The Tanglewood Terror Read Free

That’s what Michelle called it.
    “Babe?” Brian asked.
    “The bucket. She thinks of it as her baby. She had a lot of real babies, but they were all taken away from her.” Michelle told me once that Cassie used to be a breeding sow and that she’d had eight litters.
    “What happened to them?”
    “They got turned into bacon. What do you think?”
    “Oh.” Brian got a sad look on his face. I myself was thinking about not eating bacon anymore, but it’s hard to make the connection between a big friendly pig like Cassie and crispy strips of breakfast meat.
    I got the jar and went to Michelle’s back door, Brian running to catch up. She opened the door before I even had a chance to knock.
    “I’m going to be gone for a week,” she told me as she let us in, “so you’ll have full-time Cassie duty.”
    “No problem. Where are you going?”
    “Baxter to shoot bears. They’re most active just before hibernation.”
    Brian’s eyes got wide, so I softly punched him in the shoulder. “She’s taking pictures,” I told him. “She’d never actually
shoot
a bear.”
    “No hitting,” he muttered.
    “Sorry.”
    Michelle put out a package of cookies, and I grabbed a couple. She poured two cups of milk. Brian dunked his cookie into the milk and held it until it was good and soggy.
    “Hey, have you ever seen these?” I pushed the jar across the table. “They look normal now, but they were lit up when I got them. And they were blue instead of yellow.”
    “Sure I have,” she said. “I’ve seen ’em in blue, green, and orange. It’s called fox fire.”
    “What does it have to do with foxes?” Brian asked.
    “Nothing. It means ‘fake fire.’ I think somebody mispronounced a French word and it stuck. They’re not that rare, but they are tough to photograph. The light doesn’t come through. Even if you do it with a slow shutter speed, people think you faked it.”
    “Hm.” So they were kind of boring after all.
    Michelle must have seen my disappointment and tried to make up for it.
    “You know what? I read once that fox fire is where fairies come from.”
    “Really?” Brian perked up at the mention of fairies.
    “Folks used to see the mysterious light shining in the woods and thought that little creatures must be having big parties out there.”
    “Why didn’t they just go see?” I asked her.
    “The woods were dark and scary, and since they didn’t know what the blue light was, they assumed it was something bad.”
    “That’s, uh …” I was going to say “dumb,” but I’d done the same thing. I’d thought the glow was alien ooze or nuclear waste, and I was afraid to take a closer look until Brian made me. I resolved to be more reasonable from now on.
    Michelle saw Brian scowling. “I don’t mean Tinker Bell,” she said. “Their fairies were little demons.”
    “Cool,” he said.

The next day there was a ragged line of mushrooms strewn across our back lawn, petering out before they reached the back steps. With their cone-shaped caps tilting this way and that, they looked like skinny gnomes on the march. It was like they’d followed us.
    No, I told myself. We must have tracked spores on our shoes and clothes. I remembered the plume of white dust and shuddered. Those spores had been all over me. In any case, it was scientific. It was creepy and weird but scientific.
    The Patriots were playing the four o’clock game on TV, and I got bored during the one o’clock game. I went outside and took the mushroomy trail all the way to the clearing. The mushrooms had spread to the edges of the clearing, right up to the stone I’d turned over yesterday. They looked dull and yellow in the sunlight, but I could still see a blue-green glow deep in the shadows of fallen branches.
    I didn’t like them, even if Michelle said they were normal.
    I kicked at some mushrooms as I strode back throughthe yard. I knocked a few caps off, but they were tougher than they looked.
    “Can we go to the haunted