The Tanglewood Terror Read online

  The crawl space went ten feet to a drop-off.

  “Hello?” I called out. We were in complete blackness.

  “Just drop,” said Mandy. “It’s only a few feet.”

  I twisted around and backed off the ledge, dropping to a cement floor with a twinge in my ankles. A moment later I heard the clang of the metal plate falling onto the laundry room floor. Somebody would find it and figure out how we escaped, but hopefully we’d be long gone by then.

  “What is this place?” Brian asked, his voice echoing against the walls.

  “The old sewer,” Mandy’s voice echoed. She sounded farther away. I heard a click. “Drat! The battery is dead.”

  “Maybe it’s for the best,” I told her. “I think they tracked you down through the phone.”

  “Nobody knows I have it,” she said. “It’s totally safe.”

  “They did track you down, though. And I heard my mom say something about it just before—”

  “Crud!” She hurled the phone against the cement wall, and we heard it clatter in the dark. “Double crud,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’ll never find it in here.”

  “It’s probably broke anyway,” Brian said. I think he was trying to be helpful.

  “It probably was my phone,” said Mandy. “I was at the library all day, but I went out to call my parents and tell them I was still fine. I was hoping nobody would be home on a Saturday afternoon and I could just leave a message, and nobody was. The police showed up before I could finish. I thought somebody at the library saw me.”

  “Come on—let’s get out of here,” I said. “Do we just keep going straight?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “At least we can’t get lost in here. It’s just one big tube.”

  There was only a trickle of water, but my feet got damp and cold right away, even with all the socks. The pipe was big, but I had to walk hunched over, and my back started to ache.

  “This sewer hasn’t been used in a hundred years,” Mandy said when we were farther along in the darkness. “I looked up a building abstract on the state housing website, then did some creative Googling to find out the original plans, which are part of the architectural library at Columbia University. I had to chat up this geeky college student to get a log-in to their digital repository, but I finally got the blueprint. This was somebody’s house before it was a school, and it had its own water system. Eventually the owners tapped into the town’s water supply, because it existed by then. But the old system was still here. It was pointed the wrong way for the town’s sewer system, but nobody’s ever filled it in. They never capped it either, or I would have had to turn around and go back.”

  “How did you even know to look for that?” I asked her.

  “I didn’t know what I was looking for,” she said. “I got the idea from Sherlock Holmes. Actually, his older, smarter brother.”

  “He has one?” Brian asked.

  “Yes. Mycroft Holmes. He never goes outside, but there’s a story where he solves a mystery by looking at a blueprint for a building. When I read that, I got the idea to find the blueprint for the school and see if there was anything I could use.”

  We reached the end of the sewer pipe and stepped into a shallow gully among thick brush. There was a glimmer of late afternoon visible above the trees, but it would be dark soon. Evening comes fast in the woods.

  The ditch probably used to be a creek, and that was where the rich people dumped their sewage. Lovely people.

  “That wasn’t fun,” I said, stretching. It felt great after being hunched up in the pipe.

  “I thought it was fun,” said Brian.

  “Hey, we got lucky this time,” Mandy said. “Last time I saw a possum or something in the tunnel.”

  “Aw, I missed it,” said Brian.

  “Well, thanks for rescuing me,” said Mandy. “What now?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. I’d planned on talking to Mandy and biking home, not walking through a sewer pipe and getting dumped off in the middle of the woods. “I didn’t plan on rescuing you. I just thought I’d talk to you.”

  “I was going to rescue you!” said Brian. “And I’m the one who did, because Eric didn’t even bring keys or anything. He wouldn’t have even gotten inside, I bet.”

  “So what was your plan?” I asked him.

  “To go back to Michelle’s house,” he said, then clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “Michelle’s home now,” I told him. “And I already figured out what happened, so don’t worry about it.”

  “You told!” said Brian. I was confused until I realized he was talking to Mandy.

  “I didn’t tell him anything. He just figured it out,” she said. “I’ll start calling him Mycroft. He’s your older, smarter brother.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. It wasn’t that hard to put the pieces together.

  “She was going to sleep in the woods,” said Brian. “That’s the only reason I told her.”

  “Oh, I would have figured out something,” said Mandy.

  When was Mandy going to sleep in the woods? What did Brian tell her? I’d just assumed they’d met at Michelle’s the day after my accident.

  “I didn’t mean to tell her anything,” said Brian. “I didn’t even know she was a runaway. She just asked me if I’d seen some glowing mushrooms, so I showed her where they were and we were talking, and I told her about Cassie and how Michelle was going to take photographs of bears.…”

  “Forget it,” I said. I couldn’t process half of what they were saying, and it didn’t matter. However they met, we were still stuck in the woods now, with no shoes and no way home. I would never find my bike in this darkness, and Brian’s was too close to the front gate of the school. We couldn’t risk searching for it, and we couldn’t all three ride on his little bike.

  “I guess we’ll have to walk home,” I said. “It’ll take about two hours.”

  “It took me three hours before,” said Mandy. “And that was in the daytime. And I had shoes.”

  “Which way is it?” Brian asked.

  “That way.” I pointed north. You could see the glimmer of blue-green mushroom light hovering above the treetops in the distance.

  “Wow,” Mandy said in a whisper. “It’s kind of amazing.”

  “At least they’re good for something,” I said.

  We found the trail to Boise Township and started walking. It was easy to lose track of the trail in the dark, and we had to stop sometimes to pick out the pine needles that had worked their way into our socks. It was a downright miserable hike.

  I puzzled over what Brian and Mandy had just been talking about. He’d showed her the mushrooms, but when? By the time I’d met Mandy, they weren’t hard to find, but that was a couple of days after she ran away. She must have met Brian first. Brian had been off in the woods that afternoon, after the haunted house.

  It was clear now: Mandy met Brian and asked him if he’d seen the glowing mushrooms. He took her to them, babbling like Brian does sometimes, and tipped Mandy off about Michelle’s vacant house—the easiest house in town for a stranger to find, because it was the one with a pig. She found the house, found the key, and let herself in. It was no big deal, but I was impressed Brian was able to keep the whole thing a secret. For a kid who couldn’t shut up, he could keep a secret.

  “I’m hungry,” said Brian.

  “You think you’re hungry?” I said. “What about me?”

  “I’m more tired than hungry,” said Mandy.

  We weren’t even halfway home, and the second leg would be harder than the first.

  “Keep on keeping on,” I said.

  “Okay, Coach,” said Mandy.

  We walked on toward the blue-green light until we heard a low, growly noise in the distance.

  “Great. It’s a bear,” said Brian.

  “Or maybe a moose,” I said. “Either way, I’m eating it.”

  “Moose don’t growl,” said Mandy.

  “How do you know?
Have you ever heard one?”

  A moment later a machine broke through the trees. It was about a hundred years old, with high, narrow tires and a blocky frame. It looked like a prehistoric ATV. Perched on top, wearing aviator glasses and white leather gloves, was an old woman waving a flashlight. She nudged the goggles back, and I recognized her immediately.

  It was the witch.

  It was the witch from the haunted house, the creepy way-too-believable one who had scared me to tears when I was a little kid. She had to be a real witch, too, showing up in the middle of the woods at night on a contraption that looked like she’d made it with witch magic out of a stove and a baby carriage.

  “You ran away from the school,” she said. She pointed the flashlight beam in Mandy’s face, then in Brian’s. “You didn’t. They don’t take boys.” She came to me last, the light lingering on my face. I squinted against the light. “You look familiar. Do you work at the five-and-dime?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m from Tanglewood.”

  “I just went up to look at your mushrooms,” she said. “Read about them in the newspaper and decided to go see.”

  “The newspaper said they’ll go away after the first frost.”

  “They probably will,” she said. “I don’t think I ever saw mushrooms after a frost. Anyway, if you don’t want to be lost anymore, you can come to my house. I can only take one of you on the quad, but it’s not far.”

  “Um. No thanks,” Mandy told her.

  “Me too,” I agreed.

  “I’ll go,” said Brian. He climbed up in the seat before I could stop him.

  “Come on, Bri. We don’t even know this person.”

  “She’s just an old lady,” said Brian.

  “If you two want stew and shoes, follow the quad.” The witch cranked the wheel to get her machine turned around, and chugged on into the woods.

  “Brian, get back here!”

  He didn’t. There was nothing to do but hurry after them, following the single red taillight through the dark, stumbling over stones and roots as we tried to keep up.

  Mandy tripped and went sprawling, and I turned back to help. By the time I’d helped her up, the red light had vanished. We followed the trail for another quarter of a mile before we landed in the backyard of a clapboard house.

  “I’m getting a Blair Witch vibe from this whole thing,” Mandy said.

  “Seriously,” I agreed, although I’d never heard of that particular witch. “I half expected the house to be made of gingerbread.”

  We went up the steps and found the back door open. Brian was at the kitchen table, and the witch lady was spooning coffee into a kettle.

  “Borrow some shoes if you want,” she said. She pointed at a row of L.L. Bean boots. “I buy up factory seconds at the outlet store. I want one pair for every kind of Maine weather, but I still need a dozen more to get through the average day.” She cackled at her own joke. The cackling was not helping me think of her as a harmless old woman and not a witch. I wanted to check out the cupboards to see if she had a lot of eyes of newt and powdered bat wings.

  Brian was already wearing some snow mocs that looked comfy but also girly, with a ruff of fleece around the ankle.

  “You might as well be wearing the pink pom-pom socks,” I said. He ignored me.

  I found a pair of plain brown boots that were probably lady boots too, but they fit okay. Mandy took a pair of waders that went up to her knees.

  “Going fly-fishing?” I asked her.

  “I think they’re stylin’,” she said.

  “I want all those boots back,” the old woman said.

  “Of course.”

  The coffee kettle started gurgling, and the woman opened the cupboard. That was my chance to snoop, but all I saw were rows and rows of Maggie Dunne beef stew. The woman opened two and dumped them into a pot, then added a can or so of tap water.

  “This is an old family recipe,” she said with a cackle. I wished she’d stop cackling. I was glad that she wasn’t bustling about adding pinches of this and that from mysterious jars, anyway—the stew was probably safe.

  “So how did you get out of the Llewellan place?” she asked Mandy.

  “The what place?” Brian asked around a mouthful of cracker. He’d been digging into a box of saltines.

  “She means Alden,” said Mandy. “That’s who the mansion belonged to, way back when.”

  Brian didn’t die on the spot, so I took a couple of crackers myself.

  “I started as the Llewellans’ cook at the end of World War II and stayed on as the school cook after the place changed hands. They made me retire in the 1990s, so I must have been there almost forty years.”

  “It’s more like fifty years,” said Mandy.

  “Well, I never was good with numbers.” She got a bright blue flame going on the stove and stirred the stew a little. “Did you escape through the old sewer pipe?”

  “How did you guess?” Mandy asked.

  “Girls used to come and go through that thing all the time. They’d meet boys as far away as Portland and still get back before daybreak. I never told anyone. Figured it wasn’t my business to tell them anything if it wasn’t about the kitchen.”

  She looked at the coffee kettle, saw it was still gurgling, and stirred the stew some more. “You picked a strange way to do it, though, walking through an old sewer with no shoes.”

  “It wasn’t exactly planned,” Mandy explained.

  The coffee and stew had the same thickness when she was done, but I gobbled up my bowl in less than a minute. It wasn’t great, but it was made of food, and that was good enough for me. I wondered if this was the sort of thing she made when she was a cook at that school, or if she got so sick of cooking she went for the easy stuff now.

  “What’s that thing you were driving?” I asked her. “It’s cool.”

  “It’s mostly a Royal Enfield quadricycle, but it’s got a new motor from a 1955 Enfield Bullet. Plus a few other parts here and there. It gets me around.”

  “It reminds me of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” said Mandy.

  “It’s the only wheels I have anymore,” the old woman said. “Thank heavens Sylvester left it for me.”

  “Was that your husband?” Mandy asked.

  “Nah, this old coot who lived here before I did. I bought it back in nineteen …” She screwed up her face. “Well, it was after Pa died and before the Llewellan place got turned into a school.”

  Brian started yawning, and for a moment I worried that we’d all made a bad mistake—that the stew was laced with something after all, or maybe the coffee, and now we’d all three go to sleep and wake up in cages. But the woman had eaten the same stew and drunk the same coffee as we did, and besides that, I felt fine.

  “Can you tell me where the, uh …,” Mandy started to ask. The woman nodded and pointed her to a door. “Through there and to the right.”

  Brian pushed his bowl aside, propped his head up with his hand, and snoozed. Mandy was gone a long time. I wasn’t sure how long, exactly, but it felt long and I started to get worried again. The old woman bustled about like nothing was wrong, washing the dishes (I should have offered to do them, I realized—a weird thought in the middle of wondering whether she was trying to kill us all), then poured another cup of coffee.

  “I have to wash up too,” I told her. I got up and went through another room that led to the bathroom. It was one big room that looked like it was part living room, part office, part dining room, and part attic—it was the combination of a couch, a desk and shelves, an oval table, and dozens of boxes all over the place.

  Mandy was looking with wide eyes at something.

  “Hey.” I nudged her shoulder, and she pointed, her lips moving but not making a word. It was a built-in bookshelf crammed full of books. There were a few hardbacks, a lot of paperbacks, and a stack of magazines on the bottom shelf. They looked old.

  I scanned the spines of the books and saw that every single one was by Max Bailey. I thumb
ed through the magazines, which had faded cover pictures of monsters or spaceships. They each had a list of authors on the cover, and Max Bailey’s name was always among them.

  “All rare volumes and first editions,” Mandy said in a whisper. “Even the Max Bailey collection at the Portland library doesn’t have this much stuff.”

  “Don’t take anything,” I whispered back.

  “What?” She looked appalled that I would even suggest such a thing.

  “Well, you do steal stuff sometimes,” I pointed out.

  “Nothing like this,” she whispered back. “Nothing valuable.”

  “Ah, you’ve found the books.” The woman came to the door. “I don’t even read that stuff. I think life is scary enough without making up ghosts and monsters.”

  “Then why do you have them?” Mandy asked. “Did Sylvester leave these, too?”

  “Nah, those were my pa’s.”

  “This collection is worth a lot. Seriously. You could sell them. Or donate them to a library. Share them with the world.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want them,” the woman said. “I said I didn’t read them.”

  Mandy looked flustered, disappointed, and cross all at the same time.

  “They were my pa’s,” the woman explained. “They mean a lot to me.”

  “Wow, he must have been a really big Max Bailey fan,” said Mandy.

  “Um, I think her father was Max Bailey,” I said.

  “Oh!” Mandy turned and looked, and the woman nodded.

  “He may have written scary stuff, but he was a good man,” she said.

  “I know,” said Mandy hoarsely.

  “Is your name Howard?” I asked her. The biography I’d read said Max Bailey had one child. I’d thought it was a mistake in the book when they said it was a daughter.

  “Yep. Pa’s two favorite writer pals were both named Howard, so he had that name all picked out for his first son. When Ma died in childbirth, he didn’t know if there’d ever be another wife or a son in his life, so he named me Howard.”