Case File 13 #3 (7 page)

Carter tightened his jaw. “You're just mad that it doesn't look like you.” He lowered the homunculus to the ground and gave it a piece of beef jerky.

“I'm hungry,” the homunculus said.

Carter wiped his eyes. “I'm gonna miss you. Be careful, and stay away from those Oreos. A little guy like you will balloon up in no time from all the cream filling.”

The car honked a third time—an urgent
beep-beep-beep-beeeep
.

“Let's go,” Nick said.

“Go ahead,” Carter said. “I'll catch up with you. I just want to say good-bye.”

Nick rolled his eyes, then nodded. “Okay. But hurry. It sounds like my parents really want us back there.” He and Angelo started back toward the camp. A moment later, Carter joined them and the three boys raced back through the woods with Angelo checking his GPS to keep them going in the right direction.

When they reached the camp, Mom was standing by the fire pit searching anxiously for them. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I've been honking for fifteen minutes.”

Nick looked around the camp. The tents, sleeping bags, and stove were all back in the car. “What's going on?” he asked. “Dad said we could have two hours to explore.”

Mom waved a hand toward the gravel parking lot, where Dad was talking to a man in
a floppy gray hat and a green plaid coat. Actually, there wasn't much talking going on. The man in the gray hat was shouting and Dad was mostly just nodding.

“Apparently this isn't a campground after all. It seems we've been trespassing on private property and the owner, Mr. Grunwald, is not very happy about it.”

“He sure isn't,” Nick said. From what he could see, the man looked like he was going to give himself a heart attack if he didn't calm down.

“
Heiliger Bimbam!
” the man shouted. “Are you not reading the sign?”

“It's in German,” Nick's dad said. “I thought it said something about camping.”

“
Sapperlot!
” the man screamed. He threw his hat to the ground and straightened the sign, revealing the English translation that had been hidden when Nick's dad knocked it into the trees. D
ANGER!
S
TAY AWAY!
N
OT CAMPSITE!
N
O HIKING, FISHING, OR HUNTING!

“Guess we missed that,” Dad said. He pulled out his wallet. “I'd be happy to pay.”

“
Nein!
” the man yelled, his face nearly purple with rage. He spun around and spotted Nick and his friends. “You.
Jungen.
You touch nothing?”

Nick glanced nervously at Carter and Angelo. “Um, no. We didn't touch anything.”

The man marched up to them, his hands clenched. For a second Nick thought the man was going to hit him. Instead, he pointed into the trees. His bushy gray eyebrows pulled so low that his eyes nearly disappeared. He turned to Angelo. “You boys are seeing something in forest?”

“No,” Angelo said at once. “We were just bird-watching.” He pulled the binoculars out of his pack. “See? For birds.”

“Birds.” The man took a handkerchief from his coat pocket and honked his bulbous red nose into it. He glared at Carter. “You are touching nothing? Taking nothing?”

Carter gulped, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. He folded his hands behind his back. “No. I, um, didn't take anything.”

“Come on now,” Dad said, stepping between the man and the boys. “It was an honest mistake. So the actual campground was off the next exit. Is there really any harm done? I offered to pay you for the inconvenience.”

The man wheeled around. “Out!” he shouted. “Out and never coming back!”

As quickly as they could, Nick, his friends, and his parents piled into the car and drove down the road. Standing in a cloud of dust behind them, the man continued to shout and wave his fists.

Angelo leaned over to Nick and whispered, “Well, your dad was right about it being an adventure.”

The ride home was not a happy one. Dad drove with his jaw set and his eyes locked on the road ahead. For once it was Mom trying to crack jokes.

“The good news is we have plenty of supplies left over. You really can't have too much dehydrated camping food.”

Nick tried to smile but he was still a little freaked out by the homunculus and the odd German man's reaction to them being on his property. “That guy sure was mad.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Mom said. “When he wasn't screaming, throwing his hat, or spouting incomprehensible German phrases, he seemed rather friendly.”

“He was screaming the whole time,” Carter said.

Angelo elbowed him. “It was a joke.”

“Oh.” Carter laughed weakly. “Good one, Mrs. B.”

A stop for fast food didn't lighten the mood either. No one seemed to have much of an appetite. Even Carter took only a bite or two of his hamburger before tucking the rest of it into his backpack.

“You might as well throw that out,” Nick said. “It's just going to go bad.”

Carter shrugged, and looked away. “I might get hungry again in a little while.”

Nick studied him. “Are you okay? You look a little weird.”

Carter's cheeks turned pink. “It's just . . . you know.”

“Yeah.” Nick patted him on the shoulder. “I'm sorry you had to leave it behind.”

“Leave what behind?” Mom asked.

Angelo looked quickly up from his notebook. “The campground. Carter was sad to leave it.”

“Right,” Carter said. “I was really getting attached to the great outdoors.”

Dad muttered something under his breath and Mom laid a hand on the back of his neck. “It's probably a good thing we got out when we did. I heard the weather was
getting ready to turn bad.”

Nick looked out the window. The sky was blue and clear. “Yeah. It was feeling kind of chilly this morning. Might be a storm coming in.”

Dad gritted his teeth. “The only clouds around here are the ones I caused by ruining our trip.”

After that, no one even tried to talk to him. Mom opened a paperback. Angelo studied his monster notebook, occasionally jotting down a note or two. Carter kept acting weird, fiddling with his backpack and saying nothing.

Nick stared out the car window, trying to make sense of what they'd seen. The appearance of the homunculus and the reaction of the German man had to be related. Did the guy know what was on his property? Nick thought he probably did. Which meant what? Was it some kind of sanctuary where the creatures lived?

What kept the creatures from leaving? Unless maybe they did leave sometimes. That brought up another question he hadn't even considered. He made sure his mother was still reading and leaned over to Carter. “Remember when you threw up yesterday?”

“How could I forget?” Carter said. “It was a waste of perfectly good beef jerky and a full bag of corn nuts.”

“I don't want to know the contents of your stomach. I was just thinking about the voice you said you heard.”

Carter blinked. “What about it?”

“Well, the spot where you yakked was pretty close to where we pulled off to camp last night. You think the voice you heard on the side of the road could have been another homunculus? Or even the same one?”

Carter looked down at his pack, strangely subdued. “Maybe.”

“I guess it doesn't really matter,” Nick said. “I was just thinking that it's weird no one has ever seen a homunculus before. Especially with a freeway so close by. Maybe what Angelo said about their habitat was right. That might be the only place they can live.”

Carter frowned. “Or maybe no one ever gave them a chance to try living anywhere else.”

Nick guessed that was a possibility too. “We'll probably never know.”

As soon as they got home, Carter and Angelo grabbed their things out of the car.

“I'm going to do some more research,” Angelo said before heading home. “For now I say we all stay quiet about what we saw.”

“Definitely,” Nick said. “If people knew there was a homunculus, or maybe a bunch of them up there, they'd never leave them alone.”

Carter clutched his pack awkwardly in front of him. “See you guys tomorrow.”

After helping his mom and dad unpack, Nick showered and finished a homework assignment that was due the next day. Sometime around nine, he made himself a PB and J sandwich and went to bed. For something that was supposed to be restful, camping was exhausting.

Nick was hoping that by Monday morning everything would be back to normal. But when he walked into the kitchen, his mother and father were sitting silently across the table from each other, staring into their coffee cups.

“Everything okay?” Nick asked, pouring himself a bowl of cereal.

Dad slurped his drink without saying a word.

“Your father's still pouting about the camping trip,” Mom finally said.

Dad set his mug down with a
bang
, splashing coffee on the kitchen table. “I'm not pouting.”

“You haven't said ten words since we got back and all you've done is frown and watch the Outdoor Channel. What would you call that?”

Nick swallowed a mouthful of Frosted Flakes. “At least the tents didn't blow down a hill this time.”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say. Dad pushed back his chair and burst from the table. “Fine! I'm the worst outdoorsman ever. Next year we'll stay in a hotel and order room service.”

“I didn't mean—” Nick started, but his dad was already out the door that lead to the garage.

“Give him a little time,” Mom said. “Before you know it, he'll be planning the next big adventure.”

“It really wasn't that bad,” Nick said. “In fact, parts of the trip were a little
too
exciting.”

Mom laughed. “No one ever said your father was boring.”

As Nick got up to rinse his bowl, Angelo bounded through the back door. “I've been doing some more research and—” He spotted Nick's mom and paused. “Uh, hi, Mrs. Braithwaite.”

“Monster talk?” Mom gave a wry smile and picked up her mug. “You know, if I'd had a daughter I wouldn't have to hear about werewolves, vampires, and mummies every waking minute.”

“I wouldn't be so sure,” Nick said. “Angie is a girl and she and her friends love monsters almost as much as we do.”

As soon as Nick's mom was out of the kitchen, Angelo sat down at the table. “All right, I've been doing some reading. What we saw could be a homunculus. But it could also be an imp, a brownie, or even some kind of fairy.”

Nick laughed. “A fairy that looks and eats like Carter? Now
that
is a nightmare creature. So which one is it?”

Angelo shook his head. “There's no way to know for sure. I'm guessing homunculus, though.”

“But how would it get there? Where do they come from?”

“Nobody seems to know for sure,” Angelo said. “But there are two schools of thought. Some people think they are scientifically created.”

Nick shivered, remembering Dr. Dippel and everything that had happened when the boys had explored his haunted school with Angie, Dana, and Tiffany a few weeks earlier. “You think that German guy was some kind of scientist, creating little people in a secret lab?”

“If he was, where was his laboratory? And why wasn't there a fence or something to keep people from discovering his creations? It seems strange that he would have such lax security.”

That was the great thing about having a friend like Angelo. He considered every angle.

“Okay,” Nick said. “So if they aren't created in a lab, where
do
they come from?”

Angelo flipped open his notebook. “There's no definitive proof. But according to folklore, homunculi are closely related to small, beardless, humanlike beings called
mandragora
, or, as the Germans call them,
alreona
.”

“Mandragora, I think I've heard of those,” Nick said. “Don't they come from plants or something?”

“Mandrake plants, to be precise,” Angelo said. He pointed to a picture of a flat plant with thick, dark green leaves. “They grow a long, wrinkled root that can look nearly human. Supposedly, if you pick them at the right time they form actual little people. You have to cover your ears to protect yourself from their screams or they can kill you.”

“And these mandrake plants grow here?” Nick asked.

“Not usually. The plants are native to western Europe. But from everything I've read, if you have the right soil and the right temperature, they
can
grow here. Or this one could come from some other kind of plant.”

That made sense. The guy who'd kicked them off his property seemed much more like an angry farmer who'd found someone trespassing in his garden than like a mad scientist. But there was still the part that had bothered him ever since the drive home. “If
that guy is growing homunculi, why would he let them roam free? Couldn't they end up wandering onto the highway and getting hit by a car?”