“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.”
“Okay.”
Patricia looked around. Crickets were chirping now, and the sun had long since gone down. “It’s getting dark,” Terri observed. “I better go home now.”
“Okay,” Patricia said. “But don’t forget to call me in the morning.”
“I won’t. ’Bye.”
Terri walked back to her own house then. The sky was darkening before her very eyes, the sun just a dark-orange circle low on the horizon. Stars twinkled faintly. When she turned onto her own street, a big white-faced owl hooted at her from some tall trees. And just over the tops of those same trees, a yellow moon was rising, so large she could see shadows of its craters. It was a full moon.
She tried to distract herself. The library, she thought. Tomorrow. There, she and Patricia would be able to find out more about those strange words because at the library they had a special wing full of books about science and zoology. And anything they didn’t understand, they could ask the librarian, Mr. Seymour. He was a nice man, and he was very smart. Even though she and Patricia had found the words in the dictionary, Terri still didn’t quite understand them, nor did she understand what the words might have to do with whatever was going on. The only thing she could keep thinking was the idea that her mother and uncle were doing some sort of experiments. But what? Terri asked herself now. What kind of experiments? And why?
As Terri was walking up her driveway, another owl hooted at her, and then she noticed several birds flying in front of the moon…
Or were they bats?
She rushed into the house, slammed the front door quickly behind her. Suddenly the night had seemed creepy, and she wanted to get out of it as fast as she could. What am I afraid of? she wondered. But getting back into the house offered no relief. The house seemed creepy too. Dark. So silent, she could hear her own eyes blink. Empty.
Yes, the house was empty. No one’s here, she realized after checking in the family room and kitchen. The lacy curtains around the opened kitchen window puffed back and forth from a sudden warm breeze outside. “Mom?” Terri called out. “Are you here?” But there was no answer.
“Uncle Chuck?”
She waited a moment, but still—
No answer.
Of course, she was really fooling herself. She knew where they were. The same place they were every night, sometimes till long after dark…
She peeked out the kitchen window, at the sinister opening between the trees in the backyard.
They’re still down there, she realized. They’re still down there at the lake…working in the boathouse…
««—»»
The words echoed ever so faintly:
They’re getting bigger—
Eyes—giant, black, shiny eyes with gold-colored irises—blinked.
Bigger—
The bushes rustled. Trees shook. Large bent legs with rumpled, spotted skin strained and pushed forward on big webbed feet like a duck’s…
Only it wasn’t a duck, was it?
Bigger…
The big black eyes blinked again. They were so big; they were as big as basketballs!
The crunching sound echoed through the woods. The giant webbed feet squashed the bushes flat, and as the thing moved forward, some of the trees actually fell down.
They’re getting bigger, the words continued to echo through her head.
It was a toad, crawling up from the woods across the backyard in the moonlight—
A toad as big as a car!
Its long, curved, thin-lipped mouth snapped open, showing teeth the size of kitchen knives…
Bigger, bigger, bigger, the words raced round her mind as the giant, hideous creature hopped toward the house, heading straight for Terri’s bedroom window—
They’re getting bigger and bigger, Terri, and they’re coming for you…
««—»»
“Terri?” A hand gently nudged her. The voice, at first, seemed far off, like in a dream. “Terri, honey?”
Terri awoke with a chill buzzing up her spine; she almost screamed. Her eyes snapped open as she shivered. She was lying on the couch in the family room, the TV screen full of white static, and right now, two concerned faces peered down at her: her mother and Uncle Chuck.
“Honey, are you all right?” her mother asked. “My goodness! You’re shivering!”
Gradually, Terri remembered. She’d come back from Patricia’s and then had gone into the family room and turned on the TV to watch The Simpsons, and then…
I must’ve fallen asleep, she realized. I fell asleep…and dreamed…
“Terri, honey, are you sick?” her mother asked.
Uncle Chuck was down on one knee, he put his palm on her forehead. “She doesn’t have a fever,” he said, “but she looks awfully pale.”
Terri rubbed her eyes and sat up on the couch. “I—I’m all right,” she said sleepily. “I just had a bad dream. I dreamed there was a toad coming up the backyard, but the toad had teeth, and it was as big as a car…”