A dead rat was cradled perfectly in a spiral of corn husk, with green leaves artfully arranged around its dead body.
Penny started to shake. The rat’s eyes were open, the vicious little teeth bared angrily. Its brown-gray fur was soaked with something. She held her fingers up to her face, crumbs falling from her mouth. Her fingers were wet with blood.
She flung the rat away from her, hard. It hit the garage door with a dull thump and slid to the cold cement floor, leaving a bloody mark on the door. Penny fell to her knees, choking on the cookie, coughing it out whole, hysterical, and then she felt that familiar horrible feeling in her chest, the way everything went tight, her stomach churning, her fingers tingling, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, there was no air and—
“Penny?” a voice said.
She flinched at the sound, whirling around.
“You okay, sweetie?”
Her dad, wearing his lab coat, was standing in the doorway.
That night, after dinner, Penny went looking for Teddy.
She found herself doing this often lately, keeping track of him. She had always been the one to keep an eye on him, but now there seemed even greater reason to make sure her little brother was safe. Especially after what had happened that afternoon.
Her father had stared at the blood-soaked rat for a long time before he said, in a curiously flat voice, “Looks like it just crawled in here to die. They come up when the creek’s dry.”
“It was in the corn, Dad!” Penny had insisted, white-faced and shaking.
“It was probably just hungry, and I’m sure that corn smelled pretty good.”
Still, she couldn’t help but remember the way he’d eyed the lock on the garage door, and so she went through the laundry room, opened the door to the garage, and there was Teddy, sitting in the middle of the concrete floor, feeding Tom Ten.
On Mockingbird Lane all the box turtles caught and released were traditionally named Tom. Every once in a while, an empty shell would turn up in the woods with a painted number denoting which Tom it had been.
Teddy was hand-feeding the turtle little bits of lettuce. Tom Ten had been quite snappish when they’d first brought him home and put him in his new cardboard box with some grass. But as the days went by, he had grown bolder, and he would now eat out of Teddy’s hand and raise his head when someone came into the dank room.They’d had him for a while, and Penny was starting to think that maybe it was time to let him go. She knew that the longer you kept a turtle, the better chance it had of dying. Also, she was pretty sure that the fumes from the cars were not good for it.
“He’s really hungry tonight,” Teddy said enthusiastically.
“Yeah?” Penny asked, peering into the cardboard box. It was seriously smelly. Tom Ten pooped a lot for a turtle, and the grass in the box was getting kind of putrid. “Here, let’s take him out.”
She reached in, picked up Tom Ten easily, and carried him out of the garage onto the front lawn. It was dark, but everybody had turned on their front lights. She placed him on the fresh-cut grass and his head lunged out of the shell, tasting freedom.
“I think we should maybe let him go,” Penny said in a gentle voice.
“Let him go?” Teddy asked with a whine.
“Look at him. He’s sick of living in that stinky box. Remember what happened to Tom Nine?”
Benji, like Penny and Teddy, had kept Tom Nine in his garage. After several months of captivity, the turtle had somehow managed to overturn the box and had almost escaped when Benji’s dad backed over him in his Oldsmobile, smashing the turtle like a pancake.
Teddy’s face fell. “I guess so. But can I be the one to let him go?”
Tom Ten was already booking away from them in the grass.
“Sure,” Penny said. “Let’s do it in the backyard.”
Teddy grabbed up Tom Ten and they went around to the back, with Penny switching on the outside lights as they walked.
When they reached the back lawn, Teddy put the turtle down. Tom Ten looked around, as if taking stock of his new environment, and then trucked away at a steady pace, heading deep into the dark woods.
“You think he’ll be okay in the woods?” Teddy asked, a little anxiously.
“Sure, he’s got a real hard shell,” she said, watching the painted number 10 glow faintly in the dark as the turtle moved through the grass.
Penny looked deep into the dark woods and secretly wondered if Tom Ten would be all right, or if by some horrible freak chance Caleb was back there in the thicket, just waiting to make turtle soup. She didn’t want to think about that.
“Look,” Teddy said, pointing to the night sky. “A shooting star.”
“Nah,” Penny said. “It’s probably just an alien.”
He looked at her and giggled.
They sat there on the patio and watched Tom Ten make his long journey until their mother called them in.
CHAPTER 6
Mac had come up with a plan to make some fast cash to buy fireworks for the Fourth of July.
“I really want to get Roman candles,” he said. “I know a guy I can buy them from.”
The parents refused to have anything more exciting than sparklers, insisting that the fireworks organized by the local fire department at a nearby park were perfectly adequate. But Mac, who had never been one to let grownups get in the way of his grand schemes, had been stockpiling fireworks forever—firecrackers, smoke bombs, bottle rockets—all purchased illegally. He kept his secret stash in a battered steel box tucked into the hollow of a tree. The tree itself was deep in the woods, far past the fort, situated on the edge of a high, treacherous cliff that overlooked the creek far below, so that even the most suspicious father wouldn’t find it if he decided to check out their fort. The boys also stored their BB guns in the tree.
“We’ve got all these kids here every night for softball,” Mac had said. “Let’s have a haunted house and make ‘em pay to go through.”
“We can do it at my house,” Benji suggested.
However, Mrs. Albright had no intention of letting every kid in the neighborhood tromp through her house. “You can do it in the backyard,” she said firmly.
And so the haunted house idea was amended to a “haunted trail,” to be held the evening before Penny’s birthday party.
The kids set up the trail over two long days. Benji conned his dad into letting them borrow slabs of slate intended for a garden path, which they planted in the ground, like tombstones, and inscribed with chalk epitaphs such as “Rest in Pieces” and “Here Lies Skel E. Ton.” A rubber hand in the dirt in front of one of the tombstones gave the effect of a corpse clawing its way out of a grave. Mac planned to supply scary music—groans and moans and clanking—piped in from his older brother’s speakers. Oren painted Ping-Pong balls to look like eyeballs, for pelting at kids as they went through, and Penny made fake blood from corn syrup and red food coloring.
They decided to charge fifty cents to go through, and to sell refreshments as well. The mothers were happy to help out, as they were under the impression that the kids were trying to raise money for new softball equipment. Penny’s mom made chocolate chip cookies, Mrs. Albright supplied festive little bags of popcorn, and Mrs. McHale baked a batch of oatmeal cookies.
Mrs. Loew contributed a bag of store-bought cookies, which the boys thought was lame; but Penny, who had overheard her mother talking on the phone with Oren’s mom, whispering about a divorce, figured that Mrs. Loew had better things to worry about than baking cookies.
“I certainly hope you kids aren’t driving Mrs. Albright crazy,” Mrs. Carson said as Penny and Teddy dug through the oversized hanging plastic garment bags where Halloween costumes and old clothes were stored.
Boxes and old junk were piled in the middle of the attic, where long strips of plywood flooring had been nailed down. Pink cotton-candy insulation extended beyond the flooring on all sides. Teddy stood at the edge of the flooring on the far side of the attic, looking like he
wanted to take a leap onto the fuzzy stuff.
“Teddy, get away from that insulation!” his mother ordered.
“Why?” he asked mutinously.
“Because it’s very dangerous. There’s bits of sharp glass in all that pink fuzz.”
He peered down at it as if he didn’t quite believe her.
Penny was trying on a red yarn wig, the remnant of an old costume. She modeled the wig with a little shake of her head.
“You look stupid!” Teddy said.
“What was this from, Mom?” Penny asked, her hair sticking out from underneath the yarn.
“A costume party Dad and I went to before we got married. I was Raggedy Andy and your dad was Raggedy Ann.”
“Raggedy Ann? No way,” Teddy moaned. “Dad wouldn’t dress like a girl!”
“Trust me, your dad made a very cute Raggedy Ann,” Mrs. Carson said wryly.
Penny and Teddy burst out laughing.
“You kids would tell me, you know, if anyone was giving you a hard time, right?” her mother asked abruptly.
Penny thought of the dog skull at the creek. She couldn’t tell her mother about that because she wasn’t supposed to be down at the creek. And she couldn’t really confess her fears about Caleb because her mother didn’t like them to talk about him. When it came right down to it, there really wasn’t anything she could tell her.
Finally Penny said, “Like a strange man asking us to take a ride or something?”
“Exactly,” her mother answered.
There was a moment of silence as Penny looked past her mother at Teddy, who was sitting very still.
“Sure, Mom,” she said, but she wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Bats flying crazily above the Albrights’ house lent a scary cast to the night of the Mockingbird Lane Haunted Trail. The Albrights’ backyard looked downright forbidding in the dark. It was perfect.
Penny, wearing a sheet and a rubber skull mask, was more excited about the haunted trail than her birthday, which was the next day. All the kids would be coming over for her party the next evening—everyone except Zachary, of course—and she was a little worried. She had invited Amy, and she was starting to think that maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea. How did you go from being someone’s best friend to not existing?
She was stationed with Oren behind the barbecue pit, which bordered on the woods. Her job was to throw fake guts at the kids as they passed. She’d taken a bucket, put cherry Jell-O, rubber snakes and worms, and plastic spiders into it, and mixed it all up.
“It looks pretty real,” Oren said approvingly.
“Hey, I know how we can make it look even cooler,” Mac said. He pulled out his Swiss Army knife and grabbed Penny’s hand, holding it over the bucket and pressing the knife edge against her palm.
“No!” Penny shouted, going white.
Oren shoved Mac away. “Knock it off!” He turned to Penny, who was shaking. “You okay?”
“You’re such a jerk,” Penny snarled at Mac.
Mac rolled his eyes. “Duh, I was just kidding.”
“It’s not funny,” Oren said. “You know she has a thing—”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Mac said, and sauntered off, snickering.
Oren and Penny were looking at each other in disbelief when they heard a voice say “Ow!” Zachary appeared with his arm in a sling.
“Mac just punched me in my bad shoulder,” Zachary whined, eyes watery. He was rubbing his shoulder gingerly with his good arm. The bruise on his cheek was a yellowing purple blotch and his hair was pushed back off his forehead, revealing his stitches.
“Hi, Zachary,” Penny said unenthusiastically.
Mac wandered back, carrying a bag full of rubber snakes and spiders. “We’re not open yet, lame brain.”
Zachary looked at Penny. “I can help,” he offered in a hopeful voice.
“I’m sure,” Mac said derisively.
Penny felt bad. “You could take the money,” she suggested. She looked at the other boys. “We need someone to take the money.”
“No way,” Mac said swiftly.
Oren’s face brightened. “Wait a minute, Zachary.” He walked away from Zachary and waved the other kids to him. “We’ll get a ton more kids to go through the trail if we have Zachary. I mean, we’ll get kids who’ll come just to see him!”
“Oren’s right,” Penny agreed. “He’s practically famous since he got beat up by Caleb.”
“Whatever.” Mac shrugged.
The kids walked back to Zachary, who was waiting patiently.
“Sure, Zach. You take the money,” Benji said.
“Don’t even think of stealing any,” Mac growled.
Zachary grinned. “I won’t.”
The first kids Mac brought through were from Wren Circle, and the littlest one was so scared that he burst into tears when Penny threw the guts at him. Penny had to take off her mask and turn on her flashlight to prove that it was just a bucket of cherry Jell-O with a few plastic spiders and rubber snakes, and not real guts. After that, Penny only pelted the older kids.
Toward the end of the night, Penny had to go to the bathroom, but her hands were too gooey for her to go inside, so she snuck into the woods and hid behind a tree. As she crouched there, she heard a rustle, but it was dark under the cover of the trees, so dark that she couldn’t see anything.
“Who’s there?” she called softly. “Is that you, Oren?”
Silence, and then the crunch of a footstep.
“You can’t come back here. I’m going to the bathroom.”
Another crunch, closer this time.
“I mean it, you guys. Don’t be jerks.”
She hastily wiped herself with a few leaves, dragged up her shorts, and flicked on her flashlight in the direction of the crunch, but nothing was there. Just shadows.
Penny ran back up the slope.
“Can’t you guys leave me alone for five minutes?” she said.
“What are you talking about?” Mac asked.
They were all there: Benji, Mac, Oren, and Teddy.
“I was just going to the bathroom, back there in the woods behind the pit, and I heard one of you guys walking around.”
“It wasn’t us, Penny,” Teddy said, looking perplexed.
“Yeah, we’ve been here the whole time,” Oren chimed in.
“Well, if it wasn’t any of you, then who was it?” Penny asked, getting scared.
“It was probably just a deer or some other animal,” Mac scoffed. “Why are you being such a scaredy-cat, Penny? There’s nothing back there but trees.”
“Yeah, but—”
“C’mon Penny, the kids are coming!” Oren cried, waving for her to duck down, out of sight.
She pulled the bucket close to her on the ground and put her hand into the guts, waiting for the perfect moment to fling some at the approaching kids. She could hear them coming, not far away, and then she felt it. Something sort of soft and round. She rolled it back and forth in her hand. It was the size of a small Super Ball, but it was softer, mushier. What the heck? She flicked on her flashlight and shone it into the bucket.
Balanced between her thumb and forefinger was a perfect eyeball.
A real one.
It fell from her fingers and the flashlight in her hand shook, the light streaking back and forth, revealing the grisly contents of the bucket, like something right out of a horror movie.
A length of intestine, a glistening pink tongue, and a soft, furry ear, like a small dog’s.
Penny felt the horror race up her spine, and then, as if from a very great distance, as if it was happening to someone else, she felt her lungs freeze up, felt her breath strain to come through the hot rubber mask.
“Pssst! Penny! Are you asleep back there?” Oren called to her.
But Penny was frozen; she couldn’t move.
“Penny?” Oren whispered, concerned, clicking on his flashlight and pointing the beam at her. “Penny!” he yelled, running over to her and ripping o
ff her mask.
Penny’s face was white, and she was hyperventilating.
“Oh, man!” Oren yelled, dragging Penny behind him to the deck and the lights, the bucket forgotten. “Get a paper bag! Get a paper bag!”
Benji took off for the house at a tear, and soon Penny was surrounded by all the boys.
“Penny, slow down, breathe,” Oren said, his face strained with worry.
This had happened before.The boys knew the drill. “Slow down,” they all said.
But she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The harder she tried, the harder it was to get any air in; she opened and closed her mouth like a beached fish.
“Hold on, Penny, here comes Benji,” Oren said, patting her back.
And then blessed relief as the paper bag was opened over her face and her lungs took over; they knew what to do. Benji and the magic paper bag. My hero, she thought over and over.
Mr. and Mrs. Albright came running out of the house.
“Penny, honey, are you okay?” Mrs. Albright asked, smoothing the hair back from Penny’s forehead in a motherly fashion.
Penny nodded her head weakly. She felt dizzy.
“What happened back here?” Mr. Albright demanded furiously, his cheeks red. “Boys?”
Mr. Albright could be a scary guy when he wanted to. He was big and heavy, and got right up into your face, and he had no qualms about shouting at kids, even if they weren’t his.
Benji threw up his arms in confusion. “Penny just started to, you know, wheeze, probably because of it being so hot under the mask and all.”
“Penny,” Mr. Albright asked, clearly suspicious of his son, “is that what happened?’
“Yes, sir,” she squeaked. But Penny knew it wasn’t the mask that had made her stop breathing. It was fear—the tight, clawing sensation of panic.
“Well, then. That’s enough of your haunted trail for one night. You kids get your stuff and go on home. It’s nearly ten thirty, anyway,” he said sternly.
“Sure, Dad,” Benji said obediently. “I’ll be right in.”
The Creek Page 6