Dweller - Jeff Strand [3]
After a couple of minutes, he forced himself to stop.
He finally looked back. Nothing was chasing him.
It was real. Toby was absolutely positive of that. There might not actually be ghosts, or alien spaceships headed toward earth, or vampires in coffins, but there was a monster in these woods, with long, sharp claws and scary fangs. He knew the difference between the imaginary monsters he liked and the real ones he didn’t like.
And now he was completely lost.
He didn’t care anymore about getting in trouble—he just didn’t want to die in these woods, either by wandering around until he starved to death or by getting eaten. He called out as loudly as he could: “Mom! Dad!”
Nothing.
He cried out again: “Mom! Dad! I’m lost!”
What if the monster were drawn by the sound of his voice? What if it found him first?
He had to risk it. He shouted for his parents once more, screaming so loud that it hurt his throat, crying now.
Off in the distance, his mother’s voice: “Toby?”
He ran toward her.
Now that he was home safe and facing punishment, Toby wished that he’d made more of an effort to find his way out of the forest without calling for help. He sat in the living room, across from his mother and father, staring at the floor and squirming uncomfortably.
“Didn’t we tell you to stay within sight of the house?” his father asked, in a very stern tone that Toby had heard many times before.
“Yes, sir.”
“Look at me.”
Toby looked into his eyes. Fifteen minutes ago, he wouldn’t have thought there was anything scarier than his father when he was angry. Even now, he wasn’t so sure.
“Why did you disobey us?”
Toby shrugged.
If he’d had time to think about things, he probably could have made up a story that would have gotten him in a lot less trouble. Unfortunately, he’d rushed right into his mother’s arms and sobbed about having seen a monster, which had earned him a few minutes of sympathy and comfort but was now very much working against him. Even though he knew he was telling the absolute truth, he also knew that it was a tough story to swallow, and that he’d have been much better off lying about what happened and easing his parents into the whole “monster in the woods” part.
“Where’s your pocketknife?”
“I dropped it when I was running.”
“From the deer?”
“It wasn’t a deer.”
“Well, whatever it was, you shouldn’t have been out that far to see it. And now you don’t have a pocketknife. What do you think I should do about this?”
There was only one correct answer to this question. “Make me go get your belt,” Toby said quietly.
His father nodded. “Go get it.”
Toby didn’t think that the belt had ever been used to hold up his father’s pants. It was strictly a tool of punishment, and it did that often and well. Toby had tried various tricks to get out of the spankings, including pretending that he couldn’t find the belt or that he thought his father meant a different, thinner belt. None of these had worked out in his favor.
This particular spanking wasn’t that bad—three quick smacks and it was over. His mother’s lecture on responsibility took quite a bit longer. When it was over, Toby was sentenced to a week without dessert (a fate worse than a thousand spankings with a steel electrified belt) and forbidden to go into the woods by himself, at all, until further notice.
But his dad never stayed mad for long, and before it started to get dark they hiked out into the woods together to try to find his pocketknife. Toby tried to remember where he might have dropped it, but really, he’d been fleeing in pure terror at the time and didn’t have the slightest clue how to get back there. He wasn’t scared of the monster, though, not with Dad around.
“You need to be able to recognize landmarks,” his dad said. He pointed straight ahead. “What do