The Turtle Boy: Peregrine's Tale (5 page)

Peregrine staggered to a halt and
looked pleadingly at his father. At length, the sorrow left his
face, replaced by a flush of anger, "You're not my father, are you?
No more than she's my mother anymore."

His father smiled. "Get it done.
You'll have all eternity to ask her to forgive you when she's by
our side."

Will she really come
back?
Peregrine felt sick, and wondered
what would happen if he just tossed the poker away and ran. Somehow
he didn't think he'd get very far.

The breeze tossed leaves at
the house and smacked them against the window. Clouds obscured the
sun and shadows crawled through the woods. When Peregrine raised
his face, the crowd of ghosts had formed a circle around the house.
Around
him
. A
gathering of tangible figures, a phantasmagoria of flesh and blood
men, women, and children, all of them unified by the expressions of
undiluted contempt they wore. Torn faces, broken bones and ruptured
skin—a display of shattered things. They seethed and their hate
kept him from running; the threat in their eyes kept him from
trying.

This is the right thing to
do
, he told himself.
I know it is, I feel it, even if I don't want it to
be.

"Do it, boy."

Peregrine made one final, feeble
effort to wake from the nightmare, but when he opened his eyes and
saw the wet leaves beneath his shoes and the open door before him,
he glanced down at the poker, tightened his grip on the cold
handle, and entered the house.

CHAPTER SEVEN

She was in her room, sleeping, just as
his father had said. Her mouth was open. She sucked in great big
breaths that scratched at her throat and made her snoring sound
like the last choking gasps of a dying woman. Her hands were across
her chest, fingers twitching as her dreams took sharp turns. A
graying spray of auburn hair all but occluded the
pillow.

Peregrine stood by the bed,
watching her.
I can't do this. She's my
mother. I love her
. This was not the woman
who had tried to kill him, not the woman who had blamed him for her
misery. This was his mother as he knew her, albeit without the
noxious stench of whiskey that shared her room. This was how he'd
found her whenever the nightmares had propelled him from his
bedroom and into hers, with a plea on his lips for protection from
the demons still stalking him. And yet this was the worst nightmare
he'd ever had and it seemed there would be no waking from it. And
here she was in her bed, but it wasn't the same, no matter how much
he wanted it to be. The reality of what he was doing here came
crashing down and a loud sob escaped him.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, his
mother's form melting and shattering as tears filled his eyes. "I'm
so sorry."

Something eclipsed the daylight,
painting shadows on the walls. Fearful, Peregrine looked away from
his mother, to her window, with its floral drapes and painted
frame, to the dreadful aspect of his father's mutilated face
pressed against the glass.

"See her," he said, his eyes so black
they looked like pools of oil. "See her for what she is." Then the
darkness clambered from his eyes in an explosion of tendrils,
penetrating the glass without shattering it and climbing the walls,
spreading outward, consuming the light at a frightening speed. The
room darkened quickly, as if the curtains had been hastily drawn.
Peregrine began to back away, his pulse quickening, breath rapid as
he raised the poker to ward off whatever might lunge at him from
the sepia-toned gloom. And he was certain something would. His skin
crawled as the sensation of a million watching eyes flooded over
him. His father seemed to grow and stretch until he'd filled the
window, still spinning out oily black threads that had all but
devoured the light in the room. Abruptly the air turned cold,
licking Peregrine's skin with icy tongues. Overhead, the light bulb
shattered. The pieces took impossible time in falling.

Rasping, hitching breath drew his gaze
downward. To the bed.

To his mother, or what she
had once been before the shadows had mauled her, leaving behind an
ancient, crumbling thing with deep lightless caverns for eyes. On
the pillow, soiled with inky smudges, her hair writhed, struggling
to be free of her diseased skull. Dead. She had to be. And yet she
moved. Some hideous trickery made her twitch and shift beneath the
off-white sheets, still visible despite the increasing weight of
darkness. Amber light dappled the walls,
beneath
the walls, glowing dully from
under the flaking paint. He should not have been able to see her,
would have preferred blindness to looking at what she had become,
but her bed it seemed was the sole source of illumination in the
room, possessed of a purity that seemed alien in this awful room,
and incongruous given the monstrosity atop it.

"Oh how we laughed," she said, her
lips moving slower than she spoke. "How we laughed about what I was
going to do to you."

"Stop it," Peregrine said,
but not to her, not to anyone but the unseen engineer of this
horror. "I want to go home." On some level, he knew he was home,
but fear compelled him to beg for a return to the sane safe place,
the
other
place,
where mothers didn't try to kill their sons and darkness was only
an absence of light, not a cloak used by unspeakable
things.

"I wanted him to kill you," his mother
continued, in that terrible croaking whisper. "It was his idea so I
told him he should be the one to do it. He has much more experience
with these things. But he wouldn't." Her laughter sounded like
fabric tearing. "He couldn't kill a child, he said. Anything else,
but not a child. How noble of him to leave me with the dirty work.
I have to admit though…I kinda liked it."

"Please stop." The poker felt like a
sword in Peregrine's hand, a blade he could use to slice open this
darkness and free himself.

"So here I am. And here you are, and
one of us will die."

This was not his mother. This was some
corrupt thing—the monster he'd always feared lived beneath his bed.
He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to run. But he
couldn't.

"And I won't be the one
with
spine trouble
," said his mother and without warning she was sitting bolt
upright, darkness flooding from her mouth, eyes filled with cold
blue light. "It will be better soon, you little bastard," she said
and lunged at him. But as with everything else in this skewed
version of the world, her assault was slowed down by the viscous
air.

Peregrine didn't move. His eyes were
focused on her hands, sundering the air between them.

They were claws. No, not claws,
talons, better suited to a bird of prey. And as she neared him he
saw the skin sloughing from them in messy lumps that slopped to the
floor in slow motion. Her hands, he thought with a curious calm.
They were the talons from the falcon on his birthday
cake.

Sickened, he did the only thing he
could think of.

He clutched the poker with both hands,
brought it back as if preparing to hit a home run, and swung it out
in front of him. And as the iron cut through the gelatinous air,
everything changed.

There was no darkness.

There was no diseased woman with
falcon claws.

There was no slow motion.

Only his mother, looking at him with
bloodshot, barely awake eyes. "Peregrine?"

He screamed, but it was too late to
slow the impetus of his weapon.

His mother opened her mouth as if to
cry out and the poker hit the side of her head with a dull crunch.
With a grunt, she spun sideways in a whirl of blood and auburn
hair, and hit the wall beside her bed face-first, hard enough to
dent the plaster. Her head lolled, and for a moment she remained
upright, her limbs jerking crazily. Then she fell backward, feet
kicking beneath the covers as confused signals shot through her
brain.

Peregrine wept, and started to drop
the poker. A hand on his shoulder stopped him. "You must finish
it," his father said.

The boy did not look at his father,
could not look away from his shuddering mother. She convulsed,
right hand thumping against the wall. Her pupils overwhelmed her
eyes.

"End it."

"I can't."

"You want her to suffer?"

His mother whimpered and arched her
back, head snapping from side to side. She seemed to be squirming
her way beneath the blankets, and when finally her struggling
ceased, only her eyes could be seen above the sheet. Her chest rose
and feel with impossible speed.

"I want to go."

"She's still breathing," said his
father.

Sobbing, Peregrine looked at the bed.
His father was right. She was not yet dead.

"Make it stop," he pleaded.

"Only you can do that. And the longer
you delay, the more agony she'll have to endure. She deserves every
breath of pain, but if you don't wish to see it, then put her out
of her misery. Bring her to us."

Do it
, said the voice inside, that sneering voice he had apparently
acquired on stepping foot into the horrible new world.
Do it and get it over with. Your life won't
properly begin until you do.

With a scream of utter helplessness,
rage and sorrow, he took a single step closer to the bed, brought
the poker over his head in a two-handed grip, and closed his
eyes.

Before the killing blow was
struck, he heard his mother whisper, in a voice not her own.
"There were turtles the size of Buicks in there.
Snapping, snappity-snap."

CHAPTER EIGHT

He sat on a fallen log
beside his father, watching the house burn. Soot and ash had made a
dark mask of his face. The tracks of his tears were all that
allowed a glimpse of the grieving boy beneath. But something had
changed, had been
forced
to change inside him. He felt it growing in his
belly, a black mass sprouting tendrils like those he'd seen
spilling from his father's eyes. It promised a reprieve from the
hurt, an escape from the pain, if he only let it consume
him.

Something inside the house crackled
and fell, and a tongue of red-yellow flame exploded from the door,
sending a wave of heat rolling toward them. The breeze fanned the
flames, coaxing them higher, until the house was lost within a
fiery cage. His father didn't move, but Peregrine narrowed his eyes
and raised a hand to shield his face. As he did so, he caught sight
of something tumbling and leaping across the yard toward him. It
wrapped around his right ankle and fluttered like a trapped
bird.

It was the newspaper he'd seen on the
kitchen table this morning.

This morning. It felt like a lifetime
ago.

He picked up the paper and numbly
scanned the pages, not looking for anything but feeling as though
he was supposed to. Most of the paper had been lost, or burned, but
on the inside page of what remained, Peregrine's eyes halted on a
headline:

11-YEAR-OLD BOY RESURRECTS THE DEAD,
SOLVES MURDER!

Dirty light crept across the shadowy
wasteland the past few hours had made of his mind. He looked at the
grainy picture of the smiling boy—

Let him run let him go let
him get away
—and read the story.

I've seen him.

When he was done, he looked up at the
inferno, the heat now so intense his clothes were starting to
scorch him, and stood.

"I want to know why I'm here, why this
is happening to me," he said. For the first time his father offered
a smile that even his mangled mouth couldn't spoil.

"It's happening because it's supposed
to," his father replied.

Peregrine showed him the crumpled
soot-stained newspaper page. With one trembling finger, he
indicated the smiling child. "And I want to know who this
is."

"That," his father replied, "is your
brother."