A Place So Wicked by Patrick Reuman (life books to read txt) 📕

He called his kids’ names before the door was even shut behind him. He heard something from upstairs and was about to charge up there when Lisa suddenly came around the corner from the kitchen.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Toby and Trevor only mowed half the lawn and left the mower tipped over like some piece of garbage.”

“No. Trevor is upstairs. He’s sick. He was just puking. And Toby says there’s something up with the mower and the lawn.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, his frustration morphing into curiosity and concern. “And is Trevor okay?”

“I’m not sure yet. Trevor will probably be okay. Toby said he has been feeling off as well. He thinks maybe there was something up with the pizza.”

Richard nodded his head, trying to think back on whether or not he had felt sick at all since eating the pizza and didn’t think he had.

“And as for the lawn, I don’t know. I was just about to go out and look.”

Toby, Paisley, and Trevor all came walking around the corner upstairs, from in the direction of the bathroom and the twin’s bedrooms. Toby looked excited upon seeing his dad and uncle. This made Richard feel bad for misdirecting his frustrations at them so quickly.

“Hey, Dad, glad you’re here,” Toby said. “Something strange is going on with the lawn.”

“You okay, Trevor?” Richard asked.

“I’ll live. Just a little food poisoning or something probably.”

Richard nodded. “What’s this about the yard?”

The kids worked their way around the adults. “It’s painted or something,” Toby said as he opened the door.

“Painted?”

Everybody followed Toby out. He jumped right in, explaining how the coloring of the grass came off on the blades of the mower, clogging them up. And then how the grass looked brown and dead under the paint, which he showed by pulling up some grass and scraping off the green in front of them. He ended it by mentioning how the soil was strangely black, though his dad seemed far less interested in that bit of information than the fact that his mower wasn’t working.

“Well, that’s weird,” Robbie started, staring down at his phone, drawing everybody’s attention. “Says here lawn paint only takes a couple hours to dry. Nobody has been here to paint the yard since we arrived, right?” he asked rhetorically.

The kids shook their heads like they were being interrogated and weren’t sure yet if they were going to jail or if the police were there as a joke.

“Why would the lawn be dead?” Richard asked.

He looked across the road, wondering if everybody else’s lawns were dead, too, and painted over. But that was insane. They shouldn’t be. Neither should his. He looked up, at the clear sky, polluted only by a few clouds here and there. It was warm, but it definitely wasn’t hot enough to kill off the grass.

It was all so bizarre. And as Robbie had said, if it were painted, which it obviously was as he stared at the bottom of the mower, at the coat of green paint that coated the blades, it should have been well dry by then. The realtor, or whoever would be in charge of something like that, would have had to have had painted the yard days, maybe even weeks, ago. He thought back to when he visited the house pre-purchase and didn’t recall there being anything off about the yard.

Then Richard got an idea. He wasn’t sure what it would accomplish. Hell, it might even make things worse. He told everybody to hold on a minute then walked around to the garage. He disappeared inside for a few minutes and then reemerged with a hose in hand. He let it unravel as he went, leaving it snaking at one end back in through the open garage door.

Without a word, he gave the nozzle a twist, and water started squirting out, slowly at first but quickly turning to a high-pressured blast. He blasted the grass without mercy, rapidly puddling the yard. But to Toby’s and everyone else’s amazement, the grass started to come clean, the green paint joining the black puddles in a horrible swampy mixture. Remaining in the hoses wake was brown, faded grass that looked more like the hay left behind in cropping fields after the season was over than someone’s front yard. Toby realized then that he had never really seen dead grass, at least not on this scale.

By the time his father was done, the entire front yard looked like a grassy wasteland. Thankfully, when he had aimed the hose at the mower blades, that, too, came right off like it had only just been applied.

But his father wasn’t done. As they all gaped at what had become of the front yard, he told them all to meet him out back. They did as commanded and went around the house. When they reached the backyard, Richard out the back door, hose in hand, having snaked it all the way through the house.

Richard aimed the hose upward and opened fire across the entire reachable yard. The water rained down like a storm, drenching the dirt and grass. It didn’t take long for the paint to start washing away. Richard stepped forward, pulling the hose further. Toby wasn’t sure how much length the thing had left.

His dad made it rain all across the yard until the back started to look identical to the front, short, brown blades sticking up from the blackened ground. Toby could hardly believe his eyes as it all washed away. He could see the dread and awe in his mother’s eyes, the same feeling reflecting in everyone else’s.

Then something even stranger happened. Toby stepped forward, unsure if what he was seeing was real or some sort of mirage like when you were lost in a desert. It was. The grass, where the water was