The Tanglewood Terror (14 page)

The phone rang, and Dad answered it. He hollered for Mom to come and get it. Why did everyone in the house have to make a racket the one time I was watching the news?

Dad joined me after handing the phone to Mom.

“Hey, that’s Tanglewood!”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m watching.” I moved over on the couch so he could join me.

The last guy they showed was the grumpy guy who owned the hardware store. “I think we ought to spray ’em with every kind of pesticide and herbicide we got until they go away,” he said, waving his hand to show that he had plenty of both on the shelf behind him.

“Wouldn’t that kill the trees?” the reporter asked.

“Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” he said.

They switched back to the news anchor. “Some tempers flaring up in Hamlin County, but we are told the mushrooms will all go away after the first frost. Well, they might be disappointed by the weather report, which is next. But stay tuned, because we still haven’t told you the most amazing part of this story, and it’ll be easier to show you than tell you.”

We sat through the weather and sports and a story about this lady’s 104th birthday party and another batch of commercials to see the mushrooms at night.

“As promised, here’s another look at those mushrooms in Hamlin County,” the anchor finally said. “Sorry for the suspense, but we needed to wait for sunset.”

It was pretty amazing, I have to admit. The fungus looked like a squid in an inky black sea. There was a black circle in the middle of the squid like a Cyclops eye. I knew it had to be the clearing where Brian and I had seen the mushrooms for the first time. The area was black now because the core had sucked all the nutrients out of the wood and the soil. Maybe that eye would get wider and wider as the fungus fed, eventually leaving nothing but a scar where Tanglewood and the surrounding woods used to be.

It did look kind of like a monster, but it wasn’t really a monster, not the way Max Bailey drew it. It was worse: stupid and relentless and sneaky, slithering around beneath us where we couldn’t even get at it without ripping the town
apart. It would be better if it did rise up and fight—fight like a real monster.

Mom was still on the phone when we sat down to eat our tuna casserole.

“I thought you went veg,” I said to Dad.

“I eat a little fish,” he said. “Anyway, you kids need your protein.”

We ate without talking much. We were halfway through dinner by the time Mom came into the kitchen.

“Well, we found Amanda,” she said. “She’s fine.”

I dropped my fork with a clank. It was probably best Mandy wasn’t practically homeless anymore, but I wondered how much they knew.

“Oh, that’s great news,” said Dad. “That’s awesome.”

“Yeah, that’s great,” I said. I retrieved my fork. “How did they figure out where she was? Did they find clues and track her down, or did somebody just turn her in? Did she have accomplices?”

“What’s your sudden interest in all this?” she asked.

“I was curious how they find people. It’s like a cop show, only real.”

“Well, I don’t know all the details,” she said. “The important thing is that she’s fine. I have to go in.” She looked at the cold tuna casserole. “I’ll grab something on the road.”

“That’s a huge relief,” said Dad. “Huge.”

Brian jumped up from the table and ran up to his room,
shutting the door with a little
thwunk
we could hear in the kitchen.

“What’s wrong with him?” Dad said.

“I don’t know,” I said, which wasn’t true. Dad had said he was staying until the Mandy crisis blew over. Now he was going to go back to Boston.

I finished Ms. Bearish’s casserole and hoped she wasn’t being too mean to Mandy.

An hour later there were cars cruising up and down our street, some pulling off and getting out of their cars to take pictures. We had folks trampling through our yards to get to the woods. I could hear Sparky from next door barking at the strangers as they trod across his territory.

“We’re a tourist attraction all of a sudden,” Dad said, watching people cross the lawn.

“More like a freak show,” I said.

I slept until nearly noon on Sunday. Dad was sitting in the family room, paging through the book of Max Bailey stories. I must have left it on the coffee table.

“Are you reading these stories?” he asked.

“Um, yeah.” I actually hadn’t read any yet, I realized. “I’m going to, anyway. A friend at school recommended them.”

“Good stuff,” he said. “Hey, want some waffles?”

“Sure!”

Brian came bounding down the stairs.

“Can I play Gninjas?” he asked.

“Just be quiet,” said Dad. “Your mom got home really late. Do you want some waffles? Because I’m making waffles.”

“I ate
hours
ago,” said Brian.

As we ate, Dad flipped through the newspaper and found the TV schedule. He told me the Pats were playing the Tennessee Titans at four o’clock.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Aren’t you usually all over this stuff?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. I had a lot more on my mind these days.

“I make a pretty good veggie chili,” he said. “I can get it going in time for kickoff. We can watch one of the early games, too. I thought we could make a day of it. Football and food. A day for the guys.”

“Sounds good.”

I rummaged through the paper myself, looking for the sports section. I found the front section first, with a color picture of the woods at night riddled with blue-green mushrooms similar to the image from the TV news the night before.
AN EERIE AUTUMN
, the headline said. The story was about the woods, not the town—the dying trees and missing animals. I forgot all about the sports section and read the whole story. It was hard to get excited about the game when there was a fungus preparing to suck all the life out of the woods and maybe the town. It made me feel sick to my stomach, and it made me even sicker that people might go do more damage just to take care of it. They didn’t have the guy from the hardware store in the article, but they had other people saying the same thing. Burn down the woods, spray them with poison, or rip up the ground. What was wrong with people?

I took the newspaper out to the family room, still hating the squishy mushrooms under the carpet.

As luck would have it, Brian was in one of the parts of the video game where mushrooms turned into monsters, one after another—swelling up and storming about until Brian’s Gninja hacked them to pieces.

I should be doing something about the fungus, but what? Nobody knew. The article explained that. The reporter
had interviewed some guy named Kowalski from the forestry department at the university in Orono. He talked about how frustrating it was. They couldn’t roll in heavy machinery, ripping up the trees and churning up the ground, because they were trying to
save
the woods. He said that antifungal sprays were dangerous for the plants and animals and ineffective on
Armillaria mellea
, which was the scientific name for the honey fungus. The forestry professor took the same line as everyone else: we just had to wait for the first frost.

Brian eradicated the monsters, paused the game, and went to the menu. A moment later he was back in action. He was replaying the mushroom level over and over. It probably felt good. It was satisfying just to watch.

The last paragraph of the article sent my old pal the icy centipede skittering down my spine.

I remembered what Mandy had said at the museum: “They keep coming back.” The mushrooms do, that is. The fungus has been here all along.

Brian turned off the game. “I’m going to Allan’s!” he announced, and left through the back door. The video game was off, and the TV was hissing static. The one o’clock game had started, but I didn’t care.

I wanted to talk to Mandy. She’d been putting the pieces together and might know what to do. I didn’t believe in the mushroom monster—but then, a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed a fungus could live for thousands of years.

Besides wanting to talk to her, I felt bad for Mandy. It wasn’t my fault she ran away, and it wasn’t my fault she got caught, but I felt partly responsible for her.

I popped into the kitchen, where Dad was stirring furiously at a pot, a few open cans of diced tomatoes on the counter.

“Browning the onions,” he said. “It’s going to be so good!”

“Do we have any Fritos?” I asked.

“Nope. Sorry.”

“I like Fritos with my chili.”

“You know what? So do I.” He leaned the wooden spoon against the side of the pot, reached for his wallet, and handed me a five. “Do you think you can get back before kickoff?”

“Sure thing.”

“Cool. Very cool.” He grabbed for the garlic press.

I got my bike and pedaled madly down the street, making my way to the highway. At first there were mushrooms thick
on my side of the highway, up the shoulder, with little jagged rows edging into the cracks in the asphalt. I plowed right through them. They petered out and disappeared at the Tanglewood city line, and after that it was smooth sailing.

I had a brisk tailwind, and it was an easy ride except for a few hills. There was a lot of traffic for a Sunday, and all of it going one way—probably more people headed up to see the amazing, spectacular, giant, run-amok fungus. They were missing out if they saw the mushrooms only during the daytime.

There was a long, gradual incline that wore me out a bit. I stopped at the top to catch my breath. Dad was probably wondering when I’d be back with the Fritos. How long would I be gone before he got really worried? How long before I got into trouble?

Well, I was going to be in trouble. There was no way around that, at least if Mom woke up before I got back. I would think of something. Excuses weren’t hard to come by. I could get a flat tire or something. The chain could break on my bike. I could find a loose dog and take him home.

I looked back down the hill and saw two tiny bicyclers in the distance, making their way up the hill, standing on the pedals with every pump to put their weight into it. One wobbled and fell. It was Brian.

I spun my own bike around and rode back down the hill, already dreading the fact that I’d just have to ride up again. I braked hard when I reached the bottom. Brian was up but walking a slow circle to shake off the sting of the fall. Allan was straddling his bike, trying to catch his breath.

“What are you two doing?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” said Brian. “Riding our bikes.”

“You’re following me.”

“No, we’re not!”

“Well, turn around and go home. I don’t want company.”

I rode back up the hill, stopping again to catch my breath. The second time was even harder than the first. I looked down the hill and saw Brian and Allan still standing at the bottom. I waved my arm toward Tanglewood and yelled.

“Go home!”

My words were carried away by the wind, but Brian and Allan started pedaling slowly toward home.

I moved on, going right past the sign for Alden Academy. A little bit farther I found a trail into the woods and stopped, made sure the coast was clear, and plunged in. It was a rocky trail, but I have a mountain bike with a tough frame, thick wheels, and a fixed gear so the chain wouldn’t get knocked loose. I tried to keep my bearings as I twisted and turned on the path. I caught sight of a stately building, went off the trail, and locked my bike to a tree.

Mom had been working at Alden for years, but I’d never actually seen it. It looked more like a big house than a school and was surrounded by an eleven-foot-high fence. I hadn’t thought about a fence.

I didn’t think I’d find a garden gnome with a key in it, but I looked anyway. I walked around the school, keeping hidden in the trees. There was a back gate locked tight with a chain and padlocks. The front had an automatic gate and a gatehouse that looked empty. During the week there was
probably a guard, but I guessed that on weekends the staff swiped a card at the box by the gate.

I was trying to figure out a way to get in when Brian came pedaling slowly up the driveway and stowed his bike in the trees on the other side. He didn’t see me and I didn’t want to shout. I picked up a pinecone and lobbed it at him, missing by a good ten feet. I’m not a quarterback. It was enough to get his attention. I sprinted across the driveway.

“I told you to go home,” I whispered.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” he whispered back.

“Yes I can. I’m your big brother.”

“No you can’t!”

I knew from experience we could go back and forth like that for an hour. I didn’t have the heart to fight with him, anyway. He’d skinned his palms and ripped his jeans when he fell off his bike, and he looked pathetic.