The Tanglewood Terror

by Kurtis Scaletta

  “I think it was Benjamin Keats who lived here,” I told him.

  “From what we know, he was banished for fighting. So it would make sense if he was living like a hermit.”

  “Maybe they were wrong about him,” I said. I didn’t really know any better, but I felt like defending old Ben.

  “The town of Keatston kept excellent records, and one of the last entries says William threw out his own son for using a knife on people.”

  “Maybe you’re reading it wrong,” I said. “I think he liked to carve people. He whittled.”

  “Hm.” He saw the tools and the carvings, picked up one, and inspected it. It was a squirrel, both life-sized and lifelike. “So you suppose he was exiled for breaking the second commandment?”

  “I don’t know.” What was the second commandment? “I just think he was a good guy. Maybe he did get into some fights or something, but I don’t think he was completely evil.”

  “It’s an intriguing idea,” said Mr. Ritter.

  “I know it’s against that razor rule,” I said. “Our science teacher told us the simplest explanation is supposed to be the right one.”

  “History is the opposite,” he said. “No matter how you explain something, the truth is always more complicated.”

  • • •

  I did have to do some community service for assault with a deadly pumpkin, because the cops didn’t drop their own charges. I’d be picking up litter along the highway. Things could have ended up a lot worse.

  The Saturday after Thanksgiving I biked to Boise Township. I took the highway instead of the trail. The grass off to the side was white with frost. I wondered if that would have killed the fungus anyway. Maybe, but who knows what the fungus would have done in the meantime. I added that to a mental list of questions that I might never know the answers to.

  I was sure the cabin in the woods was Ben’s, and that he’d discovered the red mushrooms, and that he’d scattered their spores around the Meetinghouse to fight the devil fungus. Later—I don’t know how much later, or what happened in between—he made the prints with instructions on what to do if the devil’s fire came back. He might have made dozens, but only one survived. He’d put the spores into the carvings, probably because they already existed. Maybe he felt like he was running out of time. He never would have guessed that he’d be helping people in the twenty-first century.

  That was a lot of speculation, and I was going to learn everything I could to find out whether any of it was true.

  I’d never been to Randy’s house before, and I was surprised to see his room. There was practically no football stuff. He had a lot of books and freaky-looking posters with drooling monsters. I recognized a couple as prints of Max Bailey paintings.

  “So what’s up?” he asked me.

  “I was, uh … You know, you post sometimes on this Internet message board for sci-fi geeks. I mean sci-fi fans.”

  “I use more than one,” he admitted. “Which one?”

  “It was for Max Bailey fans,” I told him, “and you posted a picture of the glowing mushrooms before they were a big deal.”

  “Yeah, when you showed me those mushrooms, I thought, Man, the guys on the Miskatonic Web are going to love this. So I took a picture with my phone and posted it when I got home.”

  “Misawhat?”

  “Miskatonic Web. It’s what that board is called.”

  “Anyway, this girl asked you about the picture. I was hoping her profile had an email address or something.”

  I was worried that he’d give me a bunch of “Ooh, you have a girlfriend” nonsense, but he didn’t. He opened a laptop and brought up the message board in a second, then paged back through the threads for a while. “Lots of activity on this site,” he explained. He finally found it and clicked it, skimmed through.

  “Is her name Mary?” he asked me.

  “Huh?”

  “Her user name is Mary K. Like the makeup company.”

  “Mary Killer,” I said. “The K is for Killer.”

  He clicked the name and shook his head. “Email is hidden. I can send a personal message, but she’ll have to log in to see it. And this says she hasn’t been on in six weeks, so she might not see it for a while.”

  “Crud.” Whatever school she was at now must not let students use the Internet. I did know she wasn’t at Alden anymore, but that was all Mom would tell me. Not if she’d been expelled or yanked out by her parents, and definitely not her contact info. I didn’t even know where Mandy was from—maybe the Midwest, from the way she talked, but that was all I knew. I’d searched MySpace and Facebook, but there were a gazillion girls named Amanda Morris or Mandy Morris. She might try to find me, too, but there were a lot of guys named Eric Parrish, too. I’d searched once.

  “You like this girl?” he asked. He wasn’t teasing me, just asking.

  “She’s a friend,” I said. I hadn’t really thought about smoochy-type liking with any girl, but I did like hanging out with Mandy. I wanted to tell her everything I’d learned. Maybe just because she would think it was interesting and halfway believe me.

  “I’ll PM her anyway,” said Randy. “Should I give her your phone number?”

  “Sure.”

  Randy typed for a few seconds and hit return. So that was that, but I could have asked him over the phone. It wasn’t the only reason I was here.

  “I heard about your leg knitting up funny,” I blurted. “Will told me. I’m really sorry, Randy.”

  “It might not be a big deal,” he said. “Maybe it will be. I don’t know yet. I know I can’t play next year, but maybe the year after that.”

  “But if you miss next year, it’ll be harder to get scholarships to one of those prep schools, and if you go to Hamlin High, it’ll be harder to get scouted for college.” I’d thought about it the way he must be thinking about it. “You had it all planned out, and I ruined it.”

  “Ah, I’ll figure out another way to get to the NFL,” he said. “And if I don’t, I’ll come up with something else to dream about.”

  I had a thought, which meant cycling home on the icy trail through the woods. I went off the trail near Alden and left my bike, stamping through the frost until I found the spout of the old sewer pipe.

  It had been capped, a formidable lid of metal welded on the end. Somewhere back there, Mandy’s phone was still lying broken and lifeless. I might have been able to resurrect it enough to get in touch with her, but it was another dead end.

  When I got home, Dad was strumming on his guitar and humming to himself. He still hadn’t moved back to Boston because his car was wrecked. He was taking his time about getting a new one. Brian was on the couch, watching and listening.

  “Working on the movie song?” I asked him.

  “Yep. I haven’t written a new song in ages,” he said. “I’m kind of rusty.” He strummed again and mumbled some nonsense words.

  Dad’s band got a lot of exposure from the national news. Some clips of the concert got onto YouTube and got about a million hits each. Then folks figured out that the Bright Fun Guys were really Arkham Hat Shop, and their stuff started to sell like crazy on used-CD websites. A music company called them about putting out a greatest hits album and getting their backlist on iTunes. Then a big-time director wanted a song for a sound track to a movie based on the Gninjas video game. Brian practically turned himself inside out from excitement when he got the news.

  All of that took precedence over Dad getting a new car or moving back to the city.

  He strummed, tightened a peg, and strummed again.

  “I don’t even know what a Gninja is. What do they do?”

  “They kill bugs and save the world,” said Brian.

  “They kill bugs and save the world,” Dad sang. “They slash their swords at insects, too. Who can the brave gnome ninjas be?”

  I realized he was playing the chords to “Don Quixote.”

  “I like it,” I told him.

  “I bet Gordon Lightfoot’s law
yers would like it too,” he said. “I got nothing else.”

  “When are we moving to Boston?” Brian asked out of nowhere.

  “What?” Dad looked at him. “Oh, yeah, well … We have to talk, because, you know, the house does need work, but I got kind of tied up with stuff and I lost my job down there anyway and, well, we’re talking about L.A. There’s a talk show that wants us on, and the album to mix, and …”

  “You said I couldn’t go to the set of the movie and now you’re going?” Brian said.

  “I said there is no set because it’s animated, and I’m not going, I’m just going to—”

  Brian stormed up the stairs before Dad could finish the sentence.

  “You’re moving to California?” I asked.

  “I’m going to California, but it’s not definitely a move yet.”

  “What about us?”

  “It’s just … It’s like if the New England Patriots called you and asked you to be in the Super Bowl, Eric. What would you do?”

  “I don’t have children,” I reminded him.

  “Ouch. Wow, that really … Ouch.” He patted his chest to show me where it hurt.

  I headed up the stairs after Brian. The truth was I didn’t want to go anywhere, anyway. Forget the Patriots. I wanted to stay in Tanglewood. My only dream was for things to stay the way they were. The sad thing was I probably had a better chance of getting that call from Bill Belichick.

  Brian was on his bed with Digger and Starling, watching them waddle around on the comforter. The spongy terrain was freaking them out a little bit, and they were taking tiny, tentative steps, trying to figure out why the world had gone soft beneath them. I knew how they felt.

  Brian had been spending more time in his room since Allan moved away. I noticed he had a tin can on his dresser, filled with drying caps of the red fungus. He must be harvesting the spores. He was thinking ahead. There was also some wood glue from Dad’s workshop sitting there, and the carving of Ben—I was now sure it was Ben—with his head back in place. It wasn’t good as new, but it was close.

  “Hey,” he said. His eyes were rimmed with red, but he didn’t sound angry.

  “How’re you doing, buddy?”

  “Terrible.” He reached out to nudge one of the hedgehogs, who was close to the edge of the bed. She turned and headed back toward the middle.

  “Remember how you said I could punch you?”

  “Yeah.” Maybe it was a dumb thing to offer.

  “Can I punch Dad instead?”

  “Ha. I don’t think so. It wouldn’t make you feel better anyway.”

  “Let me try,” he said.

  “I know you’re mad about Dad leaving,” I said. “I am too. But we can’t really do anything to make him stay. Making music is what Dad does. He has to do it, like the hedgehogs have to eat bugs.”

  Brian sniffed.

  “It’ll be all right,” I told him.

  “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “I guess not,” I admitted.

  “Can we go bug hunting tomorrow?” he asked.

  There’d been a frost and bugs would be hard to find. On the other hand, it was something Brian wanted to do.

  “Sure thing.”

  The phone rang a bit later, and Dad hollered my name from downstairs instead of carrying the phone up. “It’s a girl!” he shouted.

  I sprinted down the hall to pick up the extension in my parents’ room. My mom’s room, I mean. Dad was sleeping on the couch these days.

  The caller ID said B. Morris in Edina, Minnesota.

  “Hello? Mandy?”

  “So I am strictly forbidden to use the computer right now, but everybody went to the megamall to go shopping. I was supposed to go with, but I pretended to have food poisoning, which I practically do, because they let my big sister help with dinner. Anyway, I got your message. So hi.”

  “Hi. Uh …” I didn’t want to jump in by talking about battling fungi and lost history. I needed to make small talk and work my way up to it. “You live in Minnesota?”

  “Yeah. I’m even staying. I got into this alternative school in Minneapolis for messed-up goth kids that’s close to the U. It should be all right for a while.” She told me a bit more about the school. Kids could design their own schedules and even sign up for college classes with special permission. She was going to take a class on early-American literature. “Some of it’s really boring but some of it’s awesome,” she said. “Like Irving and Poe.”

  “That sounds awesome,” I said. It probably was for her. “No Max Bailey?”

  “He’s not that early, but maybe I can do that next,” she said. “I can’t wait to tell the teacher I kind of know his daughter.”

  “And found his long-lost manuscripts,” I added.

  “I practically lived one of his stories,” she said with a laugh that nearly turned into a sob. “What a crazy couple of weeks that was.”

  “You missed the last part,” I said. I started to tell her about the seeds of redemption, but she stopped me.

  “Oh, crud. That’s the garage door. Listen, write it and send it to me, okay? The whole story.”

  “I’m no writer.”

  “Do it anyway. And tell Brian to write me.” She gave me her email address. “But now I really gotta go!” she said. “Email me! I might not write back right away, but I will eventually!”

  I didn’t get a chance to ask her what I really wanted to—what exactly happened, and if she remembered it the way I did, and if she’d ever heard of the razor rule.

  Brian and I went out the next morning. It was snowy and I knew the bug search was futile, but it was a nice morning to be in the woods. We stopped by the big stone we’d turned over just before discovering the mushrooms.

  “Let’s put it back the way we found it,” said Brian.

  “You mean the stone?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We should put things back the way we found them.” He reached into his pocket, found something, and set it down in the hollow beneath the rock.

  I couldn’t see it, but I had an idea of what it was.

  Before I could offer to help, Brian walked around the stone and gave it a big shove. It rolled over, sending up a puff of snow.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  We pressed on deeper into the woods.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For the third time, I give grateful acknowledgment to Angela Scaletta, Tina Wexler, and Allison Wortche for their feedback and enthusiasm through the writing and revision process. Thanks to Sarah Hokanson, Kathleen Dunn, and the rest of the team at Random House Children’s Books. Lots of gratitude and shellfish to The Otters for their advice and input: Josh Berk, Steve Brezenoff, Jonathan Roth, and Jon Skovron. Laurel Snyder and Linda Joy Singleton were way beyond helpful in the planning phase. Much of the bullying subplot was enriched by the thoughtful writing and friendship of James Preller. Charlotte the cat and her favorite toy inspired the Cassie story. Sy Montgomery’s lovely memoir, The Good Good Pig, told me everything I needed to know about having a pet pig. H. P. Lovecraft inspired the character and imaginary oeuvre of Max Bailey. Elaine Ford brought me to Maine in the first place and is the best writing teacher I ever had. A minor remembrance of a Mainer friend, Jennifer McLeod Finch, is now part of Eric’s story. Max Kimball was the first kid who read this story and liked all the parts I hoped he would. I brainstormed titles with the kids in Guys Read at Rockford Road in Crystal, Minnesota (special thanks to Zack), and got advice from the kids at South View Middle School in Edina, Minnesota, the kids at St. Michael-Albertville Middle School in St. Michael, Minnesota, and the kids at St. Joseph’s School in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Byron Ely Scaletta is, and that’s all I ask of him.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kurtis Scaletta was born in Louisiana and grew up in New Mexico, North Dakota, England, Liberia, Brazil, and a few other places. His books for young readers include Mudville, which was a Booklist Top 10 Sports Book for Youth, and Mamba Point, which the New York Times Bo
ok Review called “entertaining and touching.”

  Kurtis now lives in Minneapolis with his wife, their son, and several cats. To learn more about him and his books, please visit kurtisscaletta.com.