The Turtle Boy Read Free

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