The Turtle Boy (2 page)

His impossibly large hands
–
adult hands
,
Timmy thought – were splayed out behind him, whiter still than the
chalky foot and even from where Timmy stood he could see those
fingers were tipped with black crescents of dirt.

He nudged Pete, who jumped as if
bitten.

"
What?
"

"Go talk to him," Timmy
said, a half-smile on his face, knowing his friend would balk at
the idea. Pete raised copper eyebrows and scoffed as quietly as he
could.

Not quietly enough, however. For the
kid turned and spotted them, his eyes like bullets gleaming in the
sunlight as he appraised them. His hair was shorn away in patches,
contrasting with the long greasy brown clumps that sank beneath and
sprouted from the collar of his ripped black T-shirt. The exposed
patches of scalp were an angry red.

"Who are you?" Timmy asked,
stumbling out of his amazement and horror at the appearance of the
stranger and composing himself, ready at a moment's notice to look
tough.

The chalk foot bobbed. All
three boys watched it and then the kid smiled at them. Pete
actually backed up a step, a low groan coming from his throat like
a trapped fly, and Timmy found he had to strain to avoid doing
something similar. If someone had whispered an insult to his mother
into his ear, he wouldn't have been any less disturbed than he was
by that smile. It was crooked, and wrong. Something pricked his
ankle. He looked down and hissing, slapped away a mosquito. When he
straightened, the boy was standing in front of him and this time he
couldn't restrain a yelp of surprise.

Up close the kid looked even
more peculiar, as if his face were the result of a shortsighted
child's mix-n'-match game. His eyes were cold dark stones, set way
too far apart, and reminded Timmy of the one and only catfish he
had ever caught in this pond. He wondered if there was something
wrong with the kid; maybe he'd gone crazy after being bitten by a
rabid squirrel or something. Stuff like that happened, he knew.
He'd heard the stories.

The kid's head looked like a
rotten squash beaten and decorated to resemble a human being's and
his mouth could have been a recently healed wound…or a
burn.

Instinct told him to run and
only the steady panting behind him told him that Pete hadn't
already fled. A soft breeze cooled the sweat on the nape of his
neck and he swallowed, flinched when a bug's legs tickled his
cheek.

The kid's eyes were on him
and Timmy couldn't keep from squirming. It was as if his mother had
caught him looking at a girl's panties. His cheeks burned with
shame.

And then the kid spoke:
"Darryl," he said in words spun from filaments of phlegm, making it
sound as if he needed to clear his throat.

It took Timmy a moment to
decipher what he'd heard and to realize it wasn't a threat, or an
insult, or a challenge. The last thing he had expected from the
creepy-looking boy was a simple answer. He felt his shoulders drop
a notch.

"Oh. Hi. I'm…uh…Timmy." The
moment the words crawled from his mouth, he regretted them. Without
knowing why, he felt more in danger now that he'd revealed his
name.

The boy stared back at him
and nodded. "This your pond?" he asked, cocking his strangely
shaped head towards the water.

Timmy's mind raced, quickly
churning possible responses into something coherent. What emerged
was: "Yes. No."
Aw crap
.

The boy said nothing but grinned a grin
of ripped stitches and turned back to look out over the water. Pine
and walnut trees clustered together on the far side of the pond and
some distance beyond them lay the train tracks. Timmy found himself
wondering if the kid had been traveling the trains and jumped off
to see what trouble he could cause in Delaware. He sincerely hoped
not and was all of a sudden very conscious of how far away from the
houses they were. Would anyone hear a scream?

A sudden gust of wind hissed high in
the trees and a twisted branch overhanging the pond dipped its
leaves into the water as if checking the temperature.

The kid slid back down to
his spot on the bank and returned his foot to the drifting pond
scum. Out in the water, a red and white bobber rode the miniature
waves: memento of a past fisherman's unsuccessful cast.

"What are you doing,
anyway?" Timmy asked without knowing he was going to. He made a
silent promise to himself never to argue again when his father told
him he asked too many questions.

The boy answered without
raising his head. "Feeding the turtles."

The gasp from behind him
made Timmy spin in Pete's direction. Pete had a hand clamped over
his mouth, his face even paler than usual, his freckles gray
periods on an otherwise blank page. He pointed at the boy and Timmy
looked back, expecting to see the kid had jumped to his feet again
and was brandishing a knife or something worse. But Darryl hadn't
moved, except for his foot, which he continued to let rise and fall
into the cool water. Except this time Timmy watched it long enough,
watched it come back up out of the water and saw that a ragged
semicircle of the boy's ankle was missing, the skin around it
mottled and sore. Blood plinked into the water as the boy lowered
it again and smiled that ugly smile to himself.

Pete's urgent whisper
snapped Timmy out of the terrible and fascinating sight of what
Darryl had called 'feeding the turtles.'

"Timmy,
c'mon
. Let's get
out
of here. There's something
wrong
with that kid." He
emphasized every couple of words with a stamp of his foot and Timmy
knew his friend was close to tears. In truth, he wasn't far away
from weeping himself. But not here. Not in front of the crazy kid.
Who knew what that might set off in him?

He stepped back, unable to take his
eyes off the boy and his ravaged ankle, rising and falling like a
white seesaw over the water.

"We're going now," he said,
unsure why he felt the need to announce their departure when the
element of surprise might have suited them better.

The boy dipped his foot and this time
Timmy could have sworn he saw something small, dark and leathery
rising to meet it. He moved back until he collided with Pete, who
grabbed his wrist hard enough to hurt.

As Timmy was about to turn,
Darryl's head swiveled toward him, the frostiness of his gaze
undeniable now. "See you soon," he said. Timmy felt gooseflesh
ripple across his skin.

They didn't wait to see what
might or might not be waiting with open mouths beneath the boy's
ankle. Instead, they turned and made their way with a quiet calm
that begged to become panic, through the weeds and the tall grass
until they were sure they could not be seen from the pond. And then
they ran, neither of them screaming in terror for fear of ridicule
later when this all turned out to be a cruel dream.

CHAPTER TWO

That night, after showering
and checking for the gamut of burrowers and parasites the pond had
to offer, Timmy slipped beneath the cool sheets, more glad than
he'd ever been before that his father was there to read to
him.

Beside his bed, a new fan
had been lodged in the open window and droned out cool air as his
father yawned, set his Coke down on the floor between his feet and
smiled. "You remember where we left off?" he asked as he took a
seat just below his son's toes.

Timmy nodded. They were
reading
The Magician's Nephew
by C.S. Lewis. He smoothed the blankets over his
chest. "Queen Jadis turned out to be really wicked. She wanted to
go with Digory and Polly back to their world to try to take it over
but they touched the rings and escaped."

His father nodded. "Right."
As he flipped through the pages, Timmy looked around the room, his
eyes settling on the fish his father had painted on the walls last
summer. They were tropical fish; brightly colored and smudged where
the paint had tried to run. A hammerhead shark had been frozen in
the act of dive-bombing the wainscoting. Here a hermit crab peeked
out from the shadows of his sanctuary; there a jellyfish mimicked
the currents to rise from the depths of the blue wall. A lobster
waved atop a rock strategically placed to hide a crack in the
plaster. Bubbles rose toward the ceiling and Timmy tracked them
with fearful eyes down to the half open mouth of a gaudily painted
turtle.

He listened to his father read, more
comforted by the soft tone and occasional forced drama of his voice
than the words themselves.

When his father reached a
page with a picture, he turned the book around to show it to Timmy.
It was a crosshatching of the fearsome queen, one arm curled behind
her head, the other outstretched before a massive black metal door
as she readied herself to fling it wide with her magic. Timmy
nodded, indicating he'd seen enough and his father went back to
reading.

Timmy's eyes returned to the
crudely drawn turtle on the wall. It was bigger than any turtle
he'd ever seen and the mouth was a thin black line twisted slightly
at the end to make it appear as if it was smiling – his father's
touch. The shell was enormous, segmented into hexagonal shapes and
much more swollen than he imagined they were in real life. Was it
something like this, then, that had been chewing on Darryl's ankle?
The thought brought a shudder of revulsion rippling through him and
he pulled the sheets closer to his chin. It couldn't have been.
Even a kid as crazy-looking as Darryl couldn't have done such a
thing without it hurting him. Perhaps the boy had been injured and
was merely soaking his wound in the pond when they found him.
Perhaps it had all been a trick, a bit of mischief they had fallen
for, hook line and sinker. That made much more sense, and yet he
still didn't believe it. The cold knot in his throat remained and
when his father read to him of Digory's and Polly's escape from
Charn and their arrival – with the queen in tow – at the mysterious
pools in the Wood between the Worlds, he wondered if they had seen
a boy there, sitting on the bank of one of those pools, his feet
dipped in the water.

"Dad?"

His father's eyebrows rose
above his thick spectacles. "What is it?"

Timmy looked at him for a
long time, struggling to frame the words so they wouldn't sound
foolish, but almost all of it sounded ridiculous. Eventually he
sighed and said: "I was at the pond today."

"I know. Your mother told
me. She tugged a few ticks off you too, I believe. Nasty little
buggers, aren't they?"

Timmy nodded. "I saw someone
down there." He cleared his throat. "A boy."

"Oh yeah? A friend of
yours?"

"No. I've never seen this
kid before. He was dirty and smelly and his head was a funny shape.
Weird eyes, too."

The eyebrows lowered.
"'Weird' how?"

"I-I don't know. They had no
color, just really dark."

"What was he doing down
there?"

"Just sitting there," Timmy
said softly, avoiding his father's eyes.

"Did he say anything to
you?"

After a moment of careful
thought, Timmy nodded. "He said he was feeding the turtles." There
was silence then, except for the hum of the fan.

Timmy's father set the book
down beside him on the bed and crossed his arms. "And was he?" he
said at last, as if annoyed that Timmy hadn't already filled in
that gap in the story.

"I don't know. There was a
piece of his foot missing and he was—"

His father sighed and waved
a hand. "Okay, okay. I get it. Ghost story time, huh?" He stood up
and Timmy quickly scooted himself into a sitting position, his eyes
wide with interest.

"You think he was a ghost?"
he asked, as his father smirked down at him.

"Well isn't that how the
story is supposed to go? Did you turn back when you were leaving
only to find the boy had mysteriously vanished?"

Timmy slowly shook his head.
"We didn't look back. We were afraid to."

His father's smile held but
seemed glued there by doubt. "There's no such thing as ghosts,
Timmy. Only
ghost
stories. The living have enough to worry about these days
without the dead coming back to complicate things. Now you get some
rest."

He carefully stepped around
his Coke and leaned in to give Timmy a kiss on the cheek.
Ordinarily, the acrid stench of his father's cologne bothered him,
but tonight it was a familiar smell, a smell he knew was real, and
unthreatening.

"Good night,
Dad."

"Good night, kiddo. I'll see
you in the morning." He walked, Coke in hand, to the door. "Have
sweet dreams now, you hear me? Don't go wasting any more time and
energy on ghosts and goblins. Nothing in the dark you can't see in
the daylight. Remember that."

Timmy smiled weakly. "I
will. Thanks."

His father nodded and closed the door,
but just as the boy had resigned himself to solitude and all the
fanciful and awful ponderings that would be birthed within it, the
door opened again and his father poked his head in.