The Turtle Boy tq-1

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  And ignore it he did as he sank and drifted on waves of peace that carried him away. Until a sharp pain drove the resignation from his brain and his leg twitched, spasmed, and he was jerked from the panacea of death’s reverie. His eyes fluttered open. Darkness, but darkness he could feel between his fingers. Another bite and his heart kicked. Agony. Water. Something was gnawing on his foot. A self-preserving panic like liquid fire swelled in him and he kicked, struggled, pushed himself up to where the water moved with purpose and rhythm, shifting to the sound of the storm.

  More pain, needling between his toes, and his head broke water, panic rattling his skull as he drew a breath and went under once more. He struggled against the heaving water, his tongue numb, cottoned by the acrid taste of the fetid depths. The water fell below his neck and he sucked greedily at the air, aware for the first time that the storm vied for dominance with the sounds of human violence. Men yelled, women screamed and someone called his name.

  This time he stayed above water, his frantic paddling halting abruptly when his foot connected with something hard, something unmoving. He could stand and did so falteringly, his chest full of red-hot needles as the water shifted around him, trying to reclaim him. It rushed from his stomach, his lungs, his mind and he vomited, vomited until he felt as if his head would explode, then he staggered in the storm-induced current, his face raised to the rain.

  A splash behind him. Timmy turned, blinking away tears, rain, pond water and trying to focus on something other than his own lingering blindness and trembling bones.

  The Turtle Boy stood before him, unaffected by the tumultuous heaving of the water. He looked as he had when Pete and Timmy had found him, his face mottled and decayed. He wore a coat now and the coat moved. Timmy stepped back, the bank so preciously close and yet so far away.

  “You saw it,” Darryl croaked, the shoulders of his coat sprouting small heads that sniffed the air before withdrawing. “You stepped behind The Curtain and you saw what he did.”

  Somehow Timmy could hear him over the storm, over the churning of the water, though Darryl did not raise his voice to compete with them. He nodded, not trusting his voice.

  “You don’t know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let it change you. There is only time to let one of them pay for his crimes tonight.”

  “I don’t understand!” Timmy felt dizzy, sick; he wanted to be home and warm, away from the madness this night had become, if it was really night at all.

  “You will. They’ll explain it to you.”

  “Who?”

  “People like me. The people on The Stage.”

  Darryl swept past him and in the transient noon of lightning, he saw the coat was fashioned from a legion of huge, ugly turtles, their shells conjoined like a carapace around the boy’s chest and back. Wizened beaks rose and fell, worm-like tongues testing the air as Darryl carried them toward the bank and the figures who fought upon it.

  From here, Timmy could see his mother and Kim, huddled at the top of the rise, his mother’s hand over Kim’s face to keep her from seeing something. He followed their gaze to the two men wrestling each other in the dark.

  Dad! Possessed by new resolve that numbed the flaring pain in his feet and the throbbing in his chest and throat, he thrashed to the bank and reached it the same time Darryl did. They both climbed over, both paused as the storm illuminated the sight of Wayne Marshall punching Timmy’s father in the face—

  Just like he punched Darryl before he killed him

  —and stooped to retrieve something he’d dropped as the other man reeled back. Over the cannon roar of thunder, Timmy heard his mother scream his name and resisted the urge to look in her direction as he slipped, slid and flailed and finally tumbled to the ground between her and where his father was straightening and bracing himself for a bullet from the weapon in Wayne Marshall’s hand.

  In the storm-light, Mr. Marshall grinned a death’s head rictus, his skin pebbled with rain. He raised the gun. Timmy’s father cradled his head in his arms and backed away.

  Mr. Marshall pulled the trigger.

  And nothing happened.

  He jerked back his hand and roared at the gun, fury rippling through him. “No, fuck you, NO!”

  He thrust the gun out, aimed it at Timmy’s father’s head and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  Again and again and again, nothing but a series of dry snapping sounds.

  “Goddamn you!”

  “No!” Timmy yelled, then realized it hadn’t come from his stricken throat at all. It was Darryl and his cry had not been one of protest. It had been a command.

  And it was heeded.

  The ground beneath Timmy’s hands moved, separated into ragged patches of moving darkness, slick and repulsive against his skin. He jerked back and rose unsteadily, eyes fixed on the moving earth, waiting for the lightning to show him what he already knew.

  The turtles. An army of them. All monstrous, all ancient. And all moving toward where his father had his arms held out to ward off the bullet that must surely be on its way.

  “Timmy…son, stay back,” he said, risking a quick glance at his son. “Just stay there.”

  “Dad!” This time Timmy knew from the pitiful croak that it was indeed his own voice.

  He ran, halted, drowning again but in fear, confusion and the agony of uncertainty as the creatures Doctor Myers had introduced to his pond all those years ago trudged slowly but purposefully toward their prey.

  “Darryl,” Timmy cried, scorching his throat with the effort to be heard. Darryl looked toward him, the coat slowly shrugging itself off to join its brethren. “Darryl, please! Make them stop!”

  Another shadow rose from the pond.

  Timmy felt a nightmarish wave of disbelief wash over him. Even after all he’d been through, was still going through, he felt his mind tugging in far too many directions at once.

  But there was not enough time to dwell on it.

  He looked away from the new shadow and ran, skidding to the ground before his father. Darryl turned to look at him.

  The turtles slowed.

  “You’d die for your father?” Darryl asked, his voice little more than a gurgle.

  “Yes!” Timmy screamed, without hesitation. “Yes! Leave him alone!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love him. He’s the best father in the world and I love him. You can’t take him away from me. Please!”

  “Maybe he deserves to die.”

  “Don’t say that. He doesn’t! I swear he doesn’t!”

  The storm itself seemed to hold its breath as Darryl stared and the impatience of the turtle army stretched the air taut.

  A gentle pulse of lightning broke the stasis.

  Darryl turned to regard the shadow standing in the water next to him. Pointing to Mr. Marshall, he asked the same question: “Would you die for him?”

  Even Mr. Marshall seemed intent on the answer the shadow would give.

  But it said nothing. Instead, it gave a gentle shake of its head.

  “No!” Wayne cried as Darryl turned back to face him.

  Slowly, Timmy’s father lowered his hands and after a moment in which he realized Wayne Marshall’s attention was elsewhere, he moved away into the shadows of the pines, his face a pale blur of horror as he saw what had his neighbor’s attention.

  Darryl turned back to watch the turtles advance. The first of them found Mr. Marshall’s leg and after a moment of stunned disgust, he aimed his pistol downward and in his panic, tried the weapon again.

  This time the gun fired.

  A deafening roar and the gun let loose a round that took most of Mr. Marshall’s foot away with it. He shrieked and dropped to the ground, then realized his folly and scuttled backward on his hands. The dark tide moved steadily forward.

  Timmy’s father burst from his hiding place and ran the long way around the pond, through the pines, the marsh and along the high bank until he appeared through the weeds on the
far side of the rise. His wife released Kim at last and ran to him.

  Multi-colored lights lit the sky in the distance, back near the houses. Timmy guessed the police had arrived and were now searching for the woman who had summoned them. He silently begged them to hurry.

  A guttural scream was all that could be heard from the shadows as the tide of turtles progressed ever onward and engulfed their victim.

  A single flicker of lightning lit the face of the shadow in the water and Timmy felt a jolt of shock.

  The dead and bloated face staring back at him was Pete’s.

  Oh God…

  Someone grabbed Timmy’s shoulder and spun him roughly around. He looked up into the frightened face of his father, noticed his swollen eye and crushed nose, and almost wept again, but there was no time. The sirens were growing louder, drowning out the shrieks and snapping sounds from beneath the pines. Timmy let himself be led and almost didn’t feel Kim’s hand slipping into his own. He smiled at her but it was an empty gesture. There was nothing to be cheerful about and, head afire with unanswered questions, he looked over his shoulder as they descended the rise as one huddled, broken mass. Pete was gone. The earth still crawled and among the seething shadows The Turtle Boy stood, unsmiling in his victory.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Timmy slept for days afterward, speaking only to his parents and Kim and occasionally a police officer who tried his best to look positive. Timmy saw the horror in the man’s eyes, a horror that began on a warm sunny morning at the start of summer.

  What he learned, he learned from his father, the papers and Kim who in turn had heard it from her own parents—apparently too shocked to be discreet in their gossiping.

  They had pulled three bodies out of the pond. One was a young boy, little more than a skeleton cocooned in algae. According to the medical examiner’s report, he had been there for some time and had died as a result of a broken neck, sustained it was assumed, by a fall from an old tire swing that had hung for a brief time above the pond back in the late seventies. They had identified the body as Darryl Gaines, nephew of the second decedent, Wayne Marshall. Apparently, Marshall’s nephew had visited him back in 1967 while his mother was being treated for drug abuse. Marshall was drinking in his backyard with friends and poking fun at the boy (according to Geoff Keeler, an ex-buddy of Wayne’s) and the kid had run off in a sulk. They’d never seen him again. Divers had searched the pond and come up empty (“apart from some big turtles” one of them stated on the news, obviously relishing the attention of the camera). Shortly after, Darryl’s mother, Joanne Gaines was institutionalized. She committed suicide a month later.

  The third body filled Timmy with a wave of grief he was afraid would never leave him. Every time he stared up at his bedroom ceiling; every time he glanced at a comic book or thought about the red clay in Patterson’s field, he saw Pete’s face.

  Pete had never made it to summer camp. His body had shown signs of chronic physical abuse, culminating in a broken neck sustained—according to the evidence obtained from the Marshall house—from a fall against the edge of a marble fireplace. It was assumed Wayne Marshall had killed his son by accident, in a fit of alcohol-fueled rage.

  Panicked, Wayne decided to dump his son’s body in the pond (perhaps so he could claim later that the boy had run away) and was readying himself to do so when Timmy’s father arrived on the scene.

  “I just stood looking at him,” Timmy’s father said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Wayne, with Pete in his arms…I didn’t want to believe he was dead, couldn’t believe Wayne would kill his own son. I watched him lay the boy down on the grass. That’s when he pulled the gun on me. That’s when I saw his eyes and knew he was lost. Jesus, I should have known, should have done something sooner.”

  Timmy only smiled through the tears when he thought of what Darryl’s turtles might have done to Wayne Marshall.

  Wayne Marshall, the faceless man Timmy had seen at the pond, murdering his nephew and leaving him beneath the water to feed the turtles.

  The visitors came and went, attempted to soothe Timmy with words he couldn’t hear and through it all, through the mindless passage of feverish recollection and the debilitating agony of loss, The Turtle Boy’s words returned to him again and again, nagging at him and begging to be decoded: You don’t know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let it change you.

  Maybe he deserves to die.

  Three weeks later, they filled in the pond. They’d been trying for years but somehow mechanical difficulties had always kept them away. Timmy thought he now knew what had caused those problems.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Summer ended, and as per the rules of the seasons in Ohio, there was no subtle ushering out of the warmth; the weather dropped in temperature and the earth darkened on the very day the calendar page turned.

  Spurning all attempts his father made at trying to come up with something fun for them to do on what might be the last Saturday of good weather for quite some time, Timmy took a walk.

  Fall was already setting up camp on the horizon, prospecting for leaves to burn and painting the sky with colors from a bruised pallet.

  He wanted to forget, but knew that would never happen.

  There were three reasons why the fear would always be with him, dogging his every step and making stalkers out of the slightest shadows.

  First, the reporters. In the months since Pete’s and Mr. Marshall’s deaths, the newspapers had played up the ghost angle, delighting in the idea that an eleven-year-old boy had helped solve a murder through an alleged conference with the dead. There were phone calls, insistent and irritating, from jocular voices proclaiming their entitlement to Timmy’s story.

  They were ignored.

  But this only led to speculation, and Timmy’s face ended up in the local newspapers, topped with giant bold lettering that read:

  11-YEAR-OLD BOY RESURRECTS THE DEAD, SOLVES MURDER!

  Then the curiosity seekers started showing up, some of them from the media, most of them just regular folk. Their neediness frightened the boy. We just want to touch him, they said. Others wept and begged his mother to let the boy see if he can bring my little Davey/Suzy/Alex/Ricky/Sheri back. And they were still coming to the house, though not as much as they had in the beginning.

  The second reason was that even if Timmy managed to dismiss the calls, the desperate pleas of strangers, the newspaper reports and the occasional mention of his name on the television, there were still the nightmares. Vivid, brutal and unflinching. In his dreams, he saw everything, all the things he had been able to look away from in real life. All the things he had been able to run from.

  Every night, he drowned and ended up behind what Darryl had called ‘The Curtain.’ In the waking hours, the name stayed with him, conjuring images in Timmy’s mind of a tattered black veil drawn wide across a crumbling stage. He imagined a whole host of the dead crouching behind it, waiting for their chance to come back, to find their own killers. And perhaps they would. Perhaps also they would only be successful if they had someone to draw strength from, as Timmy was sure Darryl Gaines had drawn strength from him and Pete.

  Or perhaps it was over.

  Believing that required the most effort.

  Because the final reason, the last barrier stopping him from releasing the dread and shaking off the skeins of clambering horror was the recollection of something else The Turtle Boy had said: You don’t know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let it change you. He had mulled over this every day and every night since the discovery of the bodies. It would have been simpler to forget had he not realized something about the murders, something that came back to him weeks later—Wayne Marshall was Darryl’s uncle. The story had it that Darryl had been visiting his uncle and that’s why he was there in the first place. But Timmy had been there, however it had happened, standing on the bank of the pond when the big man had come strolling over the rise. Among the things he’
d said had been: I’m a friend of your uncle’s. We’re practically best friends! Which meant Darryl’s murderer had not been his uncle.

  But every time it got this far in Timmy’s head, heavy black pain descended like a caul over him and he had to stop and think of nothing until it went away. It was too much. Maybe in the years to come it would make sense. For now, it would hang like an old coat in a closet, always there but seldom worn.

  Maybe he deserves to die.

  His walk took him back to the pond, to where bulldozers stood like slumbering monsters next to a smoothened oval of dirt. They’d drained the pond and ripped away the banks. The telltale signs of man were everywhere now, the animals quiet. Despite his relief at having the dark water gone, Timmy couldn’t help the twinge of sadness he felt at having the good memories buried beneath that hard-packed dirt, too. All around him the land was changing, becoming unfamiliar.

  He sighed, dug his hands in his pockets and walked on, unsure where he was heading until he was standing staring down at the railroad tracks. A cold breeze ran invisible fingers across his skin and he shivered. A quick glance in both directions showed the tracks were deserted. No trains, no funny tireless cars with flashing yellow beacons.

  School would begin soon, and he hoped it would be the distraction he needed from the crawling sensation he had been forced to live with, the sense of always being watched, of never being alone.