The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  It’s kind of fascinating to watch her eat. It’s like watching Tom Brady throw a touchdown pass or David Ortiz hit a baseball. She’s perfect at her own sport, which is eating.

  “Wow,” said Brian when Cassie left the sty a few minutes later.

  I freshened the water in her water trough and brushed her backside. The only thing left to do was shovel poop.

  “Gross,” Brian said as I scooped the manure into an old wagon to haul out to the heap.

  “It’s honest work,” I told him, which is what Dad used to say whenever we complained about chores. The truth is that I like doing it. It just feels good to take care of someone. I dragged the wagon across the field to the compost heap. When I got back, Cassie was running alongside the fence, softly booting the bucket like a soccer ball and squealing.

  “Is she okay?” Brian asked.

  “Yeah, she’s just exercising Babe.” That’s what Michelle called it.

  “Babe?” Brian asked.

  “The bucket. She thinks of it as her baby. She had a lot of real babies, but they were all taken away from her.” Michelle told me once that Cassie used to be a breeding sow and that she’d had eight litters.

  “What happened to them?”

  “They got turned into bacon. What do you think?”

  “Oh.” Brian got a sad look on his face. I myself was thinking about not eating bacon anymore, but it’s hard to make the connection between a big friendly pig like Cassie and crispy strips of breakfast meat.

  I got the jar and went to Michelle’s back door, Brian running to catch up. She opened the door before I even had a chance to knock.

  “I’m going to be gone for a week,” she told me as she let us in, “so you’ll have full-time Cassie duty.”

  “No problem. Where are you going?”

  “Baxter to shoot bears. They’re most active just before hibernation.”

  Brian’s eyes got wide, so I softly punched him in the shoulder. “She’s taking pictures,” I told him. “She’d never actually shoot a bear.”

  “No hitting,” he muttered.

  “Sorry.”

  Michelle put out a package of cookies, and I grabbed a couple. She poured two cups of milk. Brian dunked his cookie into the milk and held it until it was good and soggy.

  “Hey, have you ever seen these?” I pushed the jar across the table. “They look normal now, but they were lit up when I got them. And they were blue instead of yellow.”

  “Sure I have,” she said. “I’ve seen ’em in blue, green, and orange. It’s called fox fire.”

  “What does it have to do with foxes?” Brian asked.

  “Nothing. It means ‘fake fire.’ I think somebody mispronounced a French word and it stuck. They’re not that rare, but they are tough to photograph. The light doesn’t come through. Even if you do it with a slow shutter speed, people think you faked it.”

  “Hm.” So they were kind of boring after all.

  Michelle must have seen my disappointment and tried to make up for it.

  “You know what? I read once that fox fire is where fairies come from.”

  “Really?” Brian perked up at the mention of fairies.

  “Folks used to see the mysterious light shining in the woods and thought that little creatures must be having big parties out there.”

  “Why didn’t they just go see?” I asked her.

  “The woods were dark and scary, and since they didn’t know what the blue light was, they assumed it was something bad.”

  “That’s, uh …” I was going to say “dumb,” but I’d done the same thing. I’d thought the glow was alien ooze or nuclear waste, and I was afraid to take a closer look until Brian made me. I resolved to be more reasonable from now on.

  Michelle saw Brian scowling. “I don’t mean Tinker Bell,” she said. “Their fairies were little demons.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  The next day there was a ragged line of mushrooms strewn across our back lawn, petering out before they reached the back steps. With their cone-shaped caps tilting this way and that, they looked like skinny gnomes on the march. It was like they’d followed us.

  No, I told myself. We must have tracked spores on our shoes and clothes. I remembered the plume of white dust and shuddered. Those spores had been all over me. In any case, it was scientific. It was creepy and weird but scientific.

  The Patriots were playing the four o’clock game on TV, and I got bored during the one o’clock game. I went outside and took the mushroomy trail all the way to the clearing. The mushrooms had spread to the edges of the clearing, right up to the stone I’d turned over yesterday. They looked dull and yellow in the sunlight, but I could still see a blue-green glow deep in the shadows of fallen branches.

  I didn’t like them, even if Michelle said they were normal.

  I kicked at some mushrooms as I strode back through the yard. I knocked a few caps off, but they were tougher than they looked.

  “Can we go to the haunted house now?” Brian asked when I got in.

  “Um …” I’d forgotten all about it. “Not now. The Patriots game is about to start.”

  “You promised!” he said, which wasn’t true. I said maybe we would go. I meant no.

  “Oh, take him,” said Mom, who was on her way downstairs with a basket of laundry. “He never gets to do anything he wants to do.”

  “But the game is about to start,” I said. Besides that, did she think that yesterday’s bug hunt was my idea?

  “Well, the sooner you go, the sooner you can get back and watch it.”

  So we got on our bikes and headed toward downtown but barely got to the end of the street before Allan waved us down. Allan had just moved to Tanglewood that summer. He was about halfway between Brian and me in age and always wanted to hang out with us.

  “Want to play HORSE?” he asked us. He had a basketball hoop nailed over the garage door and spent a lot of time practicing by himself. I’d played a couple of games with him, but his driveway was slanted and I got tired of uphill layups really fast.

  “We can’t right now,” I told him.

  “We’re going to the haunted house!” Brian added.

  “Ooh, a haunted house. Can I come?” he asked.

  “All right, but hurry up,” I said. He ran inside with his ball, and Brian and I were left standing out there for ten minutes while he got permission. I hoped the Broncos won the coin toss, because I’d miss at least the first drive.

  “Let’s race,” I said when he was finally out with his bike. Before either he or Brian could say no, I took off and pedaled like mad. I got pretty winded halfway but still beat them both by five minutes.

  When I caught sight of the orange banner with ghoulish black letters, I felt a little knot in my stomach. It’s a pretty plain-looking building, but it is really old. There used to be a colonial village called Keatston where Tanglewood is now, and that was the Keatston Meetinghouse. It’s a museum most of the year, but they turn it into a haunted house every October to raise money. I felt the knot in my stomach for two reasons. One was what happened to me there once, and the other was what happened to the village of Keatston.

  Brian and Allan were still pedaling up Keatston Street. The main road through town was named for that village. I decided to go ahead and buy tickets for all of us to speed things up.

  “We close at four,” the woman at the front door told me. She wouldn’t take my money. I glanced at my watch and saw it was three-fifty.

  “Come on. One last group?”

  “Well, make it quick. We all want to see the game.”

  I paid for three tickets and turned back to see what Brian and Allan were doing. Their bikes were locked up, but they were talking to someone.

  “Hey, Parrish!” he shouted, and waved. It was Tom. He was also on the football team, and one of my oldest friends.

  “Hey, Chains!” I went closer so we didn’t have to keep shouting at each other. His last name is Beauchesne, pronounced “Bo-chains,” so every
one calls him Chains.

  “Your brother was telling me about your pig pal,” he said.

  “I have a job taking care of her,” I told him.

  “I guess you got a date to the fall dance all lined up too.”

  “Yeah, very funny,” I said. “We better get going.” I pointed at the haunted house with my thumb. “I want to get home to watch the game.”

  “Yeah, I’m watching it at Papa’s Pizza. Don’t get too scared in the haunted house, Parrish.”

  Allan snickered.

  “Later, Chains,” I said, pushing Brian and Allan toward the door of the haunted house before Tom could say another word.

  Four years ago Dad took Tom and me to the haunted house. Brian was still too young for it. They had a witch that year—this woman with stringy hair and big clusters of warts on her face. I saw her in the shadows up ahead, shuffling across the corridor and disappearing into hidden doorways in the maze we had to walk through. There were also skeletons and spiders and everything else, but I barely noticed them, because I knew that sooner or later the witch was going to jump out and shriek at us. I looked up ahead and saw a vertical line of daylight, which I guessed was the exit door. Here it comes, I thought—the last big fright before we leave. I hung back so Tom would get the worst of it. That was when I felt something in my hair and took a swipe at it. My hand met another hand—a bony hand with long, misshapen nails. I heard a low, throaty cackle and felt a blast of warm breath that smelled of old meat.…

  And I started bawling. I couldn’t help it. I was shrieking and crying, and Dad had to carry me out like a colicky baby. Tom told kids at school, and life was hard for a while. I still felt a little knot of shame whenever I went to the haunted house, like someone there might recognize me and remember.

  “It’s okay to be scared,” I told Brian and Allan.

  “Hey, I’m not scared!” said Allan.

  “But it’s okay if you are,” I said.

  We went in and saw silhouettes of skeletal trees cut out of black poster board. Some years the haunted house was a walk through a creepy mansion, and sometimes it was a cave. This year it was a path through the woods.

  The first display was three stuffed bears—not teddy bears, but taxidermy of real bears—propped up in chairs, licking their plates. A child’s blue smock and buckled shoes were at the center of the table, so it wasn’t porridge on those plates. After that there was a headless horseman, who had a jack-o’-lantern for a head but no horse.

  “I don’t get this one,” Allan said at the next display. There was a black curtain draped from the ceiling. In front there was just a sign: WELCOME TO KEATSTON.

  “It’s the town that disappeared over two hundred years ago,” Brian told him. “It burned down or something.”

  “What do you mean, or something?”

  “It means the buildings besides this one were all reduced to splinters and everyone was gone,” I said.

  “But there weren’t any ashes,” Brian added in a whisper.

  Allan looked at me, and I nodded. “Nobody knows exactly what happened.”

  “You’re both making it up.”

  “Well, it’s not like I saw it for myself, but that’s what everyone says,” I told him. “They have this old picture showing the town burning down, and people running around and screaming.” I looked for it, hoping to see the picture we always saw on school trips. It wasn’t in its usual spot. Some things are too scary for a haunted house. “And there’s writing on it that says something about a fire.…”

  “ ‘The devil’s fire may burn again,’ ” Brian quoted. “ ‘God’s wrath will purify the earth. The seeds of redemption are in the people.’ ”

  “Yeah, the devil’s fire. You remembered all that?”

  “Our class was here last month,” Brian said. “I memorized it.”

  Allan looked at the sign again with new appreciation.

  “Let’s move on,” I said. I was all for respecting the past, but there was a game on.

  We moved on to see a graveyard. A couple of zombies climbed out of their graves, but it wasn’t very convincing. Past the graveyard was a witch, smiling and cackling as she poked at a pot of goop, stirring up clouds of smoke. It wasn’t the same witch as the one who used to be there, and frankly, the new one wasn’t fit to carry her broomstick.

  • • •

  We got home during halftime. The Pats were up by ten points. I was sorry I’d missed it but glad they were ahead. Brian went outside to do whatever, and I told him not to get lost in the woods.

  As it turned out, I’d missed the good part of the game. The Broncos tied it up in the second half and won in overtime. As soon as the game was over, I went out back and finished stomping down the mushrooms in the yard. I blamed them for the Pats losing. It wasn’t rational, but I didn’t want to be rational.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Brian asked, coming out of the woods.

  “Nothing. You shouldn’t be out here this late.”

  “It’s not that late.”

  “It’s nearly dark.”

  There was a high-pitched sound coming from the woods, and Brian wheeled around to see what it was. Against the blue-green night rose a fan-shaped cloud that looked like a giant hand coming to smash the house. The cloud got higher and wider, spreading out and dissipating into the darkness.

  “Wow,” said Brian. “It’s like a million bats.”

  That might not have even been an exaggeration. I knew that a lot of bats lived in the woods, but I’d never seen so many at once. Maybe they were migrating, but I wasn’t sure if bats did that. Either way, seeing that added to my feeling that things were going really wrong with the world.

  Mom still wasn’t home. She’d left a note on the fridge that there was an emergency at Alden, the all-girls school where she worked, and that I ought to make dinner. She always had the freezer stocked with pizzas, fish sticks, and other easy dinners. She trusted me to put something in the oven without burning the house down. I heated up fried chicken from a box and some frozen peas. Yeah, I don’t want to show off or anything, but I can also work the microwave.

  We ate in the family room, watching a DVD about dinosaurs and robots warring in various historical eras. We’d already seen it a dozen times.

  “Peas are gross.” Brian pushed his to the side of the plate, some diving off the edge and onto the floor like tiny green lemmings.

  “Don’t eat them, then,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  He started peeling the crunchy skin off a drumstick with his fingers.

  “Hey, that’s the best part,” I said.

  “It’s greasy.”

  “That’s why it’s good.”

  “It’s disgusting.” He finished shelling the leg and nibbled on the meat. Meanwhile, the dinosaurs on TV got some help from Leonardo da Vinci, who showed them how to build a flying machine to defeat the robots.

  “I don’t think this is accurate,” I told Brian, who rolled his eyes at me. I wanted to make sure he didn’t get really messed-up ideas about world history.

  Mom finally got home at about eleven and went straight to the family room, found the remote, and turned on the TV. Brian had been playing a video game until two minutes before. He’d run upstairs the second he heard her car in the driveway.

  She flipped through the channels until she found the news on channel 8.

  “Did you make supper?”

  “There’s chicken and peas in the fridge.”

  “Great.” She went off to the kitchen, fixed herself a plate, and came back. We sat through some of the usual stuff, Mom munching quietly.

  “This is it.” Mom pointed at the screen with her fork.

  There was a fuzzy photograph of a girl with curly dark hair and big Harry Potter–style glasses. It looked like it was taken with a webcam. It wasn’t the usual newscaster guy talking, though. It was just the same robotic voice that read off weather warnings.

  “Boise Township, Maine: An alert has been issued for fourteen-year-old A
manda Morris. Amanda was last seen at approximately two-thirty p.m. on Sunday afternoon at Alden Academy. She is believed to have run away.” They gave a number to call in case you saw her and wanted to squeal. So that’s where Mom had been all day—trying to track down a missing student.

  “I hope she’s okay,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  “You hope who’s okay?” Brian asked, coming into the room. He’d put on pajamas and mussed his hair. He rubbed his eyes for effect, to make sure Mom would think he’d been in bed and asleep.

  “Nobody,” Mom said. “I don’t hope anybody’s okay.” I’m sure she didn’t mean it to come out the way it did.

  The mushrooms had already grown back in the yard Monday morning, thicker and meaner than yesterday. I was really beginning to hate the sight of them. I went out the front door so I wouldn’t have to walk through them.

  Brian ran to catch up.

  “You’re supposed to wait for me,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I can go to school by myself, but Mom gets mad at me if she finds out because I’m not supposed to.”

  “Sorry, bud. Anyway, you don’t have to worry. Mom left early.” Before I even got up, that was. I’d found half a pot of coffee still cooling on the hot plate and a note on the fridge.

  “Do you have practice today?” Brian asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Drat. I don’t want to go to the stupid library.” He kicked at a pebble and sent it flying. I made a mental note to teach him placekicking one of these days.

  “What’s wrong with the library?”

  “It’s boring,” he said.

  “I know, but I thought you liked it.” I knew he liked the Japanese comic books you read backward, and he liked playing on the computer. He could even watch movies on one of the TVs with headphones plugged in. It was both the public library and the school library, so it had lots more than educational films.