Monster Lake (4 page)

In the boathouse,
Terri thought.

“
Well, we’ve got to go now,
Terri,” her uncle said after only eating one piece of toast. “I’ve
got to take your Mom to work.”

“
Have a good day, honey,”
her mother said, and leaned over to give Terri a kiss.

“’
Bye,” Terri
said.

Her mother and Uncle Chuck left, as usual,
in a rush. Terri glumly washed the few dishes they’d used, and put
them away. She knew she shouldn’t be selfish—after all, the reason
her mother had to work so much was because she had to pay the
bills. At least Uncle Chuck was helping her out. But—

Things were so much better
when Dad was here,
she thought. There just
didn’t seem to be anything to look forward to anymore.

squeak

Terri glanced over her shoulder. She swore
she’d heard a sound, a faint squeak. Like…

Like someone standing in
the foyer,
she realized just then, because
the foyer’s hardwood floor always squeaked the same way. But she’d
heard her mother and Uncle Chuck leave the house and close the door
behind them, and she’d heard the car engine start and the car drive
off, so she knew they hadn’t come back in to get something they’d
forgotten.

squeak

There it was again!

Terri’s eyes widened in the
kitchen. She could feel her heart racing.
It’s nothing,
she tried to tell
herself.
It’s just a house noise. Stop
acting like a baby!

So, to prove to herself that no one was
there, she boldly left the kitchen and marched right into the
foyer, and—

Screamed!

Because the second she’d stepped into the
foyer, someone grabbed her from behind—

««—»»

“Pa
tri
cia!” Terri yelled after spinning
around.

Patricia laughed hysterically, standing in
the open coat closet in the foyer. “Did I scare you?”

“
Yes!” Terri was outraged.
“What, you just walked right in the house without even
knocking?”

“
I was coming up the
sidewalk when your Mom and Uncle Chuck were leaving,” Patricia told
her, still laughing. “They said I could come in.”

“
Well, don’t
ever
do that
again!”

“
Chill out, will you,
Terri?” Patricia said. “Jeeze, it was just a joke. Can’t you take a
joke?”

“
Yes, Patricia,” Terri
sternly replied. “I can take a joke. But I don’t like to be scared
half to death!”

“
All right,
already.”

But as the scare wore off, Terri realized
she was over-reacting, and she knew why. She was still tense from
last night, from the restless sleep and the dream she’d had, and,
of course, seeing her mother coming up from the lake at 4:30 in the
morning. And again she felt immediately confused. She knew she
hadn’t dreamed the part about her mother coming up from the lake,
but what about the rest? The giant bump-skinned toad with the
sharp, pointed teeth…

I
must
have dreamed that,
she decided.

“
Well?” Patricia
said.

“
Well what?”

“
Are we going or
not?”

Terri’s mind felt in a fog. “Going where?”
she asked.

Patricia rolled her eyes. “Don’t you
remember what we planned yesterday? We’re supposed to go down to
the lake.”

««—»»

That’s right,
Terri recalled. In all her anxiety over the
dream—or whatever it had been—she’d completely forgotten.
Yesterday, they’d planned to sneak down to the lake while Uncle
Chuck was driving her mother to work. She still didn’t feel good
about it—she knew she’d be in big trouble if she got caught—but,
still…

She really wanted to go.

“
All right, let’s go,” she
said. “But we have to be quick. We can’t hang around down there for
too long.”

They went out the back sliding door and
crossed the back yard, both in sneakers, shorts, and colorful
day-glo T-shirts. The morning was sunny and bright. Sunlight shined
on the back yard grass, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

“
How long does it take your
uncle to drive your Mom to work?” Patricia asked
mindfully.

“
It’s about fifteen minutes
each way.”

“
So that gives us a half
hour.”

“
Yeah, but we better make
it twenty minutes, just to be safe,” Terri suggested. She didn’t
want to take
any
chances; if her mother or Uncle Chuck knew she’d disobeyed
them, and gone down to the lake, she’d be grounded for a month! No
TV, no badminton, no nothing!

They crunched down the gravel path behind
the house, and descended into the woods. Suddenly, the hot, bright
morning darkened and turned cool; the dense trees of the woods
shaded the path—Terri imagined herself walking down a tunnel.

Patricia, as they walked, was glancing
worriedly around.

“
What’s wrong?” Terri
asked.

“
I’m keeping an eye out for
snakes.”

Terri smiled to
herself.
There she goes again with her
snakes.
Terri wasn’t worried at all about
snakes—she knew there really weren’t any around here—but there were
a few things she
was
worried about, and the boathouse was one of them. She still
felt mystified as to why her mother would be working in the
boathouse so late. Terri herself had only been in the boathouse a
few times, and only in the front room, which her father had turned
into an office. But there were other rooms, she knew, rooms she
hadn’t seen, rooms that her parents had forbidden her to
enter.

And I’m going to find out
what’s in them,
she determined to
herself.

Because she had the strongest suspicion that
those other rooms had something to do with the strange way her
mother had been acting over the past few months.

“
It sure is pretty down
here,” Patricia said.

“
Yeah, I know.”

“
And look at all the
flowers between the trees!”

There were indeed many forest flowers all
around them, in a variety of tones and colors, plus lots of pretty
green ferns and other plants.

“
What kind of flowers are
these?” Patricia inquired. “Do you know?”

“
Not really. I don’t know
that much about flowers.”

“
Can I pick some of them
and take them home?”

“
Sure,” Terri
said.

Patricia stepped off the path into the
woods, scanning for the biggest and prettiest flowers. Then she
spotted some bright orange ones, with bright-yellow centers,
growing at the base of one of the big, thick-trunked oak trees. She
reached toward the flowers to pick them, then flinched, then…

Shrieked at the top of her lungs.

“
Patricia!” Terri
exclaimed. “What’s wrong?”

Patricia stumbled back out of the brush, and
grabbed Terri in trembling fear.

“
A snake!” she shouted.
“There’s a huge snake right there next to the tree!”

««—»»

Terri’s heart swelled in
her chest.
A snake!
She’d been wrong all along. She and Patricia clung to each
other, their faces pale with fear.

“
It’s right there!”
Patricia wailed, pointing toward the brush at the base of the tree.
“See it?”

Terri squinted, trying to focus her eyes.
She was looking right at where Patricia was pointing. But—

I don’t see any
snake,
she thought.

“
Where?” she asked.
“Where’s the snake?”

“
Right
there!
” Patricia insisted, still
pointing. “Can’t you see it? That big, fat gray snake right there
next to the orange flowers?”

Terri’s mouth hung open when she saw it. She
rolled her eyes and laughed. “Patricia! That’s not a snake! That’s
a dead tree branch!”

Patricia stared forward; she didn’t seem to
believe it. “No, it’s not! It’s a snake, just like your Uncle Chuck
said. It’s a snake, and it might bite us!”

Terri’s laughter continued. “Don’t be a
moron, Patricia.” Then she stepped into the brush, reaching
down.

“
Don’t go in there!”
Patricia screamed. “It’ll bite you for sure! It’s probably
poisonous!”

Terri boldly picked up the scaly branch and
held it up. “See?” she said. “Here’s your snake.” Nothing but an
old, dead tree branch. She broke it over her knee and cast it back
into the woods.

“
Jeeze,” Patricia said,
relieved now. “I guess I am a moron. I really thought it was a
snake.”

“
Well, sometimes your eyes
can play tricks on you. You’ll think you’ll see something that’s
not really there. It turns out to be something else.”

“
I guess so. Like when I
was little, sometimes I’d think my blouses hanging in my bedroom
closet were really people standing there.”

“
Yeah, like that.” But then
Terri thought about it. Yes, sometimes the eyes did play tricks on
you.
Is that what happened last
night?
she questioned herself. She felt
sure now that she hadn’t really seen the big toad with teeth. But
what of her mother, walking up the trail from the boathouse at 4:30
in the morning?

Maybe I didn’t really see
that, either,
she considered.
Maybe it was just my eyes playing tricks on
me.

She hoped so, at least.

“
I feel like an idiot,”
Patricia said. “I thought that stupid branch was a snake. Don’t
tell anyone, okay?”

“
I won’t tell anyone,”
Terri promised as they continued down the path. “Everybody’s eyes
play tricks on them sometimes. It’s happened to me too.”

“
Really? When?”

Last night,
Terri thought. But she didn’t want to tell
Patricia what she thought she’d seen. Patricia would laugh her head
off if Terri told her about the giant toad with teeth trying to eat
the rabbit in the yard. “I don’t know,” she said instead. “But it
happens to everybody once in a while. It’s no big deal.”

They continued on down the path, their
sneakers crunching over the gravel. Little spots of sunlight,
shining through the leaves on the trees, seemed to blink at them
from above. Along the way they saw lots of birds and mushrooms and
many more plants and colorful flowers. Butterflies fluttered around
them in the shade, and moths and dragonflies.

And then—

A glare of sunlight shined
in their eyes.
The lake,
Terri realized. Where the trees opened at the end
of the path, they could see the water now, and the sun shining
brightly on it like a huge mirror.

“
Is that it?” Patricia
asked excitedly.

“
What?” Terri asked, but
she already knew the answer to her friend’s question. The
brown-shingled building at the very end of the path, propped up
over the water on its own pier.

“
Is that the boathouse?”
Patricia said.

Suddenly, for some reason, a prickling chill
ran up Terri’s spine…

“
Yeah, that’s it,” she
informed. “That’s the boathouse.”

««—»»

“Wow, this is neat!” Patricia exclaimed.
They walked up onto the planked pier. If you looked down, you could
see the water between the cracks in the planks. And a gentle
lapping sound could be heard too: the water at the edge of the lake
slapping against the pier posts.

Patricia walked out to the end of the pier,
gazing out onto the lake. “This is beautiful. It’s bigger than I
thought it would be.”

“
It’s not that big,” Terri
said. She’d seen much bigger lakes. But it was still a good
size.

“
Is that your boat?”
Patricia asked, pointing down.

“
Yeah.” The small boat
floated lightly, tied by a thick rope to one of the pier posts.
“I’ve never even been out on it.”

“
It’s even got a motor!”
Patricia noticed. “Do you know how to work it?”

“
All I know is you pull
that cord there on top of the motor,” Terri said. “But there’re
buttons you have to adjust too, and I don’t really know how to do
it. There’s something on it called a throttle; you have to set it
right first. But I don’t even think it works anymore.”

“
How do you
know?”

“
Well, my Dad told
me.”

“
Yeah,” Patricia scoffed.
“And your Uncle Chuck told you there were snakes all over the
place. And all we found were branches. Maybe your Dad told you the
boat didn’t work because he didn’t want you to use it.”

Patricia, Terri knew, had a point. It just
seemed to her that sometimes grownups said things on purpose that
weren’t true, to discourage kids.

“
I don’t know,” was all
Terri said in response.

“
Well, why don’t we try
it?”

“
What? Riding in the boat?”
Terri questioned, astonished.

“
Yeah, why not?”

“
Because I already told
you, my Uncle Chuck’ll be back in a half-hour. Do you have any idea
how much trouble I’d get in if he caught us in the boat? I’d get
grounded if he even knew we’d come down the path.”