The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you knew how to get ahold of her.”

  “Sorry,” said Howard. “She’s a good kid. Sharp as a tack. I hope she’s all right.”

  “Me too.”

  “Do you want some stew?”

  “Sure.” I’d braced myself for some.

  “Me too,” said Brian.

  “How are the mushrooms?” she asked as she got down a couple of cans of Maggie Dunne.

  “Worse than ever,” said Brian.

  I told her about the green mushrooms and the red mushrooms. She nodded a couple of times.

  “So that’s what God’s wrath is,” she said. “My pa never did figure it out.”

  “Huh?”

  “Those red ones,” she said. “You said yourself they looked like flames creeping out across the field.”

  “They do.”

  “So is devil’s fire the blue ones?” Brian asked.

  “That’s what Pa thought, but he never got the other part straight. He thought the wrath and fire were the same thing. That’s why he struggled so much with the story. He knew he had parts of it right, but it came out all wrong. Did you bring that manuscript back?”

  “Yeah.” I showed her the pages. “I was hoping I could see the rest of it.”

  “I’m not sure what else there is, but you can poke around while I make stew. You’ve read that much. You might as well see the rest, if there is any.”

  I did poke around, and it was easier to do now that all the stories were neatly collated and labeled. There was nothing more about Keatston among the ghastly woodland vapors and sloth monsters in the unpublished works of Max Bailey.

  “You saw the mushrooms before, didn’t you?” I blurted out once the stew was on the table.

  “I was really little at the time, but I saw them,” Howard said. “They covered the woods like a blanket but didn’t go into town. Pa thought they were fascinating.”

  “What happened to those mushrooms?” Brian asked. “Did they turn into a monster and then your father killed it?”

  She laughed. “It snowed about a foot, and then it got cold. Bitter cold—the kind that takes the skin right off your nose. That put an end to it, but I think Pa was sorry those mushrooms didn’t turn into a monster. He wanted to see what they’d do next. He’d heard rumors.…” She remembered her stew and ate some, letting her half sentence hang in the air like a ten-day-old helium balloon. “He spent the rest of his life trying to dig up history. What happened to Keatston, and another outbreak in the 1800s nobody ever wrote about, but Pa heard stories from old folks who remembered. That one took a few houses, but nobody was living in them.”

  “We might lose our house,” said Brian. “Dad keeps killing mushrooms, but they keep coming back.”

  “Pa had pots full of fertilizer and fungi going all over the basement, trying to grow his own monster mushrooms. I moved out as soon as I was old enough. Don’t really care to remember him at the end.”

  “He was a good man,” I said. I remembered her saying that.

  “He just wanted to do something profound and important,” she said. “Nobody took his writing seriously enough. He wanted them to take him seriously. He wanted them to take what he was doing seriously, him and all his friends … looking at the edge of the unknown, he would say. It was a good cause, but he wasn’t much fun to be around.”

  I thought about Dad puttering around in the basement with his guitar. I glanced at Brian and guessed he was thinking about the same thing.

  “Pa said that science would always outdo the imagination,” said Howard. “The mushrooms were proof of it—something scarier than any made-up monster, but real. His masterpiece was going to be a work of science and history, he said. A nonfiction horror story.”

  “I like the part I read,” I said. “I don’t know how true it is, though.”

  “Probably not very,” said Howard. “Pa was mixed up about the fire and the wrath. What else does that picture say?”

  “ ‘The seeds of redemption are in the people,’ ” said Brian. I wondered if he was the smart kid in his class who knew all the answers. “It says that the devil’s fire may burn again and that God’s wrath will purify the earth and the seeds of redemption are in the people.”

  “Well, there you go,” she said. “Pa thought the green ones might have turned red if they’d gotten the chance. He never got that there were good ones and bad ones. The devil’s fire and God’s wrath.”

  “Good mushrooms and bad mushrooms?”

  “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” she said. “There are bugs that eat other bugs and fish that eat other fish. Why not mushrooms that eat other mushrooms?”

  “You mean fungi that eat other fungi,” I said.

  “The red ones are all around the Meetinghouse,” said Brian. We both looked at him. “In the picture at the museum,” he explained. “The red ones are all around it like it’s burning up, but that’s the building that survived.”

  “That’s it,” said Howard. “I don’t know how Pa never saw it. I think the faster you grow them red ones, the better.”

  “But how do we do that?” I asked.

  “Maybe we can take some from the football field and spread them around,” said Brian.

  “Hm.” I thought it over. The caps did make spores, but did they do it right away? Even if they did, how could you get spores to turn into mushrooms?

  On the way back Brian and I biked over to the football field and tested a few red mushrooms. They seemed less sturdy than the green ones; the caps came off easily. I rolled one in my hands until it disintegrated, but I couldn’t figure out if there were spores in there I could spread around. I remembered Mandy’s story about pigs eating the caps. But who knew if these were safe for a pig to eat?

  “Maybe you can buy packs of them, like you do with seeds,” Brian said.

  “Maybe,” I agreed, although I didn’t think we’d ever find these particular mushrooms, even if they did sell packets of mushroom spores.

  “How did they do it?” Brian asked.

  “How did who do it?”

  “The Keatston people,” he said. “Somebody must have planted the red ones if they made a picture to tell us what to do.”

  “Tell us what to do?” I’d always seen the picture as a historical depiction, not instructions. I suddenly wanted to see it again, looking at it the right way.

  There was only one way to do it. I had to go to the place in Maine where I was least welcome. I went after school on Monday. It was November now, and the Meetinghouse was converted back into a museum.

  The woman at the door held up a long purple fingernail to stop me. I recognized her as the not-very-scary witch from this year’s haunted house. I think she recognized me, too. They must have had a picture of me taped up somewhere.

  “Just one second,” she said. “Mr. Ritter?” she called.

  Mr. Ritter appeared from the back room, nodding in recognition as soon as he saw me. I knew him, too. He usually did the lecture and tour when we came here on school visits.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to leave,” he said. The woman could have told me that, but she must have wanted backup. “I think you’ll appreciate why?” He was soft-spoken, just like he was when he was leading fourth graders past the museum cases.

  “I just wanted to look at the picture of Keatston,” I said. “Maybe ask a couple of questions?”

  The woman with the purple nails shot a look at Mr. Ritter.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on him.” He reached out and ushered me over to the picture, which was still hanging in the back room. I murmured the words to myself: “ ‘The devil’s fire may burn again. God’s wrath will purify the earth. The seeds of redemption are in the people.’ ” They were instructions. I knew what the first two parts meant, but what did the last part mean?

  “You said you had questions,” Mr. Ritter said, glancing at his watch.

  “What does that writing mean?”

  “It
’s typical for the period,” Mr. Ritter said. “The Great Awakening had its share of poets and prophets. Jonathan Edwards had his ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry god.’ George Whitefield had his ‘Come, poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are.’ You had to turn a phrase if you wanted to attract a congregation.”

  I took that to mean that Mr. Ritter didn’t understand the writing any more than I did.

  “Nobody knows who did this picture?” I asked, grasping for things to ask.

  “No,” he agreed. “It may not have even been done by a person in Keatston, though it certainly dates from the pre-Revolutionary period.”

  “And nobody survived?”

  “It’s hard to say. Nobody remained,” he said. “People may have scattered to other towns, or moved back to Boston, but there’s no record of what happened. You have to understand that those were turbulent days. There was an epidemic of smallpox, and then the war.…”

  I remembered what Mandy had said to ask.

  “How come the Meetinghouse survived and nothing else did?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” he said. “It seems to be at the center of the conflagration, doesn’t it? I suppose the reproduction emphasizes the miracle of its escape. As if divine power had spared it, and the pure of spirit …” He trailed off. “Well, the truth may be less miraculous. The blaze probably began among the cluster of houses and simply didn’t touch the Meetinghouse. The picture may not be that faithful to the facts. Any other questions? I really should return to my duties, and I’m afraid I can’t leave you unattended.”

  I wished I had Mandy with me. She would have known what else to ask. I scanned the picture, afraid to ask the man if the licks of flame looked rather like mushroom caps (which they did), but hoping to find another clue. Or at least stall for time.

  “Who’s the boy in the window?” The question came out of nowhere. I just noticed him again, looking back at us with wide eyes. Everybody else in the picture was running around looking at the fire. Only the boy was looking back at us, and I suddenly had a strong feeling about him.

  “We certainly don’t know that,” he said. “Although there are surviving records documenting the residents of Keatston, there were a dozen boys and young men. Not that the figure has to be a specific person. The artist could have been re-creating a scene he or she only imagined and did not witness firsthand.”

  “I bet that’s the artist,” I said. “Why else would he be looking back at us?”

  Mr. Ritter leaned in to squint at the boy. “That’s a really interesting theory,” he said. “Of course there’s no way to ascertain that now. Absent a mark of any kind that identifies the artist …”

  “What if that is his mark? He put himself dead center because it’s a self-portrait.”

  “It’s an astounding thought,” he said.

  I realized why the boy looked familiar. Now the cords were exposed and I could see how everything connected: the seeds of redemption were in the people.

  I took the path to Michelle’s that night, stopping as soon as I was at the gate to remove the carving of William Keats from my pocket—I’d decided it had to be him. I glanced around and saw a flicker of a curtain at the back window. Michelle knew I was here.

  I twisted the preacher’s head until it snapped off, spilling some powder onto the back of my hand and my sleeve. I hadn’t thought to bring gloves. I brushed my hands off over the compost and tapped the rest of the spores out of the carving like I was peppering a steak. That was all there was to the planting. I looked at the compost heap for a while and realized that nothing would grow while I watched.

  I’d looked it up on the Internet and found out that some fungi are capable of wiping each other out—farmers and gardeners will do it sometimes. It was enough to convince me I was on the right track. The red mushrooms were the good guys.

  When I turned again, Michelle was waiting on the back porch, holding the door open. She waved at me, and I waved back before I went over. Once again I had lots of explaining to do.

  The next day the compost heap had a sprinkling of red in it, and by afternoon it looked like it was burning up. I felt a glimmer of hope. A couple of days later they poured straight from the heap and into the woods. This fungus spread even faster than the first one, the core planted in the nourishing mushroom paradise of a dung heap.

  Cassie was anxious, trotting up and down the length of her sty, grumbling and snorting. She’d never been worked up about the blue-green ones, but she hated the red ones.

  “What’s this supposed to do?” Michelle asked.

  “Purify the earth,” I told her.

  “Hm. Hardly worth it if it upsets a pig.”

  She couldn’t argue with the results, though. The devil’s fire—as I’d come to think of the first fungus—was nearly wiped out of the field, and in the woods it was fading and creeping back. Instead of working itself up to blasting a billion trumpets and climbing out of the earth, the evil fungus was in retreat.

  At night there was rumbling from the woods, and the flashing and clashing of red and blue-green lights. I watched from my window, pangs of fear and excitement rippling through my body. Police cars and fire trucks lined the street, and men and women with floodlights and protective uniforms traveled by twos and threes into the woods, only to come out again scratching their heads.

  “No fire! Just fireworks!” one of them shouted to the neighbors who’d gathered in their backyards.

  A lot of people packed their cars and left. Tom’s family was among them.

  “My mom has a really bad feeling about all this,” he told me. “We’re going to my aunt’s place in Concord.”

  “For how long?”

  “However long it takes,” he said. “You guys be safe.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “My mom has a really bad feeling about all this,” he said.

  By Thursday morning the devil’s fire had pulled all its soldiers from our yard, the red fungus giving chase. Mr. Davis stumbled out in his own yard in his pajamas and slippers, falling to his knees and blessing the ruined lawn. On the other side, Sparky ran along the back fence, barking jubilantly.

  As dusk fell on Friday, there was howling and shrieking from the woods. The trees shook as if they were in a high wind. Our house seemed to rattle. The plaster on the ceiling cracked and white dust snowed onto the carpets. Through the back door I could see the shed collapse, the wood already weakened by the fungus.

  “Maybe we should go,” Mom said.

  “You’re not supposed to drive in an earthquake,” said Dad.

  “I don’t think it’s an earthquake,” I said.

  “Anyway, you’re not supposed to drive.”

  He made us crouch on the floor in the family room, everybody behind a piece of furniture. “My buddy in L.A. told me to do this,” he explained. The house shook again, and there was another shower of plaster.

  Then the screaming started. The mushrooms had screamed before like warriors rushing into battle. Now they screamed like warriors being vanquished—the combination of the noise and the shaking made me think my whole body would come apart at the seams.

  “I’m scared!” Brian shouted.

  I put my arm around him, and Dad put his arm around me, and we lay there in a huddled mass while the house shook and the screaming went on and on. Mom was across the room, behind an armchair. I slipped out and crawled over there so she wouldn’t be alone.

  “Thanks,” she said, clutching my hand.

  It was like that all night. We lost electricity and heard a horrible noise that turned out to be part of the garage collapsing on Dad’s car, but the house held up.

  It was still dark when it finally grew quiet and still. Mom had fallen asleep on my shoulder.

  “You awake?” Dad whispered.

  “Yeah. But I’m trapped.”

  “Here.” He crept over and handed me a sofa cushion. I slid it between Mom’s head and the back of the chair so I could get ou
t without waking her.

  “I’m going to go look,” said Dad.

  I got up and followed him to the back door. He stopped cold, then stepped out of the way so I could see.

  An enormous black bear was in the backyard, running in a slow and uneven circle around the ruined shed. I could see it in the moonlight. That was all there was. The electricity was out, and there was no mushroom light anymore. The bear tried to scramble up the dead trees and lost its footing, roared, and waved its paws, then went back the other way and disappeared into the woods.

  “That was amazing,” said Dad.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I hoped the bear would gallop up to Michelle’s house so she could get a few pictures.

  We stood there looking, even though there was nothing to see. The woods were completely dark. The wrath of God had purified the woods.

  The news called it an ordinary earthquake, even though there are never earthquakes in Maine. Not real earthquakes, where the earth moves all on its own. It was the easiest story to tell. Since the news about the Foxfire Festival, there had been a lot of talk about things happening in threes: a fungus, a riot, and an earthquake. There were also jokes that it was just the beginning, that next it would rain frogs or something.

  I had to stop listening. Nobody was telling the truth. They wanted to explain it all away.

  On the upside, the museum decided not to prosecute me for breaking and entering. In fact, I was made an honorary member after I led Mr. Ritter to the cabin in the woods. It was a treasure trove for museum people—two dozen more carvings and old tools belonging to the hermit who had lived there.

  Mr. Ritter wept when he saw the original engraving used to make the print of Keatston. It was on the floor in a pile of dust, the wood blackened with age and ink.

  “It’s cast aside like garbage,” he said, running his hand over the engraving. “But it’s astonishing how well it’s held up.”

  I noticed two jutting stones on the wall and guessed what had really happened—the carving had been turned into a shelf, and I’d knocked it off the wall when I was stumbling around in the dark.