Tommy and Duncan walked
and talked, going deeper and deeper into the woods, further and further away
from their dilemma. It felt good to be away from it all, even if their dog Woodruff
wasn’t there with them. The distance between them and the broken window that
started the whole mess eased the stress of the situation and soon the boys were
back in their own world, back to being boys.
“Look there! I didn’t know there was a pond back here!
Cool!” Duncan shrilled as he ran towards the gloomy water.
The pond couldn’t have been bigger than the size of a
baseball field and was shaped like the letter C. It was surrounded by so many
trees that it was almost impossible to see from far away. It blended in so well
with its surroundings that you could easily walk right into the water, if you
weren’t watching where you were going.
“Why don’t we get the boat down here?” The boat Duncan
referred to was a small dinghy that they had stashed and deflated in their
garage back home. It’d be a lot of fun to take it out into the pond and go
exploring.
That idea did seem wonderful until Tommy saw the
head and arms of a human-shaped creature rise-up from the black waters at the
opposite end of the pond.
“Holy shit!”
“What?” Duncan said, not quite scared yet.
“There’s a man swimming in it, I think.”
“Where?”
Tommy pointed over to the man on the other side of the pond as he
gently pushed Duncan down with himself so that the two of them were obscured
from whatever it was arising from the dark water some thirty feet away.
“He looks funny,” Duncan observed, as the green-colored
creature slowly pulled itself up onto the shore, its movements as keen as a cat
about to strike its prey.
“It’s a wetsuit. He must be a diver,” Tommy rationalized. “I
thought for a minute it was a big liz…”
It was at that moment that the creature’s arm lunged forward
and took something from the bushes on the shore with its webbed hands. The
strange thing turned around, facing in the boys’ direction before sliding back
into the swampy water with a small, twitching animal in its grasp.
Tommy and
Duncan observed that this was not a man in a diving suit at all. Its head
looked rather like a frog’s with large, bulging eyes and its body was scaled
like a snake or lizard. But it was the mouth that really put the fear into
them.
Though not as
elongated as a crocodile’s jaws, they could see the brief flash of rows of
razor sharp white teeth inside the predator’s reptilian mouth. It halted
momentarily before submerging, locking its starkly white bulbous eyes on them
both before vanishing from view with its still living dinner.
Both boys got
up and began to back away from the pond, their gazes fixed on the disturbed
water that had enveloped it.
“What… what
was that, Tommy?”
“I don’t know. I think we should get out of here,’ Tommy
said as he placed his hand on Duncan’s shoulder, urging him to walk faster.
“It’s probably just some guy messing around.”
“You think it was a Halloween costume?” Duncan asked.
“Yeah. Just a Halloween costume, Duncan.”
But they both
knew, deep down, that that wasn’t the truth.
Taken from The Monster Squad Unauthorized Quiz Book
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