The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Kurtis Scaletta

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2011 by Peter Ferguson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Scaletta, Kurtis.

  The Tanglewood terror / Kurtis Scaletta.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When a giant glowing fungus encroaches upon thirteen-year-old Eric’s small town, he, his little brother Brian, and a runaway girl try to stop it—and figure out what happened to the Puritan town that had mysteriously disappeared from the same spot.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89845-7

  [1. Mushrooms—Fiction. 2. Family life—Maine—Fiction. 3. Brothers—Fiction.

  4. Runaways—Fiction. 5. Maine—Fiction. 6. Horror stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S27912Tan 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010035994

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  FOR ANGELA, WHO STANDS UP FOR ANIMALS;

  AND FOR BYRON, A FUN GUY.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - The Strange Clearing

  Chapter 2 - The Mysterious Light

  Chapter 3 - The Town That Disappeared

  Chapter 4 - The Figures in the Shadows

  Chapter 5 - A Peculiar Silence

  Chapter 6 - The Nameless Horseman

  Chapter 7 - The Intruder

  Chapter 8 - The Fungal Wrath

  Chapter 9 - Innumerable Eyes

  Chapter 10 - The Undead School

  Chapter 11 - The Dark Maze

  Chapter 12 - Still Missing

  Chapter 13 - The Fallow Field

  Chapter 14 - Rotting From the Inside

  Chapter 15 - An Eerie Autumn

  Chapter 16 - The Sound Outside the Window

  Chapter 17 - The Old Sewer

  Chapter 18 - The Witch’s Machine

  Chapter 19 - Lost in the Woods

  Chapter 20 - When Everything Else is Gone

  Chapter 21 - The Wilderness Abounds With Monsters

  Chapter 22 - The Abandoned Cabin

  Chapter 23 - The Heavier Hammer

  Chapter 24 - The Screaming

  Chapter 25 - The Heart of the Monster

  Chapter 26 - The Biggest Secret

  Chapter 27 - The Seeds of Redemption

  Chapter 28 - Against the Razor Rule

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  There are just enough woods behind our house to get lost in, and Mom doesn’t let Brian go out there by himself. He’s nine and I’m thirteen. Until last year she didn’t want me in the woods by myself either. Now I’m qualified to be his guide.

  Brian goes out by himself sometimes anyway, but that morning she heard him sliding open the back door.

  “Take Eric!” she shouted.

  I was in the kitchen, reaching for the Cheerios.

  “Can you go with him?” she asked, now that she’d already volunteered me.

  “I guess so.” I shook the box and heard the few remaining O’s rattling on the bottom.

  “Spend the day with him if you can,” she said. “He gets lonely.” She grabbed the coffeepot, letting liquid drip and fizzle on the hot plate. She was going to work, even though it was Saturday.

  “Come on!” Brian shouted.

  “Fine!” I shouted back, setting the box down.

  Two minutes later I was out on a bug hunt.

  It was still dark, and the morning fog made me feel even stiffer and sorer than I did when I woke up. It was warm for October, but the dampness sank into my bones. Some of the lesser aches and pains had faded, but the rest were now more distinct—a shoulder that felt not quite put back into place, and a dull throbbing in my head from an accidental helmet-on-helmet blow. On top of all that, my stomach was growling.

  “Why can’t you just find bugs in the backyard?” I grumbled.

  “I like to look in different places,” Brian said. “It’s like what Dad says about fishing. You can’t overfish in one spot.”

  The path we were on was one of the better ones, snaking its way south to Boise Township. Birds were skipping around in the branches, trilling and chirping. Michelle can tell you which one is which, but I don’t care—I just like the sound of them all going at once. As we came around a curve, a squirrel screeched at us and scrambled off over a rock. I was hungry, tired, and sore, but it was kind of nice being in the woods in the morning.

  “Let’s look under there,” said Brian, pointing at the boulder.

  It was about three feet across and two feet wide—bigger than I wanted to deal with—and nestled pretty deep in the mud.

  “Does it have to be that one?”

  “Why, can’t you lift it?”

  “Of course I can. I was just … Never mind.”

  I’d brought a garden shovel with me, knowing it might come in handy. I scraped the mud away from the sides of the stone, then got my fingers under it and gave it a big heave, wrenching the same shoulder that was already throbbing from a rough open-field tackle on Thursday.

  The stone was easier to roll over than I’d thought it would be. Two or three grubs were there, waving their disgusting little appendages. I looked away and gagged.

  “Stag beetles!” Brian grabbed them up with his bare hand and dropped them into the jar he was carrying. He’d gotten good at identifying bugs, even larval ones like the chubby, shrimplike things that were nothing like the pincer bugs they would turn into—or would have turned into, if they hadn’t been somebody’s breakfast.

  “That’s enough, right?” I asked.

  Brian nodded, but before we headed back to the trail, he stopped.

  “What’s over there?” He pointed past some trees.

  “What?” I looked but couldn’t see anything special. Brian didn’t explain. He bounded over the boulder and disappeared behind some bushes.

  “Come here!” he hollered. “You got to see this!”

  I took a moment to memorize the scene: the big rock I’d just rolled over, the tree right next to it, and the bushes behind it. I didn’t think we’d get lost, but it didn’t hurt to have a marker or two. Once I had the scene committed to memory, I plunged into the woods after Bri.

  I stepped out on a quaking, jumbled layer of rust-red dead boughs. All the trees were down in a ragged circle about ten yards wide. The smell of rotting vegetation was overpowering, even to me—and I’m used to the smells of compost heaps and locker rooms. It looked like a spaceship had landed and crushed everything in its path.

  Even spookier was a faint bluish-green light glowing from beneath the dead wood.

  “What’s that?” Brian asked.

  “I don’t know.” I crouched and peered through the branches. There was a bubbling puddle of neon ooze down there. Maybe the spaceship had left some alien goo behind to infest our planet and turn us all into pod people.
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  “I’m going to see.” He dropped to his knees, set the jar down, and shoved one of the dead branches aside. He tossed one in my direction, sending up a cloud of white dust.

  “Be careful,” I told him. Even if it wasn’t alien ooze, what if it was toxic waste?

  He threw a second branch my way, then laughed while I tried to wave away another dust cloud. But he wasn’t laughing at me.

  “Look!” He pointed.

  There was a cluster of mushrooms, and every one of them was lit up like a little blue Christmas tree. Was something spilled on them, or did they just glow like that naturally? I knelt to get a better look.

  “Sometimes they turn into monsters,” said Brian.

  “What?”

  “Like in Gninjas,” he said. That was a video game he was obsessed with, about gnome ninjas saving the Garden World. “The mushrooms light up, then they turn red. When they turn red you have to smash them before they blow up and turn into monsters.”

  “Come on, Brian. That’s make-believe.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s just what they look like.”

  Even if they didn’t turn into monsters, there was something wrong with them.

  “Give me your jar,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to take a few mushrooms. I need to show them to someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Brian let the bug larvae slide into his hand, stuffed them in his pocket, and gave me the jar.

  I knelt down to scoop up a few of the mushrooms with the shovel. I wanted to get some soil, too, so the mushrooms would live for a bit longer. I dug a circle around a few mushrooms, planted the shovel, and levered up the sod. The hardest part was breaking the roots. They were no thicker than threads but tough as steel. They seemed to tug back as I tried to saw through them with the edge of the blade. I worked up a sweat doing it, finally got a shovelful of the mushrooms, put them sideways into the jar, and screwed on the top. I was careful not to touch any in case they were dangerous.

  “Are you going to keep those in the house?” Brian asked.

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “What if they do turn into monsters?”

  “They’ll be trapped in the jar.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He laughed at the idea.

  I was glad to get out of the strange clearing. We found the big rock I’d just rolled over. From that angle it looked like a toppled tombstone, and the damp ground where it used to lie looked like a grave. It put me on edge a little, which is why I nearly jumped out of my skin when a figure leaped out from behind the rock and let loose with a scream that sounded like a dinosaur getting electrocuted. I saw that once on one of Brian’s cartoons, so I knew exactly what it sounded like.

  The screamer broke into laughter, and I saw that it was only Randy Weaver, one of my teammates. He lived a few miles away in Boise Township. He was wearing running pants and was sopping with sweat so I guessed that he’d been jogging through the woods. He was a real jock.

  “You got him good!” said Brian.

  “Not you, though. You didn’t even flinch.” Randy offered him a hand and Brian high-fived it.

  “Fine, you startled me,” I admitted. “You’re just lucky I didn’t get you in a piledriver.”

  “Hey, save that for the Oxen quarterback,” said Randy. “Whatcha got? Fireflies?” He pointed at the jar.

  I shook my head and passed it over.

  “Holy cow,” he said. “They look like something out of … out of a horror movie or something. Where’d you get them?”

  “Right there.” I pointed back over my shoulder with my thumb.

  “No kidding. Are there more?”

  “Lots.”

  “They’re cool. I’m going to take some photos.” He took a phone from his pocket and flipped it open. “Hey, show me that piledriver, Undertaker-style.” He held up the phone to get the picture.

  I picked up Brian, who hollered and flailed while I demonstrated the pro wrestling move, except for the last part, when you’re supposed to drive the guy’s head into the ground. Even the pro wrestlers don’t do that really; it’s all make-believe. Randy snapped the picture and gave me a thumbs-up. I set Brian down gently, but he was still mad.

  “No picking me up without asking!” he hollered, and ran up the path toward home.

  “What’s up with him?” Randy wondered.

  “Little brothers,” I said.

  Mom was gone when I got home, and Brian was in his room with the door shut. Arkham Hat Shop blared through the door. That was Dad’s old band. They were popular in Boston back before I was born, but they broke up when Dad got married and moved to Maine.

  Last winter Dad started hanging around in the basement a lot, strumming on his electric guitar and listening to his band’s old CDs. Mom finally asked him if he wanted to give the rock and roll thing another try. She thought he’d get together with some guys on the weekends and jam in the basement, but what Dad did was call up all the other guys from Arkham Hat Shop and talk them into getting the band back together—in Boston. All the other guys still lived there.

  “I wish I could explain this to you,” he told Brian and me. “I know it sounds selfish of me, running off to chase my dream, but I’m doing it for you guys. I want you to know that it’s never too late to follow your own dreams.” He looked at me first, really seriously. “That means you should never give up on football, Eric.”

  “All right,” I agreed, but of course I’ll have to give up on football by the time I turn his age. Most pro football players retire by that time.

  He turned to Brian. “What’s your dream?” he asked.

  Brian didn’t even think about his answer before he blurted it out. “I want pet hedgehogs.”

  “Sure thing, kid. We’ll go get some this weekend.”

  “Cool!” That was how he got Digger and Starling. He was only eight at the time, and his dream had already come true.

  With the curtains pulled in my room, I could still see a faint blue-green shine on the mushrooms. What if there was something seriously wrong in the woods? Maybe there was a chemical spill, or nuclear waste dumped where it shouldn’t be. I set the mushrooms on the dresser and watched them for a while, but they didn’t do anything interesting other than glow.

  If we still had Internet access I could look them up, but Mom got rid of it when Dad left. She said we had to cut expenses. The library was open but there was usually a line to get on the computers. Michelle might know what they were, and I had to go over there anyway to take care of Cassie.

  I figured I’d better take Brian with me, since Mom had asked me to spend the day with him. I went and tapped on his door.

  “Hey, Bri, want to go to see Cassie?”

  He opened the door a crack and looked at me with hurt eyes.

  “First say you’re sorry. I don’t like being picked up.”

  “I know that now. Sorry. So do you want to go?”

  “Can we go to the haunted house after?” There was a haunted house downtown every October, but I wasn’t a big fan.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

  “All right,” he agreed.

  I glanced at the terrarium, which was a mistake. One of the hedgehogs was still working away at a grub. I would have lost my breakfast, if I’d remembered to eat any.

  Tanglewood is built like a spider, with the downtown at the body and a lot of legs spindling off this way and that into the woods. We live at the end of one leg, and Michelle lives at the end of a nearby leg. It’s easier to take a shortcut through the woods than walk up one road and down another.

  Brian ran on ahead, nudging rocks and logs.

  “Looking for more bugs?”

  “It doesn’t hurt to look,” he said.

  I had the jar of mushrooms with me. In the light they just looked like ordinary mushrooms, but they had a blue glint when we passed through the shadows of trees.

  Michelle is from Boston. She
used to be a portrait photographer, but she got tired of taking pictures of people and decided to take pictures of nature instead. She thought she’d run a little farm, because apparently there’s always a market for pictures of cows and pigs and horses, but she way underestimated how much work even one animal is, especially when it’s a pig. So she settled for one pig and hired me to help out. The pig turned out to be camera-shy and doesn’t even pay her own keep. She is cool to have around, though.

  Brian and I wedged through some pine boughs and scooted down a steep bank to Michelle’s place, which was fenced in but the gate was never locked. She had a big field of weeds, big enough to put a football field, with the house and pigsty on one end and the compost heap on the other. The gate was at the compost heap end.

  “Pig poop!” Brian shouted. He was right—that’s mostly what the compost heap was made of. We trudged past the heap and through the field to the sty, which was attached to a shed where Cassie slept when it was raining or cold. Now she was basking in the sunlight and lazily cuddling a pink bucket. She got up as soon as she saw us and trotted over.

  I scratched her ears, and she made huffy-puffy noises, tilting her head and closing her eyes.

  “Can I?” Brian asked.

  “Of course.”

  He reached out and gently stroked the bristly side of her other ear, laughed, and gave it a good rub. Cassie grunted and stepped closer, startling him a little bit.

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “She doesn’t bite or anything.” Sometimes she snorted and got pig slobber on you, but Brian could learn that the fun way.

  “Hey!” I heard Michelle’s voice and turned around. She was waving from an upstairs window. “Can you feed her?” she hollered. “I’ve got a lot going on.”

  “Yes!” I gave a couple of exaggerated nods, in case she couldn’t hear.

  “Come see me when you’re done!” she shouted, then disappeared from the window.

  I set the jar down and headed around front, where I found a fresh bag of garbage from Emily’s Café. They save up their food waste for Cassie and drop it off every day. I broke open the bag and filled her food trough. She had her head buried in the mess before the bag was half empty.

  Cassie is quick but methodical, first going for the berries, bananas, and apple cores, followed by the half-eaten waffles and pancakes, then turning her snout to the piles of scrambled eggs. She’ll even eat leftover pieces of bacon and sausage, which I don’t like to think about. The restaurant tries to leave them out, but a little bit always ends up in the bag. If Cassie’s still hungry after all that, which she always is, she’ll eat the soggy hash browns soaked in ketchup, but not if there are onions and peppers mixed in.