The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “About my name or my ma?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Well, I didn’t even know Howard was a boy’s name until I was in school,” she said. “I’ll never forget how my first teacher hollered at me for being a sass, asking my real name again and again until I finally gave up and stormed out of the room. That set the tone for me all the way through school.” She laughed the way she did sometimes. It didn’t sound like a cackle to me anymore. It was more like a dry laugh.

  “In case you couldn’t tell, I love your father’s work,” Mandy said. “Seriously. He’s amazing.”

  “Thank you. I don’t think he expected folks to even know who he was this many years later, but I’m glad they do.”

  “You have all the books but not any of his pictures,” I said. I liked the pictures better.

  “I sold them off, over the years,” she said. “The school didn’t have much of a retirement program, so it was a lifesaver. Sold the last one for a good sum. Though I hear it’s worth ten times that now. I never could part with his books, though.”

  “Do people pester you a lot?” Mandy asked. “Your father has … well, he has some crazy big fans.”

  “Ah, they used to track me down,” said Howard. “Someone writing a biography, or hoping to dig up a long-lost manuscript. It’s been years since anyone did that, though. Maybe everyone thinks I’m dead—I don’t know.”

  “Is there a long-lost manuscript?” Mandy asked hopefully.

  “You know, he asked me to burn his manuscripts after he died. All the drafts and unfinished works.”

  “I know he asked, but—did you go through with it?”

  “No, I didn’t. I always told him he’d have to do it himself. I wouldn’t burn up anyone’s hard work, especially his.”

  Mandy closed her eyes and wobbled a little bit. I thought she might actually faint.

  “Before you ask, though,” Howard told her, “no, you can’t read it, and it’s not even because I won’t let you, although I wouldn’t anyway.”

  “Huh?”

  “I got to where I didn’t trust these fellows who were sniffing around, so I put everything in a safe about twenty-five years ago.” She counted out decades on her fingers. “Maybe it was thirty-five years ago. However long ago it was, I lost the combination somewhere in between then and now and haven’t been able to open it since. I can’t even blast it open, because I might burn the papers.”

  “Did you set the combination yourself?” Mandy asked her. “Because if you did, maybe we can figure it out. Birthdays, lucky numbers …”

  “I did set it myself, but I tried all of those a hundred times each. I don’t know what was on my mind. I have no head for numbers and never did.”

  “Maybe we could help you remember,” Mandy said.

  “Ha!” Howard laughed. “You think looking for a needle in a haystack is hard, try looking in this muddled brain of mine for numbers.”

  “You would have picked something you’d remember,” said Mandy. “I mean, something you thought you’d remember.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve forgotten about half of what I remember,” said Howard.

  I glanced at a clock on the wall. “I wish I could help, but Brian and I better go home.”

  “Want to take the quad?” Howard asked. “I’m too tired to go on a drive, but if you bring it back first thing tomorrow, I suppose you can borrow it.”

  “Seriously?” An hour ago I’d thought she was a witch, and here she’d given us all food and shoes and now was lending me her only wheels.

  “You can’t take it,” Mandy whispered. “Don’t. It’s too much.”

  “You seemed to like it,” said Howard. “You might as well give it a spin.” She took me outside to show me how to start the quad.

  I had a hard time at first, pumping the clutch and revving the motor at the right time. Finally a few puffs of heavy black smoke came out and the motor sputtered to life. The clutch, throttle, and brake were all pedals, and it took me a while to get used to them and remember which was which. I lurched in circles around the yard until I got the hang of it.

  “I have to go get my brother,” I said. I’d left him sleeping at the kitchen table.

  “You know, I always felt bad about the haunted house,” she told me as we walked back to the house. “I didn’t realize how young you were. I never meant to set you off.”

  “You remember that?”

  “I got kicked out of the haunted house for it,” she said. “So yeah, I remember.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry too, then. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  “They said I was too scary for kids,” she said. “Can you believe that? I mean, don’t they try to make the house scary?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “Well, maybe scaring people too well runs in your family?”

  “Maybe so. I hope this makes up for scaring the tarnation out of you.”

  “Way more,” I said.

  Brian was waking up. He made a big noisy yawn and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Do we get to go back on the thing?”

  “Yep.”

  “Awesome.”

  “You can stay here for a while,” Howard told Mandy. “I won’t tell on you. I never liked the way that school pushed girls around.”

  “That’s really nice,” said Mandy. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “Maybe you can rummage around in my brain tomorrow and find that combination,” Howard told her. “If you don’t mind the dust and cobwebs.”

  We found the trail back to Tanglewood, the mushroom light growing brighter and brighter as we got closer. The quad only went about eight miles an hour, and the steering was easy—you used handlebars like you would with a bike. It was fun once we got used to bouncing around.

  Soon we were cruising along the mushroom caps, and it was an even slower and bouncier ride, but the bounces were less jarring. It was like riding on Jell-O. I slowed down as I got close to Tanglewood. We could hear voices and footsteps along the trails—fewer people than last night, but still plenty of gawkers.

  I tried to avoid them but nearly ran over some guy in a Colby College sweatshirt. I slammed on the brakes just before he got flattened. A woman I assumed was his girlfriend stood just off the trail.

  “Wow, what is that thing?” the guy asked.

  “It’s a quadricycle,” said Brian. “Don’t you college kids know anything?”

  The guy’s girlfriend laughed. “He told you, Brendan!”

  “Of course I’ve heard of quartercycles,” he said. “I just never saw one like that.”

  I blasted by them but slowed way down when we were nearly home. I wasn’t too eager to get there. We’d been gone for a really long time, and I didn’t even have a bag of Fritos to show for it.

  Brian was quiet until I brought the quad to a stop at the edge of the woods.

  “That was the most fun ever,” he said. “Can we do it again?”

  “Well, we have to take the thing back tomorrow, so sure.”

  We hid the quad behind the shed and went in through the back door. The kitchen light was on. We took the Bean boots off and put them in the hall closet, then knocked a parka off the hanger to cover them, hoping it looked like ordinary closet mess that nobody would notice or try to clean up. We’d barely closed the door when Mom came flying out of the kitchen, scooping up Brian.

  “Put me down!” he shouted, even though his tiptoes never left the ground.

  She squeezed him first, then let him go and hugged me.

  “You’re all right,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, and launched into an explanation before she could get another word in: I’d gone for a ride and blown out a tire. It was a long walk home and I got lost in the woods. Brian was following me and left his bike with mine—I didn’t have a good reason for why he’d do that, but she didn’t ask for one.

  “I’m glad you’re both okay, but you couldn’t have picked
a worse day,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. I had another disaster at work, but I didn’t go in. I can’t handle a missing girl when my own boys are missing.” She sniffed. “You know I love you two more than anyone. My job keeps me busy, but I really am doing it all for you. You know that, right?”

  “Sure,” said Brian. “Another girl is missing?” I could have hugged him for playing it so cool.

  “The same girl is missing again.” She noticed our feet. “What happened to your shoes?”

  “We took them off when we came in. They were really muddy.”

  “Hm.” She squinted at our socks, which were also pretty messy. Too messy for her to tell they were girl socks, at least.

  “We need to shower and go to bed,” I said, stretching for effect.

  “You must be hungry.”

  “Oh, yeah.” We should have been hungry. Actually, I was hungry. That stew already seemed like a long time ago.

  “First let me call your father and tell him he can stop looking for you,” she said. “Then I’ll heat up some of Dad’s chili.”

  She picked up the phone, and we took advantage of the pause to run upstairs. When I went into my room, I saw splashes of blue-green here and there in the darkness. There were mushrooms dotting the walls. The fungus must have scaled the exterior of our house, wiggling through the woodwork and poking through the plaster.

  • • •

  After second supper I went to bed, leaving the lights on. I’d rather have regular light than the patches of neon. I fell asleep right away, but a second later Dad woke me up.

  “Are you afraid of the dark now?”

  “No, just the stuff that hides in it.” It was a joke we used to make when I was little. “Dad, the house is in really bad shape.”

  “I know,” he said. “I ran into the Shop Smart tonight, but they were out of every brand of fungal spray and powder. I’ll try some more places tomorrow. I’ll drive to Bangor if I have to.”

  “Okay,” I said. I doubted a spray would do it, but at least he was finally doing something.

  “You missed a good game,” he said.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. It sounds like you had a real adventure today.”

  “Yep.”

  “Maybe you and Brian shouldn’t go to school tomorrow,” he said. “The doctor said you should rest up, and you really haven’t.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I mean, yeah, I could use a day of rest.”

  I got up before anybody else, put on my loafers because my sneakers were long gone, and tapped on Brian’s door.

  “Are you up?” I whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “We have to return the quad and get our bikes.”

  After a quick breakfast, we grabbed the Bean boots and left the house. The mushrooms were eight or nine inches tall, coating the deck and rails and scaling the side of the house like ivy. They shone dimly in the morning light.

  “Can I drive this time?” Brian pleaded. “Please?”

  “No.”

  I went to the shed, which was now a bluish-lit den and smelled like rotten wood. Tendrils of fungus were working their way through the thin wood of the shed walls. I grabbed a tank of gas that we kept for the lawn mower and snowblower and slammed the shed door.

  I topped off the tank of the quad with gas but then had trouble starting it.

  “Let me try,” said Brian.

  “No.”

  I rummaged through a compartment on the quad between the seats, looking for instructions. I didn’t find any, but I did find a little bottle of lead additive for gasoline. Of course—gas was different way back when this contraption was made.

  After I added a little of the liquid to the tank, the engine started right up, puffing black toxic smoke into the clean morning air. This thing has got to be bad for the environment, I thought. Why did everything good in life have to be bad for somebody or something?

  I headed south, picking up the trail to go to Howard’s. I stopped by the big rock I’d tipped over. From there I could see the black circle of death in the woods. It was bigger than the last time I saw it, and the smell of decaying wood was overwhelming.

  “It’s worse,” said Brian.

  “I know.”

  I revved the motor and hurried on. By “hurried,” I mean cranked it up to maybe ten miles an hour—a lawn tractor could outrace it. I followed a trail that went west, deeper into the woods, gradually arcing south. I took some of the hills kind of hard, to make the ride bouncier, and Brian yelped every time.

  We realized it was pretty early to bang on someone’s door, so we left the quad in the yard and the boots on the back porch and went off to find our bikes.

  “They probably found our shoes by now,” Brian said as we walked. “Mom will see them and know they’re ours.”

  “Maybe.” My Puma sneaks were pretty common, and I’d bought them with my pig-sitting money. I wasn’t sure Mom noticed what kind of sports shoes I wore. Could police take toe prints off the inside toe? Or would they even need to, since our fingerprints were on them too?

  “Why did you want to rescue Mandy?” Brian asked.

  “I told you, I didn’t mean to,” I told him. “I just wanted to talk to her. What about you? So Dad would stay here longer?”

  “I like her,” said Brian.

  “I like her too, but I didn’t plan to bust her out,” I said. “The school stinks, but you know—she needs a place to live. And her parents need to know she’s all right.”

  We went off the trail so we wouldn’t get too close to Alden.

  “We didn’t tell Mom and Dad where we went yesterday,” said Brian. “They didn’t know if we were all right.”

  “Stop being logical.”

  We found Brian’s bike right away, but I had trouble finding my own.

  “Maybe they searched the area and found it,” said Brian.

  “Maybe so,” I said. If so, I was done for. The bike had a number hidden on the frame, to prove it belonged to me if it ever got stolen. It probably also proved that I belonged to the bike. But I figured if they didn’t find Brian’s, they couldn’t have looked very hard.

  Fortunately we did find it, stashed farther off the trail than I remembered and well hidden. I entered the combination, which was 9797—my football number twice over. If Howard had as much imagination as I did setting combinations, Mandy would have cracked that safe open in three seconds.

  Howard was on the couch holding her head. Some blankets were bunched up at the other end. Mandy was sitting on the floor by the safe with a notebook and a pen, surrounded by boxes that had been shoved out of the way.

  “Maybe it was the days of the month your grandparents were born,” she suggested.

  “Didn’t you try all four combinations using those numbers?” Howard asked.

  “There are twenty-four combinations,” said Mandy. “And I did try them all, but that was when we still thought your grandfather was born on the twenty-first, but according to the obituary we found, he was born on the twelfth.”

  “I told you that was a mistake.”

  “But maybe you went with the typo?”

  “Now why would I do that?” Howard asked. “Oh, hello,” she said, finally noticing us standing there in the doorway. “I’m letting this girl give me the third, fourth, and fifth degrees.”

  “I just want to help,” said Mandy.

  “I know, I know. I told you it was no use. I’ve been through the whole family tree and tried all the birth dates, death dates, and wedding dates in every order. I’ve been through all my favorite books and songs in search of numbers. Whatever it was I thought I’d remember is long gone. Anyway, I’m getting hungry.” She got up. “Anyone want lunch?”

  “Sure,” I said. Brian nodded, a little unsurely. Mandy didn’t seem to notice the question. She was still fiddling with the dial on the safe.

  Brian crouched to thumb
through the magazines on the bottom of the bookshelf, settling on one with a giant robot on it.

  “Can I read this?” he asked, showing it to Howard.

  “Just be careful with it.”

  “Thanks!” He followed her into the kitchen carrying the magazine. I caught a flash of Max Bailey’s mushroom monster on the back cover.

  “I read this book once about a safecracker who used a stethoscope to listen to the tumblers,” Mandy said. “I wonder if that really works. And I wonder where I could find a stethoscope.”

  “The doctor store?” I suggested.

  “Is there one?”

  “I don’t know.” I noticed a huge, careening pile of Bangor newspapers next to the safe. Yesterday’s was on top.

  “You should read this,” I told Mandy, grabbing the paper and showing her the headline: AN EERIE AUTUMN. “It says there was a similar outbreak of mushrooms eighty years ago.”

  “We knew that,” she said. “I found a newspaper article from back then, remember?”

  “That one didn’t say where they were or how many there were. This says they were right here, and that there were a lot of them, and that it could even be the same fungus. I don’t mean the same kind of fungus, but the exact same one. It doesn’t die. It just kind of hibernates.”

  She took the newspaper and skimmed the article. “It doesn’t even say what happened to them.” She dropped the paper back on the pile. “It’s useless.”

  “You’ve been doing all that research,” I said. “I was hoping you’d know what to do.”

  “I don’t,” she said, “but I do know what to ask.”

  “Don’t go all Yoda on me.”

  “First, what happened to those mushrooms eighty years ago?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “Second, why is the Keatston Meetinghouse around when everything else is gone?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does.”

  “If we find out, we can save it again,” she said. “And maybe the rest of the town along with it.”

  Howard was at the stove mixing up a batch of Maggie Dunne beef stew. Two cans were sitting on the counter, gravy dripping down the edges and smudging the face of the kid on the can. She started ladling the stew into four bowls. Brian folded the magazine and set it on the pantry shelf behind him so he wouldn’t get food on it.