be polluted.”
Terri’s brow rose. She’d seen the lake lots of times, and it didn’t look polluted to her. The water was crystal clear, and she’d never seen any garbage or anything floating in it. This seemed like a strange thing for Uncle Chuck to say.
“But I told Patricia that you or Mom would take us down there and show it to us sometime,” Terri said, remembering her promise.
And again—
—Terri’s mother and Uncle Chuck traded weird glances.
“Well, sure, honey,” her Mom said. “We can do that sometime.”
“But not soon,” Uncle Chuck said. “It’s too hot to go down there during the summer. There’re lots of bugs and mosquitoes and things. And snakes.”
“Snakes!” Patricia exclaimed. “I’ve never seen a real snake.”
But Terri raised her brow again.
I’ve never seen any snakes at the lake, she realized.
It almost sounded like Uncle Chuck was making it up, so Terri and Patricia wouldn’t be tempted to go down there on their own…
Hmmm, she wondered. Then she said, “Are we going to get pizza tonight, Mom? Like you said we could this morning?”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” her mother apologized. “I hope you’re not too disappointed, but I’ve got so much work to do tonight, I don’t have time, and neither does Uncle Chuck.”
I knew it, Terri thought. Same old story.
“We’ll get pizza soon, though,” Uncle Chuck said.
“Maybe Pamela would like to stay for dinner,” Terri’s mother suggested.
“It’s not Pamela, Mom. It’s Patricia,” Terri corrected.
“Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry, Patricia. Anyway, why don’t you cook some TV dinners for yourselves in the microwave?”
“But aren’t you and Uncle Chuck going to eat?” Terri asked.
“Later,” Uncle Chuck said, and held up the briefcases. “Right now your mother and I have to get to work.”
“Okay,” Terri glumly replied.
“Nice meeting you, Patricia,” Uncle Chuck said as he and Terri’s Mom headed for the back door.
“Bye,” Patricia said.
Then the back sliding glass door slid closed, and they were gone.
Patricia squinted after them.
“You want to stay for dinner?” Terri asked, but it was more for distraction than anything else. She could guess what Patricia was thinking. “We’ve got all kinds of good TV dinners.” She opened the freezer and showed her. “Fish fillets, enchiladas, sliced turkey and gravy. They’re pretty good.”
“Well, okay. But I’ve got to call my parents first.”
“The phone’s right over there,” Terri said, pointing to the end of the kitchen counter.
Patricia dialed her number, then asked if she could stay. Then she hung up, looking weird.
“Did they say you can stay for dinner?” Terri asked.
“Uh, yeah, I can stay.”
“Then why do you look so weird all of a sudden?”
“Well…” She glanced out the back sliding-glass door.
“What is it?”
Patricia turned back to her.
“Your Uncle Chuck said that he and your mother have lots of work to do?”
“Yeah,” Terri said. “They have lots of work almost every night, like I said.”
“You mean like office work, right? From the zoology lab where your Mom works?”
“Yeah.”
Patricia glanced back out the door again. “If they’ve got office work to do, how come they’re walking across the back yard with their briefcases? Toward the lake?”
««—»»
The microwave beeped, and Terri, wearing pot-holder mittens shaped like owls, took the food out. “Well,” she said, to answer Patricia’s question, “remember that trail I showed you, that leads to the lake?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s also a little boathouse down there, right on the water—”
“Wow!” Patricia said excitedly. “You have a boat too?”
“It’s just a little motorboat, we’ve never even used it because it needs to be fixed. But my Dad turned the boathouse into an office.”
“An office? Why?”
Terri shrugged as they sat down at the kitchen table to eat their TV dinners. “I told you, he and my Mom are zoologists, and I guess they wanted their office to be close to the lake so they could study the animals there.”
“Like the frogs and toads and things?”
“Yeah.”
“And the snakes!”
Terri paused. “Well, I don’t think there really are any snakes in the lake.”
“But your Uncle Chuck said there were.”
“Yeah, but he may have been making that up so you and I wouldn’t be tempted to go down there by ourselves. I mean, I’ve never seen any snakes around here… Anyway, that’s why my Mom and Uncle Chuck were going out back. They do their work in the boathouse.”
Patricia turned her fork idly in her cheese enchiladas. “But isn’t that—you know—kind of weird?”
“What?”
“Turning a boathouse into an office?”
Terri thought about that. Sure, her mother was a zoologist—just like her father had been—and the boathouse was close to the lake. But the work she brought home every night came from the laboratory she worked at just outside of town. What could it have to do with the lake?
Yeah, she finally had to admit to herself. I guess it is kind of weird. And that thought only reminded her more of how weird her mother had been acting over the past few months, and Uncle Chuck too.
“And another thing,” Patricia went on. “Did you see the weird way your mother and your Uncle Chuck looked at each other whenever you mentioned the lake?”
Terri had noticed that too, and she couldn’t deny it. “You’re right,” she agreed. “It was almost like they were…hiding something from us.”
“That’s right,” Patricia agreed. “And it must have something to do with the lake or the boathouse.”
Terri couldn’t imagine what it could be. What could they possibly want to hide? she wondered.
Then Patricia asked, “Have you ever been in the boathouse?”
“Yeah, a few times, back when my father lived here.”
“What was it like?”
“Well, like I told you, my father turned it into an office, or I should say he turned the front room into an office.”
“You mean there are other rooms?”
“A few,” Terri recalled.
“What was in them?”
Terri hesitated. “I don’t really know,” she confessed. “Mom and Dad told me to never go into any of the other rooms.”
Patricia held her hands out. “See, there’s another weird thing. Whatever it is they’re hiding, it must be in those other rooms.”
Terri hadn’t considered that. But she had to admit: Patricia was right. There did seem to be an awful lot of weird things going on lately.
Patricia leaned over the kitchen table, lowered her voice. “Don’t you want to know what it is? What they’re hiding?”
“Well, yes,” Terri agreed.
“Well, then…”
“Well, then what?” But this was a phony question on Terri’s part, because she already had a pretty good idea what Patricia was going to suggest.
“Why don’t we sneak down there?” Patricia said.
“We can’t!” Terri exclaimed. “We’re not allowed. If I took you down there without my Mom’s permission, I’d get into all kinds of trouble!”
Patricia grinned like a cunning cat. “They’ll never know,” she said. “We’ll go in the morning, when your Uncle Chuck is taking your Mom to work.”
Terri thought about it.
We really shouldn’t, she thought.
But—
“Okay,” she said. “That’s just what we’ll do.
”
««—»»
The best thing about summer vacation was that she could stay up a little later and watch TV. Terri preferred the Disney Channel and the National Geographic shows about nature and wildlife and animals in other countries, and, of course, The Simpsons. But tonight, she found it hard to pay attention to her favorite shows. Her mind felt like it was somewhere else, and she thought she knew why…
Patricia had been right. Terri’s mother and Uncle Chuck were acting weird. Those strange, foreboding glances they’d exchanged, Uncle Chuck’s lie about snakes, and then the entire business with the boathouse. Terri supposed she’d known something was wrong all along, but she’d never wanted to admit it to herself. It was hard enough that her father and mother were divorced, and that she hadn’t seen her father for so long—plus her fear that she’d never see him again. Sometimes, when things were too hard to cope with, people would overlook the obvious. There were a lot of strange things going on recently; Terri was surprised that it took her this long to realize it.
“Terri?” Uncle Chuck stuck his head in the rec room, where Terri lay on the floor before the TV. He was still wearing the same clothes he wore when he’d brought Terri’s mother home from work, and he gripped one of the big black briefcases.
“Bedtime,” he said.
Generally, Terri would’ve complained a little, but tonight she was unusually tired. She straggled up to her feet, and then noticed with some surprise that it was past eleven o’clock.
“Has Mom already gone to bed?” she inquired.
“Not yet,” Uncle Chuck answered. He looked tired too, droopy. “She’s still working in her office.”
Her office, Terri thought to herself. You mean the boathouse…
And whenever she thought of the boathouse, she remembered the rooms in it that her mother and father had forbidden her to ever enter.
“But she’ll be up soon,” Uncle Chuck continued. “Sweet dreams.”
“Goodnight,” Terri said.
Uncle Chuck, still toting his briefcase, disappeared down the hall. Terri retreated to her own room, and put on her favorite soft-pink nightgown. Then she climbed into bed, lay back in the pillows, and—
—listened.
She almost always kept her bedroom window open during the summer; summer nights in Devonsville were breezy and cool, unlike the summer days. It was nice to listen to the crickets peep at night, a steady, gentle throbbing sound that always lulled her to sleep. But tonight she felt fidgety and restless. And the nightsounds coming in through the window sounded…different.
But how so?
They sounded louder and faster. They sounded, somehow…
Menacing.
But why should she think that?
They’re just crickets and little tree frogs, she realized.
She was being silly, she knew.
Her hand reached up then, paused, and turned off the light.
Darkness jumped into the room, and the nightsounds seemed to grow even louder and more etchy. She’d never been afraid of the dark before, not even when she was little. Only babies are scared of the dark, she told herself. Unless—
Unless…what?
Unless there’s really something in the dark to be afraid of, Terri thought.
She drifted in and out of sleep, tossing and turning. Every so often she’d wake up and, for some reason, look at her bedroom window, which was full of moonlight. The nightsounds throbbed on without letting up.
She tried to think about fun things. Like about when school started up again next month, about her lessons, and about boys. She hoped Matt Slattery didn’t have a girlfriend by then, and Marty Cadeaux too, even though he was kind of fat. In three or four years, she’d be old enough to go on real dates, and that would be fun…
But the more she tried to think of these things, the more she realized she was forcing herself to do so.
And the more she realized—
She was scared.
But of what, she couldn’t guess.
And that’s when she heard the sound.
Not the typical nightsounds. Not the crickets and peepers and the owls hooting.
This sound was different.
It was coming from her open window, and as she lay wide-eyed in the dark, she eventually figured out just exactly what the sound was:
Footsteps.
««—»»
Footsteps! Terri thought.
And right outside!
At first, she wanted to call out, but then she thought, Don’t be a baby, Terri. Maybe you just dreamed the sound.
But still…
She had to know.
Very slowly, then, she slid out from underneath the sheets and climbed out of bed. The only light was moonlight streaming in from the window, and the window was several yards away. Her bare feet padded across the carpet, through the dark. When she reached the window, she went down onto her knees. Her hands reached out. Her fingers gripped the sill. Then, very slowly, she inched her face toward the window screen, and looked out…
At first, she didn’t see much. Just the back yard, and the dark splotches that were the tall trees where the woods began. Between some of the trees she saw weird green dots that seemed to be glowing… Fireflies, she realized. Lightning bugs.
Then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she noticed—
Jeeze!
Strange shapes seemed to be jerking about in the back yard. She knew at once that they were toads, hopping around, looking for bugs. But—
They’re huge, she saw.
Her eyes must be playing tricks on her. She’d seen lots of big toads and frogs in the yard before, but never this big!
They were as big as puppies!
Then—
From the bushes, a baby rabbit hopped into the yard, then stopped to nibble some grass. Its ears poked up, its little nose twitched. But Terri’s breath caught in her chest, and she nearly squealed out loud when she saw what happened next.
One of the huge toads hopped toward the rabbit, seeming to move with astonishing quickness, its heavy rear legs flexing mightily with each hop. Terri knew that toads didn’t eat rabbits, not even big ones like this—toads only ate small insects, like flies and moths and beetles. But what frightened her was this:
In the streaming moonlight, the toad’s wide jaw snapped open, and sparkling inside its mouth were two rows of sharp, pointed teeth!
It’s going to eat the rabbit! Terri’s thoughts screamed in her head.
The hideous toad leapt forward several more times, its razor-toothed jaw opening wider. Each leap seemed a yard long—
Oh, no! Terri thought in sheer dread.
But just as the toad would pounce on its unsuspecting prey, the baby rabbit finally took notice, its head jerking aside, and it scampered safely away just in the nick of time.
Terri sighed in relief. It would have been horrible to have to watch that toad eat the rabbit. But then she stopped to think—
None of it made sense, it was impossible. One thing she was sure of: toads, no matter how big they were, didn’t eat animals and they didn’t have long, sharp, pointed teeth!
Am I dreaming? she considered again. She must be, to have witnessed such a thing. Outside, everything looked unreal, the grass like spikes of ice in the moonlight, the blinking green swirls of the fireflies, the cramped shadows between the trees, not to mention the monstrously large toads. But then she remembered the reason she’d gone to look out the window in the first place.
The footsteps, she recalled. I heard footsteps in the back yard. I’m sure I did. And they sounded like they were coming up from the lake…
Terri strained her vision then, focusing her eyes through the window screen, toward the rear corner of the yard.
crunch, crunch
She was right. There was the sound again, and they were footsteps.
crunch, crunch
There could be no denying it. Someone was indeed walking up the gravel path from the lake to the house.
And the sound was much louder now, which meant that whoever was walking—they were getting closer.
Terri bit her lower lip as she stared on, gripping the window sill. Only a moment later, a figure appeared at the entrance to the trail.
Who could it be?
She glanced warily at the lighted, digital clock on her nightstand—
It was almost 4:30 in the morning!
Terri’s breath grew thin. Her heart beat faster as the figure came out of the crisp shadows thrown by the trees and—
crunch, crunch
—stepped into the moonlight, fully into view.
It’s…my mother, Terri realized in shock. She’s been down at the boathouse all night…
««—»»
All night, Terri thought again the next morning at breakfast. What could her mother be working on that was so important she had to stay up till past 4:30 a.m.? And Terri could tell. Right now, coming into the kitchen, her mother looked exhausted, with drooping shoulders and dark circles under her eyes.
“Good morning, dear,” she said groggily.
“Hi, Mom,” Terri said. “You sure look tired.”
“I am, I was up late. Working.”
You’re not kidding you were up late! Terri agreed in her own thoughts. Late as in 4:30 in the morning!
But Terri declined to actually comment on what she’d seen last night. By now, she wasn’t even sure what she’d seen. The whole thing was so visually unreal—maybe she really had dreamed a lot of it. After all, she thought she’d seen a giant toad try to eat a rabbit! And she knew that was impossible. Maybe she’d only dreamed seeing her mother coming up from the trail to the lake so late…
But then her mother commented:
“God, I’m so tired. I could fall asleep right here at the table…”
Terri looked at her, and that set her to thinking. If she’d only dreamed seeing her mother coming up from the lake, why would she be so tired?
I must not have dreamed it, Terri concluded. And if I didn’t dream that, then I must not have dreamed about the toad either. The toad…with teeth…
