The Tanglewood Terror (20 page)

What Mr. Keats didn’t get was that the people in town weren’t doing it to be nice. They did it because they were scared. They thought it was better to give Ben what he wanted than to have him sneak into their homes. After Mr. Keats yelled at them, they banded together to take care of Ben once and for all. It was against the puritanical spirit of things, so Mr. Keats pretended he didn’t know about it even though he overheard Alex’s dad talking about it.

It was like a scene out of Frankenstein, all these colonial guys grabbing pitchforks and torches and searching the woods for Benjamin, who ran deeper and deeper into the woods. They finally let him go, but he was so deep in the wilderness, he was completely lost and really alone and scared.

That was the fungal wrath.

Benjamin realized the power of the fungus and moved some of the spores to Keatston, casting them along the ground so they could take root. The townspeople were scared of the mushrooms as soon as they saw them, taking them to be an evil omen or some kind of witchcraft. They tried to destroy them, but the mushrooms kept creeping back in the night. Bailey described the various clumps of fungus fusing together underground, making one enormous monster that got bigger and bigger until it was ready to swallow up the village.

William Keats gathered all the people into the Meetinghouse and swore them protection; they huddled and waited for the fungal wrath to consume them. The ground quaked.…

And that was the last page I had. The manuscript—or at least what I had of it—ended there.

Dad called us down to dinner. Mom wasn’t there, so I guessed that she was busy trying to track down Mandy again. We could hear cars cruising up and down the street. People still wanted to ooh and aah at the glowing mushrooms, but not as many people were parking and running out into the woods. They didn’t need to. The mushrooms were plentiful right along the street.

“Did you get some rest?” Dad asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I can probably go back to school tomorrow.”

“Oh, school is canceled,” he said.

“Really?” I asked. Brian also looked up in surprise.

“We got a call. Some parents have complained about the mushrooms. They think they might be toxic.”

“Cool,” said Brian. “Will they turn us into monsters?”

“No, they’ll just make you sick,” said Dad.

“Only if you eat them,” I said. “Or if you’re allergic.” I remembered Allan’s wheezing. It was probably his parents who complained. I’d have to send them a thank-you card.

“I was only kidding,” said Brian.

“The school board wants the mushrooms tested to make sure they’re safe,” Dad said. “There may not be an immediate effect, but over time … who knows?”

I imagined scientists in coats taking slices of mushroom, dropping chemicals on them with eyedroppers, and putting them under a microscope.

“What if they are toxic?” I asked. “They’re in our house.”

“Then we’ll all move to Boston for a while. It’ll be like a vacation.”

“What about Mom’s job?” asked Brian.

“Everything will be fine,” Dad said, dodging the question.

Mom came home, and I heard her and Dad arguing from up in my room. I couldn’t tell what it was about, but I did hear Dad finally shout out: “You know what, I don’t blame her! If I was stuck at that school, I’d run away too!”

“You mean like you ran away from home?” Mom snapped.

The front door opened and shut, but I didn’t know which one of them was storming out until I heard Mom’s footsteps on the stairs. I heard her talking to Brian, telling him things
were all right, then going to her own bedroom. She didn’t stop and talk to me, but my lights were off. Maybe she figured I’d slept right through the fight. Maybe she thought I was man enough to handle it.

When it got quiet, I went down the stairs in the dark, the mushrooms lighting my path like the runway lights at an airport guiding in an airplane. I’d never actually been on an airplane, but I’d seen scenes like that in movies. The steps seemed creakier than usual. The mushrooms had grown back in the family room but seemed feeble. The light was a sickly yellowish green instead of the usual bluish green. Dad’s battles were helping a little. I sat down in the toxic light and thought some more about Ben Keats. I needed to go back to Howard’s and find the rest of the manuscript. The answer had to be in there how Keats saved the Keatston Meetinghouse from getting smashed to smithereens like everything else in town. That was assuming any of it was real, which was a lot to assume. I knew parts of it were real: William Keats founded a town called Keatston, and something happened to it.

Maybe I could go to the museum and talk to one of the old folks who lecture kids when they come on school trips. The problem was that the museum wouldn’t even be open again until after Halloween, and for that matter I was probably banned for life.

I was turning into Mandy, I thought, reading and researching instead of taking action. I didn’t need to be digging in the past; I needed to be digging in the
soil
. I’d read about it on Wikipedia, that the fungus was one big organism with a heartlike center. I knew where the center was, too—right
in the middle of that black circle in the woods, where we saw the mushrooms for the first time. That was where the fungus started growing, so the core had to be there. Why not dig it up? All I needed to do was find the core and put a stake through it, or crush it with a big stone. You did that with vampires and werewolves and all kinds of monsters. You stabbed them in the heart.

I went out to see the black circle in the woods as soon as the sun came up. The air was damp and cool, but not cold enough for a frost. The mushrooms were still booming. I walked out on the pile of fallen trees and dead boughs, the wood crunching under my feet. I had to take my hands out of my jacket pockets to steady myself as I clambered up a tree trunk, finding the highest point to survey the area. The spot in the forest was about sixty feet across, maybe wider. The layer of branches was between two and three feet high in places.

I’d imagined picking up a few branches and digging, but this was going to be way more work than I could do by myself. It was more than I could do even if I got Mandy and Brian to help. We needed a lot of people, preferably people with muscles.

I started by calling the one guy who couldn’t help at all.

“Hey, Randy. It’s Eric.”

“Dude, it’s like five a.m. On a day we don’t have school.”

“It’s eight.” I’d waited until it was reasonable to be calling people.

“Well, it’s early. What’s up?”

I told him about the mushrooms, and my theory of how
we could get rid of them. He was the only one who might halfway take me seriously. He did, too—exactly halfway.

“The news said they’ll go away after the first frost,” he said.

“What if they don’t? Or what if something bad happens first?”

“Like in a Max Bailey story?”

“Exactly like in a Max Bailey story.”

He didn’t answer for a minute, and I expected him to hang up on me.

“We got to play it like it’s all about the trees,” he said. “If we tell people there’s a fungus getting ready to eat the town, they’ll send us both to a shrink.”

“Will they care if it’s about the trees?”

“They will if I tell ’em they do,” he said.

Tom was the first person to show up, walking around the house and meeting me in the backyard. By that time Brian was up, wanting to help. We were piling tools into a wheelbarrow: shovels and spades, axes and saws—anything that might help.

“Hey, guys,” he said, really normal, like we hadn’t shoved each other around the last time we talked. “I’m here to help.”

“Hey,” I said back. I hadn’t called him, but Randy must have. “Good to see you.”

“So you’re sure this will make a difference?”

“No, but we have to try something,” I said. “Nobody else is doing anything.”

“Everything’s already infected,” he pointed out.

“We have to start somewhere.”

“Yeah, I guess so. At least nobody at school will talk about us losing the game.”

“I missed school on Friday,” I reminded him. “Was everybody talking about it?”

“Not really. They mostly talked about the mushrooms. And they talked about how you ran smack into that goalpost. They would have talked about us winning, if we’d won.”

The tools were loaded up, so we threw a football around while we waited. I hadn’t realized that Brian was a good receiver. Tom and I took turns tossing him long bombs, and he got right under them. I was beginning to worry nobody else would come when Will’s mom dropped him off. A few minutes later three eighth graders walked up the road, wearing their letter jackets and work gloves.

“Is this everybody?” one of them asked.

“So far.”

“Who’s, like, in charge?”

“Nobody,” I said. “All of us.”

“All right. Just asking.”

I was satisfied. Six guys made a good work crew—seven, with Brian—and we were big for our age. But we ended up with twice that many before we trooped into the woods, and then more guys came, including a few high school kids who’d been Owls last year.

I lost track of exactly who was there, because I was too busy lifting and hauling, axing and sawing—we’d brought almost every tool in the shed out with us. We needed a big area to dump the dead wood, and the only thing I could
think of was our own yard. The guys formed an assembly line to cart it off and dump it on the fringe of tall grass between the woods and our house. The wood was crinkly and gave off a cloud of dust when you dropped it.

Brian worked there, breaking up the wood and forming it into a tidy pile. Allan tried to help but didn’t last long, even wearing a dust mask. The air made him cough and wheeze too much. Brian had to beg him to leave.

“Eric!” I heard Dad hollering my name, turned around, and saw him at the back door. I went over so we didn’t have to shout. Hopefully he wasn’t mad about dumping the wood in the yard.

“The football team has an ecology project,” I told him. “We’re clearing out some of the dead stuff in the woods.”

“Sounds awesome,” he said. “What are you going to do, plant new trees?”

“Yeah, but not until spring.”

“Hm.” He scratched his head. “You should be taking it easy, though.”

“I actually feel pretty good,” I told him. “And the woods are in bad shape. Nobody’s doing anything about it. We wanted to do something.”

“I know, I know. How about if I go to Papa’s and get pizzas for everyone?”

“That would be terrific.”

“Sodas too,” he said. “And those big chocolate chip cookies they make there.”

“Yeah. That would be awesome.”

“This is good stuff, Eric,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

School was canceled again on Wednesday—the county health department had taken the samples, but not all the tests were done. It was a good thing, because even with a dozen guys, it took us well into the second day before we were finished. I’d never worked that hard, not even for football. I was achy all over.

We did more than we needed to. I mean, I would have been happy just dragging enough of the dead trees out of the way to get a shovel into the dirt. But since we’d explained that we were going to ready the ground for new trees, we were committed to clearing out the whole area, and that took some doing.

As soon as everybody left, I grabbed a shovel and a spade from the shed and headed back. I had another two hours of daylight, and that was all I needed. I’d find the core and smash it.

“Whatcha doin’?”

I wheeled around and saw Brian and Allan tagging along.

“Going to kill the fungus, I hope.”

“Kill it how?” Brian asked.

“I’m going to rip out its heart,” I said.

“Mushrooms don’t have hearts,” said Allan.

“Funguses do. They have cores.”

We reached the big rock at the front of the clearing. I walked to what I thought was the dead center of the clearing, then looked around and decided I was off by a few paces. I went to the left and decided I was still wrong.

“I could go get measuring tape,” said Brian. “And flashlights.”

“Never mind. We don’t know it’s right smack-dab in the middle anyway.” I picked a spot, grabbed the spade with both hands, and drove it down into the soil with all my might.

“Now that’s a piledriver,” I said, but the spade had barely made a dent. The forest floor was hard and stony.

“You have to dig harder,” said Brian. He was helpful that way.

“Maybe get a jackhammer,” said Allan.

“We don’t have a jackhammer.”

I dropped the spade and grabbed the shovel. I set my foot on the back edge of the blade and put all my weight on it. The blade went in an inch, maybe an inch and a half. I scooped out about a handful of dirt and tried again with the same result. Brian swung the spade at the ground, but it just bounced off.

“Don’t whap yourself in the face,” I told him as he took another swing and nearly did just that.