The boy answered without raising his head. “Feeding the turtles.”
The gasp from behind him made Timmy spin in Pete’s direction. Pete had a hand clamped over his mouth, his face even paler than usual, his freckles gray periods on an otherwise blank page. He pointed at the boy and Timmy looked back, expecting to see the kid had jumped to his feet again and was brandishing a knife or something worse. But Darryl hadn’t moved, except for 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 line twisted slightly at the end to make it appear as if it was smiling — his father’s touch. The shell was enormous, segmented into hexagonal shapes and much more swollen than he imagined they were in real life. Was it something like this, then, that had been chewing on Darryl’s ankle? The thought brought a shudder of revulsion rippling through him and he pulled the sheets closer to his chin. It couldn’t have been. Even a kid as crazy-looking as Darryl couldn’t have done such a thing without it hurting him. Perhaps the boy had been injured and was merely soaking his wound in the pond when they found him. Perhaps it had all been a trick, a bit of mischief they had fallen for, hook line and sinker. That made much more sense, and yet he still didn’t believe it. The cold knot in his throat remained and when his father read to him of Digory’s and Polly’s escape from Charn and their arrival — with the queen in tow — at the mysterious pools in the Wood between the Worlds, he wondered if they had seen a boy there, sitting on the bank of one of those pools, his feet dipped in the water.
“Dad?”
His father’s eyebrows rose above his thick spectacles. “What is it?”
Timmy looked at him for a long time, struggling to frame the words so they wouldn’t sound foolish, but almost all of it sounded ridiculous. Eventually he sighed and said: “I was at the pond today.”
“I know. Your mother told me. She tugged a few ticks off you too, I believe. Nasty little buggers, aren’t they?”
Timmy nodded. “I saw someone down there.” He cleared his throat. “A boy.”
“Oh yeah? A friend of yours?”
“No. I’ve never seen this kid before. He was dirty and smelly and his head was a funny shape. Weird eyes, too.”
The eyebrows lowered. “’Weird’ how?”
“I-I don’t know. They had no color, just really dark.”
“What was he doing down there?”
“Just sitting there,” Timmy said softly, avoiding his father’s eyes.
“Did he say anything to you?”
After a moment of careful thought, Timmy nodded. “He said he was feeding the turtles.” There was silence then, except for the hum of the fan.
Timmy’s father set the book down beside him on the bed and crossed his arms. “And was he?” he said at last, as if annoyed that Timmy hadn’t already filled in that gap in the story.
“I don’t know. There was a piece of his foot missing and he was—”
His father sighed and waved a hand. “Okay, okay. I get it. Ghost story time, huh?” He stood up and Timmy quickly scooted himself into a sitting position, his eyes wide with interest.
“You think he was a ghost?” he asked, as his father smirked down at him.
“Well isn’t that how the story is supposed to go? Did you turn back when you were leaving only to find the boy had mysteriously vanished?”
Timmy slowly shook his head. “We didn’t look back. We were afraid to.”
His father’s smile held but seemed glued there by doubt. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Timmy. Only ghost stories. The living have enough to worry about these days without the dead coming back to complicate things. Now you get some rest.”
He carefully stepped around his Coke and leaned in to give Timmy a kiss on the cheek. Ordinarily, the acrid stench of his father’s cologne bothered him, but tonight it was a familiar smell, a smell he knew was real, and unthreatening.