Monster Lake (5 page)

“
All right, all right,”
Patricia agreed. “But let’s at least look around.”

“
Okay.”

They approached the door to
the boathouse. Terri was still very curious about what was in
there. She knew the front room was just an office, but why would
her parents forbid her from ever going in the other rooms?
I’m going to find out right now,
she decided. Her Mom and Uncle Chuck would never
know. What harm could there be in her just looking around real
quick?

“
All right,” Terri said.
“Let’s go in.” And then she put her hand on the doorknob, turned
it, and—

“
Oh, no!” she
exclaimed.

“
What’s the matter?”
Patricia asked.

Terri looked back at her friend in sheer
frustration.

“
The door’s locked!” she
exclaimed.

««—»»

The wooden door jiggled in its frame but
wouldn’t open. Terri could see the lock’s metal bolt between the
gap.

“
What are we going to do
now?” Patricia asked, with more than a little
disappointment.

Terri’s eyes thinned. “Well,” she said
slowly, thinking. “One time on TV I saw somebody open a locked door
with a credit card.”

“
A credit card!” Patricia
exclaimed. “Where are we going to get a credit card? We’re only
twelve! Are you telling me you have a credit card?”

“
No,” Terri said. Of
course, she didn’t have a credit card; only adults had those. “But
I’ve got a library card.”

Patricia watched with amazement as Terri
withdrew her plastic covered Devonsville Library card and slipped
it in between the edge of the door and the doorframe. Very
carefully, she worked the edge of the card against the angled side
of the bolt. Gently, gently…

“
Aw, it’s not going to
work,” Patricia dismissed.

“
Wait…”

Terri worked the card in further. The bolt
moved a little.

“
Wait,” Terri repeated,
biting her lower lip as she concentrated.

The bolt moved a little more. Then—

click!

The door opened.

“
You did it!” Patricia
celebrated.

Yeah,
Terri thought, a little surprised herself that she’d actually
been able to. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go check it
out.”

The front room of the boathouse remained as
Terri had last seen it, a refurbished office. There was the big
desk next to the window, and on top of the desk sat stacks of
papers, a typewriter, and a computer. There were also several high
file cabinets.

“
What’s all this stuff?”
Patricia inquired, reaching out to pick up some of the papers
laying on the desk.

“
Don’t touch it!” Terri
exclaimed. “We can’t touch
anything,
Patricia! If everything
isn’t exactly the way my Mom left it, she’ll know we were
here!”

“
Oh,” Patricia slowly
realized, pulling her hand away from the papers. “Sorry… But I
wonder what all these papers and things are.”

“
Just notes, from my
mother’s zoology work.” Then Terri walked to the back of the
office. There were two more doors against the rear wall. A sign on
one door read SUPPLY ROOM, while the sign on the second door read
DO NOT ENTER.

“
Are those the rooms you
were telling me about?” Patricia asked. “The rooms that your father
told you to never go in?”

“
Yeah,” Terri answered, her
curiosity burning. Immediately, she put her hand on the knob to the
supply room. The knob turned—the door was unlocked—and she went in,
Patricia following close behind.

“
Wait a minute,” Terri
observed.

“
This doesn’t look like any
supply room to me,” Patricia noticed at once.

The room was full of more computers on big
racks, with lots of blinking lights. There must’ve been half a
dozen computer screens the size of small television sets. But one
of the screens was turned on, and it had words on it.

Terri squinted at the screen and read some
of the brightly lit words:

LOT 2: TRANSMISSION FAILURE

LOT 2a: TRANSMISSION FAILURE

LOT 3: POSITIVE REAGENT

TRANSMISSION OF GENETIC

CARNIVORE MUTATION

“
What’s all that mean?”
Terri asked.

“
I don’t know,” Terri said,
disappointed. She didn’t know what any of the words
meant.

“
Come on,” Patricia urged.
“This room is dull. Let’s go into the other one.”

“
Good idea.”

The girls went back out; Terri was careful
to remember to close the door behind her—she knew it was very
important that the boathouse be left as it was, otherwise, her
mother and Uncle Chuck would surely guess that she’d been in
here.

Terri’s frown was sharp when she turned the
knob on the door marked DO NOT ENTER.

“
It’s locked,” she
said.

“
Use the library card,”
Patricia suggested. “It worked before.”

Terri was thinking just that. But this lock
looked different; it looked more sturdy. Again, she slipped her
laminated library card into the door’s gap and went to work.

“
How come it’s not
opening?” Patricia asked impatiently after a minute.

“
This lock is harder,”
Terri replied in concentrated frustration. “But… I think the
bolt
is
moving…”

“
I’m going to look around
outside,” Patricia said. “Call out to me when you get the door
open.”

“
Okay. But be
careful.”

Terri continued to work on
the lock as her friend left the boathouse to examine the deck and
the pier. The bolt of the doorlock continued to move as Terri
wedged the library card in further, but it was much more difficult
than the outside door.
Come on, come
on,
she thought.
Open!
Time was growing short, and if
she wasn’t careful, she fully realized that she could ruin the
card.

Come on, come on…

And just as the bolt was about to open—

“
Terriiiiiiiiii!” Patricia
screamed from outside.

—
Terri flinched in
startlement. The library card slipped out of the door.

And the bolt snapped back into place.

But Terri wasn’t worried about that. She ran
out to the pier, her thoughts racing along with her heart:

What happened! Why is Patricia
screaming?

««—»»

When Terri ran out to the pier, Patricia,
shuddering with fear, ran right into her.

“
What’s
wrong?
” Terri demanded.

Patricia looked frantic,
her blond hair going every which way. “There’s some
thing
on the edge of the
pier,” she wheezed, nearly out of breath. “It’s black and slimy,
and it’s really
huge!
I think it’s some kind of giant lizard!”

“
Yeah, right, Patricia,
just like you thought that old branch was a poisonous
snake.”

“
I’m
serious,
Terri!” Patricia insisted.
“Go and look! It’s right around the corner!”

Terri skeptically did so, rounding the
corner of the boathouse. But the instant she turned, she came to a
dead stop.

She couldn’t believe what she was
seeing.

Patricia was at least partly right. At the
very end of the wooden pier-walk sat a shiny, coal black thing with
four pudgy feet and a long tail. But it wasn’t a lizard—

“
It’s a salamander,” she
said distractedly. “I can tell by the yellow dots on its
back.”

“
It looks like a lizard to
me,” Patricia remarked, clinging to Terri’s shoulders, still
obviously afraid.

“
Lizards are reptiles,”
Terri informed her friend. “They can’t go in the water. But
salamanders are amphibians.”

“
Amphibians?”

“
It’s a kind of animal that
can live on land or in the water. Like toads and frogs. And that
thing has definitely been in the water. You can tell. See how wet
its skin is?”

“
Well, yeah,” Patricia
agreed.

“
Besides, I know it’s a
salamander because I’ve seen them before, and I’ve read about them
in my Golden Nature books.” But this was where Terri’s knowledge of
wildlife ended. “There’s only one problem,” she said, now even a
little scared herself.

“
What’s that?”

“
Salamanders
never
get to be more than
eight or ten inches long.” And after she said that, all she could
do was stare at the puffy, wet, black thing on the pier.

“
Eight to ten inches long?”
Patricia questioned, staring in disbelief. “But that thing
is—”

“
I know,” Terri said, her
own eyes wide in what she was seeing.

Because
this
salamander was no eight or ten
inches.

It easily over
three feet
long.

««—»»

“Don’t go near it!” Patricia warned.

“
I’m not,” Terri assured
her. “I just want a closer look.” She still couldn’t believe it.
She knew for a fact that salamanders didn’t get this big; she’d
seen lots of salamanders in the yard, and they all had the same
shiny black color with the bright yellow spots on their
backs.

But I’ve
never
seen one this
big,
she reminded herself.
Nothing even close to this…

The giant salamander lay there lazily. Terri
could see its cheeks puffing in and out as it breathed, and its two
big eyes on top of its head looked like giant black marbles that
never blinked. Its tail alone must’ve been over a foot long
itself.

I can’t believe
this,
Terri thought.

“
Terri,” Patricia continued
to nervously warn. “You better not get too close. That thing could
bite you.”

“
No, it can’t,” Terri
responded, and leaned over to take another step. “Salamanders don’t
have teeth.”

But then her own thoughts
stalled right after she’d said that, and she couldn’t help but
remember last night. Just when she’d finally convinced herself that
what she’d seen was really just a dream—now, again, she wasn’t so
sure.
Toads don’t have teeth
either,
she reminded herself.
But that toad I saw last night
definitely
had
teeth…

And, then, when Terri took one more step
toward the giant salamander—

The salamander lurched forward, its big lazy
head raised, and it opened its thin-lipped mouth and hissed at
her.

Terri’s heart thudded in her chest, and she
jumped back.

Then she and Patricia screamed at the same
time, because the salamander’s mouth stretched open wider, and
Terri could easily see that it too had teeth.

Two rows of gleaming, white teeth that
looked sharp as sewing needles.

Then the creature hissed again, and began to
move toward Terri and Patricia, its jaw nearly snapping like a mad
dog’s.

««—»»

“Run!” Terri yelled.

And they ran, all right, as fast as they’d
ever run before in their lives, down the wooden pier-walk and back
up the gravel path through the woods. The last thing they’d seen as
they’d sprinted away in their sneakers was the salamander crawling
after them on its fat feet, its tooth-filled mouth snapping open
and shut as though it meant to bite them.

When Terri and Patricia got halfway back up
the trail, they stopped to catch their breath. The uphill run left
them winded and sweating, and they were still scared.

“
It’s impossible,” Terri
whispered. “I can’t believe what we just saw. A salamander
with
teeth.
”

“
Well you better believe
it,” Patricia said, huffing and puffing. “And don’t try to tell me
it was our eyes playing tricks on us. That was
real.
”

Terri nodded. This was
definitely different from last night. Last night, she’d been
sleeping restlessly, and she’d been groggy, and she supposed
it
was
possible
that her eyes had been playing tricks on her. But today? Just now?
Terri knew
this
wasn’t a dream. It couldn’t be.

Something’s really wrong
around here,
she thought.

But what could she do?

If she told her mother and Uncle Chuck about
the giant salamander, she’d get in lots of trouble for disobeying
them. All kinds of trouble.

And then another thought rang in her mind
like an alarm.

“
Oh, no!” she
fretted.

“
What?” Patricia
asked.

“
How much time has gone by
since Uncle Chuck took my mother to work?”

Patricia looked at her wristwatch. “About
twenty-five minutes,” she said.

Terri’s thoughts exploded in her mind like a
string of firecrackers.

Twenty-five minutes!

Patricia grabbed Terri’s arm. “What’s
wrong?”