The Tanglewood Terror Page 10

  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.

  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 Tan
glewood!”

  “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.

  This is not the first widespread outbreak of Armillaria mellea in Hamlin County, though few residents will remember the last one. That occurred in 1932, when the fungus devastated a hundred acres of forest west of Tanglewood close to the current infection site. Kowalski suggests it may even be the same fungus, as Armillaria is a hardy species that can live for hundreds—even thousands—of years. “The frost typically ends the fruiting, but it doesn’t destroy the fungus,” he said. “This thing may have been around longer than any of us.”

  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.