Monster Lake (3 page)

Then Patricia asked, “Have you ever been in
the boathouse?”

“
Yeah, a few times, back
when my father lived here.”

“
What was it
like?”

“
Well, like I told you, my
father turned it into an office, or I should say he turned the
front room into an office.”

“
You mean there are other
rooms?”

“
A few,” Terri
recalled.

“
What was in
them?”

Terri hesitated. “I don’t really know,” she
confessed. “Mom and Dad told me to never go into any of the other
rooms.”

Patricia held her hands out. “See, there’s
another weird thing. Whatever it is they’re hiding, it must be in
those other rooms.”

Terri hadn’t considered that. But she had to
admit: Patricia was right. There did seem to be an awful lot of
weird things going on lately.

Patricia leaned over the kitchen table,
lowered her voice. “Don’t you want to know what it is? What they’re
hiding?”

“
Well, yes,” Terri
agreed.

“
Well, then…”

“
Well, then
what?
” But this was a
phony question on Terri’s part, because she already had a pretty
good idea what Patricia was going to suggest.

“
Why don’t we sneak down
there?” Patricia said.

“
We can’t!” Terri
exclaimed. “We’re not allowed. If I took you down there without my
Mom’s permission, I’d get into all kinds of trouble!”

Patricia grinned like a cunning cat.
“They’ll never know,” she said. “We’ll go in the morning, when your
Uncle Chuck is taking your Mom to work.”

Terri thought about it.

We really
shouldn’t,
she thought.

But—

“
Okay,” she said. “That’s
just what we’ll do.”

««—»»

The best thing about summer
vacation was that she could stay up a little later and watch TV.
Terri preferred the Disney Channel and the National Geographic
shows about nature and wildlife and animals in other countries,
and, of course,
The Simpsons.
But tonight, she found it hard to pay attention to
her favorite shows. Her mind felt like it was somewhere else, and
she thought she knew why…

Patricia had been right.
Terri’s mother and Uncle Chuck
were
acting weird. Those strange, foreboding glances
they’d exchanged, Uncle Chuck’s lie about snakes, and then the
entire business with the boathouse. Terri supposed she’d known
something was wrong all along, but she’d never wanted to admit it
to herself. It was hard enough that her father and mother were
divorced, and that she hadn’t seen her father for so long—plus her
fear that she’d never see him again. Sometimes, when things were
too hard to cope with, people would overlook the obvious. There
were a lot of strange things going on recently; Terri was surprised
that it took her this long to realize it.

“
Terri?” Uncle Chuck stuck
his head in the rec room, where Terri lay on the floor before the
TV. He was still wearing the same clothes he wore when he’d brought
Terri’s mother home from work, and he gripped one of the big black
briefcases.

“
Bedtime,” he
said.

Generally, Terri would’ve complained a
little, but tonight she was unusually tired. She straggled up to
her feet, and then noticed with some surprise that it was past
eleven o’clock.

“
Has Mom already gone to
bed?” she inquired.

“
Not yet,” Uncle Chuck
answered. He looked tired too, droopy. “She’s still working in her
office.”

Her office,
Terri thought to herself.
You mean the boathouse…

And whenever she thought of the boathouse,
she remembered the rooms in it that her mother and father had
forbidden her to ever enter.

“
But she’ll be up soon,”
Uncle Chuck continued. “Sweet dreams.”

“
Goodnight,” Terri
said.

Uncle Chuck, still toting his briefcase,
disappeared down the hall. Terri retreated to her own room, and put
on her favorite soft-pink nightgown. Then she climbed into bed, lay
back in the pillows, and—

—
listened.

She almost always kept her bedroom window
open during the summer; summer nights in Devonsville were breezy
and cool, unlike the summer days. It was nice to listen to the
crickets peep at night, a steady, gentle throbbing sound that
always lulled her to sleep. But tonight she felt fidgety and
restless. And the nightsounds coming in through the window
sounded…different.

But how so?

They sounded louder and faster. They
sounded, somehow…

Menacing.

But why should she think that?

They’re just crickets and
little tree frogs,
she realized.

She was being silly, she knew.

Her hand reached up then, paused, and turned
off the light.

Darkness jumped into the
room, and the nightsounds seemed to grow even louder and more
etchy. She’d never been afraid of the dark before, not even when
she was little.
Only babies are scared of
the dark,
she told herself.
Unless—

Unless…what?

Unless there’s really
something in the dark to be afraid of,
Terri thought.

She drifted in and out of sleep, tossing and
turning. Every so often she’d wake up and, for some reason, look at
her bedroom window, which was full of moonlight. The nightsounds
throbbed on without letting up.

She tried to think about fun things. Like
about when school started up again next month, about her lessons,
and about boys. She hoped Matt Slattery didn’t have a girlfriend by
then, and Marty Cadeaux too, even though he was kind of fat. In
three or four years, she’d be old enough to go on real dates, and
that would be fun…

But the more she tried to think of these
things, the more she realized she was forcing herself to do so.

And the more she realized—

She was scared.

But of what, she couldn’t guess.

And that’s when she heard the sound.

Not the typical nightsounds. Not the
crickets and peepers and the owls hooting.

This sound was different.

It was coming from her open window, and as
she lay wide-eyed in the dark, she eventually figured out just
exactly what the sound was:

Footsteps.

««—»»

Footsteps!
Terri thought.

And right outside!

At first, she wanted to
call out, but then she thought,
Don’t be a
baby, Terri. Maybe you just dreamed the sound.

But still…

She
had
to know.

Very slowly, then, she slid out from
underneath the sheets and climbed out of bed. The only light was
moonlight streaming in from the window, and the window was several
yards away. Her bare feet padded across the carpet, through the
dark. When she reached the window, she went down onto her knees.
Her hands reached out. Her fingers gripped the sill. Then, very
slowly, she inched her face toward the window screen, and looked
out…

At first, she didn’t see
much. Just the back yard, and the dark splotches that were the tall
trees where the woods began. Between some of the trees she saw
weird green dots that seemed to be glowing…
Fireflies,
she realized.
Lightning bugs.

Then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the
dark, she noticed—

Jeeze!

Strange shapes seemed to be jerking about in
the back yard. She knew at once that they were toads, hopping
around, looking for bugs. But—

They’re huge,
she saw.

Her eyes must be playing
tricks on her. She’d seen lots of big toads and frogs in the yard
before, but never
this
big!

They were as big as puppies!

Then—

From the bushes, a baby rabbit hopped into
the yard, then stopped to nibble some grass. Its ears poked up, its
little nose twitched. But Terri’s breath caught in her chest, and
she nearly squealed out loud when she saw what happened next.

One of the huge toads hopped toward the
rabbit, seeming to move with astonishing quickness, its heavy rear
legs flexing mightily with each hop. Terri knew that toads didn’t
eat rabbits, not even big ones like this—toads only ate small
insects, like flies and moths and beetles. But what frightened her
was this:

In the streaming moonlight, the toad’s wide
jaw snapped open, and sparkling inside its mouth were two rows of
sharp, pointed teeth!

It’s going to eat the
rabbit!
Terri’s thoughts screamed in her
head.

The hideous toad leapt forward several more
times, its razor-toothed jaw opening wider. Each leap seemed a yard
long—

Oh, no!
Terri thought in sheer dread.

But just as the toad would pounce on its
unsuspecting prey, the baby rabbit finally took notice, its head
jerking aside, and it scampered safely away just in the nick of
time.

Terri sighed in relief. It would have been
horrible to have to watch that toad eat the rabbit. But then she
stopped to think—

None of it made sense, it was impossible.
One thing she was sure of: toads, no matter how big they were,
didn’t eat animals and they didn’t have long, sharp, pointed
teeth!

Am I dreaming?
she considered again. She must be, to have
witnessed such a thing. Outside, everything looked unreal, the
grass like spikes of ice in the moonlight, the blinking green
swirls of the fireflies, the cramped shadows between the trees, not
to mention the monstrously large toads. But then she remembered the
reason she’d gone to look out the window in the first
place.

The footsteps,
she recalled.
I heard
footsteps in the back yard. I’m sure I did. And they sounded like
they were coming up from the lake…

Terri strained her vision then, focusing her
eyes through the window screen, toward the rear corner of the
yard.

crunch, crunch

She was right. There was
the sound again, and they
were
footsteps.

crunch, crunch

There could be no denying it. Someone was
indeed walking up the gravel path from the lake to the house.

And the sound was much louder now, which
meant that whoever was walking—they were getting closer.

Terri bit her lower lip as she stared on,
gripping the window sill. Only a moment later, a figure appeared at
the entrance to the trail.

Who could it be?

She glanced warily at the lighted, digital
clock on her nightstand—

It was almost 4:30 in the morning!

Terri’s breath grew thin. Her heart beat
faster as the figure came out of the crisp shadows thrown by the
trees and—

crunch, crunch

—
stepped into the
moonlight, fully into view.

It’s…my mother,
Terri realized in shock.
She’s been down at the boathouse all night…

««—»»

All night,
Terri thought again the next morning at breakfast.
What could her mother be working on that was so important she had
to stay up till past 4:30 a.m.? And Terri could tell. Right now,
coming into the kitchen, her mother looked exhausted, with drooping
shoulders and dark circles under her eyes.

“
Good morning, dear,” she
said groggily.

“
Hi, Mom,” Terri said. “You
sure look tired.”

“
I am, I was up late.
Working.”

You’re not kidding you
were up late!
Terri agreed in her own
thoughts.
Late as in 4:30 in the
morning!

But Terri declined to
actually comment on what she’d seen last night. By now, she wasn’t
even sure
what
she’d seen. The whole thing was so visually unreal—maybe she
really had dreamed a lot of it. After all, she thought she’d seen a
giant toad try to eat a rabbit! And she knew that was impossible.
Maybe she’d only dreamed seeing her mother coming up from the trail
to the lake so late…

But then her mother commented:

“
God, I’m so tired. I could
fall asleep right here at the table…”

Terri looked at her, and that set her to
thinking. If she’d only dreamed seeing her mother coming up from
the lake, why would she be so tired?

I must
not
have dreamed
it
, Terri concluded.
And if I didn’t dream that, then I must not have dreamed
about the toad either. The toad…with teeth…

“
Breakfast is ready!” Uncle
Chuck announced, placing a large tray down on the kitchen table.
Toast, marmalade, assorted jellies. Terri was grateful for the
distraction; she felt so confused about things right now that she
didn’t want to think about them.

She nibbled at her toast,
remembering times not so long ago when breakfast had been a big,
happy family affair full of conversation and laughter.
Back when Dad was still here,
she thought. Now, things were so different. Breakfast, like
most meals they had together, were fast, thrown together at the
last minute, and over before anyone really had a chance to talk.
Her mother was so busy now, always in a rush to go to work, and
even when she was home, most of her time was spent—