Jackson spent the week not reading the books he had so meticulously gathered. Instead, he spent his time out-of-doors, watching the sun move along in the sky, boiling ants with magnifying glasses, wrestling his dog, climbing trees (but "Not higher than the telephone poles!" his mother always declared), and exploring the woods around the house.
Of course, he had been through every bit of the woods for years by this point (after all, he was 11, and growing boys need to explore), but he did it anyway, sneaking into the neighbors hen house on the other side of the woods to steal eggs, dumpster-diving in the apartment dumpsters for cool globes and furniture and computers, and avoiding the swamp down the road a ways.
The swamp was easily the most dangerous area around Jackson's home. Decades in the past, there had been a river that flowed through the area, parallel to the road that Jackson's home was on. The government, in an attempt to raise the beauty and cost values of the area, decided to dam the river at a strategic point, resulting in a beatiful lake in place of fully half the river and a dam that powered the area with its hydroelectric turbine. This was decades ago. The hydroelectric engine had been stolen by some pseudo thugs a while back to fund their meth lab (which, incidentaly, had subsequently exploded, showering the lake with a significant portion of their product), and the lake hadn't been dredged since it was dammed, becoming little more than a slowly flowing puddle.
The deepest it ran was about two meters, and two mud-islands had formed along the middle of the 'lake' (one even grew a couple of pine trees). The water the lake was composed of had seeped into the durt around the entire perimeter of the lake, mixing into a black, dead-smelling rotten layer of mush. This wasn't the marsh, however. The groundwater of the lake had backed up, all along the original river, turning hundreds of square meters of previously wooded land into marsh. It wasn't until you crossed the road two kilometers away that you could find riverbank that was not marsh.
The marsh was supposedly extremely dangerous. There were several different species of animal that made their homes there, some of which carried rabies. Unfortunately for the children, not many things can dampen the exploratative energy of young boys, and of those things that can, rabid animals is not one. Jackson and his brother, Ralph, along with several neighbor boys, happened upon a storm drain one day near the massive series of apartment complexes down the road.
Of course, the first thing they did was climb in (or, in this case, lower the smallest member of their 'team' into the depths).
Jackson was lowered silently into the darkness, and one of the boys tossed a flashlight down to him so that he could make his way in the dark. He didn't exactly need it, though. When he reached the bottom and crouched down to peer into the tunnels leading away from him (or towards him, according to the water rushing from three of the tunnels past him into the fourth), he found that one tunnel led to a widening bright circle or radiant greenness.
He knew that the other boys wouldn't particularly care for that interesting tidbit of information, so he switched on the flashlight and started crawling up a tunnel that ran parallel to the road and river.
As it slowly constricted around him, he started worrying that it might be a main thoroughfare for rabid wildlife, and began erratically shining the light behind himself to catch anything that may be sneaking up on him. There was nothing. He kept crawling forward, straining his ears to hear the faint scratching of small claws on concrete. It was tight enough now that he could no longer turn around if he wanted to. He might could back up. But then any animals that wanted to hurt him would be able to. He kept moving forward.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The tunnel became restrictively small, and just when he thought he was alone in the tunnels (granting him some respite from his desperate paranoia), he began to hear noises ahead of him. Above the soft sound of water running through algae on concrete, he heard a snuffling sound, and faint, but clearly heavy thumping.
He crawled out of the tiny entrance into the storm drain, standing underneath the drain hood. He peered out from underneath and saw a friendly face looking back.
"Well hello there," he said, and crawled out from under the concrete slab into the dry, warm grass.
"Holy CRAP!" the lady shouted. Her dog barked in response, and the neighborhood boys from the next storm drain over turned to see what was causing the commotion. Jackson reached up to pet the curious retriever and the lady began loudly demanding to know what he had been doing in the storm drain, where were his parents, was he allowed to be 'going around pretending to be Gollum' and whatnot. Ralph came to his defense and told the lady that they thought there were animals in the drain and that they had been looking for them.
As the lady jogged away, dragging the friendly golden fluff behind her, Jackson looked at his brother and smiled, saying "We're going to get in trouble tonight".
At around 6 PM that night, a police cruiser pulled up in their driveway, and a sherriff got out. He came up to the house and began talking with Jackson's father on the front porch. At first he seemed calm, collected, reasonable. Over the course of the conversation, Jackson's father became tense, using words tersely and with barely withheld disrespect toward the officer. At long last, the sherriff left, and the father entered the house.
"Kids!" he called, "Come here!"
Jackson and Ralph came from their bedroom, Dana came from she and Lydia's bedroom, and Lydia meandered in from the kitchen.
"I know that you are all relatively intelligent individuals, and that you like to have your fun, go exploring, and whatnot," he began, "but why did you let her catch you?"
"Who was she, Papa?" Jackson asked.
"Linda Matthews," he sighed. "Her husband has been the main proponent of the Neighborhood Watch in this area. When she came home babbling about 'some kids' 'doing things' in the storm drains, he decided to play it safe and call the police. Instead of coming and talking to me like a man, he decided to report us to the police!!" He breathed in an out, slowly, several times, and then continued. "Next time you guys want to go exploring, don't get caught, ok? That's all I wanted to tell you."
"Ok, Papa!" they chorused.
By that time, dinner was ready, and so they prayed together and ate. That night they read through Proverbs 10, and then, to help the children go to sleep quickly, their mother read a segment of CS Lewis famous kids' series to them, and then the parents sang their children to sleep.