Spartacus Ryan Zander and the Secrets of the Incredible

by Elwood, Molly;

  Eli kept watching because he thought the van was weird—and because he didn’t have anything better to do. He said it was there for exactly forty-three minutes and that he heard banging and crashing coming from inside the house. He never saw Mom, but he did see two creepy men heave a big black bag into the back of the van right before it left, tires squealing down the street.

  “And you didn’t think to call the cops?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know your mom was going to be missing,” he said. “Anyways, one of the guys was all pale and really tall. Like a vampire version of Conan O’Brien. The other guy was like an Incredible Hulk, weight-lifter type. Looked like a pile of bricks. Man, I can’t believe they kidnapped your mom!”

  Yeah, he said it just like that. No build-up, no saying it in a Do-you-think-this-is-possible? kind of way. Just bam! Dropped the bomb without even thinking. Of course, he argues over who actually said it first, but this is my story and I can say with complete certainty that I am pretty sure it was Eli.

  Will was dribbling his soccer ball around the lawn like nothing had happened when I ran to tell him about the Black Van. He snorted, but didn’t look up. “So what you’re saying,” he said, dancing around the ball and breathing hard, “is that you and The Eel think she was kidnapped?”

  Pow!

  I jumped as Will kicked the ball hard against the fence. It always hit the same spot. He’d put one toe on it, fake left, fake right, then: Pow!

  “Maybe,” I said, trying to sound more casual than I was. Will made me nervous. But then, Will made everyone nervous. I think he even made our parents nervous.

  “Why would a circus kidnap somebody?” Will asked.

  “Maybe so they don’t have to pay them?” I ventured.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  Pow!

  I flinched again. He was kicking the ball really hard. Harder than usual. But I wasn’t going to let it drop.

  “What about the bag, though?” I asked. “It was big enough for a person.”

  “Maybe it was her makeup,” he said. I worked up enough confidence to glare at him. “What? Seriously! They wear a lot of makeup in the circus,” he said, before firing the ball again.

  Pow!

  The look on Will’s face made it clear that unless I wanted him to refocus his attention from the soccer ball to me, the conversation was over. So I kept quiet for a while, but I thought about it all the time. It wasn’t just the destroyed house and the Black Van and the large-enough-for-a-person bag. There was more. Much more.

  A few weeks later I started getting postcards from my mom. Postcards with secret messages, saying things like “Help me” and “I’m in trouble,” all hidden within seemingly happy notes. And all in her handwriting—or handwriting that was close, like she’d written them in a hurry.

  No matter how ridiculous it seemed, it was true—my mom actually had been kidnapped by the circus.

  

  Even before the postcards, Eli and I had looked into The Incredible. What we found wasn’t very encouraging—in fact, it was downright sketchy.

  The website for Bartholomew’s World-Renowned Circus of The Incredible was kind of underwhelming. It had only a few pictures and a schedule that listed just a handful of shows. Eli and I knew from news websites, though, that the circus performed a lot more often than that. And news stories were easy to come by. Bartholomew made headlines wherever he went—and not just because people were clamoring to see his shows.

  Bartholomew’s Wikipedia page linked to all the legit news stories: There had been an “accident” where three trapeze artists had died (getting weird). Then there was a tiger mauling where a guy lost his tongue (getting weirder). People said the circus was cruel to its animals, that it didn’t pay workers on time, but the circus got out of any legal trouble, swearing these were lies from angry ex-employees. Eli thinks Bartholomew bribed the investigators.

  And all that? That’s not even close to the weirdest (and worst) stuff. Wikipedia noted someone had created a forum, IHateBartholomewsCircus.com, where people shared even more stories—dark, bizarre stories. The sort of thing my dad would have yelled at me for reading. So of course Eli and I read every conversation on it. People on the forum said that Bartholomew had sold his soul to the devil. That he used dark magic to turn his audiences into zombies. That he’d helped fix the 2005 Tour de France. There’s more, but I’ll tell you about that later.

  It all came down to this: I wasn’t the only person who thought there was something strange about The Incredible. Okay, all the devil, weirdo-stuff sounded too stupid to believe, but if even some of it was true, it was bad news for my mom.

  I wasn’t really surprised that Dad didn’t take my kidnapping theory seriously. Adults seem to lose their ability to think about anything strange or out of the ordinary. But Will, who knew evil inside and out, should have sensed that something was off.

  Over the next ten months, Mom sent me twenty-five postcards, and half of them had secret codes. Each time I got a new one, I brought it immediately to Will. I’ve never seen anyone laugh so hard.

  “How could it be more obvious?” I fumed, shoving the postcard from Last Chance, Colorado, in his face. “Read it.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Circuses don’t kidnap people. Don’t be a moron.”

  “Just read it,” I repeated. “Read it and tell me she isn’t asking for help.”

  And so he read it out loud:

  Hello Spartacus!

  Everything is going well!

  Lots of fun people to meat and

  Places to see.

  My cannonball thing is going really great.

  Everyone thinks I’m the best they have ever seen!

  Love,

  Mom

  “She’s trying to get my attention,” I insisted. “I mean, look how she spelled ‘meet.’”

  Will squinted at the card and then back at me.

  “You seriously think there are hidden messages in these things, Smarticus?”

  I wanted to think that maybe he was hiding his fear to protect me. That maybe, deep down, he saw how weird and scary the whole situation was. But when I pointed out that the first letter of each line, going from top to bottom, spelled “HELP ME,” he laughed so hard, he farted.

  “Why would she write that in there, huh?” I asked.

  “It’s a coincidence!” he exclaimed, after containing himself and wiping a tear from his eye. “Look, you know how a hundred monkeys pounding on a hundred typewriters for a hundred years—”

  “Yeah, yeah. They’d write a play,” I said, rolling my eyes. I hated his guts right then.

  “Yeah. Everyone knows that. It’s a scientific fact,” Will explained. “But it doesn’t mean anything. Besides, what about the other postcards? She sends you some without all the…what did you call them?”

  “Clues,” I huffed, pulling the card out of his hand and tucking it back in an envelope with the others.

  “Clues!” Will giggled. “Some don’t say anything secret, though, right? Why would she do that?”

  I thought about it for a minute and then shuffled through the envelope until I found one I liked, the one with the skull of a triceratops on it. It was from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

  Dear Spartacus,

  Hello, my sweet one. Today it rained, and I thought of you. Remember last summer when we got caught in the rain in the park and we waited under a tree for it to pass? You told me about helping the pigeon with the red yarn tangled around its foot. I said I was very proud of you, yet you were sad. You asked me why such things happen. I didn’t have an answer then, and I still don’t have an answer now. But I do know that the world is better with you in it.

  I will always think of you when it rains.

  Love,

  Mom

  There we
ren’t any clues on it—at least none that I could find. And it was written so much better than the others.

  Why was that?

  “Maybe she’s being tricky, so Bart or his goons don’t catch on. One normal note, one note with a clue? That’s harder to figure out, right?” I suggested as Will snatched it out of my hand and began to read,

  “Dear Spartacus,” he began, speaking in that high lady-voice he used when he imitated Mom—or any girl, for that matter. “You don’t know how much I miss you and your lovely and generous brother Will. Will is the best brother you could—”

  “Give me that! It doesn’t say that!” I lunged for the postcard, but he hopped up onto the sofa he’d been sitting on and, holding a hand over my face, jumped up and down while continuing to “read.”

  “The best brother you could ask for. In fact—oof! Watch it, Poop Lip!—In fact, I’ve told your father to give your allowance to sweet William for the next four years and—Ooh, Poopy, now you’ve done it!”

  There’s no reason to describe the scuffle blow for blow, so let’s just cut to me, back upstairs in the safety of my room, tending my bruises and taping the postcard back together. (Will had turned it into confetti and stuffed it down my pants.)

  As I taped the last piece into place, I had to admit Will had a point.

  Why would only some of the cards have clues and not the others? And why would the ones without clues make it sound like she was having a great time?

  But what I’d said to Will about her being tricky also made sense: she wrote and sent the normal ones to make it appear like everything was fine, just in case someone was reading them. Or maybe she even wrote them in front of others. And maybe she mixed in the other postcards—the ones with the clues—secretly. But she still put them in code, just in case.

  That made total sense—right?

  

  Before we get any further, I suppose I should address the whole Spartacus thing. Mom was pretty smart, but she seemed to have had a brain fart when naming me. I don’t think it crossed her mind that growing up in a town the size of Brenville might not be easy for a kid named Spartacus Ryan Zander. Then again, her name was Athena, which is just as ridiculous, so maybe I should blame her parents—then again, we never visited her parents. Mom never told us why. It’d just always been that way.

  When I asked her why Will got a normal name and I got Spartacus, she just kissed me on the head and said in her airy way, “In time, Spartacus. In time.”

  Whatever that meant.

  The name didn’t bother me for the most part because I’m not an idiot and I went by Ryan instead. For obvious reasons. If you’re like any normal almost-thirteen-year-old, you’re probably not up-to-date on how cool the real Spartacus actually was. So explaining to classmates how he was a gladiator who led a slave revolt? Yeah, that conversation doesn’t end well (I tried to defend my name in first grade and was pummeled by a third-grader who was trying to see if I’d inherited any of the original Spartacus’s gladiatorial skills. Long story short: no, no I hadn’t).

  So the name Spartacus didn’t come up except when we had a substitute teacher or when it was report card time; both of these occasions reminded my classmates that I wasn’t only Ryan, or Poop Lip, but also Spartacus. Sure, kids can be mean, but they’re also creative (“Sparty Pooper” was one of the more popular plays on my name). I found if I ignored them, just like I ignored “Poop Lip,” things weren’t so bad. I mean, they kept it up, but I didn’t let it get to me.

  Mom, though, was the only one who called me Spartacus, at least in a serious, not-making-fun-of me way. And I never minded. It never sounded weird when she said it. Dad, however, thought the name was just as stupid as I did. He started calling me Ryan as soon as I was born, hoping I’d “turn out normal.”

  Even when Mom told him that Ryan wasn’t my name, he’d say “Ryan” right over the top of her “Spartacus,” until they were both yelling my names back and forth over my crib. As I got older, it continued.

  “Spartacus, please pass the peas.”

  “Ryan, pass your mother the peas.”

  “Phil, Spartacus heard me.”

  “Ryan. The peas. Now.”

  

  I tried to talk to Dad about the postcards, but he refused to even read where they were from, let alone help me decode the secret messages. And when I tried showing him a news article about Bartholomew that I’d printed at the library? His response was—well, you know those people who can crack their knuckles without even touching them? Yeah, Dad’s one of them. Two or three cracks from his fingers and that angry, hundred-mile stare and I clammed up. (That, and he marched across the room, snatched the article from me, and flushed it down the toilet—or at least tried to).

  But I kept trying. I mean, this was my mom.

  As it turns out, Dad’s limit for putting up with conspiracy theories is two and a half months.

  He was doing bills at the new dinner table (the old one had been tossed into the wood chipper) when he saw me standing in the doorway, postcards in hand. I was trying to get up the nerve to sit down next to him, hoping he’d finally show some interest.

  He slammed his checkbook down so loudly, dust flew off the light fixture.

  “No more of your stupid, silly ideas,” he growled before I’d even said a word. “You hear me, Ryan? No more postcards, no more random connections, nada. If I see a map with even a pushpin in it, I will tear it up and make you eat it like cereal. Got it?”

  I heard Will snicker from the family room, but I ignored him. I was just starting to think about saying something when Dad shut his eyes and sucked air in through his teeth. Then, with his eyes still closed, he pounded both his fists on the table.

  “NOT.”

  Bang!

  “ANOTHER.”

  Bang!

  “WORD!”

  Bang!

  I shot out of the kitchen before he could open his eyes and light me on fire with them.

  After he had shut me down, I ramped up my phone calls to the police from once a week to once a day. Then, a detective called our house and told Dad I had to stop calling them. Dad grounded me for a month. That gave me time to do some more research and draft a few letters to the FBI. But all I got back was an FBI baseball cap and a letter written from a cartoon dog.

  A lot of help they were.

  Nobody listens to kids.

  

  Eli and I spent all winter putting a rescue plan together. But before I explain my idea, I should tell you about one of Mom’s odd talents—one that would make rescuing her a snap.

  One afternoon, while Dad was out of the house, I heard Mom calling for help. It took me a few minutes to trace her voice to Dad’s study, but even then, I couldn’t find her. The room was empty. Then I realized—her voice was coming from inside Dad’s filing cabinet.

  I opened the top drawer, thinking I was going crazy. Then I heard her say, “Lower.”

  She was in the very bottom drawer. A single drawer. I watched, agog, as she went from pretzel to Mom, unfolding to her full height. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible if I hadn’t seen it myself.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she said, shoveling everything back in the drawer. Like anyone would believe me. But I knew what she meant: “Don’t tell Dad.”

  So I came up with the idea of using a suitcase the size of a small dog carrier—with wheels. I knew she could fit into that; it was bigger than the cabinet drawer. My brilliant, if simple, plan was to get to The Incredible, get backstage, and get Mom into the suitcase. Then I’d just wheel her out, hidden by the crowd. We’d go straight to the cops, Mom would tell them everything, and we’d take Bartholomew down.

  Easy, right?

  We planned the rescue mission for June, right after school let out. Sure, it was a long time to wait, but not skipping school just might mean the differen
ce between being grounded for a couple of months and Dad just killing me himself. Besides, according to the Bartholomew’s schedule, they had a show in June that was within traveling distance: San Francisco. It was only nine hours away.

  Like I said before, we knew they performed in more places than they listed on their website, but strangely, they didn’t announce them ahead of time. For all we knew, they could be performing in Brenville next weekend (okay, nothing ever came to Brenville, but you get what I mean). But at least with San Francisco, we could plan in advance.

  And our plan was this: Eli’s cousin Carl was going to drive me to Bend in his pickup. Bend is a bigger city about two hours away and that’s where I’d “resurface,” as Eli put it.

  “You can’t just get a bus from Brenville,” he explained. “You have to go dark for a bit of time and pop up somewhere you don’t belong. They’ll never track you that way.” Did I mention Eli watches a lot of old spy movies? But it made sense. So, once I was in Bend, I’d catch a ride to San Francisco. Eli would set it all up using this ride-share website he’d found.

  Meanwhile, Mom’s postcards got more and more desperate. The one from Imalone, Wisconsin, (which said “bring help”), made me realize that she didn’t mean for me to come alone. Eli was out, though. He wasn’t exactly known for his bravery—in the fourth grade, he peed his pants crossing a four-lane highway. I mulled it over and over (and over) until finally deciding Will was my only hope. After all, he’s tough, she’s his mom, and we’re brothers. All that had to count for something, right?

  And, if I’m going to be honest, I needed Will. I wasn’t going to even get out the door without someone else counting on me to go with them. And I’m not exactly big. Or brave. Or a fighter. My impulse is to run away first, ask questions later—if at all. So I needed someone who wouldn’t hide around the corner the moment he was needed. And I needed someone who would get fed up with me for being a wimp and stalk off angrily, someone who I’d chase after and apologize to and tell them I’d try to be braver, for their sake.