The Tanglewood Terror (13 page)

“These things are a lot tougher than they look,” he said.

“I know.”

He lined the hole with stones we found around the field and in the woods. It was going to be a tiny fire—not much for warmth, but enough for ambience and marshmallow toasting. Only we didn’t have any marshmallows, because Dad didn’t have a chance to go shopping for the campout. He said most marshmallows weren’t vegetarian anyway—they were made with gelatin, which was made from cow hooves. He’d prepped some apples at home, coring them and stuffing the middles with butter and brown sugar, then wrapping each in tin foil. We tossed them into the fire, waited a bit, then rolled them out to the edge of the pit. The foil cooled off fast, so we could pick them up, but inside the apples were warm and gooey. Dad called them camping apples, and they were one of my favorite things in the world.

I looked up at Michelle’s house again, sure that I saw a flicker of light in the window, but I decided it was just the moon reflecting in the glass. I noticed Brian looking that way too. He must have been trying to figure out what I was looking at.

Dad started strumming on his acoustic guitar, strumming and humming, like he didn’t have any particular song in mind. It was hypnotic listening to him and looking across
the fallow field, the shadows of trees dividing the two vast seas of light—mushrooms below and stars up above. The mushrooms seemed especially bright, like they were happy to be alive.

“Can you play that song about the horseman?” I asked him.

“What?”

“ ‘Through the woodland, through the valley.’ That one.”

“Oh, yeah. ‘Donkey Hotay.’ ” He plucked a string and turned one of the pegs.

“It’s not a donkey, it’s a horse.”

“No. ‘Don Quixote.’ That’s his name.” He spelled it out for me, explaining it was based on some old novel. Somehow I never knew the guy really did have a name. Why did the lyrics keep asking “Who can the brave young horseman be?” if the answer was right there in the title? Dad played the song, and Brian and I started humming along, and for a few minutes everything was all right with the world. When we stopped, the guitar and our voices echoed over the field.

Brian and I had gotten bigger since the last time we’d been camping, and the tent was a tight fit. Dad fell asleep right away, but Brian was more restless, whispering and mumbling in his sleep. Before I could get comfortable, I heard a noise outside. It sounded human. I slipped out of the sleeping bag, put on my shoes, and crawled out into the mushroom-lit night. When I reached back to zip up the tent, my hand hit Brian’s head. He was right behind me.

“I want to help,” he whispered.

“Thanks.”

We crept along the tree line so we wouldn’t give ourselves away. There was definitely somebody at the sty. We heard voices, but no words—just a high-pitched chattering sound. It sounded like some little kids were mocking Cassie.

A moment later I saw what was going on and laughed. Against the backdrop of blue-green mushroom light were the silhouettes of two raccoons, one foraging in Cassie’s trough, the other one perched on the roof of the shed, lifting its voice to chatter an emphatic warning. Cassie herself was inside the shed, probably sleeping and oblivious to this theft of her scraps. There were usually raccoons all over the place around here, but I hadn’t seen any trace of wildlife since the mushrooms took over.

I’d never been happier to see an oversized rat. If raccoons were holding out, maybe there was hope.

The raccoon in the trough climbed out, turning its head to look at us with contempt. It wasn’t afraid of us. It took its time waddling away, too, although from the size of its bottom, I’m not sure it could have run if it had to. It disappeared into the trees, and its little watchdog scampered after it.

“I like living here,” Brian said in a whisper.

“Me too,” I said.

Dad was up first and got the fire going again. I unwrapped the last apple and fed it to Cassie, who responded with a surprised grunt when she found the sweet buttery mess in the middle. Mom brought us a box of donuts and thermoses full
of coffee and cocoa. I filled my tin cup with half of each and grabbed two donuts. That was my idea of a good breakfast.

We lingered until late in the morning. Mom hunched by the fire, holding her coffee. Dad strummed his guitar, and Brian played Cassie’s favorite game, Feed the Pig Another Donut, until the box was empty. I poked at the fire and thought about everything. It was all going to fall apart pretty soon. Dad would move back to Boston. Brian would go back to being bratty. I might go to reform school. On top of all that, the mushrooms would continue to spread through town. The cords were sprawling out beneath us, making their way into the foundations and walls of our houses. The fungus could make the ground give way, the walls crumble—even if it didn’t rise up from the earth and devour us all.

When Dad started pulling tent pegs to roll up the tent and go home, Brian cried.

Dad and Brian went on a bug hunt. Dad thought it sounded like a blast.

“I can go too,” I offered.

“You’re supposed to be taking it easy,” Dad said, which was fine with me. I relaxed in the living room and found a college game on TV. Mom settled down in the armchair with a historical novel.

“You’re not working today?” I asked.

“It’s Saturday,” she said, as if that answered the question.

A moment later she got a call and went into the kitchen. I heard “She’s not supposed to have a phone,” and that was about it. I guessed it was more about Mandy. She wasn’t supposed to have a phone at school, and now they’d figured out that she did. Next time I saw her, I’d give her a warning. In fact, I should probably try to do that right now.

I put my shoes on and headed for the door.

“I’m going to feed Cassie!” I shouted, since I was supposed to be grounded. Mom waved at me from the kitchen, the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear. She didn’t remember I’d just been there.

I didn’t know where to look. Maybe Mandy was at Michelle’s? The house had been as quiet as a graveyard last night, but it wasn’t like she’d crank up loud music and turn on all the lights.

Michelle’s jeep was parked in the driveway. I guessed that Mandy wasn’t there.

“Eric!” Michelle hollered out of one of the kitchen windows. “Come on in—we need to talk.” She waved me toward the back door. I wished she hadn’t seen me. I was pretty sure what she wanted to talk about.

She’d made iced tea, and she poured me a glass as soon as I came in.

“How were the bears?” I grabbed a chair at the kitchen table.

“I didn’t see any to ask,” she said. “Usually they’re at the birches around this time, but it’s been so warm, the bears might be confused.”

“Sorry.”

“So what happened while I was gone?”

“Huh?”

“It looks like somebody’s been living here. The refrigerator’s been raided, and there was a pile of blankets on the couch.”

“Oh.” What could I say? That I was hungry? That I felt sick and took a nap?

Michelle must have seen the wheels turning in my mind.

“It wasn’t you. There are long black hairs in the shower.” She ran her hands through her own hair, which was short and gray.

“What happened, Eric?”

I took a swallow of tea to stall for time. It tasted fruity, like peach or mango or something. I didn’t like it.

“Eric?”

“This girl broke in,” I said. “I told her to leave but I think she came back.” She might have run off through the woods when Michelle’s jeep pulled into the driveway. No time to clean up or put things the way she found them. “She ran away from Alden. She’s nice. She helped me take care of Cassie and I felt bad for her. I’m really sorry.”

“Did you think about calling the police?”

“I thought about it.…”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I mean, you really did take the best care of Cassie that you could have, but this is my home, Eric. I can’t tell you how it feels to have a stranger living in my home. And what’s worse is you didn’t think about
her
. Who knows what will happen to her?”

“I’m really sorry,” I said again.

“I’ll take over all the pig duties for now,” she said. “I’m not really mad at you, Eric, but maybe you’re too young for this much responsibility.”

“You mean I’m fired?”

“Let’s call it an indefinite leave of absence,” she said.

I left without finishing my tea.

Maybe Michelle had gotten back in the nick of time, if they were about to nab Mandy by tracking down her phone. Where would Mandy go next? I should have gotten her phone number. Of course if I had it, I’d call to tell her not to use her phone, and that would make no sense.

The only thing I could think of was the library, but she wasn’t there. I checked the computer area, then walked through the stacks. It’s a small library, and it didn’t take long. There was no trace of Mandy.

I left the library feeling a little knot of dread in my stomach. I didn’t especially want to go home. Even though Mom and Dad had made up, there was a bad vibe in the house. Not to mention fungus crawling up through the floorboards.

I glanced at the football field and remembered Brian’s carving. He’d said he’d looked for it, but I could look too.

The mushrooms there had gotten tall on the field and tickled my ankles. I had to separate the caps with my hands and peer down between the stems. I started at the goalpost I’d smashed into and worked from there in widening circles until I gave up on the end zone and tried to retrace my path after the fumble. I finally found the carving in a clump of mushrooms under the bench where I’d sat for a few seconds before they’d taken me to the hospital.

It was broken. Not in half, but the head was tilted sideways. Some dust spilled out of the neck, like maybe it was rotting from the inside out. I tried to gently straighten the head, but it was permanently skewed. I’d thought of the little guy as grim before, but with his head cocked he looked a little sly.

I took the long way home. I didn’t want to walk through woods full of mushrooms and was in no hurry to get back. On the way I heard the
chop-chop-chop
of a helicopter and looked up, wondering if it was a police helicopter searching
for Mandy. It had a big 5 on it, the news station out of Bangor. Tanglewood was going to be on the news for something. The copter whirled out of town and into the woods. Of course—the fungus was going to be on the news.

Brian was playing Gninjas.

“Turn that off. I want to watch the news.”

“I was here first.”

“Come on, Bri. Tanglewood is going to be on!”

“Oh, all right.” He turned it off and started out of the room.

“Don’t you want to watch?”

“Nah.”

“Wait, I have something for you.…” I found the broken carving in my pocket and handed it to him. “Sorry, it’s a little messed up. I lost it during the game.”

He looked at it sadly and tried to straighten the head but couldn’t.

“I’m really sorry,” I said again.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Things break.” He went slowly up the stairs, still playing with the head and tapping out dust onto the steps.

I turned the TV to channel 5 but had to sit through some other stuff about an upcoming referendum, layoffs in Portland, and a house fire in Presque Isle before they showed our own neighborhood getting smothered by fungus. You couldn’t see individual caps. It was a giant spongy mass taking up an acre of woods and spilling into town.

“Next: A small town in Hamlin County has a
mushrooming
problem … with mushrooms,” the news guy said. They went to a commercial break.

I had to sit through four or five ads before they came back, again showing the aerial footage of Tanglewood.

“What you see here is a
whole
lot of mushrooms,” the anchorman said, dragging out the word “whole,” sounding like a game show host. At that point Dad came in and said something about dinner.

“I’m watching the news.” I pointed at the TV.

“And it’s not even the sports segment,” he said in surprise.

The news now showed a reporter talking to a neighbor from down the street, Mr. McNeil. “They’re a serious problem,” he said. He had a furrow in his brow the size of a canyon. “We can’t get rid of them, and now they’re in our house.” There were snippets of interviews with half a dozen other people, all of them complaining about the mushrooms.