And his dad? Well, Macauley realized that he would never have a dog to call his own on the day that his father discovered that the Hansons’ dog had been drinking out of the decorative fountain in their yard again. The dog had licked it dry and the pump had sputtered air for so long that its motor burned out.
“I HATE DOGS!” Mr. Creevers howled. “I’ve had it up to HERE with people letting their dogs traipse around our yard like they own the place!”
“Me, too!” his mom had shrieked. “Dogs smell like old socks and they have fleas and ticks and-and communicable diseases!” Mrs. Creevers shuddered.
As Macauley listened to his parents yell and scream about the various reasons why dogs were so terrible, he let his lifelong dream of having one to call his own fade away. Then his mom turned around and saw him standing there. Her lips trembled. “I’m sorry, son,” she said. Your father and I just aren’t animal people.”
The next day, Macauley’s parents showed up with a car full of camping equipment, which was pretty weird since they weren’t camping people, either.
“What’s going on, Dad?” he asked.
“We’re going camping!” His dad gave him a big fake grin. “You’ve always wanting to go camping, right?”
“Uh, sure.” MacCauley nodded.
“Then hop aboard.” His dad waved.
A few hours later, rain started pelting the windshield. “I sure hope that the weatherman was right about this storm passing through dear.” Mrs. Creever frowned at the pounding rain. After a long and twisty drive, the Creevers finally arrived at their campsite. “We’re going to have to move fast to get this camp set up before nightfall, gang!” Mr. Creevers was already unpacking the tent and poles. Macauley started to open a box with an air mattress inside, but his mom grabbed it. “I’ll take care of that,” she said. “Now that the rain’s stopped, you should go, uh,” she glanced over her shoulder with wide eyes, “enjoy n-nature or something.”
MacCauley grabbed a flashlight and headed toward the trailhead across from their campsite. The woods seemed strangely silent after the rain, except for water dripping from the branches. He heard what might have been someone shouting, or maybe an owl hooting in the distance. As he rounded a curve in the trail, Mac froze. There, just a few feet away, stood a dog so black it almost blended with the shadows beneath the trees.
“Hey, boy!” Mac held out a hand. “You lost?” He figured the dog had wandered away from one of the campsites. “Don’t worry, boy,” Mac said. “We’ll find your owners. Come here!”
But instead of coming toward him, the dog turned away. Within seconds, it had disappeared into the forest. “Hey!” Mac called. “Come back here!” He flipped on his flashlight and pointed the beam under the trees. At that moment, the dog looked back over its shoulder. Its eyes glowed bright as fresh blood. Mac started to back up, slowly—step by step. “It’s okay, B-Buddy,” he stuttered. “You go wherever you want to.” But at that moment, the black dog with the glowing red eyes whined, just like any dog separated from its owner might whine, and Mac’s heart melted.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.” Mac followed the black dog deeper and deeper into the woods. Soon, he heard rushing water and felt a wet chill creeping over him. Up ahead, he spotted a ghostly mist coming from what might have been a creek. As he got closer, he saw that the wooden bridge that crossed the creek had collapsed. A girl hung there, clinging to a board while raging white water tried to pull her into the torrent.
“Hey!” Mac hurried forward. “Hey, you okay?”
“Help me!” the girl yelped. “I-I don’t think I can hold on much longer.”
Mac looked around frantically for something that would help. Then he heard scratching. He spotted the black dog’s eyes glowing red beneath the underbrush. It was pawing at a thick branch. “Good boy!” Mac grinned. He grabbed the branch, sat down behind a rock at the edge of the creek, and planted his feet on it. Then he reached the branch toward the girl. A few minutes and a lot of tugging later, she was gasping on the bank. When she caught her breath, she looked at Mac with grateful eyes. “Thank you so much,” she said. “If you hadn’t showed up, I’d be dead now.”
Mac shook his head. “Don’t thank me. Thank your dog. He led me here.”
The girl’s eyes went wide. “My dog? No. No he couldn’t have.”
“But he did.” Mac assured her.
“What did he look like?”
“Big,” said Mac. “And black as night.”
The girl’s lips trembled. “Nightmare. That’s his name.”
“Cool,” said Mac.
“He was a good dog.”
She’s in shock, Mac decided. “Is, right? You mean he is a good dog.” But then the girl sat up, turned back toward the creek, and pointed. In the middle of the creek, Mac saw a body caught between two boulders: the body of a large black Lab. The rushing water rocked it gently, but it was clear that the big black dog was dead.
After a long quiet minute, the girl sniffed. “You’re right,” she said. “He is a good dog. Even after death.”
Two days later, MacCauley’s parents took him to the shelter to pick out a dog. He found a big black one with sad lonely eyes. “I’m going to call him Wisht,” he told his parents.
“Wisht?” His parents looked puzzled.
“Because he’s just what I’ve always wished for,” said MacCauley.
MacCauley’s mother reached out to pat the dog’s head. “If he keeps you safe like Nightmare did his owner, he’s just what we wish for, too.” The she stuck her hand in her purse and rumbled around for her hand sanitizer.
“Don’t worry, Wisht.” Mac ruffled the dog’s fur. “My parents are weird, but they mean well.”
THE END
“There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.”
—Thomas A. Edison
TOP 10 PHOBIAS
Sweaty palms…racing heartbeat…an overwhelming feeling of dread…. Which of these Top 10 fears would send YOU over the edge?
1.BATS! Afraid of creatures with dark, leathery wings? Then you have chiroptophobia—fear of bats. Never fear! Even though you’ve probably seen Dracula turn into a bat in scary movies, in real life that just doesn’t happen. Even the dreaded vampire bat mostly feeds on cattle and horse blood—rarely on humans. Most bats are beneficial animals, pollinating the rainforest, distributing the seeds of fruits such as bananas and mangos in their poop, and eating insects—lots of insects. A colony of 30 million bats in Texas eats 250 tons of insects every night. (Maybe bugs are the ones who should have chiroptophobia!)
2.VAMPIRES! Sanguivoriphobia—the fear of “blood eaters”—has been around since the Middle Ages (A.D. 1066–1485). Back then, misfortunes like a drought or a crop failure or a dread disease were blamed on vampires. Never fear! Vampires don’t exist. (Really. They don’t.) So why did people believe in them? A lack of knowledge about what happens to a body when it decays helped fuel vampire stories in medieval times. Villagers would dig up recently buried bodies as they searched for the vampire causing all the trouble. Sometimes they found grisly “evidence.” For example, a body might have had intestinal decomposition—meaning its guts were rotting. That can cause blood to travel to the mouth of the corpse, which was seen as “proof” that the vampire had been found.
3.STORMS! If storms have you diving under the bed you probably have astraphobia, fear of lightning and brontophobia, fear of thunder. Lightning can be dangerous: on average, 52 people are killed and over 300 injured every year by lightning strikes. But there are ways to stay safe. If you can’t count to 30 between the lightning flash and the thunder boom, then the lightning is close enough to be a danger. Move away from water—even puddles. Don’t stand under tall trees, especially a lone tree in the middle of a field. Stay away from wide-open
spaces where you’re the tallest object. Don’t climb a mountain, or, if you’re already on a mountain, try to get below the tree line. And avoid touching metal until the storm ends.
4.REPTILES! Herpetophobia is a fear of reptiles. It comes from the Greek word herpeton which means “creeping creature.” Most of the 6500 species of reptiles pose no threat to people but some of them are worth a few goosebumps. The Nile crocodile is believed to kill around 200 people a year. Venomous snakes kill approximately 20,000 people a year worldwide: 14,000 in Southeast Asia alone. And in Indonesia two Komodo dragons waitied patiently under a tree to maul a fruit picker to death (Now that’s scary!).
5.BURIED ALIVE! George Washington is best known as the first president of the United States. But he also suffered from taphephobia—a fear of being buried alive. If this is your fear, you don’t have as much to worry about as George. Before modern embalming methods, people were buried quickly after being pronounced dead. Unfortunately some of them weren’t actually dead. In 1852, George Bateson patented the “Bateson’s Belfry.” It was a coffin with a bell inside that could be rung by pulling a cord—just in case… (Read more about this fear on page 213.)
6.GRAVES! Does the idea of visiting a graveyard give you chills? Then you may have coimetrophobia, the fear of cemeteries. A similar phobia is placophobia—the fear of gravestones. (Especially one with your name on it!)
7.THE DARK! If you have nyctophobia, you’re not alone. A recent study showed that even adults are afraid of the dark: at least, about half of them are. Fear of the dark may go back to the beginnings of human history. Many predators hunt at night—and some of them hunted our human ancestors. So fear of the dark was a survival strategy. Today? Statistics show that between 60 and 70 percent of crimes happen after dark. So it’s no surprise that, for some, the fear of being hunted at night remains strong.
8.VEGGIES? Not all phobias are about graveyards and bats and slithery things. There are plenty of other things to be horrified about. “I have always had an irrational fear of vegetables,” says Vicki Larrieux of Great Britain. “Even as a child I used to properly freak out if some carrots or a few peas were on my plate.” If you’re like Vicki then you have lachanophobia.
9.PUBLIC POTTIES! Can you only “go” at home? Then maybe you have paruresis, the fear of public restrooms. Never fear! “One of the cleanest things in bathrooms are the toilet seats,” says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona says. “I’d put my fanny on it anytime—unless it’s wet; then you’d want to wipe it first.”
10.BEDTIME! Not wanting to go to bed is one thing, but being afraid to go to bed? That’s a whole different bedtime story. There’s a name for it: clinophobia. And it’s the irrational fear of going to bed or falling to sleep. Why fear bedtime? Some people have sleep apnea, a medical condition that slows or even stops a person’s breathing during sleep. (Scary!) Some fear dying in their sleep. Others fear nightmares. If that’s your big bedtime fear, then Uncle John wishes you… sweet dreams!
PURPLE PEE-PLE
On page 97, we told you about a blood disease that can give humans that “wolfman” look. Here’s a form of the disease with royal roots.
•Porphyria is a group of diseases caused by a buildup of porphyrins (red and purple pigments) in the body.
•Europe’s royal houses of Stuart, Hanover, and Prussia have passed the faulty gene that causes porphyria from generation to generation.
•Pee the color of port wine is one symptom of too many red and purple pigments in the body.
•King James I of England probably had porphyria. His doctor wrote a note describing the king’s urine as being “purple as Alicante Wine.”
•England’s “Mad King” George III wasn’t insane after all. He had the classic “purple pee” symptom of porphyria. The disease interrupts nerve impulses to the brain and can cause everything from confusion to delusions. At one point, George held conversations with angels (or so the deluded king thought).
•Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Charlotte wrote in her letters of having dark red urine. By scraping a bit of bone marrow from her skeleton, researchers proved that she had porphyria, “beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
•One out of every two royals who have the faulty gene will pass it down to their children.
DEADLY WEATHER
Zombie apocalypse? Not gonna happen. Monster storms that make sci-fi scares look like a sunny day in the park? Oh, yeah!
SUPER TYPHOON NINA
1975’s Super Typhoon Nina dumped 42 inches of rain—a year’s worth—on central China in 24 hours. The deluge collapsed two dams designed to protect the region…against heavy rainfall. The Banqiao Dam could resist a 1,000-year flood—11.8 inches in one day. The Shimantan Dam could hold enough water to fill 28,000 Olympic swimming pools. But Nina dumped 7.5 inches of rainfall per hour into the reservoirs. When the dams failed, a wall of water 20 feet high and 7.5 miles wide surged down the river channel at speeds near 31 mph. The floods swept away 86,000 people and submerged thousands of square miles of land. Nina collapsed 6 million buildings, affected 11 million people, and cause $1.2 billion in damage. That puts Nina at the top of the list of destructive typhoons.
BLIZZARD OF 1993
At its height, the blizzard of ’93, or Superstorm ’93, stretched from Canada into Central America, but its main impact was on the Eastern United States. The storm raged for three days, from March 12 to 14. It paralyzed the eastern seaboard with record cold temperatures, snowfall, and winds.
Tennessee received the most snow—a whopping 56 inches. Along the shores of Long Island, New York, pounding waves tumbled 18 houses into the sea. In Florida, the storm spawned 15 tornadoes and killed 44 people. The Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean churned, and the Coast Guard rescued 160 people. But 48 more were still missing at sea when the storm ended. Overall, the storm’s surge, snows, winds, and tornadoes damaged or destroyed 18,000 homes and killed 285 people. It’s been called “The Storm of the Century.”
HURRICANE KATRINA
Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana, on August 29, 2005. The monster storm hovered over the region for seven terrifying hours. Winds of up to 145 mph ripped buildings to shreds. A 20-foot storm surge sent water pounding through canals and surging over levees. Then…the battered levees crumbled. “There was water on the street, then the sidewalk, then water in the house,” one survivor told The Times-Picayune.
Water rose fast in low-lying neighborhoods near levees, such as the Lower Ninth Ward. Daniel Weber tried to pull his wife onto the roof of their house. “My hands were all cut up from breaking through the window to escape,” he said. Weber and his wife both went under. She never surfaced. He grabbed a piece of driftwood and hung on for 14 hours before being rescued.
When the hurricane ended, 80 percent of New Orleans was under water. Though New Orleans had been nearly wiped off the map, Hurricane Katrina also affected 90,000 square miles of land in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. At least 1,800 people died during the nightmare storm. Bodies continued to be found in condemned homes eight months later. More than 700 people are still reported missing.
•••
REDNECK RODENT ROAST
How many rednecks does it take to turn an apartment complex into a smoking ruin? Just one, as long as he has a propane torch on hand. According to Fire Chief Jim Kohsel, a resident on the third floor of the Clear View Apartments in Holland Township, Michigan, wanted to cook up a squirrel for dinner. But first, he decided to burn off the rodent’s fur… with a propane torch. Not a good idea. The squirrel’s fur burned just fine, but so did the wooden deck beneath the animal and the surrounding apartments. By the time the fire department put out the flames, 32 apartments had smoke damage and 8 had been totally toasted.
“The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth.”
—Andrés Segovia
TERROR IN THE WATER
Whether you swim in oceans, lakes, or rivers, seriously scary
creatures might be sharing the water with you.
VIPERFISH
The first thing you notice about this fierce predator is its fangs—they are so long, they curve out of its mouth and all the way back to its eyeballs. The spine of this two-foot-long fish is tipped with a photophore, an organ that actually lights up. The viperfish floats motionless in the totally dark depths of the ocean, waving a long lure in front of its mouth that blinks on and off like a neon sign. Unsuspecting shrimp, anchovies, mackerel, and other fish are attracted by the light and swim toward it. In a flash, the viperfish sinks its fangs into dinner. If the prey is too big for its mouth, no problem—the viperfish’s skull has a hinge that allows it to open its mouth wider and…wider…and wider…to swallow bigger fish.
SNAKEHEAD FISH
This monster fish has a huge mouth with short spiky teeth and a monster appetite to match. A single snakehead fish can eat every living thing in a pond or lake, including plankton, carp, snails, and frogs. What’s really bizarre is when the food runs out, the snakehead fish climbs out of the pond and crawls off in search of another pond, eating frogs, mice, rats, and small birds on its way. This prehistoric-looking fish can grow to be 3 feet long and weigh as much as 15 pounds. But no matter how attractive that may sound, you can’t have one for a pet. Because they can wipe out entire populations of fish, snakeheads are illegal to own.
VANDELLIA FISH
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