It was already open.
His mother turned back to them, her face gaunt as she hurried them down from the porch and back into the rain.
“What is it?” Timmy asked, shouting to be heard above the shrieking wind. Sheets of icy rain lashed his face. Kim gave him a frightened look he figured probably mirrored his own. All he had seen as the door swung open had been a dark hall, broken at the end by the fluorescent glare from the kitchen. He was sure no one had been sitting at the table.
“Nothing,” his mother called back. “Nothing at all. But I don’t think they’re here!”
Timmy felt as if his head had been dunked in ice water. His teeth clicked and an involuntary shiver coursed through him. Over their heads, a plastic lighthouse struggled valiantly to keep its wind chimes from tearing loose. The resultant muddle of jingles unsettled him. Mr. Marshall’s weather vane groaned as it swung wildly from south to north and back again, adding to the discordant harmony of the turbulent night.
“Then where are they?” Kim shouted, her arms crossed and buried beneath the coat as she danced from foot to foot.
But Timmy knew the answer.
“The pond,” he said. His mother turned toward him and put a hand to her ear.
“The pond,” he repeated. Another chill capered down his spine, like a flow of icy water.
“That’s absurd,” she said. “Why would they go back there? Especially on a night like this!”
Timmy shook his head, but in the wind he heard his father: I think the reason Mr. Marshall is so mad is because he’s seen it too.
It occurred to him then that The Turtle Boy — Darryl, or whoever he was — had come to Myers Pond not for Timmy, or Pete, or any of them. He had come for Mr. Marshall. And Mr. Marshall had been acting so strange, so angry because The Turtle Boy was tormenting him, frightening him.
But why?
It didn’t make sense and the more he pondered it, the less likely it seemed. All he was sure of in that moment, standing in the pouring rain outside Mr. Marshall’s house with the nervous white faces of his mother and Kim fixed on him, was that for whatever the reason, the men had gone to Myers Pond.
“I’m going to call the police,” his mother said, already mounting the steps. “You two wait here and yell if you see them coming.”
With that, she disappeared into the house, the door easing closed behind her.
Timmy turned.
“Hey!” Kim called and he looked back at her. She was a huddled mass of shadows, only a trembling lower lip visible through her hair. “Where are you going?”
“To the pond. I think Mr. Marshall is going to try to hurt my father. If we wait for the police it might be too late.”
“But what are you going to do? You’re just a kid! You can’t stop a grown-up if he wants to do something bad. Especially a crazy grown-up!”
Timmy shook his head. If Mr. Marshall intended to hurt his father, he at least had to try to stop it. Chances were he’d end up getting hurt in the process, but that didn’t matter. He remembered his father reading to him, hugging him in the kitchen and telling him he loved him. He remembered riding his father’s shoulders through the cornfields and feeling like the king of the world atop a throne. He remembered the disappointment of being in his first school play without his father present, only to see him creep to a seat next to his mother halfway through. He remembered the nightmares, the dreams in which he lost his father. He remembered the fear, the horror at being left alone without his father to live with the ghost of his mother.
No.
He would try. It was all he could do and just maybe it would make a difference. Determined, he stalked through the curtains of rain, flinching when the sky cracked above his head. He squinted through the temporary moonlight of the lightning, the mud sucking against the soles of his shoes.
“Timmy, wait!” Kim cried and he faltered at the far side of the house.
After a moment, he called to her: “Just tell my Mom where I’m going and not to worry.”
“You idiot, of course she’ll worry!”
“Just tell her!”
“Tell her yourself,” Kim shouted, the hurt in her voice ringing over the raging wind.
He walked on until the ground hardened and stones rolled beneath his shoes. In a flash of lightning that sent stars waltzing across his field of vision, he saw the gravel winding ahead of him, emerging like a pale tongue from the black mouth of the weaving trees. Then the shade of night dropped once more and he was blinded, walking on a path from memory.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Daylight.
Impossible and warm.
Mind numbing in its reality but most certainly there.
Eyes wide, Timmy stumbled and almost fell from the rain-swept night into a summer day.
This can’t be happening. This isn’t real.
But as he felt the sun start to warm his face, he knew it was real. The grass was dry against his ankles, the sky above the pond a stark, heavenly blue that bore no hint of rain. It was as if he’d stepped from real life onto a movie set, onto an authentic reproduction of Myers Pond on a summer day.
Timmy moved slowly, as if in a dream. Frogs croaked and toads belched in the reeds while dragonflies whirred over the unbroken surface of the water. Birds chirped and whistled, trilled and cawed and rustled in the trees. He glimpsed the rump of a deer, cotton-white tail twitching as it wandered away from the pond.
With his neck already aching from trying to take in all this magic at once, Timmy looked down to the bank where he had seen The Turtle Boy on that first day in another world. And there he was.
Darryl.
But not the scabrous, grotesque creature he and Pete had seen. No, this boy was smiling, fresh-faced and healthy, his skin pale but unmarked, devoid of weeping wounds and bites. His hair was parted neatly and shone in the midday sun, his gray trousers unsullied, the crease down the middle crisp and unruffled. His black t-shirt looked worn but not old. He did not seem to notice he was no longer alone, so intent was he in dipping his ankle into the cool water. Timmy watched as that ankle rose, expecting to see a glistening red wound, but the skin remained unbroken, unblemished. Pure. This, Timmy realized, was who The Turtle Boy had been before he’d changed into the malevolent, seething figure of decay and disease they’d found on the bank that day. This was Darryl before whatever had corrupted him had compelled him to feed himself to the turtles.
“Who are you?” Timmy asked softly, but received no reply. Darryl continued to smile his knowing smile, continued to dip his smooth ankle into the calm waters.
“Why are you here?” Timmy demanded. For the first time he noticed the small red notebook sitting next to the boy. He was almost tempted to reach down and grab the book, to read it, to search for the answers he could not get from the boy on the bank. But he didn’t. Couldn’t. For as the resolve swelled in him to do that very thing, he heard the gentle swish of grass being crumpled underfoot as someone approached from the opposite side of the rise.
Mom, Timmy thought with a sigh of relief, and wondered if she too would see this miraculous pocket of daylight and calm where there should be a storm.
But it wasn’t his mother.
The man who came striding over the rise was longhaired and thickly built, his faded denim jeans ripped across the knees and trailing threads. He wore battered tan loafers, comfortable looking but tired and dying. A v-shaped patch of tangled black chest hair sprouted from the open neck of the man’s navy shirt. He looked normal, except for one horrifying detail.
He had no face.
Beneath the brim of a dark blue baseball cap, there was nothing but a blank oval that twitched and shifted as if made of liquid. The flesh-colored surface darkened in places as if plagued by the memory of bruises and now and again, the suggestion of features—a dark eye, the twist of a smile—surfaced from the swimming skin. But otherwise, it was unfinished, a doll’s face left to melt in the sun.