Edward Lee: Monster Lake

“Well, why don’t we try it?”

“What? Riding in the boat?” Terri questioned, astonished.

“Yeah, why not?”

“Because I already told you, my Uncle Chuck’ll be back in a half-hour. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’d get in if he caught us in the boat? I’d get grounded if he even knew we’d come down the path.”

“All right, all right,” Patricia agreed. “But let’s at least look around.”

“Okay.”

They approached the door to the boathouse. Terri was still very curious about what was in there. She knew the front room was just an office, but why would her parents forbid her from ever going in the other rooms? I’m going to find out right now, she decided. Her Mom and Uncle Chuck would never know. What harm could there be in her just looking around real quick?

“All right,” Terri said. “Let’s go in.” And then she put her hand on the doorknob, turned it, and—

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed.

“What’s the matter?” Patricia asked.

Terri looked back at her friend in sheer frustration.

“The door’s locked!” she exclaimed.

««—»»

The wooden door jiggled in its frame but wouldn’t open. Terri could see the lock’s metal bolt between the gap.

“What are we going to do now?” Patricia asked, with more than a little disappointment.

Terri’s eyes thinned. “Well,” she said slowly, thinking. “One time on TV I saw somebody open a locked door with a credit card.”

“A credit card!” Patricia exclaimed. “Where are we going to get a credit card? We’re only twelve! Are you telling me you have a credit card?”

“No,” Terri said. Of course, she didn’t have a credit card; only adults had those. “But I’ve got a library card.”

Patricia watched with amazement as Terri withdrew her plastic covered Devonsville Library card and slipped it in between the edge of the door and the doorframe. Very carefully, she worked the edge of the card against the angled side of the bolt. Gently, gently…

“Aw, it’s not going to work,” Patricia dismissed.

“Wait…”

Terri worked the card in further. The bolt moved a little.

“Wait,” Terri repeated, biting her lower lip as she concentrated.

The bolt moved a little more. Then—

click!

The door opened.

“You did it!” Patricia celebrated.

Yeah, Terri thought, a little surprised herself that she’d actually been able to. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go check it out.”

The front room of the boathouse remained as Terri had last seen it, a refurbished office. There was the big desk next to the window, and on top of the desk sat stacks of papers, a typewriter, and a computer. There were also several high file cabinets.

“What’s all this stuff?” Patricia inquired, reaching out to pick up some of the papers laying on the desk.

“Don’t touch it!” Terri exclaimed. “We can’t touch anything, Patricia! If everything isn’t exactly the way my Mom left it, she’ll know we were here!”

“Oh,” Patricia slowly realized, pulling her hand away from the papers. “Sorry… But I wonder what all these papers and things are.”

“Just notes, from my mother’s zoology work.” Then Terri walked to the back of the office. There were two more doors against the rear wall. A sign on one door read SUPPLY ROOM, while the sign on the second door read DO NOT ENTER.

“Are those the rooms you were telling me about?” Patricia asked. “The rooms that your father told you to never go in?”

“Yeah,” Terri answered, her curiosity burning. Immediately, she put her hand on the knob to the supply room. The knob turned—the door was unlocked—and she went in, Patricia following close behind.

“Wait a minute,” Terri observed.

“This doesn’t look like any supply room to me,” Patricia noticed at once.

The room was full of more computers on big racks, with lots of blinking lights. There must’ve been half a dozen computer screens the size of small television sets. But one of the screens was turned on, and it had words on it.

Terri squinted at the screen and read some of the brightly lit words:

LOT 2: TRANSMISSION FAILURE

LOT 2a: TRANSMISSION FAILURE

LOT 3: POSITIVE REAGENT

TRANSMISSION OF GENETIC

CARNIVORE MUTATION

“What’s all that mean?” Terri asked.

“I don’t know,” Terri said, disappointed. She didn’t know what any of the words meant.

“Come on,” Patricia urged. “This room is dull. Let’s go into the other one.”

“Good idea.”

The girls went back out; Terri was careful to remember to close the door behind her—she knew it was very important that the boathouse be left as it was, otherwise, her mother and Uncle Chuck would surely guess that she’d been in here.

Terri’s frown was sharp when she turned the knob on the door marked DO NOT ENTER.

“It’s locked,” she said.

“Use the library card,” Patricia suggested. “It worked before.”

Terri was thinking just that. But this lock looked different; it looked more sturdy. Again, she slipped her laminated library card into the door’s gap and went to work.

“How come it’s not opening?” Patricia asked impatiently after a minute.

“This lock is harder,” Terri replied in concentrated frustration. “But… I think the bolt is moving…”

“I’m going to look around outside,” Patricia said. “Call out to me when you get the door open.”

“Okay. But be careful.”

Terri continued to work on the lock as her friend left the boathouse to examine the deck and the pier. The bolt of the doorlock continued to move as Terri wedged the library card in further, but it was much more difficult than the outside door. Come on, come on, she thought. Open! Time was growing short, and if she wasn’t careful, she fully realized that she could ruin the card.

Come on, come on…

And just as the bolt was about to open—

“Terriiiiiiiiii!” Patricia screamed from outside.

—Terri flinched in startlement. The library card slipped out of the door.

And the bolt snapped back into place.

But Terri wasn’t worried about that. She ran out to the pier, her thoughts racing along with her heart:

What happened! Why is Patricia screaming?

««—»»

When Terri ran out to the pier, Patricia, shuddering with fear, ran right into her.

“What’s wrong? ” Terri demanded.

Patricia looked frantic, her blond hair going every which way. “There’s some thing on the edge of the pier,” she wheezed, nearly out of breath. “It’s black and slimy, and it’s really huge! I think it’s some kind of giant lizard!”

“Yeah, right, Patricia, just like you thought that old branch was a poisonous snake.”

“I’m serious, Terri!” Patricia insisted. “Go and look! It’s right around the corner!”

Terri skeptically did so, rounding the corner of the boathouse. But the instant she turned, she came to a dead stop.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Patricia was at least partly right. At the very end of the wooden pier-walk sat a shiny, coal black thing with four pudgy feet and a long tail. But it wasn’t a lizard—

“It’s a salamander,” she said distractedly. “I can tell by the yellow dots on its back.”

“It looks like a lizard to me,” Patricia remarked, clinging to Terri’s shoulders, still obviously afraid.

“Lizards are reptiles,” Terri informed her friend. “They can’t go in the water. But salamanders are amphibians.”

“Amphibians?”

“It’s a kind of animal that can live on land or in the water. Like toads and frogs. And that thing has definitely been in the water. You can tell. See how wet its skin is?”