The Tanglewood Terror (16 page)

Mandy was a few steps behind and nearly crashed into me. I heard a loud squeal from inside as Brian came out a second later—the alarm had gone off.

“I lost my shoes on the stairs,” he said. “No laces.”

Great. We were three runaways without one pair of shoes between us.

“Mandy, how did you get past the fence before?” I asked.

“The old sewer.” She took off running and I tried to keep up. Old sewer? I was hoping I’d misheard her.

She ran around the school to a gray, windowless door.

“Locked,” she said, yanking on it. I pulled out the keys and started trying them.

“Hurry,” said Mandy. “It might say ‘Yale’ on it because the lock does.”

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” I tried a few more keys. One went in and didn’t turn, but it was close. I scanned the other keys, looking for one that was similar. I found it and got the door open. The alarm was still shrieking. The three of us nearly fell over each other getting in, and Brian pulled the door shut behind us.

Mandy flew down a flight of concrete steps and through a door. She flipped on a light switch. I saw a row of washers and dryers and a couple of metal tables. There was a cart-style laundry basket full of socks and stuff.

“Grab some extra socks,” Mandy said. “Two or three pairs.”

“I don’t want to wear those,” said Brian. “They’re girl socks.”

“Man up,” I told him, tossing a handful his way and stooping to put a couple on each of my own feet.

“I’m
not
wearing the ones with pink pom-poms,” said Brian, tossing a couple back.

“So where’s this sewer?” I asked Mandy. I didn’t know how much time we had, but it couldn’t be long before people came through that door.

“It’s this way,” said Mandy. She went past the machines through a doorway and into a cramped area with a bunch of pipes and a humming water heater. “Here,” she said, crouching at an access panel in the wall. “This lock is broken.” She slipped her fingertips into the space around the panel and pulled it off, exposing a cobwebby crawl space. A moment later she was crawling off into the darkness.

“Gross,” said Brian, but he clambered in and followed Mandy.

I was left with the task of getting the panel back into place, which wasn’t easy. I used my stubby fingernails to bring the edge of the panel flush with the wall, but I was afraid it would fall if I let go. I waited, breathing in the cobwebs, feeling itchy and tickled all over, trying to hear
if anyone was out there. I finally risked pulling my hands back, away from the plate—it stayed put. I crawled off after Mandy and Brian.

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.