Monster Lake (10 page)

“
But I’m really getting
worried,” her uncle continued. “Things are really getting
dangerous.”

“
I know,” her mother
agreed.

“
I mean, can you imagine?
If she went to the boathouse and actually got into the backroom,
and saw the specimen tanks? She’d be terrified. Or, worse, if she
got in there and found the key…” Uncle Chuck paused as if troubled.
“And opened the trapdoor?”

“
Don’t even say it!” her
mother said in the most dreadful voice Terri had ever
heard.

The kitchen conversation halted for a few
moments, as though Terri’s mother and uncle were thinking about
things. Then her mother said, “What did you do? When you caught her
in the boathouse?”

“
I sent her to her room,”
Uncle Chuck said. “Didn’t really know what to do.”

“
The poor thing. She must
be so confused; I never have even a minute to spend with her since
the project, and with her father being gone, that can only make it
worse for her.”

Terri continued to listen eagerly at the
crack in her opened bedroom door.

“
But I’m really getting
worried now,” her Uncle Chuck said next. “I mean, they’re getting
bigger.”

“
I know, bigger each day.
And they’re coming up into the yard at night,” her mother said. “I
saw them last night—they were all over the place.”

The toads,
Terri realized.
She must
be talking about the toads…
And the memory
never left her mind.

The big, bumpy toads with teeth.

“
What are we going to do?”
Uncle Chuck said next, and he sounded desperate. He even
sounded…scared.

“
What are we going to do,”
he continued, “if those things get into the house?”

««—»»

Just the way he’d said
it—those
things
—made Terri shiver. It made the tiny hairs on the back of her
neck stand up straight.

What are we going to do if
those
things
get
into the house?

The words chilled her to the bone. But could
that be possible? Could those horrible fanged toads and salamanders
actually get into the house? At first, Terri didn’t think so. But
then she thought back to some other things she’d heard her mother
and Uncle Chuck say.

They’re getting bigger…

Meaning the toads and
salamanders, Terri had already figured. But how could they
get
bigger?
This
question nagged at her, until she started putting things together.
Maybe her mother and Uncle Chuck were working on some kind of
experiment that made toads and salamanders bigger, and grow teeth.
Maybe some kind of new vitamin they’d invented at her mother’s
laboratory—

And something had gone wrong.

This seemed to Terri to be
a strong possibility.
An
experiment,
she wondered.

And they’d said something else, hadn’t they?
Something that scared her even more.

Something about the
trapdoor,
she recalled. The trapdoor she’d
seen this morning in the backroom of the boathouse.

With the big padlock on it.

Why was it locked? What was in it? Why would
her mother and uncle be so concerned about Terri finding the key
and opening the trapdoor up?

Questions, questions!

And Terri was still determined to find the
answers, and she knew that some of the answers at least would come
when she found a way to look up those words she’d found in Uncle
Chuck’s black-leather briefcase.

“
Terri?”

It was her uncle’s voice, on the other side
of her bedroom door. “I’d like to speak with you for a moment.”

“
Okay,” Terri
said.

Her door swooshed open, and
there was Uncle Chuck standing there. He wasn’t tapping his foot,
which was a good sign, and another good sign was that he hadn’t
called her
young lady.

“
What is it, Uncle Chuck?”
Terri asked.

“
Well, I just wanted to say
that you can come out of your room now; you’ve been punished
enough.”

Great! She didn’t have to stay in her room
anymore!

“
But I just want you to
know,” Uncle Chuck went on, “that the reason I punished you is
because we love you very much and we care about you, and we don’t
want you to do things that you shouldn’t. Do you
understand?”

“
Yes, Uncle Chuck,” Terri
said. But she couldn’t resist asking the next question. She wanted
to see what Uncle Chuck would say. “How come I shouldn’t go to the
boathouse?” she asked him next.

“
Well, honey, because, like
I’ve said, the boathouse is dangerous. Those old boards on the pier
could break, and you could fall in the water.”

Terri managed to keep her thoughts to
herself. That wasn’t the real reason, and she knew it. But instead,
she changed the subject. “Are we going to have dinner now?”

“
Well, no, honey. Your
mother and I are still working on something very important for your
mother’s job, and we have to get to work right now, so we don’t
have time to eat dinner. But I want you to fix yourself something
in the microwave, okay?”

Terri nodded. “Can I go to Patricia’s?”

“
Sure, but only after
you’ve had something to eat,” her uncle said. “And make sure you’re
home before dark.” Then he stepped back from the door. “And you can
watch TV later too. I’ll see you later.”

“’
Bye,” Terri
said.

She waited a minute in her bedroom, then she
went out into the hallway. Uncle Chuck had gone into his own
bedroom and was coming out again right now.

With the briefcase.

Terri waited a few moments more. Then she
quietly walked out to the kitchen and looked out the big
sliding-glass door into the backyard.

There they go,
she thought, looking on.
Just like every night…

Through the glass door, she could see her
mother and Uncle Chuck walking across the back yard, to the narrow
gravel path that led to the boathouse.

««—»»

“Wow!” Terri said. “That’s a big
bandage.”

Patricia, sitting in a chair, was holding
her knee up, to show Terri the large white bandage on it.

“
And it doesn’t hurt?”
Terri asked.

“
Naw,” Patricia said. “It
just itches a little. I have to go back to the doctor’s in a week,
so he can take the stitches out.”

Terri had quickly fixed herself a spaghetti
TV dinner in the microwave, then she’d gone immediately to
Patricia’s house. And why shouldn’t she? Her uncle had given her
permission.

“
So you didn’t get
grounded?” Patricia asked.

“
Nope. I lucked out. But—”
Terri took out the piece of paper from her pocket. “Look what I
brought.”

“
What is it?” Patricia
wanted to know.

Terri explained it all, about the words
she’d seen in the boathouse, and how she’d been able to write them
down after seeing them again on the notepad she’d found in her
uncle’s briefcase.

“
Terri!” Patricia
exclaimed. “You really took a big chance! If your uncle had caught
you in his bedroom right after catching you in the boathouse,
you
really
would’ve been grounded!”

“
I know,” Terri admitted.
“But I had to find these words. I’m sure they’ll give us a lot of
answers to all the weird things that have been going on lately. But
the only dictionary I could find was one of those real skinny ones
they gave us in first grade—you know, just when you’re learning to
read.”

“
Oh, yeah,” Patricia
said.

“
And it didn’t have any of
these words in it. Do you have a dictionary, like a big one for
adults?”

Patricia rubbed her chin. “Yeah, I think so.
I think there’s one in the den. But we’ll have to ask my father’s
permission first.”

“
Okay. Let’s do
it.”

Patricia’s father was in the living room,
sitting back in a big recliner chair reading the newspaper. The
television was on, with a baseball game. “Yankees,” he said to
himself, “what a bunch of dopes.” Patricia asked if they could use
the dictionary, and her father said yes without thinking twice.
Terri would at least have expected him to ask why; most adults
always did.

“
This is great,” Terri
commented as Patricia took her into the paneled den. A big
hard-covered dictionary sat opened on top of a low dark-wood
bookshelf.

“
That’s the biggest
dictionary I’ve ever seen!” Terri remarked.

“
Yeah, and if this doesn’t
have those words in it,” Patricia guessed, “then nothing will.
What’s the first word?”

“‘
Reagent,’” Terri said,
and pointed to the word on the paper so Patricia could see
it.

Patricia turned to the R’s in the big
dictionary, skimmed her finger down the page. “Here it is,” she
said and began to quote, “‘Reagent: a substance used to react with
another substance.’”

Terri frowned, and wrote the definition down
on her piece of notebook paper. Then she read the next word.
“Transmission.”

“
Isn’t that something in a
car?” Patricia asked.

“
Well, yeah, I think it is,
but it’s got to mean something else too.”

Patricia, then, turned to the T’s. “You’re
right,” she told her. “It also means ‘to cause to go to another
person or place.’”

Then Terri read off the other words, and
Patricia looked them up.

Genetic
meant having to do with “genes,” and genes were
these special things in all living cells.

Mutation
meant change.

And
carnivore
meant—

They both knew what that
word meant…animals that eat meat. Which meant these animals
had…
teeth.

««—»»

“Yeah, this is really
weird, all right,” Terri said. She and Patricia were sitting out on
the curb now, trying to put together what they’d read in the
dictionary. The word, of course, that bothered her most was
carnivore.
Something that
eats meat, something that has teeth.
Like
the toads and salamanders,
she thought.
They definitely had teeth. But, as she’d told Patricia, when she
read about toads and salamanders in her Golden Nature books, it
stated that neither animal had teeth. And she remembered something
else, too. The books said that toads and salamanders were
insectivores,
and when
they looked that word up in the dictionary they discovered that it
meant an animal that ate insects, not meat.

“
Yeah, it’s weird,”
Patricia agreed, “and what’s weirder is that your mother and uncle
know all about it.”

And my father knew all
about it too,
Terri realized,
before he got divorced from my mother and moved
away.

The other word they’d
looked up was
counter-reagent,
and that was something that reacted against a
reagent, which was sort of confusing. A reagent was a substance
that reacted with another substance, so a counter-reagent was
something that reacted against that.

All the pieces are
here,
Terri thought, sitting next to
Patricia at the curb.
Now if only I can
put all the pieces together and make sense of them.

“
You know what we have to
do, Terri,” Patricia said in a low voice.

“
What?”

“
We’re going to have to go
back to the boathouse.”

“
We
can’t
!” Terri insisted. “My Uncle
Chuck said we couldn’t!”

“
Yeah, well he said we
couldn’t last night too, but we went anyway.”

“
I’ll get
grounded!”

“
Not if they don’t find
out.”

“
No!” Terri said firmly.
“Absolutely not.” And then she remembered what her uncle had warned
her of. “It’s really dangerous. You heard my uncle; the pier could
break, and we could fall in the water.”

“
Aw, come on, Terri,”
Patricia objected. “The pier’s not going to
break.
He just said that because he
doesn’t want us to go down there and find out what’s
really
going
on.”

Terri smirked. She knew Patricia was right.
But still, she couldn’t allow it. “No way. We’re not going to go
back there. I could get in too much trouble.”

“
Suit yourself,” Patricia
said. “But can you think of another way to find out what’s really
going on around here?”

After a long pause, Terri
thought to herself with her chin in her hands,
No, I can’t
. “We’ll figure something
out,” she said instead. “Maybe we can go to the library tomorrow,
find out more about those words.”

“
Well, I guess we could try
that,” Patricia said, but she sure didn’t sound very
convinced.

“
That’s what we’ll do
then,” Terri made plans. “I’ll call you in the morning, and we’ll
walk down to the town library, see what else we can find
out.”