CHAPTER 59 

Dennis expected Mother Grimes' house to look more weathered, but essentially the way it had been when he glanced back at it after hacking his way clear. 

"Oh..." he murmured in distaste and horror when he saw the reality. "Oh. I should have known." 

The "house" was Mother Grimes, a chitinous shell to draw in the unwary. Dead, Mother Grimes decayed as quickly as her sons had rotted where Dennis left their corpses sprawled in the grass. 

The roof had fallen in; the upper portions of the walls were bare and white. The layer of flesh which had pretended to be wood and brick and stone was now slumped onto the ground as a pond of thick green fluid in which maggots swam and feasted. 

Dennis stared at what he had seen and walked into, thinking it was a house. He nibbled at his lower lip, wondering what kind of deceptions he would face on the Banned Island. 

"The baton is here, Dennis," Chester said from a short distance away. One tentacle pointed to the ground, where the object had fallen when Dennis hurled it away from him. "Do you wish that I should carry it?" 

The youth shivered in the sunlight. 

"No," he said in a firm voice. "I'll carry it, Chester. It's part of my duty, I think." 

The robot didn't respond directly, but Dennis thought he read approval in the expressionless features.