The Tanglewood Terror (25 page)

“I wonder if anyone has heard of Occam’s razor?” She wrote it on the board. Nobody raised their hand. Randy almost did but took it back.

“It’s a theory that when you don’t know the answer, the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true,” she said. “It’s not always the right answer, but it’s the best guess. For example, if you’re missing a quarter and discover there’s a hole in your pocket, what do you think happened? Did somebody steal it?”

“No, you probably lost it,” Randy answered.

“Exactly,” the teacher said. “That’s the biggest secret in science. A lot of it isn’t about knowing the right answer, just making the best guess.”

A few kids snickered.

“Well, the simplest explanation for what happened on Friday night was that some feedback from the speakers spooked the audience and started a stampede. It’s
possible
the mushrooms were screaming, but that would mean a whole new species of fungus had come along that had powers beyond any fungus we’ve ever seen. It’s a lot to believe, compared to believing that people simply made a mistake, isn’t it? Especially when there was lots of chaos and confusion?”

I raised my hand this time but didn’t wait for her to
call on me. “So what is the simplest explanation for the red mushrooms on the football field, if it isn’t that some of the mushrooms changed color? Because that seems like the simplest explanation to me.”

From across the room Tony held up his hand in a make-believe high five.

“The simplest explanation is that the red ones are a different species of mushroom,” the teacher said, extending her hands to me like she was handing me a big ball of obviousness.

If she was right, the red mushrooms were in a real battle for control of the football field, from end zone to end zone, sideline to sideline. The old ones were yellowish white in the daytime, but the red ones were still orangey and bright, their pointed tops looking like tongues of flame, higher and brighter than the yellow ones. The whole field looked like a lake of toasting marshmallows. If people were scared of the green ones, the red ones would really put them into a panic. It would look like a flood of fire pouring into town. That’s what the picture in the museum showed, too—red and blue mushrooms mingling, the townspeople screaming and waving their arms.

I felt like there was something there I wasn’t seeing. It had something to do with the football field turning red and Max Bailey’s story and what my science teacher said about the razor rule. The truth was like the fungus itself, the caps appearing aboveground like separate things, but they were all connected underground and I couldn’t see how. I needed
to find the dead center of the problem and dig it up, but I didn’t know where the center was.

Dad was packing already. Boxing up his books and carrying them up the basement stairs, because this time the move was permanent.

“Just trying to get some of this stuff taken care of now,” he said, dropping a box in the hallway.

“Don’t forget your Max Bailey book,” I told him. “I think it’s still in the living room.”

“Did you finish it?”

“Nope.” I’d actually only read one Max Bailey story, and that one wasn’t even in the book.

“Go ahead and finish it. You can pack it with your things. You’re coming with me, remember? You might want to get a head start on stuff too, you know.” He tousled my hair and went back downstairs.

Oh, yeah. I didn’t think we were moving right away. For some reason I thought we’d wait until after the school year, even though nobody said so. But Dad was going to move back to Boston, and Bri and I were going to join him as soon as he found a place.

Allan came down the stairs, looking a little thoughtful. He was wearing a dust mask dangling around his neck.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m moving,” he said. “I was just saying goodbye to Brian.”

“He must be bummed,” I said. “I am too.” I meant it. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning. I’m going to spend the rest of the school year in Portland living with my grandma.”

“Wow.”

“Allergies,” he reminded me. “The mushrooms are worse than ever.”

“I know. That’s a drag. Hey, if you’re back this summer, let’s play HORSE.”

“You’re moving too,” he reminded me. I’d forgotten for a second, and remembering made me feel a little lurch in my stomach.

I noticed he had the Celtics keychain I’d seen in Brian’s drawer.

“Going-away present?”

“It’s mine,” he said. “I lost it in the trough and Brian kept forgetting to give it back to me.”

“The what?”

“I just mean I lost it and Brian found it.”

“You lost your keys in the trough? You mean Cassie’s trough? How did that happen?”

“It was nothing,” he said. He started for the door and turned back. “I’m really sorry about what happened to Cassie, and so is Brian.”

“Huh? What happened to Cassie?”

“You know.” He hung his head and told me.

Brian was in his room, watching his hedgehogs nibble at wheat-colored nuggets.

“No bugs?”

“Sometimes they eat hedgehog food,” he said.

I watched one of them pick up a pellet with its weird little hands and chisel it down with its pointy teeth. It was kind of cool to watch when it wasn’t a bug.

“They remind me of Cassie,” I said.

“There’s a reason they’re called hedgehogs,” he said.

“Oh, yeah.” I waited a bit, not sure how to edge into this topic. “So are you going to miss Allan?”

He shrugged slowly, but there was a lot of sadness in it.

“He just told me you guys were there the night I fought with Randy.”

“What?” He looked up at me in what I took to be completely fake astonishment. “He said that?”

“He said you told Tom to do it.”

“Allan’s a rat fink,” he muttered.

“I think you’re the rat,” I said. “You didn’t stand up for
Allan. He said he tried to stop them when Cassie got upset, and they threw him in the trough.”

“They were just kidding around. He didn’t get hurt.”

“Brian …” I didn’t think he was the kind of kid who’d just stand there while a friend was bullied. “You should have stood up for him,” I said again.

“It wasn’t like I could stop them,” he added. His voice cracked and he started crying. “I told Allan I was sorry. I was scared. They were bigger than me and there were more of them.”

I understood that part, but not what led up to it.

“Why would you put yourself into that mess, Bri? You like Cassie.”

“I know.” He sniffed and reached into the terrarium for one of the hedgies. “You can do something to Digger if you want.” He held the hedgehog out to me.

“Brian, that’s the last thing I want to do.” I laughed at Digger’s stunned expression, like she knew she’d been offered up in sacrifice.

“I didn’t think it would turn out like that,” he said, putting Digger back in the terrarium. “It was supposed to be a joke.”

“Not after they dumped Allan in the trough. Not after Cassie started freaking out.”

“Okay. Maybe I thought you would start a fight and they would beat you up.”

“You wanted guys to beat me up?”

“Not bad. Just a little.”

“Brian—” I was about to ask why, but I didn’t. I had enough pictures in my head: the make-believe piledriver,
pinning him on the bed, shoving him all the time, and ordering him around. I’d put him headfirst into the laundry basket, tossed him on the couch from across the room, and a hundred other things. I’d never actually hurt him, but thinking back on it all made me want to beat myself up a little.

“I’m sorry, buddy.”

“You always say that.”

“What if I let you punch me right now?” I asked. “You can hit me as hard as you can? Just not in the face or the crotch?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Seriously. I have it coming. You can just haul off and sock me once. I won’t fight back. I deserve it.”

“I don’t want to right now,” he said. “Can I wait until the next time I’m really mad at you?”

“Okay,” I agreed, but maybe that was a bad idea. I’d seen the steely-eyed way Brian drove that shovel into the fungal core. I’d better not get on his bad side ever again.

We went to see Howard on Saturday. I still had the manuscript, and I was hoping Mandy had left behind a way to contact her. Brian insisted on coming with me. We pedaled out on the highway. The woods were too overtaken with mushrooms.

We knew Howard was home because the quad was parked in the backyard, but we had to bang on the back door for a long time before she answered.

“Oh, it’s you two.” She opened the door so we could come in. “I thought maybe the police were back. They called me everything from a kidnapper to an accomplice.”

“Did you get arrested?” Brian asked. “Eric got arrested a while ago!”

“Bah, I just kept asking if they’d seen Missy Speckle Nose, and if they did see her, could they bring her home.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Missy was a cat I had about twenty-five years ago. She was a real sweetheart. But nothing scares a man like a daffy old lady talking about her cats. They cleared out of here quicker than if I’d set the place on fire. How’s Mandy?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you knew how to get ahold of her.”

“Sorry,” said Howard. “She’s a good kid. Sharp as a tack. I hope she’s all right.”

“Me too.”

“Do you want some stew?”

“Sure.” I’d braced myself for some.

“Me too,” said Brian.

“How are the mushrooms?” she asked as she got down a couple of cans of Maggie Dunne.

“Worse than ever,” said Brian.

I told her about the green mushrooms and the red mushrooms. She nodded a couple of times.

“So that’s what God’s wrath is,” she said. “My pa never did figure it out.”

“Huh?”

“Those red ones,” she said. “You said yourself they looked like flames creeping out across the field.”

“They do.”

“So is devil’s fire the blue ones?” Brian asked.

“That’s what Pa thought, but he never got the other part straight. He thought the wrath and fire were the same thing. That’s why he struggled so much with the story. He knew he had parts of it right, but it came out all wrong. Did you bring that manuscript back?”

“Yeah.” I showed her the pages. “I was hoping I could see the rest of it.”

“I’m not sure what else there is, but you can poke around while I make stew. You’ve read that much. You might as well see the rest, if there is any.”

I did poke around, and it was easier to do now that all the stories were neatly collated and labeled. There was nothing more about Keatston among the ghastly woodland vapors and sloth monsters in the unpublished works of Max Bailey.

“You saw the mushrooms before, didn’t you?” I blurted out once the stew was on the table.

“I was really little at the time, but I saw them,” Howard said. “They covered the woods like a blanket but didn’t go into town. Pa thought they were fascinating.”

“What happened to those mushrooms?” Brian asked. “Did they turn into a monster and then your father killed it?”

She laughed. “It snowed about a foot, and then it got cold. Bitter cold—the kind that takes the skin right off your nose. That put an end to it, but I think Pa was sorry those mushrooms didn’t turn into a monster. He wanted to see what they’d do next. He’d heard rumors.…” She remembered her stew and ate some, letting her half sentence hang in the air like a ten-day-old helium balloon. “He spent the rest of his life trying to dig up history. What happened to Keatston,
and another outbreak in the 1800s nobody ever wrote about, but Pa heard stories from old folks who remembered. That one took a few houses, but nobody was living in them.”

“We might lose our house,” said Brian. “Dad keeps killing mushrooms, but they keep coming back.”

“Pa had pots full of fertilizer and fungi going all over the basement, trying to grow his own monster mushrooms. I moved out as soon as I was old enough. Don’t really care to remember him at the end.”

“He was a good man,” I said. I remembered her saying that.

“He just wanted to do something profound and important,” she said. “Nobody took his writing seriously enough. He wanted them to take him seriously. He wanted them to take what he was doing seriously, him and all his friends … looking at the edge of the unknown, he would say. It was a good cause, but he wasn’t much fun to be around.”

I thought about Dad puttering around in the basement with his guitar. I glanced at Brian and guessed he was thinking about the same thing.

“Pa said that science would always outdo the imagination,” said Howard. “The mushrooms were proof of it—something scarier than any made-up monster, but real. His masterpiece was going to be a work of science and history, he said. A nonfiction horror story.”

“I like the part I read,” I said. “I don’t know how true it is, though.”

“Probably not very,” said Howard. “Pa was mixed up about the fire and the wrath. What else does that picture say?”

“ ‘The seeds of redemption are in the people,’ ” said
Brian. I wondered if he was the smart kid in his class who knew all the answers. “It says that the devil’s fire may burn again and that God’s wrath will purify the earth and the seeds of redemption are in the people.”