Read The Turtle Boy: Peregrine's Tale for Free Online

mauled her, leaving behind an
ancient, crumbling thing with deep lightless caverns for eyes. On
the pillow, soiled with inky smudges, her hair writhed, struggling
to be free of her diseased skull. Dead. She had to be. And yet she
moved. Some hideous trickery made her twitch and shift beneath the
off-white sheets, still visible despite the increasing weight of
darkness. Amber light dappled the walls, beneath the walls, glowing dully from
under the flaking paint. He should not have been able to see her,
would have preferred blindness to looking at what she had become,
but her bed it seemed was the sole source of illumination in the
room, possessed of a purity that seemed alien in this awful room,
and incongruous given the monstrosity atop it.
    "Oh how we laughed," she said, her
lips moving slower than she spoke. "How we laughed about what I was
going to do to you."
    "Stop it," Peregrine said,
but not to her, not to anyone but the unseen engineer of this
horror. "I want to go home." On some level, he knew he was home,
but fear compelled him to beg for a return to the sane safe place,
the other place,
where mothers didn't try to kill their sons and darkness was only
an absence of light, not a cloak used by unspeakable
things.
    "I wanted him to kill you," his mother
continued, in that terrible croaking whisper. "It was his idea so I
told him he should be the one to do it. He has much more experience
with these things. But he wouldn't." Her laughter sounded like
fabric tearing. "He couldn't kill a child, he said. Anything else,
but not a child. How noble of him to leave me with the dirty work.
I have to admit though…I kinda liked it."
    "Please stop." The poker felt like a
sword in Peregrine's hand, a blade he could use to slice open this
darkness and free himself.
    "So here I am. And here you are, and
one of us will die."
    This was not his mother. This was some
corrupt thing—the monster he'd always feared lived beneath his bed.
He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to run. But he
couldn't.
    "And I won't be the one
with spine trouble ," said his mother and without warning she was sitting bolt
upright, darkness flooding from her mouth, eyes filled with cold
blue light. "It will be better soon, you little bastard," she said
and lunged at him. But as with everything else in this skewed
version of the world, her assault was slowed down by the viscous
air.
    Peregrine didn't move. His eyes were
focused on her hands, sundering the air between them.
    They were claws. No, not claws,
talons, better suited to a bird of prey. And as she neared him he
saw the skin sloughing from them in messy lumps that slopped to the
floor in slow motion. Her hands, he thought with a curious calm.
They were the talons from the falcon on his birthday
cake.
    Sickened, he did the only thing he
could think of.
    He clutched the poker with both hands,
brought it back as if preparing to hit a home run, and swung it out
in front of him. And as the iron cut through the gelatinous air,
everything changed.
    There was no darkness.
    There was no diseased woman with
falcon claws.
    There was no slow motion.
    Only his mother, looking at him with
bloodshot, barely awake eyes. "Peregrine?"
    He screamed, but it was too late to
slow the impetus of his weapon.
    His mother opened her mouth as if to
cry out and the poker hit the side of her head with a dull crunch.
With a grunt, she spun sideways in a whirl of blood and auburn
hair, and hit the wall beside her bed face-first, hard enough to
dent the plaster. Her head lolled, and for a moment she remained
upright, her limbs jerking crazily. Then she fell backward, feet
kicking beneath the covers as confused signals shot through her
brain.
    Peregrine wept, and started to drop
the poker. A hand on his shoulder stopped him. "You must finish
it," his father said.
    The boy did not look at his father,
could not look away from his shuddering mother. She convulsed,
right hand thumping against the wall. Her pupils overwhelmed