A Place So Wicked Patrick Reuman (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📖

Maybe it was.” He shrugged his shoulders and let out a deep, weighted breath. “But it smelled terrible when I went down there earlier. There’s a locked door, some room coming off the basement. We think maybe an animal crawled in there and died somehow.” He paused, sighing again as he looked at the front lawn. “It’s just all a bit stressful.”

Toby took in his dad’s words. He knew all this was happening, or at least some of it, not the basement part, but he hadn’t put it all together like this. He tried to imagine his dad’s stress.

“Well, I’ll take care of the yard tomorrow. I’ll finish it up,” Toby said.

His dad smiled. “Thanks, but I’ll just take care of it.”

There was a crack and then a snap. Before Toby knew what was happening, he lunged forward and shoved his dad back. A thick branch crashed to the ground where his dad had been standing. His dad looked up, and then down, in some manic combination of amazement, shock, and fear. Toby wasn’t sure if the branch was large enough to kill his father, but it was definitely big enough to have done some serious damage.

“Thanks,” his dad mumbled just loud enough for Toby to hear it.

Toby didn’t respond, still in his own state of shock, surprised he was able to move quick enough to get his dad out of the way. If he hadn’t come out to look for his mother to begin with, he wasn’t sure what would have happened.

His dad bent down and picked up the end of the branch. It was maybe four or five inches thick. He was looking inside it, through it, like the branch was a pirate’s telescope. The expression on his father’s face morphed into something he couldn’t put a label on.

“What in the hell?” his dad said.

He passed the branch off to Toby, who was eager to see whatever his dad was seeing. When he took it, he saw immediately and understood fully what his dad had been feeling. The inside of the branch was rigged and partially hollowed out. There were slender holes passing through its innards like little tunnels, probably created by hungry insects.

But that only happened when a tree was dead, which this tree was, it looked like. Its insides were brown and grey, like a log you found lying on the ground deep in the woods, long time homes to hordes of crawlers. But this tree was standing, and it was in their front yard.

The single question that stood out amongst the rest, the question that haunted his disheveled mind, was why? Why was this tree dead? And if it was, how was it still standing?

Toby noticed his dad staring down at his hand. He tried to peek, to see what had caught his attention, but the sun had already passed its peak and was starting to take cover, placing the yard in just enough shadow that Toby couldn’t make out exactly what his dad was looking at. Before he could move to get a closer look, his dad told him to wait there and headed toward the garage.

Toby continued to jumble around the pieces of info in his head like a puzzle that lacked all its pieces. Dead grass. A dead tree. A dead animal in the basement? It was definitely strange to say the least. Maybe there was some sort of poison in the soil, like pollution from a waste spill or…he wasn’t sure.

His dad came walking back with the hose in hand. He didn’t say anything. He just twisted the nozzle and opened fire on the tree. In no time flat, the brown of the tree trunk started to trickle down the tree like mascara on the face of a crying woman.

It started as single streams going down the trunk but quickly turned into waves. Behind the mask was grey bark, a color that didn’t really seem like a real color at all to Toby but, rather, a lack thereof. It was like something had come along and just sucked the color right out of the tree, like some sort of vampire creature that fed off plant life. The silly idea seemed more realistic when he remembered the dead grass under his feet.

Toby swallowed hard as his father directed the hose stream up higher, toward the leaves. Just as it did with the trunk, the green color of the leaves started to wash away. It dripped down like green rain, drops smacking into the grass below, bursting into little green splatters. For whatever reason, it felt like the most unnatural thing he had ever seen in his life. It must have taken someone hours of precise time to paint this tree color specific, detailed enough that nobody had noticed its deception until now. It reminded him of those wax fruits you found on some people’s tables, their fruit souls completely fake, painted to look like the real thing but fake all the same.

Those things were fake, though. This, the tree, the grass, it was all real. It was dead but real.

9

Robbie knew it was time to talk to his brother. Lisa was out in the kitchen cooking, filling the house with a fantastic aroma. All the kids had retreated back to their rooms, or elsewhere, he wasn’t really sure, which left him and Richard sitting in the living room watching some show on Netflix that he was pretty sure neither of them was really paying attention to. Richard was staring down at his phone.

Robbie shifted in the chair uncomfortably. He was pretty sure Richard probably knew this was coming. Whether or not he was going to let him stay for a while was a decision he and Lisa had probably already made amongst themselves. His brother was a smart man and was always able to read Robbie like a book, even