by Robert West
ZONDERKIDZ
Escape from the Drooling Octopod!
Copyright © 2008 by Robert West
Illustrations © 2008 by C.B. Canga
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ePub Edition June 2009 ISBN: 0-310-86184-5
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zonderkidz, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Applied for
ISBN 978-0-310-71427-9
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All Scripture quotations unless otherwise noted are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
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Zonderkidz is a trademark of Zondervan.
Editor: Barbara Scott
Cover design: Merit Alderink
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08 09 10 11 12 • 5 4 3 2 1
For my wife, Helen, whose gentle patience and love were always more support than I could deserve, and for my three sons, Chris, Robbie, and David—each so unique in personality but who share qualities of idealism, intellectual honesty, and an appreciation of life that continually make me proud beyond reason.
-RW
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
1. Flight of the Pink Carpet
2. Missing: Beauty and the Beast
3. Monsters of the Deep
4. Pink Wars
5. Mission Abort!
6. First Contact
7. Invasion
8. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
9. Moon Child
10. Oh, Brother
11. Banished!
12. The Enchanted Forest
13. Monster Bash
14. Rock and Roll
15. Mole People
16. The Secret in the Attic
17. Bug Juice
18. Lab Rats
19. Beginnings and Endings
About the Publisher
Share Your Thoughts
1
Flight of the Pink Carpet
Beamer didn’t have a clue where he was. He just woke up and . . . boing! — he was circling in the air around a castle. He’d have preferred an F – 18 or a stealth fighter. What did he get? A flying carpet. Talk about obsolete! He could forget Mach one. “Skateboard one” was probably pushing it. What was worse, the carpet had a temper. How do you hang on to these things? “Whoa!” he yelped as he was suddenly flipped into the air. He managed to grab hold of the carpet’s fringe just as it dived through a large window in the castle. “Whaaaaoooooooooo,” he exclaimed as his stomach turned inside out.
Incidentally, the castle was pink . . . yeah, pink, as in bubble gum, peppermint sticks, and Barbie toys. Come to think of it, so was the carpet — pink, that is. He hated pink. That was the color his big sister, Erin, wore all the time. Frankly, if he wasn’t dipping through the hallways of the castle and holding on for dear life, he’d never have taken a flying pink carpet seriously.
The next thing Beamer knew, he was on the floor looking up at a pink crystal chandelier about the size of his house. Whoa! If that thing falls on me, I’ll be a sparkly porcupine — not to mention dead. It seemed like a good idea to get out from under it, but, for some reason, he couldn’t move. He felt like he was wearing a straitjacket. He tried to wiggle free — no such luck. Then he looked down. That rascally carpet had wrapped around him like a cocoon. Great! Now he was a bug in a rug! “A little breathing room, please!” he called out to the carpet.
That was when Beamer noticed that he was rolled up at the foot of a huge pink staircase. It was shaped sort of like an hourglass, narrower in the middle than at the top or bottom. For all he knew, this could have been the very staircase where Cinderella lost her glass slipper. Why anyone would wear a glass slipper was beyond him. One step is all it would take for his sister to crunch it into smithereens. Then she could forget being found by the prince who was posing as a would-be shoe salesman. Of course, if the only way this prince guy could recognize her was by her shoe size, he probably needed glasses as thick as binoculars. Either that or the fairy’s spell on Cinderella included some major plastic surgery.
Suddenly Beamer heard loud crunching and splintering. He jerked his head up to see an elephant swinging on the chandelier. Yep, you guessed it — a pink elephant! The big pachyderm was filling the air with pink glass like a hailstorm.
Then Beamer heard something groaning and then wailing in a high pitch. The chandelier is about to fall! Beamer twisted and turned, trying to get the carpet rolling. But instead of rolling across the room, he started rolling up the stairs! Hey, what happened to gravity? You can’t roll up stairs! But then, what else could he expect from a flying carpet? “Ow! Ow! Hey! Whoa!” he yelped as he bumped along, lickety-split, up the stairs. The staircase must have been much taller than he thought. He just kept on bumping and rolling without coming to the top of the stairs. Of course, he wasn’t seeing things all that well. Spinning around in that rug was making him pretty dizzy. Everything was swirling around like a pink tornado.
Beamer finally thudded to a stop. As the whirl of pink in his head slowed down, he noticed that he was no longer on the stairs. He also began having second thoughts about what he was wrapped up in. It wasn’t a rug or a carpet or a straitjacket anymore. He was in a cocoon — a pink cocoon! What was worse, he was stuck in the middle of a huge pink spiderweb! He twisted and kicked, trying to break out of the cocoon. The web shook beneath him. Pretty soon it was shaking even more. He strained to tilt his head back. Then he saw it — a pink nightmare whose eight legs were churning in perfect order across the web. Soon he was going to be one big Slurpee for that hairy spider behemoth.
Soon it would be all over — no obituary, no tombstone, no nothing. Since none of this could possibly be real, Beamer MacIntyre wasn’t even going to be history — he was just one more fantasy character crumpled and tossed into the trash can. He flailed about one last time, trying to escape —
Beamer thumped on a hard surface. “Ow!” he yelped in pain. Anxiously, he fought the confinement of the cocoon. Finally, he threw it off. But it wasn’t a cocoon anymore. It was a blanket — his sister’s pink quilt! Yech! No wonder everything was pink. His blanket must have been in the wash and his mom snuck his sister’s on his bed under the bedspread. He looked up and saw the ceiling with the ice-cream-cone water stain. He was back in his bedroom, on the floor next to his bed. It was all a dream — a silly old dream. He sighed. Talk about twisted fairy tales!
“Beamer, you’ll be late for school!” his mom called from the kitchen downstairs. “Stove, plate fo’ah low. Toastah own!” he heard her say. The only way to get the kitchen appliances
to work in this house was to talk to them. But you had to talk to them nicely and in a Southern accent. Californian wouldn’t cut it. That’s where Beamer had come from — California. Living on Murphy Street in Middle America was turning out to be a whole new ball game.
“Mo-o-o-o-ommm!” a shrill voice shouted at the same time. “Where are my pink Nikes?” It was Beamer’s big sister, Erin, otherwise known as Zero, Zero, Zero (0,0,0). Those are the coordinates for the center of the universe, which is what she thought she was. It was totally disgusting. As far as she was concerned, everyone and everything else in the universe revolved around her.
Also, at the same time, Beamer heard alternating thumping and slapping sounds on the staircase. That was the sound of a strange quadruped named Michael, his nine-year-old brother, who always came up the steps on all fours.
The last set of sounds came from his dad in the shower: “Too hot, too hot!” he said to the plumbing. “Caolder, caolder, caolder . . . ahhhh, jaust raight.”
This was why Beamer didn’t have many sleepovers at his house.
During history class, it finally occurred to Beamer where at least part of his dream had come from. It should have been obvious. It was the web! — his web! Nearly two stories tall and as wide as the house, the famous MacIntyre Web was the nightmare in the attic — the greatest entomological mystery this side of Cleveland.
Up until Christmas, the scientists experimenting on the web in their attic weren’t even sure that it was a real web. Some thought it was man-made, somebody’s joke or a hobby project or a mad scientist’s experiment. But back on Christmas Eve, Molgotha, the web maker, had returned. She’d spun a cocoon around every piece of scientific equipment surrounding the web. Then she sucked the electronic life out of them, leaving them totally useless, as dead as the flies in the little web under the corner gutter.
So now, scientists from all over the country were in the MacIntyre attic, hovering around the web, hooking up this and that sensor. More than ever, the attic looked like the bridge of Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer. Cameras now monitored the web 24 – 7, and multiple alarm systems registered every movement. The only reason the MacIntyres were still willing and able to live in the house was because the scientists calculated that all of the security systems gave the spider only “one chance in a hundred” of getting down where they lived. Of course, that “one chance in a hundred” was covered by family prayers every night. How many spiders do you know of that get into people’s prayers?
That was three months ago. Spring vacation was only a half circle of the moon away, and still nobody knew who or why or what Molgotha was all about. Part of Beamer hoped they never would. It was kind of cool having a big mystery in your attic, except for the fact that it gave you the heebie-jeebies every time you got near it. You could never lose the feeling that Molgotha was up there somewhere, hiding in the shadows, smackin’ her chops for your yummy red corpuscles.
His history teacher interrupted Beamer’s little day-dream with a question. Unfortunately, he didn’t hear the question — something you could never admit doing in Mrs. Hotchkiss’s class. She wasn’t called “the drill sergeant” for nothing. Beamer hemmed and hawed, tugging at his polo-shirt collar. He’d read the assignment, for Pete’s sake. “Uh, could you repeat the question, please?” he asked sheepishly. “I . . . uh just missed the last couple of words.”
“Murphy Street,” his teacher said simply.
“Huh?” Beamer asked, remembering nothing about Murphy Street in his history lesson.
“Isn’t that where you live — Murphy Street?” she asked, growing impatient.
“Uh . . . yes, ma’am, that’s where I live all right,” he said with a fake smile.
“Good,” Mrs. Hotchkiss said. “Come by my desk on your way out. I have a little favor to ask of you.”
Beamer groaned. A favor for Mrs. Hotchkiss could be anything from banging chalk out of the erasers until you were coated white to making a full-scale papier-mâché statue of Genghis Khan.
2
Missing: Beauty and the Beast
As it turned out, Mrs. Hotchkiss only wanted him to drop off some study guides for a homeschool student who lived on Murphy Street. Beamer’s friend and tomboy neighbor, Scilla, and his brother, Michael, were with him on the way home, as usual. Their friend Ghoulie had already split off for his place. When they got to the address his teacher had given him, all Beamer could see was a huge hedge. They found a walk-in gate. Beamer started to push the call button but bumped the gate. It swung open, so they went on in.
One thing became clear right off: neither his mom nor his dad could ever be allowed to see this yard. It would be “all she wrote” for weekend playtime. If they tried to match this yard, he’d be drafted into slave-labor yard duty up to the age of thirty.
You see, this yard was perfect. Every blade of grass was in place and as green as green could get. Plants and bushes (flowering and otherwise) were perfectly trimmed, and the brick walkway was lined with flowers spaced evenly apart like marching soldiers.
The walkway wound to the right and then to the left and then finally through a row of Italian cypress trees — you know, the trees that look like narrow green flames rising up from the ground. That’s when they saw it. Scilla gulped with her mouth open. Michael covered his eyes and looked between his fingers. It was a house guaranteed to make you diabetic at first sight.
Actually, it looked like a giant birthday cake — a very pink birthday cake. Beamer groaned as memories of his pink dream rolled around in his head like a loose marble. There were no sharp corners on the house. Everything was rounded off — walls, the tops of windows, and doors — and decorated with fanciful little flower and plant designs. If he hadn’t been sure the walls were made of stone, he’d have taken a lick or two. But then pink icing wasn’t exactly his favorite.
They walked up a short flight of steps onto a small but elegant porch with columns on either side. Beamer pushed the doorbell. They heard a musical ring inside, but no one came to the door. After a few moments, Beamer pushed it again. Still no one answered. Beamer looked around for someplace to leave the papers, but Michael jumped up next to him and punched the doorbell several times like it was a pinball machine.
“Hey!” Beamer yelped at him. “If they hadn’t heard it already, they’re probably asleep and won’t appreciate being woke up.”
Just then someone opened the door. Beamer had his back to the door at that moment and turned only in time to see a fluffy sleeve and the corner of a frilly dress disappear. Beamer could feel a gust from the rush of movement inside. A young girl had opened the door — he was sure of it — but in a switcheroo move as quick as a magician with a rabbit in his hat, she was gone.
The person who now appeared in the pink doorway had dark blonde hair rolled up in a bun — definitely not a little girl. She wore wire-rimmed glasses balanced on a pointed nose.
“Children, you should have rung me befoah coming into the yahd, ” the woman said, a little flushed from alarm. Her words sounded funny. She definitely wasn’t from Middleton. “I’m sahry. I don’t mean to be rude,” she said nervously as she shoved her glasses back up on her nose. “What do you want?”
“Ah . . . well, my teacher, Mrs. Hotchkiss, asked me to drop off these papers for you.” Beamer noticed the picture of a little girl on the wall in the background. Was that the little girl she had yanked away from the door so quickly? She didn’t look more than six or seven.
“Oh, of coahse,” the woman said as she took the papers and flipped through them. “Thank you very much for dropping them by. Heah, let me give you something for yoah trouble,” she added as she moved quickly back inside the house.
“That’s all right,” Beamer called to her. “I live just down the street. It was on my way home.” Beamer had run through his mental database of movie characters and concluded that the woman talked like Mary Poppins. She was a magical nanny from England. He didn’t see an umbrella, though, and guessed that this English nanny
probably couldn’t fly like Mary Poppins could.
“Well, that’s vahry kind of you,” she said as she returned to the doorway. “Please pull the gate closed when you leave,” she said as she started to close the door. “It is supposed to stay locked. Bye now.” Her parting smile was about as sickly sweet as the house.
Beamer and Scilla gave each other questioning looks. Beamer could tell that Scilla was thinking about the same person he was thinking about — someone else who had shooed them away from a door. The memory of the overprotective Mrs. Drummond and her sisters was still very clear in their minds. Those ladies had kept Solomon Parker locked up and hidden from the world so that they could use his great wealth. Was something like that going on with the girl in this house?
“Hey, what’s the holdup?” Michael asked impatiently.
Beamer shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Aw, come on, we’re just being paranoid.”
Now that the days were stretching longer, Beamer had a little extra time to spend in the tree ship after school. The tree was sprouting leaf buds like goose bumps, and Beamer was beginning to hear the chirping and chittering of birds and squirrels. He’d listened for the crickets, but Ghoulie told him that a lot of insects, including the crickets, wouldn’t come out for another month or two.
As he climbed up the tree in his backyard, he wondered what the old broken-down trolley station looked like now. Last winter the snow cover had given it a kind of magical look. Of course, whatever it looked like now, it wasn’t going to stay that way. Solomon Parker was already working on plans to revive his trolley business for tourists. Why anybody would want to tour Middleton was beyond Beamer. It’s not like it is Disneyland.
Solomon Parker’s trolley company had gone out of business fifty years ago when buses replaced trolleys on city streets. Although he was a genius who built amazing inventions, like spidery robots and hovering trains, nobody believed they could really work. He finally got so discouraged that he lost all faith in himself and in God. He became a hermit in his own house, exiled to the ballroom on the second floor of his mansion. He was left there amid gathering dust and cobwebs by his house-keeper, who took over his home affairs while he wallowed in depression. Meanwhile, his investment in a railroad grew over the years until he was very wealthy, but his housekeeper hid the truth from him while she and her two identical sisters lived in luxury.
