behind his house well, but it was a vast forest that offered new discoveries all the time. Mostly just different trees, but still…
He moved through the woods for about half an hour, alternating between jogging, walking fast, and a couple of brief bursts of sprinting. He should probably join track at school. Might make him some friends. Or one friend.
He stopped running.
Something was lying on the ground in front of a small clearing. Toby walked over to investigate. It was a wooden sign, lying on its side, mostly covered by bushes. The red lettering had faded to almost the same gray color as the wood, but the words were still legible:
DANGER. KEEP OUT.
Wow.
A couple of years ago, Toby had discovered an old rusted car, right there amid the trees. It had looked like something from the 1930s. He’d spent long nights wondering how it got there. Rationally, he knew that the answer was straightforward, that there had probably just been a path at one time that had since been abandoned and overgrown. But there were dozens of much more interesting scenarios, and they’d captured his imagination until a few weeks later when he found the deer carcass. He’d searched the vehicle thoroughly, but alas, there was no hidden stash of mobster cash.
DANGER. KEEP OUT. promised something even more exciting.
What could it be? An abandoned mine? An old bunker filled with explosives?
Toby slowly stepped through the clearing, which was a circle about fifty feet in diameter, watching his feet to make sure he didn’t walk in a bear trap or something like that. The clearing itself seemed to be devoid of anything interesting. He walked around the perimeter, then walked across it several times, but didn’t see anything that looked even remotely worthy of the sign.
They wouldn’t put out a sign like that for no reason. There had to be something. Maybe it was the former site of a horrible plague.
No, even in ancient times, people probably took stronger precautions against the spread of a plague than simply putting out a wooden sign.
He kept searching the area, but there was nothing. What a rip-off.
What if the sign had been moved? He just needed to keep searching. He continued to walk around the area, not going quite so far as to crawl around on his hands and knees, but making sure he was searching thoroughly. If there were something great out here, he was going to find it.
About five minutes beyond the sign, he found a path. A narrow uphill path that looked recently used.
Well, maybe not. There weren’t any distinct footprints or broken branches or anything specific to indicate that somebody might have recently taken a stroll around here. Still, Toby had a weird feeling, something he couldn’t quite pinpoint, that he wasn’t the only person to have used this path today.
This meant that, as a rational, intelligent human being, his best bet was to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
Instead, he stepped onto the path and followed it.
C HAPTER T HREE
The path ended at the entrance to a cave. A cave! Toby knew there were caves out in this forest somewhere, but there weren’t supposed to be any within walking distance of his house. How could something like this have eluded him all this time? He could’ve been hanging out in a cave for years!
There were some rusted metal hinges-almost worn down to dust-on the left side of the cave entrance, but the door itself was long gone. There was, however, a large pile of brush in front of it. Had the wind blown it there, or had somebody put it there? It wasn’t a very good camouflage. Must’ve been put there by Mother Nature. The cave door wasn’t a perfect rectangle, but it was obviously man-made, or at least an enhancement of a natural entrance.
Toby pushed the brush out of the way and peered inside. Totally dark.
He removed his backpack, reached inside, and dug around until he found the small penlight he used for reading. He turned it on and shone it inside the entrance. It didn’t help much, but at least it might keep him from walking into an open pit and plummeting 800 feet to his death.
He replaced his backpack and stepped through the entrance. He immediately recoiled-it smelled awful in here. Not like something had died, but like something had failed to empty about six months’ worth of garbage. Noxious. He took one more step forward and shone the light around.
The rock ceiling was low enough that he could scrape against it with the tips of his fingers if he reached up. The cave was extremely narrow, not quite claustrophobic, but he wouldn’t be able to lie sideways on the floor. He couldn’t see the far end, so he continued walking forward, very slowly and carefully.
He bet that Larry, Nick, and Frank wouldn’t have the courage to walk into an unexplored cave like this. Those babies would be standing at the entrance, whining, “There might be bats inside! There might be bats inside!” Losers.
A few more steps in, his light washed against the far wall. More rock. Nothing particularly interesting about it. Toby ran the beam of his flashlight around the perimeter, and there was…nothing.
So this was it? One small room?
Toby turned in a slow circle, shining his flashlight all over the cave, and it really did seem to be a single room, maybe twice the length of one of his classrooms. Not that impressive. Still, he wondered what its purpose was. Obviously, somebody had used it for something, or there wouldn’t be hinges and the sign. It could have been the start of a mine. Maybe the owner was a bumbling incompetent and after bringing all of the equipment out here and digging for a couple of days he’d realized that there were no minerals to mine. He’d sheepishly sent everybody home, put up the sign, and declared bankruptcy.
Or, the workers had been attacked by rats. Giant rats. Well, not giant rats-not fifty-footers, but rats twice the size of normal ones, with glistening greasy fur and glowing red eyes and pus leaking from their ears. As the workers drilled, a section of the wall collapsed and thousands of them swarmed out. The three closest men were consumed immediately, their shrieking forms reduced to skeletons within seconds, like a cow falling into piranhainfested water. The others had panicked and opened fire, killing one rat for every fifty that latched onto their flesh. The owner made it to his automobile just in time and sped off, running over his assistant in his haste to drive out of the area. He’d abandoned the mine idea and concocted an elaborate story to keep himself out of prison.
Yeah.
Toby did another circle with the flashlight. Kind of disappointing, but still, he’d found a cave! There might be other caves nearby. An entire system of caves. He could get a girlfriend for sure if he knew his way around a local cave. They were dark, slightly spooky, romantic…
Something bellowed.
The sound, which came from inside the cave, startled Toby so badly that he dropped the flashlight.
Another bellow. It sounded like God himself were shouting from the cave walls.
Toby raced for the exit-or tried to. His foot came down on the flashlight, slipped out from under him and twisted with a painful crack, and he fell to the ground.
He scrambled on his hands and knees toward the exit, hurting his foot even worse but not caring, terrified that the entire cave was going to collapse and splatter him under tons of rock and dirt.
Toby made it outside without the cave ceiling splattering him. Now the only noise was his own frantic breathing. What on earth had it been? What made a noise like that? It wasn’t his imagination, and it was unlikely to have actually been God, so what was it?
The question was answered quite satisfactorily when the monster emerged from the cave.
