The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  The mushrooms were even thicker in the woods, climbing the tree trunks and crawling along the branches. There was a peculiar silence in the woods. It was late in the season for bugs, and maybe the squirrels were hibernating and the birds had all gone south for the winter, but it was as quiet as a cold winter day with newly fallen snow. It was lifeless. Which was also how I felt.

  When I got to Michelle’s, I saw the papers from my notebook scattered across the field. Did Tom and Will do that while waiting for the ambulance or after Randy was rushed off to the hospital? I ran around and gathered them up. They were easy to see in the dim light, the perfect rectangles of white standing out against the dark grass. The only one I couldn’t find was the one with my notes from the library.

  I found my textbooks in Cassie’s food trough, but fortunately she hadn’t eaten them, even though she hadn’t been fed last night. I took them out and tried to shake off the spatters of swill, then fed and watered Cassie. When I reached out to pet her, she snorted and backed up, her eyes wide open. She’d never done that before.

  I got work gloves and a shovel out of the shed and cleaned the corner where Cassie does her business. When I rolled the wagon across the field, I noticed something black against the brown, barely visible except for a glimmer of smudged yellow. I knew what it was even before I lifted it off the pile and shook it out. It was my football jersey. The rest of my uniform and pads were also thrown onto the heap. I started to pick them out, but by the time I found the left cleat, which was buried especially deep, I figured it wasn’t worth it. I threw the whole stinking mess in a garbage can by the shed and went to school.

  That morning at school was rough. I had the feeling everyone was looking at me and whispering about me, which they probably were. If it had been two other kids at the school who got in a fight and one of them busted the other guy’s leg, I’d talk about it. I hid behind books and pretended to take furious notes in every class so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anyone. Randy and I were in all the same classes, but he wasn’t in any of them that morning.

  I usually sat with the team at lunch, but that didn’t seem like a good idea anymore. I carried my tray past tables full of kids staring at me, nobody sliding over or saying, “Hey, Eric, right here.” Well, that was my own fault for not having friends outside the team.

  I ended up at a table of sixth graders, and they didn’t strike me as the cooler sixth graders. They looked back at me in shock. A popular football player like me was not supposed to sit with them. I realized that Allan from down the street was there. I’d never even noticed him in the halls. I didn’t know he was in sixth grade. I thought he was in fifth grade, tops.

  “Hey,” I told him. He looked down at his food and didn’t say anything back.

  As bad as the morning was, the afternoon was ten times worse.

  The science teacher asked me if I’d researched the mushrooms for my oral report, and I told her I had but I’d lost the notes. I didn’t say why, but everyone was looking at me like they knew it was connected to everything else, and they were right. I also didn’t have the sample to pass around, because even though mushrooms were all over my life like—well, like a fungus—they weren’t my number one problem anymore, and I’d forgotten to harvest some new ones.

  Then there was a surprise school assembly instead of last period. Everybody was muttering and whispering to each other, wondering what it was about. I myself thought it might have to do with the missing girl from Alden Academy—it’s the kind of thing that kids start rumors about. There was a computer hooked up to a projector on a cart, so whatever it was, it was going to involve multimedia.

  Principal Dahl coughed into the microphone, causing a squeal of static over the PA. Ms. Brookings, the guidance counselor, stood next to him, looking grim. Now I knew it was serious. The last time they had a surprise assembly with Ms. Brookings, she told us a girl named Gail Hendrickson had leukemia.

  “Okay,” Principal Dahl said after he got the microphone figured out. “We’re meeting today to talk about an incident that took place … It was not on school grounds but involved several students here, so …” He isn’t great at finishing his sentences. “To help facilitate this conversation, we’re …” He looked back at Ms. Brookings, saw she was there, and handed her the microphone.

  “Thank YOU, Mr. DAHL,” said Ms. Brookings. She has a way of overemphasizing certain words. She’s also big on exaggerated facial expressions. In the last assembly, she talked about “GRIEVING” and made a sad face like she was talking to preschoolers who wouldn’t know what that was.

  “I wonder,” she said now, making a stagey puzzled look, one outstretched finger to her lips. “I WONDER if someone can TELL me … what is a BULLY?” I felt a silent groan course through the auditorium. That’s what we were having an emergency assembly for, to talk about bullying? We thought we’d left all that behind us when we got out of grade school.

  “Well?” Ms. Brookings shrugged dramatically, shaking her head. “Does anybody KNOW what a BULLY is?”

  A girl in front finally raised her hand.

  “YES?” The counselor hustled over to hand her the microphone.

  “It’s somebody who beats up on smaller kids?”

  “Okay, okay, yes. A bully is someone who ‘beats up’ on people ‘smaller’ than themselves.” Ms. Brookings used her fingers for quote marks. “That’s good. But what else might a bully do?” She browbeat the kids in the front row until they mentioned name-calling or playing mean tricks or posting junk on someone’s Facebook wall. I remembered the picture Randy tagged me in. Did that count? I didn’t know.

  After all that, she went over to the cart and clicked a button. A cartoon came up with animals who wore baggy jeans and flip-flops and said “Yo, homey” at one another. We’d seen the exact same movie in second grade. I wasn’t pro-bully or anything, but the whole thing was dumb. It’s not like mean kids don’t know they’re being mean and will be better after watching a cartoon.

  While the cartoon was playing, I saw Randy coming in on crutches. He sat right in front, and the guidance counselor knelt down and whispered to him, nodding with exaggerated empathy when he whispered back.

  I got a sick feeling in my stomach, realizing what was going on. The incident that Principal Dahl was talking about—the one that happened off school grounds—was what happened with me and Randy. But they thought Randy was the victim and I was the bully. I could see why they might think that. I mean, Randy is smaller than me, and I did break his leg, but that wasn’t the whole story. I almost jumped up to explain myself, but nobody had actually singled me out, so I stayed quiet.

  I decided to skip football practice. I really wasn’t in the mood to talk to my teammates. And besides that, I was probably going to get kicked off the team for wiping out our biggest star a few days before the championship. Brian wasn’t at the library, so I went straight to Michelle’s.

  Cassie was sprawled out on a pile of hay, dozing peacefully, last night’s trauma apparently forgotten. She still had food and water from this morning, but I topped off both, then brushed her down on the side I could get at. I didn’t need to shovel again so soon, so I swept up some of the dropped goop beneath her trough and carried it to the compost heap.

  There were a few dozen mushroom caps dotting the heap. They were the biggest I’d seen yet, and they gave off a blue-green shimmer even in the sunlight. Manure must be a mushroom paradise. I flung the new stuff on the heap and headed back to the sty, putting the wagon and the brush away. Everything seemed to be okay. Wait, where was Babe?

  I panicked for a second until I saw it in the corner of the sty. There was something else there, just over the fence—a white garbage bag stuffed full of something. It couldn’t have been there this morning. I would have seen it.

  It must be food for Cassie, I thought. Even though the restaurant always leaves their scraps around front, not in the sty. I went closer and saw “PIG BOY” written on the side with a bright blue Sharpie. Did so
mebody from the team leave it there?

  I opened it, expecting something awful, and saw black polyester and a flash of yellow. I reached in and pulled out my jersey. It was my whole uniform, washed and folded. There was my number, 97, bright and yellow. The pads were there and everything.

  Had Michelle come home, found it in the garbage, and cleaned it for me? I banged on the door, but there was no answer.

  I took the shortcut home through the woods, which were still spooky quiet. I realized that the fungus had probably scared all the animals away, just like the cloud of bats I’d seen soaring away two nights ago. The squirrels and rabbits must have gone deeper into the woods to get away, and the birds probably went south. Or maybe the animals weren’t scared of the fungus itself. Maybe they knew the woods were dying.

  The Wikipedia article said the honey fungus mostly feeds on dead wood, but these trees were alive, at least for now. The branches were drooping and eventually might turn black and fall down like the trees Brian and I had seen the other day. What if the fungus ate its way through trees until it killed the entire forest? I imagined the mushrooms creeping all the way to Baxter State Park, making their way down the Appalachians, and moving west across prairies and deserts and mountains until the entire continent was nothing but fungus. That first frost was way past due and couldn’t get here soon enough.

  Our next-door neighbor Mr. Davis was in the backyard with a snow shovel, trying to scoop up the mushrooms and toss them back into the woods, but it wasn’t going very well. He had to really put his shoulder into it and kick at the back of the shovel to help the blade cut through the roots.

  On the other side, Ms. Fisher’s Jack Russell terrier was yipping and yapping at the mushrooms, running up and down along the chain-link fence. He finally let loose with a yellow stream at one of the denser patches. Go for it, Sparky, I thought. If those mushrooms were as electric as they looked, his name would suddenly be perfect.

  The mushrooms wrapped around both sides of our house, and I followed them to see how far. They’d pushed their way into the front yard but petered out before they reached the sidewalk.

  When I looked up, I saw Dad’s car in the driveway, a U-Haul trailer latched to the back.

  I went inside and found the basement door ajar. I stood on the top step for a bit, listening. Dad was strumming on a hollow-body electric guitar that wasn’t plugged into anything and singing my favorite song of his, which isn’t an Arkham Hat Shop song or even really by him but one he used to play for me when I was a little kid. It’s about a nameless horseman riding through the valley, having all these adventures. “Who can the brave young horseman be?” the song asks, but you never find out the answer. Dad also played a song about an octopus and some others I forget, but the one about the horseman was my favorite.

  As a little kid, I thought he’d made all those songs up himself. I got into a huge argument with my kindergarten teacher about “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I told her my dad made up that song, and she asked me if his name was Peter, Paul, or Mary.

  I waited for Dad to finish, then went down the steps. Brian was sitting next to him, listening. Dad’s little practice area is at the west end of the house, the side facing the woods. There were a few dots of bright green on the wall behind them.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey back at you.” He strummed once more, good and hard so the strings rang out for a long time. “I guess I should finish hauling stuff in.” He put the guitar gently on its stand and came over to give me a hug, squashing my nose with his shoulder.

  “You came home, huh?”

  “For a while. Your mother says everything is nuts up here.”

  “It is nuts,” I agreed.

  “So I’m here to de-nuts-ify it, if I can. Put my job on hold, postponed a couple of gigs.”

  “Sorry.” I was the reason Mom called Dad. I knew that. She must have done it after I’d gone to bed.

  “Hey, I told you all, call if you need me. Your mom called, and here I am. I came straight home, just like I said I would.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “I don’t know. At least until they find that girl, so your mom isn’t working twenty-four-seven.”

  “What are you going to do while you’re here?” I was wondering if he’d try to work out of the home or something.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Try to help with things, I guess.”

  “Did you see the mushrooms?” I asked them, pointing at the wall.

  “Huh?” He wheeled around and looked. “I’ll have to do something about those.” He might have been talking about a leaky faucet or a loose doorknob—something he could put off for a few days, or forever.

  “They spread really fast,” I told him. “They’ve already taken over the lawn.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that. Crazy.” He started up the stairs without giving them another look. I wished he thought it was more urgent. Maybe he didn’t care because he thought he’d head back to Boston in a few days, leaving us to deal with our crazy fungus.

  I helped him carry everything else in. There wasn’t that much, just his clothes and his laptop and a few other things. He’d only needed the trailer so his guitars wouldn’t get smashed up in the backseat.

  “So—I hear you’re in a spot of trouble,” he said as he dropped the last box in the foyer.

  “I guess so. I broke a guy’s leg.” I tried to explain what had happened, but every time I talked about those guys taking Cassie’s bucket, it sounded less like a good reason for a fight. “It was an accident,” I said at last.

  “Did you tell him you were sorry?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “That’s okay. I think it’s better this way, legally. You should probably avoid talking to him until this is all settled.”

  “Oh.” That didn’t make sense to me, but Dad did work at a law firm now and probably knew what he was talking about.

  “We’ll get through this,” he said. “Anyway, I have to get the trailer to Millinocket by seven. Can you make dinner?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks, bro.”

  A few minutes later he was gone.

  Mom called just after he left.

  “Dad’s here,” I told her.

  “Already? I didn’t think he’d get here today. Well, I’m glad he did. I think it’s going to be a late night for me. I’m glad you boys aren’t alone.”

  I didn’t bother telling her we were.

  “Any luck finding that girl?” I asked.

  “We don’t have a lot to go on,” she admitted. “She just disappeared. But we’re talking to everybody in case somebody knows something.”

  “She’ll be fine,” I said.

  “You don’t know that, Eric.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “If you or Brian ever does something like this …” She trailed off. “Don’t. That’s all. I’ll see you later.” She clicked off.

  I wanted to get some fresh mushrooms before it got dark. I emptied the jar and dug up some new ones from the backyard, sawing the edge of the shovel against the tough roots to sever them. I slid the mushrooms sideways into the jar, replaced the cap, and brought the jar back to my room.

  “Why do you keep bringing those inside?” Brian stood in my doorway, looking at me accusingly.

  “I’m doing a science project on them.”

  “Why don’t you do your science project on hedgehogs? You could bring in Digger or Starling and feed her a bug.”

  “Maybe next time.” I’m sure grossing out the class would be a great way to win back my popularity.

  “Is Dad moving back for good?” he asked me.

  “Probably not,” I said. “He said just until they find that runaway girl.” I realized that Mom might not have told Brian about Amanda, but he knew what I was talking about. Everybody in town knew about her.

  “Oh.” He turned around and went back to his own room, half slamming the door.

  I put some potpies in the
oven and did homework at the kitchen table while I waited for them to bake. I could have cooked them in the microwave, but I didn’t like how soggy and white the crust was when I cooked them that way.

  I decided to re-create my science notes so I could give my oral report the next day. I got a notebook and wrote down everything I remembered.

  1. Honey fungus.

  I’d written down the scientific name for it—carefully, so it was spelled right—but that page was gone, so I’d have to call it the honey fungus. The mushrooms sure didn’t smell like honey, and I was willing to bet they didn’t taste like honey, so they probably got the name from their color in daylight.

  2. All one big thing.

  The mushrooms were all connected, underground, connected by those cords. So it was one big organism, and it could get even bigger. Wikipedia said there was one in Oregon that spread out over a mile in every direction.

  3. Really old.

  The same fungus in Oregon was at least a thousand years old. I didn’t know how they knew that, but they did. So these things could be alive for a very long time.

  4. Bioluminous?

  I couldn’t remember the exact word my teacher used. I couldn’t find the reason they lit up in the article, either. It just said they lit up “in the right conditions.”

  5. _____core.

  I couldn’t remember the word, but the fungus had a kind of heart. Everything grew out from there.

  It wasn’t much information, but it was good stuff. An ancient, giant underground fungus that could light up when it wanted to—that sounded like a sci-fi movie, but it was real. Unless somebody hacked the Wikipedia article just to mess with my head.

  I wrote it all down, neatly enough to hand in, and took the notebook up to my room. I put it in my book bag and went to grab the mushroom jar so I wouldn’t forget. It was gone.

  “Brian, did you borrow my mushrooms?” I yelled down the hall. He didn’t answer.

  I went to his room and tapped on the door.

  I could hear him moving around, but he still didn’t answer. I opened the door and saw him shoving something into the top drawer of the bureau.