The Turtle Boy tq-1

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  Pete’s urgent whisper snapped Timmy out of the terrible and fascinating sight of what Darryl had called ‘feeding the turtles.’

  “Timmy, c’mon. Let’s get out of here. There’s something wrong with that kid.” He emphasized every couple of words with a stamp of his foot and Timmy knew his friend was close to tears. In truth, he wasn’t far away from weeping himself. But not here. Not in front of the crazy kid. Who knew what that might set off in him?

  He stepped back, unable to take his eyes off the boy and his ravaged ankle, rising and falling like a white seesaw over the water.

  “We’re going now,” he said, unsure why he felt the need to announce their departure when the element of surprise might have suited them better.

  The boy dipped his foot and this time Timmy could have sworn he saw something small, dark and leathery rising to meet it. He moved back until he collided with Pete, who grabbed his wrist hard enough to hurt.

  As Timmy was about to turn, Darryl’s head swiveled toward him, the frostiness of his gaze undeniable now. “See you soon,” he said. Timmy felt gooseflesh ripple across his skin.

  They didn’t wait to see what might or might not be waiting with open mouths beneath the boy’s ankle. Instead, they turned and made their way with a quiet calm that begged to become panic, through the weeds and the tall grass until they were sure they could not be seen from the pond. And then they ran, neither of them screaming in terror for fear of ridicule later when this all turned out to be a cruel dream.

  CHAPTER TWO

  That night, after showering and checking for the gamut of burrowers and parasites the pond had to offer, Timmy slipped beneath the cool sheets, more glad than he’d ever been before that his father was there to read to him.

  Beside his bed, a new fan had been lodged in the open window and droned out cool air as his father yawned, set his Coke down on the floor between his feet and smiled. “You remember where we left off?” he asked as he took a seat just below his son’s toes.

  Timmy nodded. They were reading The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis. He smoothed the blankets over his chest. “Queen Jadis turned out to be really wicked. She wanted to go with Digory and Polly back to their world to try to take it over but they touched the rings and escaped.”

  His father nodded. “Right.” As he flipped through the pages, Timmy looked around the room, his eyes settling on the fish his father had painted on the walls last summer. They were tropical fish; brightly colored and smudged where the paint had tried to run. A hammerhead shark had been frozen in the act of dive-bombing the wainscoting. Here a hermit crab peeked out from the shadows of his sanctuary; there a jellyfish mimicked the currents to rise from the depths of the blue wall. A lobster waved atop a rock strategically placed to hide a crack in the plaster. Bubbles rose toward the ceiling and Timmy tracked them with fearful eyes down to the half open mouth of a gaudily painted turtle.

  He listened to his father read, more comforted by the soft tone and occasional forced drama of his voice than the words themselves.

  When his father reached a page with a picture, he turned the book around to show it to Timmy. It was a crosshatching of the fearsome queen, one arm curled behind her head, the other outstretched before a massive black metal door as she readied herself to fling it wide with her magic. Timmy nodded, indicating he’d seen enough and his father went back to reading.

  Timmy’s eyes returned to the crudely drawn turtle on the wall. It was bigger than any turtle he’d ever seen and the mouth was a thin black line twisted slightly at the end to make it appear as if it was smiling — his father’s touch. The shell was enormous, segmented into hexagonal shapes and much more swollen than he imagined they were in real life. Was it something like this, then, that had been chewing on Darryl’s ankle? The thought brought a shudder of revulsion rippling through him and he pulled the sheets closer to his chin. It couldn’t have been. Even a kid as crazy-looking as Darryl couldn’t have done such a thing without it hurting him. Perhaps the boy had been injured and was merely soaking his wound in the pond when they found him. Perhaps it had all been a trick, a bit of mischief they had fallen for, hook line and sinker. That made much more sense, and yet he still didn’t believe it. The cold knot in his throat remained and when his father read to him of Digory’s and Polly’s escape from Charn and their arrival — with the queen in tow — at the mysterious pools in the Wood between the Worlds, he wondered if they had seen a boy there, sitting on the bank of one of those pools, his feet dipped in the water.

  “Dad?”

  His father’s eyebrows rose above his thick spectacles. “What is it?”

  Timmy looked at him for a long time, struggling to frame the words so they wouldn’t sound foolish, but almost all of it sounded ridiculous. Eventually he sighed and said: “I was at the pond today.”

  “I know. Your mother told me. She tugged a few ticks off you too, I believe. Nasty little buggers, aren’t they?”

  Timmy nodded. “I saw someone down there.” He cleared his throat. “A boy.”

  “Oh yeah? A friend of yours?”

  “No. I’ve never seen this kid before. He was dirty and smelly and his head was a funny shape. Weird eyes, too.”

  The eyebrows lowered. “’Weird’ how?”

  “I-I don’t know. They had no color, just really dark.”

  “What was he doing down there?”

  “Just sitting there,” Timmy said softly, avoiding his father’s eyes.

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  After a moment of careful thought, Timmy nodded. “He said he was feeding the turtles.” There was silence then, except for the hum of the fan.

  Timmy’s father set the book down beside him on the bed and crossed his arms. “And was he?” he said at last, as if annoyed that Timmy hadn’t already filled in that gap in the story.

  “I don’t know. There was a piece of his foot missing and he was—”

  His father sighed and waved a hand. “Okay, okay. I get it. Ghost story time, huh?” He stood up and Timmy quickly scooted himself into a sitting position, his eyes wide with interest.

  “You think he was a ghost?” he asked, as his father smirked down at him.

  “Well isn’t that how the story is supposed to go? Did you turn back when you were leaving only to find the boy had mysteriously vanished?”

  Timmy slowly shook his head. “We didn’t look back. We were afraid to.”

  His father’s smile held but seemed glued there by doubt. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Timmy. Only ghost stories. The living have enough to worry about these days without the dead coming back to complicate things. Now you get some rest.”

  He carefully stepped around his Coke and leaned in to give Timmy a kiss on the cheek. Ordinarily, the acrid stench of his father’s cologne bothered him, but tonight it was a familiar smell, a smell he knew was real, and unthreatening.

  “Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night, kiddo. I’ll see you in the morning.” He walked, Coke in hand, to the door. “Have sweet dreams now, you hear me? Don’t go wasting any more time and energy on ghosts and goblins. Nothing in the dark you can’t see in the daylight. Remember that.”

  Timmy smiled weakly. “I will. Thanks.”

  His father nodded and closed the door, but just as the boy had resigned himself to solitude and all the fanciful and awful ponderings that would be birthed within it, the door opened again and his father poked his head in.

  “One more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want you going back to the pond for a while. You know, just in case there are some odd folk hanging around down there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good boy. See you in the morning.”

  “See you in the morning too.” His father started to close the door.

  “Dad?”

  A sigh. “Yes?”

  “Do you think there are turtles back there? Like, big ones?”

  “Who knows? I’ve never seen
them but that isn’t to say they aren’t there. Now quit worrying about it and get some sleep.”

  “I will.”

  “Goodnight.”

  The door closed and Timmy listened to his father’s slippers slopping against the bare wood steps of the stairs. It was followed by mumbled conversation and Timmy guessed his mother was being filled in on The Turtle Boy story. Her laughter, crisp and warm, echoed through the house.

  Timmy turned his back on the aquatic renderings and stared at his Hulk poster on the opposite wall. As he replayed moments from his favorite episodes of the show, he found himself drifting, edging closer to the bank of sleep where he sat among ugly children with wounded feet and burst stitches for smiles.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning, he called for Pete and found him in his sun-washed kitchen, hunched over a bowl of cereal as if afraid someone was going to steal it.

  “Hi Pete.”

  Pete looked positively bleached. Except for the angry purple bruise around his left eye. “Hi.”

  “Ouch. Where did you get the shiner?”

  “Fell.”

  “Where?”

  Pete shrugged but said nothing further and while this wasn’t unusual, Timmy sensed his friend was still shaken from their meeting with Darryl the day before. He, on the other hand, had managed to convince himself that they had simply stumbled upon some sick kid from one of the neighboring towns who had ventured out of his camp to see what the city had to offer. Pete’s father had once told the boys about the less prosperous areas of Delaware and warned them not to ride their bikes there after sundown. He’d frightened them with stories about what had happened to those children who’d disobeyed their parents and ventured there after dark. They had resolved never to step foot outside their own neighborhood if they could help it. Of course, they couldn’t stop people from coming in to their neighborhood either and after much musing, Timmy had decided that that was exactly what had happened. Nothing creepy going on, just a kid sniffing around in uncharted territory. No big deal. And though he’d been scared to stumble upon the strange kid with the mangled foot, the fear had buckled under the weight of solid reasoning and now he felt more than a little silly for panicking.

  It appeared, however, that the waking nightmare had yet to let Pete go. The longer Timmy watched him, the more worried he became. It didn’t help that Pete was accident-prone. Every other week he had some kind of injury to display.

  “You all right, Pete?” he asked as he slid into a chair.

  Pete nodded and made a snorting sound as he shoveled a spoonful of Cheerios into his mouth. A teardrop of milk ran from the corner of his mouth, dangled from his chin, then fell back into the white sea beneath his face. A smile curled Timmy’s lips as he recalled his mother saying: “If you ever eat like that kid, you’d better be prepared to hunt for your own food. Honestly, you’d think they starve him over there or something.”

  When Pete finished, he raised the bowl to his lips and drained the remaining milk from it, then wiped a forearm across his lips and belched softly.

  “So what should we do today?” Timmy asked, already bored with the stale atmosphere in Pete’s house.

  Pete shrugged but the reply came from the hallway behind them.

  “He’s not doing anything today. He’s grounded.”

  Timmy turned in his chair. It was Pete’s father.

  Wayne Marshall was tall and thin; his skin brushed with the same healthy glow nature had denied his son. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses atop an aquiline nose. Thick black eyebrows sat like a dark horizon between the sweeping black wings of his bangs. He was frightening when angry, but Timmy seldom stuck around to see the full force of his wrath. Right now it seemed he was on ‘simmer.’

  “What were you two boys doing back at Myers Pond yesterday?” he asked as he strode into the kitchen and plucked an errant strand of hair from his tie. From what Timmy had seen, the man only owned two suits — one black, the other a silvery gray. Today he wore the former, with a white shirt and a red and black striped tie.

  He looked at Pete but the boy was staring into his empty bowl as if summoning the ghost of his Cheerios.

  Timmy swallowed. “We were looking for something to do. We thought we might go fishing but our poles are broken.”

  Mr. Marshall nodded. As he poured himself a coffee, Timmy noticed no steam rose from the liquid as it surged into the cup. Cold coffee? It made him wonder how early these people got up in the morning. After all, it was only eight-thirty now.

  “The new Zebco pole I bought Petey for his birthday a few months back, you mean?”

  Timmy grimaced. “I didn’t know it was a new one. He never told me that.”

  The man leaned against the counter and studied Timmy with obvious distaste and the boy felt his face grow hot under the scrutiny. He decided Pete had earned himself a good punch for not rescuing him.

  “Yeah well….” Pete’s father said, pausing to sip from his cup. He smacked his lips. “There isn’t much point going back to the pond if you’re not going fishing, is there? I mean, what else is there to do?”

  Timmy shrugged. “I dunno. Stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  Another shrug. His mother had warned him about shrugging when asked a direct question, and how irritating it was to grown-ups, but at that moment he felt like his shoulders were tied to counterweights and threaded through eyehooks in the ceiling.

  “Messin’ around and stuff. You know…playing army. That kind of stuff.”

  “What’s wrong with playing army out in the yard, or better still in your yard with all the trees you’ve got back there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The urge to run infected him, but his mind kept a firm foot on the brakes. He had already let his yellow belly show once this week; it wasn’t going to happen again now, no matter how cranky Mr. Marshall was feeling this morning. But it was getting progressively harder to return the man’s gaze, and although he had seen Pete’s dad lose his cool more than once, he wasn’t sure he had ever felt this much animosity coming from him. The sudden dislike was almost palpable.

  Mr. Marshall’s demeanor changed. He sipped his coffee and grinned, but there was a distinct absence of humor in the expression. His smoldering glare shifted momentarily to Pete, who shuffled in response. Timmy felt his spine contract with discomfort.

  “Petey was telling me about this Turtle Boy you boys are supposed to have met.”

  At that moment, had Timmy eyes in the back of his head, they would have been glaring at Pete. He didn’t know why. After all, he had told his father. But his father hadn’t blown a gasket over some busted fishing poles, Zebco or no Zebco, and had waved away the idea of a ghost at Myers Pond without a second thought.

  The way Mr. Marshall was looking at him now, it appeared he had given it a lot of thought.

  “Yeah. It was weird,” he said with a lopsided grin.

  “Weird? It scared Pete half to death and from what he tells me you were scared too. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk to strangers?”

  “Yes, but it was just a ki—”

  “Don’t you know how many children disappear every year around this area? Most of them because they wandered off to places they were warned not to go. Places like that pond, and while I don’t believe for a second that either of you saw anything like Pete described, I don’t want you bringing my boy back there again, do you understand me?”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “I spent most of last night prying ticks off him. Is that your idea of fun, Timmy?”

  “No sir.”

  “I told him not to hang around with you anyway. You’re trouble. Just like your father.”

  Caught in the spotlight cast by the morning sun, dust motes seemed to slow through air made thick with tension.

  Timmy’s jaw dropped. While he had squirmed beneath his friend’s father’s angry monologue, this insult to his own father made something snap shut in his chest.
Anger and hurt swelled within him and he let out a long, infuriated breath. Unspoken words flared in that breath and died harmlessly before a mouth sealed tight with disgust. He felt his stomach begin to quiver and suddenly he wanted more than anything to be gone from Pete’s house. The departure would come with the implied demand that Pete go to hell in a Zip-Loc bag, the sentiment punctuated by a slamming of the front door that would no doubt bring Mr. Marshall running to chastise him further.

  Fine, he thought, the words poison arrows in his head. Let him. He can go to hell in a baggie too.

  “I gotta go now,” he mumbled finally, and without sparing his treacherous comrade a glance, started toward the front door.

  Hot tears blurred the hallway and the daylight beyond as he left the house and closed the door gently behind him. The anger had ebbed away as quickly as it had come, replaced now by a tiny tear in the fabric of his happiness through which dark light shone. He was dimly aware of the door opening behind him.

  Pete’s voice halted him and he turned. “Hey, I’m sorry Timmy. Really I am.”

  “Oh yeah?” The hurt spun hateful words he couldn’t speak. With what looked like monumental effort, Pete closed the front door behind him. With an uncertain smile, he said: “My Dad’ll kill me for this, but let’s go do something.”

  “Good idea,” Timmy said, aware that an errant tear was trickling down his cheek. “You can go to hell. I’m going home.”

  “Timmy wait –”

  “Shut up, Pete. I hate you!”

  He ran home and slammed the door behind him. His mother sat wiping her eyes, engrossed in some soppy movie. He waited behind the sofa for her to ask him what was wrong and when she didn’t he ran to his room and to bed, where he lay with his face buried in the cool white pillows.