by Edward Lee
Now I’ll never forget those words from the boathouse, she thought, because I’ve got them right here in my hand…
Yes, she did. She’d written them all down.
And now that I have them, she realized, I can look them up in the dictionary and finally find out what they mean.
And next she went to do just that, sliding open her top desk drawer and rooting around. She knew she had a dictionary around here somewhere. Or then…
Maybe it was out in the den, where she kept her books during the school year.
Here it is, she thought, relieved. It wasn’t the dictionary she usually used, but at least it was a dictionary, a slim paperback with a brick-red cover.
She looked up the first word: reagent.
Oh no! she thought.
The word wasn’t there! Then she busily looked up the other words, mutation, transmission, genetic, carnivore, and—
None of them were in the dictionary!
««—»»
Just another disappointment, Terri thought, brooding now at her desk. And after all the trouble she’d gone to in order to get the words—sneaking into Uncle Chuck’s room, finding the briefcase.
All for nothing, she thought drearily.
Or—
Maybe not.
One thing she hadn’t considered. She looked then and saw that the dictionary she’d found in her desk was old, not the one she usually used. Then—
Oh, man!
She looked more closely at the dictionary and saw just how old it actually was. Right there on the cover, it said Elementary Dictionary, Preschool-Age 8.
It was a children’s dictionary, left over from way back when she was in the first and second grade.
Of course!
This was a dictionary for kids, not adults. And those words she’d written down were definitely adult words. So—
I’ll just have to get a bigger dictionary, she concluded. A dictionary for grownups.
She knew there must be one in the house somewhere. The only problem was finding it. Or maybe she could go to the town library—surely they’d have all kinds of dictionaries there.
But who knows when I’ll be able to do that? she glumly reminded herself. I’m probably grounded…
Then she looked up, at the sound of voices.
She walked to her door. Yes, she could hear her mother and Uncle Chuck talking in the kitchen, but their voices were muffled. Terri pressed her ear against the door and tried to listen.
Darn it!
The voices still couldn’t be heard well enough to understand.
Next, she put her hand on the doorknob and very carefully turned it, so not to make any noise. Then she pulled the door open to a narrow crack.
And now she could hear…
“Well, what I didn’t tell you yet,” Uncle Chuck was saying to her mother, “was that Terri got into the boathouse this morning. You must’ve forgotten to lock the door last night when you came up.”
“How could I have been so forgetful?” her mother scolded herself. “What did she see?”
“Not much, at least I don’t think so. I caught her in the office. The only thing she could’ve seen was the desk, and some preliminary notes.”
“But what about the backroom?” her mother fretted next. “She didn’t get into the backroom, did she?”
“I don’t see how she could have,” Uncle Chuck replied. “The door was locked.”
At least that’s one good thing, Terri thought to herself. They don’t know I used my library card to get in, and they don’t know I saw the stuff in the backroom…
“But I’m really getting worried,” her uncle continued. “Things are really getting dangerous.”
“I know,” her mother agreed.
“I mean, can you imagine? If she went to the boathouse and actually got into the backroom, and saw the specimen tanks? She’d be terrified. Or, worse, if she got in there and found the key…” Uncle Chuck paused as if troubled. “And opened the trapdoor?”
“Don’t even say it!” her mother said in the most dreadful voice Terri had ever heard.
The kitchen conversation halted for a few moments, as though Terri’s mother and uncle were thinking about things. Then her mother said, “What did you do? When you caught her in the boathouse?”
“I sent her to her room,” Uncle Chuck said. “Didn’t really know what to do.”
“The poor thing. She must be so confused; I never have even a minute to spend with her since the project, and with her father being gone, that can only make it worse for her.”
Terri continued to listen eagerly at the crack in her opened bedroom door.
“But I’m really getting worried now,” her Uncle Chuck said next. “I mean, they’re getting bigger.”
“I know, bigger each day. And they’re coming up into the yard at night,” her mother said. “I saw them last night—they were all over the place.”
The toads, Terri realized. She must be talking about the toads… And the memory never left her mind.
The big, bumpy toads with teeth.
“What are we going to do?” Uncle Chuck said next, and he sounded desperate. He even sounded…scared.
“What are we going to do,” he continued, “if those things get into the house?”
««—»»
Just the way he’d said it—those things—made Terri shiver. It made the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand up straight.
What are we going to do if those things get into the house?
The words chilled her to the bone. But could that be possible? Could those horrible fanged toads and salamanders actually get into the house? At first, Terri didn’t think so. But then she thought back to some other things she’d heard her mother and Uncle Chuck say.
They’re getting bigger…
Meaning the toads and salamanders, Terri had already figured. But how could they get bigger? This question nagged at her, until she started putting things together. Maybe her mother and Uncle Chuck were working on some kind of experiment that made toads and salamanders bigger, and grow teeth. Maybe some kind of new vitamin they’d invented at her mother’s laboratory—
And something had gone wrong.
This seemed to Terri to be a strong possibility. An experiment, she wondered.
And they’d said something else, hadn’t they? Something that scared her even more.
Something about the trapdoor, she recalled. The trapdoor she’d seen this morning in the backroom of the boathouse.
With the big padlock on it.
Why was it locked? What was in it? Why would her mother and uncle be so concerned about Terri finding the key and opening the trapdoor up?
Questions, questions!
And Terri was still determined to find the answers, and she knew that some of the answers at least would come when she found a way to look up those words she’d found in Uncle Chuck’s black-leather briefcase.
“Terri?”
It was her uncle’s voice, on the other side of her bedroom door. “I’d like to speak with you for a moment.”
“Okay,” Terri said.
Her door swooshed open, and there was Uncle Chuck standing there. He wasn’t tapping his foot, which was a good sign, and another good sign was that he hadn’t called her young lady.
“What is it, Uncle Chuck?” Terri asked.
“Well, I just wanted to say that you can come out of your room now; you’ve been punished enough.”
Great! She didn’t have to stay in her room anymore!
“But I just want you to know,” Uncle Chuck went on, “that the reason I punished you is because we love you very much and we care about you, and we don’t want you to do things that you shouldn’t. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Uncle Chuck,” Terri said. But she couldn’t resist asking the next question. She wanted to see what Uncle Chuck would say. “How come I shouldn’t go to the boathouse?” she asked him next.
“Well, honey, because, like I’ve said, the boathou
se is dangerous. Those old boards on the pier could break, and you could fall in the water.”
Terri managed to keep her thoughts to herself. That wasn’t the real reason, and she knew it. But instead, she changed the subject. “Are we going to have dinner now?”
“Well, no, honey. Your mother and I are still working on something very important for your mother’s job, and we have to get to work right now, so we don’t have time to eat dinner. But I want you to fix yourself something in the microwave, okay?”
Terri nodded. “Can I go to Patricia’s?”
“Sure, but only after you’ve had something to eat,” her uncle said. “And make sure you’re home before dark.” Then he stepped back from the door. “And you can watch TV later too. I’ll see you later.”
“’Bye,” Terri said.
She waited a minute in her bedroom, then she went out into the hallway. Uncle Chuck had gone into his own bedroom and was coming out again right now.
With the briefcase.
Terri waited a few moments more. Then she quietly walked out to the kitchen and looked out the big sliding-glass door into the backyard.
There they go, she thought, looking on. Just like every night…
Through the glass door, she could see her mother and Uncle Chuck walking across the back yard, to the narrow gravel path that led to the boathouse.
««—»»
“Wow!” Terri said. “That’s a big bandage.”
Patricia, sitting in a chair, was holding her knee up, to show Terri the large white bandage on it.
“And it doesn’t hurt?” Terri asked.
“Naw,” Patricia said. “It just itches a little. I have to go back to the doctor’s in a week, so he can take the stitches out.”
Terri had quickly fixed herself a spaghetti TV dinner in the microwave, then she’d gone immediately to Patricia’s house. And why shouldn’t she? Her uncle had given her permission.
“So you didn’t get grounded?” Patricia asked.
“Nope. I lucked out. But—” Terri took out the piece of paper from her pocket. “Look what I brought.”
“What is it?” Patricia wanted to know.
Terri explained it all, about the words she’d seen in the boathouse, and how she’d been able to write them down after seeing them again on the notepad she’d found in her uncle’s briefcase.
“Terri!” Patricia exclaimed. “You really took a big chance! If your uncle had caught you in his bedroom right after catching you in the boathouse, you really would’ve been grounded!”
“I know,” Terri admitted. “But I had to find these words. I’m sure they’ll give us a lot of answers to all the weird things that have been going on lately. But the only dictionary I could find was one of those real skinny ones they gave us in first grade—you know, just when you’re learning to read.”
“Oh, yeah,” Patricia said.
“And it didn’t have any of these words in it. Do you have a dictionary, like a big one for adults?”
Patricia rubbed her chin. “Yeah, I think so. I think there’s one in the den. But we’ll have to ask my father’s permission first.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
Patricia’s father was in the living room, sitting back in a big recliner chair reading the newspaper. The television was on, with a baseball game. “Yankees,” he said to himself, “what a bunch of dopes.” Patricia asked if they could use the dictionary, and her father said yes without thinking twice. Terri would at least have expected him to ask why; most adults always did.
“This is great,” Terri commented as Patricia took her into the paneled den. A big hard-covered dictionary sat opened on top of a low dark-wood bookshelf.
“That’s the biggest dictionary I’ve ever seen!” Terri remarked.
“Yeah, and if this doesn’t have those words in it,” Patricia guessed, “then nothing will. What’s the first word?”
“‘Reagent,’” Terri said, and pointed to the word on the paper so Patricia could see it.
Patricia turned to the R’s in the big dictionary, skimmed her finger down the page. “Here it is,” she said and began to quote, “‘Reagent: a substance used to react with another substance.’”
Terri frowned, and wrote the definition down on her piece of notebook paper. Then she read the next word. “Transmission.”
“Isn’t that something in a car?” Patricia asked.
“Well, yeah, I think it is, but it’s got to mean something else too.”
Patricia, then, turned to the T’s. “You’re right,” she told her. “It also means ‘to cause to go to another person or place.’”
Then Terri read off the other words, and Patricia looked them up.
Genetic meant having to do with “genes,” and genes were these special things in all living cells.
Mutation meant change.
And carnivore meant—
They both knew what that word meant…animals that eat meat. Which meant these animals had…teeth.
««—»»
“Yeah, this is really weird, all right,” Terri said. She and Patricia were sitting out on the curb now, trying to put together what they’d read in the dictionary. The word, of course, that bothered her most was carnivore. Something that eats meat, something that has teeth. Like the toads and salamanders, she thought. They definitely had teeth. But, as she’d told Patricia, when she read about toads and salamanders in her Golden Nature books, it stated that neither animal had teeth. And she remembered something else, too. The books said that toads and salamanders were insectivores, and when they looked that word up in the dictionary they discovered that it meant an animal that ate insects, not meat.
“Yeah, it’s weird,” Patricia agreed, “and what’s weirder is that your mother and uncle know all about it.”
And my father knew all about it too, Terri realized, before he got divorced from my mother and moved away.
The other word they’d looked up was counter-reagent, and that was something that reacted against a reagent, which was sort of confusing. A reagent was a substance that reacted with another substance, so a counter-reagent was something that reacted against that.
All the pieces are here, Terri thought, sitting next to Patricia at the curb. Now if only I can put all the pieces together and make sense of them.
“You know what we have to do, Terri,” Patricia said in a low voice.
“What?”
“We’re going to have to go back to the boathouse.”
“We can’t!” Terri insisted. “My Uncle Chuck said we couldn’t!”
“Yeah, well he said we couldn’t last night too, but we went anyway.”
“I’ll get grounded!”
“Not if they don’t find out.”
“No!” Terri said firmly. “Absolutely not.” And then she remembered what her uncle had warned her of. “It’s really dangerous. You heard my uncle; the pier could break, and we could fall in the water.”
“Aw, come on, Terri,” Patricia objected. “The pier’s not going to break. He just said that because he doesn’t want us to go down there and find out what’s really going on.”
Terri smirked. She knew Patricia was right. But still, she couldn’t allow it. “No way. We’re not going to go back there. I could get in too much trouble.”
“Suit yourself,” Patricia said. “But can you think of another way to find out what’s really going on around here?”
After a long pause, Terri thought to herself with her chin in her hands, No, I can’t. “We’ll figure something out,” she said instead. “Maybe we can go to the library tomorrow, find out more about those words.”
“Well, I guess we could try that,” Patricia said, but she sure didn’t sound very convinced.
“That’s what we’ll do then,” Terri made plans. “I’ll call you in the morning, and we’ll walk down to the town library, see what else we can find out.”
“Okay.”
Patricia looked around. Crickets were chirping now, and the sun h
ad long since gone down. “It’s getting dark,” Terri observed. “I better go home now.”
“Okay,” Patricia said. “But don’t forget to call me in the morning.”
“I won’t. ’Bye.”
Terri walked back to her own house then. The sky was darkening before her very eyes, the sun just a dark-orange circle low on the horizon. Stars twinkled faintly. When she turned onto her own street, a big white-faced owl hooted at her from some tall trees. And just over the tops of those same trees, a yellow moon was rising, so large she could see shadows of its craters. It was a full moon.
She tried to distract herself. The library, she thought. Tomorrow. There, she and Patricia would be able to find out more about those strange words because at the library they had a special wing full of books about science and zoology. And anything they didn’t understand, they could ask the librarian, Mr. Seymour. He was a nice man, and he was very smart. Even though she and Patricia had found the words in the dictionary, Terri still didn’t quite understand them, nor did she understand what the words might have to do with whatever was going on. The only thing she could keep thinking was the idea that her mother and uncle were doing some sort of experiments. But what? Terri asked herself now. What kind of experiments? And why?
As Terri was walking up her driveway, another owl hooted at her, and then she noticed several birds flying in front of the moon…
Or were they bats?
She rushed into the house, slammed the front door quickly behind her. Suddenly the night had seemed creepy, and she wanted to get out of it as fast as she could. What am I afraid of? she wondered. But getting back into the house offered no relief. The house seemed creepy too. Dark. So silent, she could hear her own eyes blink. Empty.
Yes, the house was empty. No one’s here, she realized after checking in the family room and kitchen. The lacy curtains around the opened kitchen window puffed back and forth from a sudden warm breeze outside. “Mom?” Terri called out. “Are you here?” But there was no answer.
“Uncle Chuck?”
