Kealan Burke - The Turtle Boy

And it was heeded.

The ground beneath Timmy’s hands moved, separated into ragged patches of moving darkness, slick and repulsive against his skin. He jerked back and rose unsteadily, eyes fixed on the moving earth, waiting for the lightning to show him what he already knew.

The turtles. An army of them. All monstrous, all ancient. And all moving toward where his father had his arms held out to ward off the bullet that must surely be on its way.

“Timmy…son, stay back,” he said, risking a quick glance at his son. “Just stay there.”

“Dad!” This time Timmy knew from the pitiful croak that it was indeed his own voice.

He ran, halted, drowning again but in fear, confusion and the agony of uncertainty as the creatures Doctor Myers had introduced to his pond all those years ago trudged slowly but purposefully toward their prey.

“Darryl,” Timmy cried, scorching his throat with the effort to be heard. Darryl looked toward him, the coat slowly shrugging itself off to join its brethren. “Darryl, please! Make them stop!”

Another shadow rose from the pond.

Timmy felt a nightmarish wave of disbelief wash over him. Even after all he’d been through, was still going through, he felt his mind tugging in far too many directions at once.

But there was not enough time to dwell on it.

He looked away from the new shadow and ran, skidding to the ground before his father. Darryl turned to look at him.

The turtles slowed.

“You’d die for your father?” Darryl asked, his voice little more than a gurgle.

“Yes!” Timmy screamed, without hesitation. “Yes! Leave him alone!”

“Why?”

“Because I love him. He’s the best father in the world and I love him. You can’t take him away from me. Please! ”

“Maybe he deserves to die.”

“Don’t say that. He doesn’t! I swear he doesn’t!”

The storm itself seemed to hold its breath as Darryl stared and the impatience of the turtle army stretched the air taut.

A gentle pulse of lightning broke the stasis.

Darryl turned to regard the shadow standing in the water next to him. Pointing to Mr. Marshall, he asked the same question: “Would you die for him? ”

Even Mr. Marshall seemed intent on the answer the shadow would give.

But it said nothing. Instead, it gave a gentle shake of its head.

“No!” Wayne cried as Darryl turned back to face him.

Slowly, Timmy’s father lowered his hands and after a moment in which he realized Wayne Marshall’s attention was elsewhere, he moved away into the shadows of the pines, his face a pale blur of horror as he saw what had his neighbor’s attention.

Darryl turned back to watch the turtles advance. The first of them found Mr. Marshall’s leg and after a moment of stunned disgust, he aimed his pistol downward and in his panic, tried the weapon again.

This time the gun fired.

A deafening roar and the gun let loose a round that took most of Mr. Marshall’s foot away with it. He shrieked and dropped to the ground, then realized his folly and scuttled backward on his hands. The dark tide moved steadily forward.

Timmy’s father burst from his hiding place and ran the long way around the pond, through the pines, the marsh and along the high bank until he appeared through the weeds on the far side of the rise. His wife released Kim at last and ran to him.

Multi-colored lights lit the sky in the distance, back near the houses. Timmy guessed the police had arrived and were now searching for the woman who had summoned them. He silently begged them to hurry.

A guttural scream was all that could be heard from the shadows as the tide of turtles progressed ever onward and engulfed their victim.

A single flicker of lightning lit the face of the shadow in the water and Timmy felt a jolt of shock.

The dead and bloated face staring back at him was Pete’s.

Oh God…

Someone grabbed Timmy’s shoulder and spun him roughly around. He looked up into the frightened face of his father, noticed his swollen eye and crushed nose, and almost wept again, but there was no time. The sirens were growing louder, drowning out the shrieks and snapping sounds from beneath the pines. Timmy let himself be led and almost didn’t feel Kim’s hand slipping into his own. He smiled at her but it was an empty gesture. There was nothing to be cheerful about and, head afire with unanswered questions, he looked over his shoulder as they descended the rise as one huddled, broken mass. Pete was gone. The earth still crawled and among the seething shadows The Turtle Boy stood, unsmiling in his victory.

Timmy slept for days afterward, speaking only to his parents and Kim and occasionally a police officer who tried his best to look positive. Timmy saw the horror in the man’s eyes, a horror that began on a warm sunny morning at the start of summer.

What he learned, he learned from his father, the papers and Kim who in turn had heard it from her own parents—apparently too shocked to be discreet in their gossiping.

They had pulled three bodies out of the pond. One was a young boy, little more than a skeleton cocooned in algae. According to the medical examiner’s report, he had been there for some time and had died as a result of a broken neck, sustained it was assumed, by a fall from an old tire swing that had hung for a brief time above the pond back in the late seventies. They had identified the body as Darryl Gaines, nephew of the second decedent, Wayne Marshall. Apparently, Marshall’s nephew had visited him back in 1967 while his mother was being treated for drug abuse. Marshall was drinking in his backyard with friends and poking fun at the boy (according to Geoff Keeler, an ex-buddy of Wayne’s) and the kid had run off in a sulk. They’d never seen him again. Divers had searched the pond and come up empty (“apart from some big turtles” one of them stated on the news, obviously relishing the attention of the camera). Shortly after, Darryl’s mother, Joanne Gaines was institutionalized. She committed suicide a month later.

The third body filled Timmy with a wave of grief he was afraid would never leave him. Every time he stared up at his bedroom ceiling; every time he glanced at a comic book or thought about the red clay in Patterson’s field, he saw Pete’s face.

Pete had never made it to summer camp. His body had shown signs of chronic physical abuse, culminating in a broken neck sustained—according to the evidence obtained from the Marshall house—from a fall against the edge of a marble fireplace. It was assumed Wayne Marshall had killed his son by accident, in a fit of alcohol-fueled rage.

Panicked, Wayne decided to dump his son’s body in the pond (perhaps so he could claim later that the boy had run away) and was readying himself to do so when Timmy’s father arrived on the scene.

“I just stood looking at him,” Timmy’s father said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Wayne, with Pete in his arms…I didn’t want to believe he was dead, couldn’t believe Wayne would kill his own son. I watched him lay the boy down on the grass. That’s when he pulled the gun on me. That’s when I saw his eyes and knew he was lost. Jesus, I should have known , should have done something sooner.”

Timmy only smiled through the tears when he thought of what Darryl’s turtles might have done to Wayne Marshall.

Wayne Marshall, the faceless man Timmy had seen at the pond, murdering his nephew and leaving him beneath the water to feed the turtles.

The visitors came and went, attempted to soothe Timmy with words he couldn’t hear and through it all, through the mindless passage of feverish recollection and the debilitating agony of loss, The Turtle Boy’s words returned to him again and again, nagging at him and begging to be decoded: You don’t know who did it. When you do, remember what you saw and let it change you.