The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  “They keep coming back,” she said in a whisper. A centipede with very cold feet ran along my spine.

  “We need more evidence,” I said, using her own words from earlier. “Let’s gather facts.” I searched the picture for some clues. Why couldn’t the words say something useful, like “Ye Olde Toade Stooles,” instead of that stuff about the seeds of redemption?

  “They are mushrooms,” she said. “I’m sure of it.” Her light flickered and dimmed. “Uh-oh. I need an outlet so I can charge up my phone.”

  “And use the flashlight to find an outlet to charge it up?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Oh, but I left the cord in my bag in the other room.”

  “Maybe we can find a light switch?” I stretched my hands out and took baby steps until I found the wall, then started groping around.

  “No. Somebody might see the lights through the windows.”

  “Good point.” I gave up my search.

  “There’s some jack-o’-lanterns by the headless horseman,” she said. “I bet they have little lights in them.”

  “Oh, good thinking.”

  “Can you please go get one?” she asked.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Because it was my idea.”

  “Fine.” I found my way through the curtains to the haunted house, crashing into the make-believe welcome sign. I reached out in front of me until I found the canvas wall of the maze and went left. The pumpkins were that way, in the corner. I took a few small steps, scared that I might trip and bring down some of the walls.

  I heard a noise behind me and pictured the witch in the maze with me, following me, ready to reach out and tousle my hair. That ice-footed centipede was back, and he’d brought a bunch of friends to line-dance.

  Stop freaking yourself out, Parrish, I told myself. Get a grip.

  I accidentally kicked something soft and heavy, probably one of the pumpkins. I stooped down and found it rolled over sideways. I took off the top and felt around inside its pulpy orange skull until I grabbed a pumpkin light about the size of a quarter. I ran my finger along the surface and flicked a switch. My prize for all this was a little halo of light about a foot in diameter.

  A moment later the building was filled with light. Somebody had flipped on the overheads.

  “I heard something down that way,” someone shouted. It sounded like Officer Withers. He came to the school sometimes, telling us to say no to drugs.

  “Stop! Who’s that?” another voice shouted. I peeked around the wall and saw another policeman down the corridor, waving his flashlight at the black curtain leading to the back room. He must have heard Mandy.

  Even though I thought Mandy should go back to her school, I thought it should be her decision, and for some reason I felt stupidly heroic. I picked up the slightly damaged pumpkin, stepped out into the corridor, and hurled it with all my might.

  The officers jumped back as the pumpkin smashed to the floor and spattered their shoes. Before they looked up again, I was headed down the maze the other way. I took a wrong turn and ended up in the room with the three bears. I threw myself behind the display, watching two sets of feet run past me. The taxidermy bears reeked of wet dog and old rug.

  The wood-and-fabric wall behind me had a flap for a door, maybe so the haunted house actors could get around. I slipped through and found myself in the make-believe graveyard.

  “You see anything up there?” Officer Withers hollered to the other cop.

  “No, and the front door’s barred shut. He must be hiding in here somewhere.”

  “Go secure the back entrance,” said Officer Withers. “I’ll flush him out.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t have any more pumpkins,” the other cop said.

  If they caught me, I’d be in a lot of trouble because of that pumpkin. So it was best that they didn’t catch me. I’d have to get out the back door before that other cop got there.

  I jumped out into the corridor right in front of him.

  “You!”

  I froze. He would have grabbed me, but one of the maze walls came crashing down on top of him. He stumbled into the opposite wall, knocking that one down and flattening some tombstones.

  The cop was sandwiched between the two rectangles of wood and fabric, and Mandy was sitting on that canvas-and-cop sandwich like a sprig of parsley.

  “Go!” she shouted.

  “No, you go! You’re the one who’s wanted.”

  Officer Withers appeared in the graveyard, having shoved some of the walls out of the way. He didn’t have his gun out, but his right hand was hovering near the grip.

  “Stop right there!” he hollered.

  “You go!” I yelled again at Mandy, and tackled the policeman.

  “At least he didn’t break anyone’s leg,” Dad told Mom on the drive home. “If we’re looking for a bright side, there’s that one.” He smiled at her hopefully, but she was driving and kept her eyes on the road without even a glance in his direction. “It could be worse is all I’m saying,” he said.

  I’d remained silent all the way through the ordeal at the police station. I’d been told I had the right to, so I did. The cops had grilled me about what I was doing at the haunted house, what I was thinking when I threw that pumpkin, who my accomplices were, and a bunch of other stuff. I’d kept my mouth shut. Eventually they’d called Mom and Dad to come get me. They’d said they’d let me know when my court date was.

  Now I was slouched down in the seat. I was exhausted. Remaining silent is hard work.

  “Is Eric going to jail?” Brian asked. He was in the back with me, bouncing from excitement. I didn’t think he actually wanted me to go to jail, but I could see things from his perspective—if I went to jail, he’d have something cool to talk about at school.

  “No,” said Dad. “If anything, he’d go to a juvenile detention center.”

  “That’s like prison for kids,” said Brian.

  “It’s not as bad,” Dad said. “I saw a story about this joint near Boston where the kids live on a farm. They get to go horseback riding and everything. But they also have to do all the farm duties, so they can learn values. It didn’t seem that bad. No different from the way kids lived for most of American history.”

  “Maybe Eric can go live on a pig farm,” Brian suggested. “He’d like that.”

  Mom hit the brakes for a red light. We all lurched forward, then backward. “Your son is not a delinquent,” she said. “And he is not going to a juvenile detention center.”

  If she’d known who my accomplice was, she might have changed her mind.

  We turned down our street. The car made soft little bumps as it rolled over stripes of mushrooms that had broken across the road. There were mushrooms sprawled out across all the lawns, wrapping around trees, and climbing up the sides of houses.

  “You’ve got lots of ’splainin’ to do,” Dad said when I went down for breakfast. I think he was impersonating somebody, trying to make it easier on me by being funny, but my brain was too addled to figure out who he was supposed to be.

  “Lots of explaining,” Mom agreed.

  “I have the right to remain silent,” I reminded them. Mom had told me that herself. I opened the fridge so I could hide my head in it for a few seconds.

  “Maybe with the cops,” I heard Mom say. “Not with your parents.”

  The refrigerator was filled with fruit. I knew Dad had gone veg, but it also looked like he’d gone fruity. I took an apple and crunched into it, keeping my mouth full so I didn’t have to say anything while Mom recapped the charges against me: breaking and entering, assaulting a police officer, vandalism.

  “You’ve gotten yourself into some pretty thick soup in a short amount of time,” she said.

  I shrugged. What else could I do? My mouth was full of apple.

  “You’re grounded until further notice,” she said. “Do you still have to take care of your pig?”

  I nodded. It was Thursday. Michelle wouldn’t be back until the week
end.

  “Then you can do that,” she said, “but no football.”

  I swallowed. “The championship game is today, and they need me for that.”

  “You should have thought about that before you got into the soup,” she said.

  “Aw, let the boy play football,” Dad said.

  “What?” She shot him a look that would have taken the pink off a pig, but Dad barely noticed.

  “You can’t take football away from him. That’s his dream.…”

  “You and your dreams!” Mom slammed her coffee cup down, causing a minor caramel-colored tsunami to come crashing over the rim and splash onto the table.

  He looked at me and shook his head—not his whole head, just his eyes, so Mom couldn’t see him doing it. Shifting them back and forth, from side to side, then shifting them up and down, nodding—telling me that everything was fine, I would get to play in the championship game that day. Mom would be at work and wouldn’t know until it was too late to do anything about it. There was no way she’d come home before the game was over, especially if Mandy was still missing.

  But was she? I didn’t know what had happened to her after I got arrested. Maybe she’d been caught after she left the museum.

  “Hey, did they find that girl?” I asked, trying to sound natural.

  “Don’t change the subject,” said Mom. “We’re talking about you.”

  “I was just hoping she was okay.”

  “She’s still missing,” Dad whispered, getting another angry look from Mom.

  I did want to do something minor to make things better, so I got a paper towel and blotted up the coffee. When I opened the cabinet under the sink to throw it away—that and my apple core—I saw a few tiny mushrooms breaking through the woodwork, scattered along the cabinet floor, a few more scaling the walls. I threw my garbage in the can and shut the door in a hurry.

  When I went back up to my room to get my stuff, the carving Brian had found was sitting on my desk, a sticky note next to him. “This is for luck,” it said. The note didn’t say if he was giving the carving to me or if he was just lending it to me, but I was touched either way. I looked into the colonist’s tough wooden face. “Bring me luck, buddy,” I told him, and stuck him in my hip pocket.

  I stopped and took care of Cassie, then plodded through the school day. It didn’t seem like anyone knew about my run-in with the law, but it was hard to say. They were all talking about the mushrooms, which now blanketed the school grounds, edging up the outside wall and in a few cases poking through the corners into classrooms. I wondered if the probing cords would gradually crumble the foundation and bring down the walls. Just like they did to Keatston, if that’s what happened to Keatston.

  I realized halfway through my second class that I didn’t have my football uniform. It was either still at the museum or in the evidence room at the police station. The game was right after school, so I took off during lunch period and ran downtown. I was seriously sucking wind by the time I saw the haunted house and realized it was closed. Of course it was. There was no point in having it open when all the kids were in school and all the grown-ups were at work. I stopped to catch my breath. There was a pounding sound coming from inside—somebody hammering the heck out of something. I went around back and saw a handyman’s van parked in the alley.

  I found a side door propped open with a brick, sneaked in, and tiptoed past two men putting up a wall of the maze. They were repairing the damage Mandy and I had done. I slipped through the curtains and glanced at the ancient print of Keatston. Mandy’s theory had gotten to me, and I now saw the licks of flame as mushroom caps. “The devil’s fire may burn again,” it said. It gave me a shudder. “God’s wrath will purify the earth. The seeds of redemption are in the people.”

  I squeezed between the museum cases, glad for the sunlight streaming through the windows. My uniform was still beneath the bench, my helmet right next to it. The police must not have searched the place top to bottom. Maybe the museum people didn’t want them crashing around among their artifacts.

  When I passed the print the second time, my eyes connected with those of the boy in the window of the Meetinghouse. There was something familiar about him, like I knew him from somewhere other than this picture. It was a hard feeling to shake.

  I crept past the carpenters and out of the building without being seen but got back five minutes late for science class. The room was dark, and nobody said anything when I slipped in and sat down. They were watching a documentary about snakes. A black mamba was making short work of a frog. Brian would have loved it.

  Usually I get a surge of adrenaline before a game, but now that I really needed one, it didn’t come. I crammed my clothes into the locker. My football pants didn’t have pockets, so I had to tuck the carving into the belt, cinching him in so he wouldn’t fall out.

  Whatever the groundskeeper had done to the mushrooms hadn’t worked. They were thicker and fuller than yesterday and blanketed the field. When we trotted out to warm up, there were already enough kids in the bleachers to do an Owls cheer—“Who’s going to win? Whooo? Whooo?”—but the cheering fell silent when a few Owls players tripped and fell. I managed to stay up but did have a hard time finding my balance. The problem was obvious—our cleats were getting stuck in the spongy mass of mushrooms that covered the field.

  “We can’t play on this,” one of the players complained, and a few others grumbled in agreement. Down at the other end of the field, the Blue River Oxen were having a lot more fun than we were, bouncing up and down on the mushrooms and laughing. They’d arrived but hadn’t changed yet. They looked like little kids in one of those inflatable castles, and that gave me an idea.

  “Take off your cleats,” I suggested, and sat down on the field to take off my own. I ran across the field and dropped the cleats by the bench, enjoying the springy feel of the caps. It really was like being a little kid in a fun castle.

  I noticed Dad and Brian in the bleachers about three rows back. Dad had never seen me play before, because he’d lived in Boston since I’d started getting playing time. I didn’t think Brian had ever seen me play either. I waved, and they waved back.

  “Score a touchdown!” Brian shouted. He must not have known I was a defensive lineman, or he didn’t know that meant I wouldn’t ever score a touchdown unless I recovered a fumble or something.

  Allan was there too, sitting by himself. I wondered why he wasn’t sitting with Brian. Maybe he didn’t want to hang out with a lowly fourth grader in front of his classmates.

  The other guys kicked off their cleats too, and we went into our warm-ups. The QB kept lobbing the ball a little high so the receivers would have to spring up to get it, then take exaggerated tumbles across the spongy mats nature had given them.

  “I think I’m faster than usual,” Jake said, sprinting across the mushrooms to midfield and back again. He was probably slower, but he was right that it felt faster, with our legs bouncing off the rubbery mushroom caps.

  And that’s how we played the game. The only players who wore shoes were the kickers. Jake took the opening kickoff to about the thirty-yard line (we couldn’t see the numbers) and got bounced on his back by a defender. He dropped the ball and it was picked up by an Oxen player who fumbled it himself a few seconds later. Our guys finally fell on it and ran a swing pass on the first play from scrimmage. It ended up as a touchdown, defenders diving and missing all over the field as the halfback lumbered by. The whole first half was like that: wild plays and pratfalls, touchdowns and turnovers.

  “This game is a joke,” Tom said in the locker room during halftime. Maybe he was saying that because we were losing by thirteen points.

  “We can get it back,” I said. It was a high-scoring game. I’d lost track of the exact score, but thirteen points was nothing.

  “The game is a joke,” he said again. “I don’t even care if we win. It’s a joke. It was a joke without Randy anyway, but it’s now an even bigger joke.” He kicked at a locker an
d stubbed his toe. He forgot he wasn’t wearing shoes.

  I knew what he meant. The game didn’t have the usual intensity. I hadn’t thought about it much because I was having fun. Maybe it was boring to watch, too. The stands had emptied out a bit. I saw that Dad was still there and waved to him, but Brian and Allan were gone.

  Early in the second half I scooped up a loose ball and bounded toward the end zone while the Oxen tried to catch up to me. One of them did, a guard who was nearly as big as me. He hurled all his weight at me and hit me like a barrel. I fell into the end zone, scoring my first ever touchdown, but I stumbled and banged my forehead on the post part of the goalpost. It was padded and I was wearing a helmet, but my head bounced back and there was an audible thud.

  Colors pulsed and spun around in blackness, and my entire body felt like a computer in shutdown mode, one window after another closing, the screen fading to black, and then silence and nothingness.

  “Hey. Hey. Are you okay?” The Oxen guard was kneeling over me, waving his fingers at me. Then Coach was there. I smiled and held up my hand, meaning to make a touchdown signal, but I couldn’t. You need both hands for that. You need to be standing up, too, and I wasn’t. I laughed at that—and wondered why Coach wasn’t laughing with me.

  He turned to talk to someone, his voice really far away. I slowly got up and walked back toward the bench, wobbling and feeling sick to my stomach. Coach caught up with me and helped me off the field. I sat down on the bench and tried to take off my helmet, then realized it was already gone. I’d lost it somehow.

  “Nice score,” said Randy. “Feels great, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Hey, shouldn’t you be out there?”

  He showed me his crutches and the cast on his leg.

  “Oh, yeah.” I couldn’t remember what had happened to him, though. I watched the game for a few seconds, but I didn’t feel like it mattered, really. They were kids in socks bouncing around on a field of marshmallows. It made me smile.

  Then Coach was bugging me again, telling me to get up. I realized that it was our defense out there, and that he must want me to play. First I had to find my helmet. I stood up so fast I felt like a bird taking flight, like my feet were letting go beneath me, which they were.