by Edward Lee
But the mutation was changing him so fast that his words were deteriorating even as he spoke. She couldn’t understand him!
“Siiiiiiiiixbeeeeee,” came her mother’s croaking voice in a long, low groan.
What? she wondered. What did that mean? But when she called out again, their heads had lowered into the water so that only their big black eyes showed—like toads—and they were swimming away.
By now, Terri felt dizzy from so much confusion. She wanted to just sit down and cry. They had said there was something she could do to help them but they’d never been able to say what it was!
I’ll have to figure it out myself, she realized.
And there was only one place to do that. The boathouse.
She quickly turned away from the moonlit lake, rushed into the boathouse, and all at once her heart felt like it was going to explode.
Lying right in the middle of the boathouse floor was a slimy black salamander, its jaws stretched wide open, its long fangs showing.
It was as big as an alligator…
««—»»
And when the salamander began to slither toward her, Terri shrieked at the top of her lungs. It was the biggest salamander she’d seen so far, and it had the biggest teeth. Terri knew she could run away, but then what would she do?
I know, she thought.
She didn’t have much of the ground beef left, but maybe it would be enough. She broke off little pieces of the meat and made a trail leading from the front room of the boathouse to the edge of the pier. She waited, staring wide-eyed. It had worked before but this salamander was so big, maybe it wouldn’t be interested in such small pieces of meat.
It probably wants bigger meat, Terri fretted. Like me!
But eventually the giant salamander began to move, slithering up to each piece of ground meat, eating it, and then moving on to the next piece, until it was out of the boathouse and nearing the edge of the pier.
Now! Terri thought.
Just as the salamander was about to eat the last clump of hamburger, Terri grabbed a broom, and—
SPLASH!
—pushed the salamander over the edge into the water.
She dropped the broom, ran back into the boathouse, her feet thudding against the wood-plank floor. Now what do I do? she asked herself. If there was something in here that could help her parents, her uncle, and Patricia, where would it be?
The backroom, she realized at once.
The door was open. The instant she went in, she could see the broken trapdoor and the stains on the floor from where the bottle of reagent had broken. But now she felt lost. How could she figure out what to do to help?
And what was that her mother had said?
Siiiixbeee, she remembered. Or something like that.
But what was that? What did it mean?
The rest of the backroom was just how she remembered it. One wall full of glass bottles, the other three walls full of glass tanks containing toads and salamanders. She scanned her eyes across the rows of tanks, and then—
Wait a minute, she thought.
Something was different, wasn’t it? Yes…
She walked up to the first tank she’d looked at the other morning. She easily remembered then that the toad inside had been changed; it was abnormally large, and had sharp, white fangs. But now…
Terri peered in through the glass, astonished.
It’s…normal now, she saw.
Yes, the toad inside was normal size, and it didn’t have teeth any more, and when Terri looked around some more, she noticed that lots of the toads and salamanders that had been large and fanged just two days ago had all turned back to normal size.
She stood there excitedly, thinking. She thought back to what Mr. Seymour had said, about reagents and counter-reagents.
A counter-reagent was like an antidote. It was something that reversed the changes made by a reagent. Which meant…
Mom and Uncle Chuck, she realized. They must have been able to make a counter-reagent that works, but they got changed themselves before they could use it…
Then she looked at the tanks again, the ones with the normal-sized toads and salamanders. White labels, which she remembered from the other morning, were stuck to the top of each tank, and they all said the same thing:
COUNTER-REAGENT 6b ADMINISTERED: 6b.
Siiiixbeee! Terri thought. The word her mother had said.
6b was the name of the counter-reagent that worked!
She rushed to the other wall with all the metal shelves of bottles. Each bottle, too, had a label but they all said different things. 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 2c, and on and on.
Terri’s fingers traced along the rows of bottles until—
Here it is!
6b, read the label on one of the bottles.
Terri stood on her tiptoes, took the bottle down off the shelf. Then she went out onto the pier.
Her eyes scanned all around the moonlit lake, but she didn’t see any evidence of her parents, her uncle, or Patricia. But there was one thing she knew:
They’re out there somewhere…
Terri unscrewed the top from the glass bottle. She paused a moment, standing in the bright moonlight, the nightsounds throbbing in her ears. And then—
She leaned over the pier rail and emptied the bottle into the lake…
««—»»
A week later.
The bright morning sun beamed in through the kitchen window. “And that night,” Terri’s mother was explaining, “your Uncle Chuck and I accidentally got some of the reagent on our hands, too, just like Patricia did when she broke the bottle.”
“And that’s why we mutated,” her uncle added. “Because the reagent goes through your skin.”
“But all summer long,” Terri’s father got into the conversation now, “your Mom and Uncle Chuck were trying to make a counter-reagent, to change me back to normal. And they did it, only they changed themselves before they could use it.”
“And it’s a good thing you figured it out, Terri,” her mother then added, “because if you hadn’t, we’d all still be in the lake, and who knows how much we would’ve changed by now.”
The thought sent a shiver up Terri’s back. She’d only seen them mutated once, and once was enough. But none of that mattered now anyway. All that mattered was that everything was normal again.
When Terri had emptied the bottle of counter-reagent over the pier, everything in the lake—her parents, her uncle, and Patricia, as well as all the mutated toads and salamanders—had absorbed it into their bodies through their skin, and it had only taken a day or two to change them all back to normal.
But there were still a few things she didn’t understand, and that’s when her father explained it all.
“Your Mom and Uncle Chuck,” he said, “couldn’t tell you what really happened to me, because you would’ve been too upset. So that’s why they made up the story about us being divorced. But your mother and I were never really divorced, Terri. We love each other just as much as we always have.”
“And just as much as we’ve always loved you,” her mother added, setting bacon and eggs out on the table.
This much Terri had figured out. “But why?” she asked. “I still don’t understand why you wanted to change the toads and salamanders…into monsters.”
“We never really wanted to change them, honey,” her father said. “At the lab where I work, we were trying to make a reagent that would give toads and salamanders certain properties of other kinds of animals.”
“Carnivores, you mean,” Terri said.
“Exactly. And that’s why the toads and salamanders got larger and grew teeth.”
“But I still don’t understand why,” Terri insisted.
“Because amphibians—toads and salamanders and frogs—never get the same kinds of diseases that human beings and other mammals get, and my job at work was to find out why. And that’s the reason I made the reagent, to give the toads and salamanders certain properties of mam
mals. And from there I would study them and see it they remained resistant to disease. It’s called genetic research, honey. And with this kind of research, we’ll be able to cure lots of diseases one day, and make the world better for everyone.”
Now Terri understood. They weren’t making monsters after all; they were just doing research and something went wrong.
Terri sat back in her seat at the table, where they were all together for the first time in months and months. Her parents had never really been divorced, and her father had his job back.
Her mother, her father, Uncle Chuck, and Patricia were all changed back to normal now, and so were all the animals in the lake.
Terri smiled.
Yes, everything was back to normal now, and the best part of all was that her life had returned to normal too.
Edward Lee has had more than 40 books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the hardcore novel HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3.
Although primarily known for his adult horror, this is Edward Lee’s first young reader novel. If you enjoyed this book please check out his second young reader novel, Vampire Lodge, available in eBook form from Little Devil Books.
Lee lives Tampa, FL. Visit him online at:
http://www.edwardleeonline.com
