Marvel Monsters Unleashed: Beware the Glop!

by Steve Behling

  Don Cyphers stood over Ben, leering. He was breathing through his mouth, which was usual for Don. His lips were curled in a cruel smile as he poked at Ben’s monster journal.

  “Whatcha drawing in your monster book? Something dumb?” Don chortled. That was a particularly bright, insightful insult coming from him.

  “Well, I’m not drawing you, if that’s what you’re asking,” Ben said. He stood up from the stoop, then started to walk away. Better to find another place to sit down, Ben thought. Maybe the school should set up a “Don-Free Zone.”

  Don didn’t even listen, but he followed Ben and kept right on talking. “I bet it’s that dumb statue from the town square.” Dumb was Don’s favorite word. “I’ll bet that dumb ol’ Mr. Pierce switched it.”

  The old art teacher lived on the outskirts of town, in a ramshackle house on top of Mount Minor. Mount Minor wasn’t really much of a mountain or a mount. It was barely a hill. Still, by town standards, it was big.

  “Why do you think Mr. Pierce put it there?” Ben asked. Did Don know something about the art teacher that he didn’t? It sure didn’t seem likely, but hey, you never know.

  “Because he likes dumb art and doing dumb things,” Don said.

  Ben sighed. “You know everything,” he said.

  “I know, right? That’s what my dad tells me.”

  The recess bell rang as Don made a grab for the monster journal with a meaty hand. Ben yanked it away. Don sniffed and wandered inside with the other kids.

  It’s crazy, but could Don be right? Ben thought. Could Mr. Pierce be the one behind the statue?

  IT SEEMED LIKE school lasted about thirty hours that day instead of the usual six and a half. In fact, it felt like Mrs. Rubin’s science class had taken about twenty-five of those hours. Ben liked Mrs. Rubin well enough, and he liked science. But he didn’t like having Don Cyphers in his class. All he did was bug Ben, get in trouble, and ask when they were going to make baking soda volcanoes.

  Finally, Ben and his sister were walking home, toward the town square.

  “Did anyone respond yet?” Cindy asked excitedly. Ben knew she was talking about his post on Tales to Astonish. Ben shook his head.

  The first thing he had done when they left school was to check Tales to Astonish on his phone. “Not yet. I was hoping someone would have posted something by now.…” His voice trailed off.

  “‘Someone,’ like Kid Kaiju?”

  Ben grinned. “Yeah, that would be something. But come on, there’s no way he’s going to see this. He’s got to be super busy. Besides, he’s, like, a big shot in the monster world. He’s never going to notice me.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re Ben Lee, New York’s Super Hero expert and Highland Park’s resident monster master!”

  Ben laughed.

  When they arrived at the town square, they saw the townspeople going about their business as usual. Sheriff Cyphers was there, helping to direct what little traffic the town had. And there was the statue, right where Ben and Cindy had left it.

  Except it looked different, somehow.

  Like the statue had changed positions. Again.

  Its “hands” were now touching the ground.

  But how? If someone had actually replaced the statue at night, how did they pull off the same thing in broad daylight? It didn’t make any sense!

  “Looks a little different this afternoon, doesn’t it?” said Sheriff Cyphers, pushing back his hat. He looked at the statue and shook his head. “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. I don’t like it.”

  “It’s kinda weird,” Ben said. It was more than kind of weird. It was super weird. A statue that stood in one position one minute, then in another the next? What was going on here?

  And as they were entranced by the weirdness of the statue that had seemingly moved, neither Ben nor Cindy nor anyone else noticed the little puddle of ooze that had slowly appeared near the statue.

  The puddle that glowed.

  HE HAD MADE IT home in record time. Not that he didn’t like school—he loved it. But what Kei really wanted was to get back to his room, his drawings, and his world of monsters. The creature he was drawing last night, the one that left all the glop behind it…something about the drawing had caught his interest. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt there was something familiar about it.

  Had he read about this monster somewhere before?

  His first stop was his bookshelf. He had all kinds of volumes on the subject of monsters. These were the kind of books he had loved since he could remember. Whenever he went to the library, he would check out the same monster books over and over and over. It drove Kei’s mom crazy, but at least he was reading.

  Kei pulled a weather-beaten book off the shelf with the title The Bloodstone Chronicles: The Bloodstone Family and the Search for Monsters. This was one of Kei’s go-to books whenever he needed some quick info on a monster. He flipped the pages and did a picture walk through the book but didn’t find anything.

  The gears in Kei’s mind started to whirl and click, and he hopped over to his computer and logged in to the Tales to Astonish website. If it wasn’t in his books, maybe he could find the answer here. He bypassed the message-board tab and went straight to another one, marked MONSTER LORE. That was the history part of the website—a virtual encyclopedia of all different kinds of monsters from across the globe and history. It was Kei’s favorite part of Tales to Astonish, where he could learn all about strange, new creatures.

  Monster Lore had its own search function, so Kei typed in one word:

  GLOP

  He pressed Return on the keyboard and waited. A few seconds later, a screen came up showing 198 different hits for glop. Kei scrolled through them, looking for anything, any detail that might catch his eye. Most of the entries were about big, apelike monsters with tails that drooled a lot and left “glop”—in this case, ape drool—behind.

  “I did not come here to read about ape drool,” Kei said out loud as he continued to scroll through the search results. It seemed like the search was going nowhere, until he saw an entry near the end. It wasn’t the word glop that grabbed him, though.

  It was a name.

  Elsa Bloodstone.

  Kei’s eyes nearly bulged out of his skull when he saw the name. He knew about Elsa Bloodstone! She came from a family of monster hunters. They were the subject of the book he had just been looking at—The Bloodstone Chronicles: The Bloodstone Family and the Search for Monsters. Elsa’s father, Ulysses Bloodstone, had been a monster hunter for years—some even believed that he was hundreds of years old! There was a rumor that he had once called himself Ahab and went off in search of a giant whalelike creature, and that was the basis for the book Moby Dick. Kei wasn’t sure whether or not he believed that one, but he did know that the Bloodstones were the real deal. If Elsa Bloodstone’s name was attached to a search about this “glop,” Kei had to find out more.

  He clicked on the search link, and the page opened before him.

  Kei was shocked to see nearly the same creature he had sketched the previous night staring back at him from the computer screen. The entry had been written by an anonymous Tales to Astonish user, but they quoted extensively from notes written by Elsa Bloodstone. Kei’s pulse raced. This was incredible!

  Kid Kaiju couldn’t believe it—it was like he was working with Elsa Bloodstone!

  BEN AND HIS SISTER were walking home down the tree-lined street when they noticed it. Actually, it was Cindy who noticed it first. Her shoes were making a “thwuck-thwuck” sound whenever they hit the pavement. It was an annoying sound, and it was slowly driving her nuts.

  “What’s on my shoes? What did we walk through?” Cindy asked, causing Ben to snap out of his monster dreams.

  “What are you talking about?” Ben replied. He looked down at Cindy’s feet, and that’s when he saw it. An orange-ish glop that seemed stuck on the soles of her shoes. Ben stared at his own shoes and saw that they had the same glop on th
em. It looks like we have been hiking through the swamp with the Man-Thing, Ben thought.

  They walked a few more steps, and again there was the “thwuck-thwuck” sound.

  “Get that gunk off your shoes,” Cindy said. “I can’t stand that sound. Gross!”

  Both kids scraped the soles of their shoes against the curb, and the glop seemed to come off. They looked behind them and saw they had left a trail of gloppy footprints all down the sidewalk.

  “You know this is getting way too weird, right?” Cindy said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ben said. He snapped a few pictures of the gloppy footprints with his cell phone. “I think we should upload these to Tales to Astonish, too. Man, I wish we could actually talk to Kid Kaiju. He might know what this is all about.”

  Cindy nodded. “I wish it was a giant monster, but that would be too cool for this town,” she said. “Let’s get home. We need to be living, breathing, and eating Tales to Astonish!”

  “What about our homework?” Ben asked. “We better do it first, or Mom is gonna kill us.”

  Cindy glared at him. “Seriously?” she said.

  “I know, it sounded dumb as soon as it came out of my mouth. Homework, shmomework. Tales to Astonish it is!”

  The kids and their now glop-free shoes headed for home.

  If only they had waited just a few seconds longer, they would have seen something far stranger than just gloppy footprints.

  They would have seen the glop they had scraped off on the curb peel itself away from the cement.

  And then it rolled.

  It rolled toward the first set of gloppy footprints. The glop oozed into the footprint until it became a part of it. Then that glop peeled itself off the pavement and rolled to the next footprint. It became a slightly bigger ball of glop, then rolled to the next footprint. Which oozed a few inches to the next gloppy footprint.

  And so on…and so on…

  “CLOSE THE DOOR so Mom doesn’t see the light!” Ben shout-whispered. “How is it possible that you never get in trouble when you’re the one who’s always doing stuff?”

  Cindy rolled her eyes, shook her head, and quietly closed Ben’s bedroom door. “Happy now?” she said. Ben grumbled and turned back to the computer. The Tales to Astonish home page stared back at him as Ben clicked through the various threads, searching. His stomach rumbled. They had purple blobs for dinner, which his mom claimed was something called “eggplant surprise.” He feigned a stomachache to get out of eating it. Now he was hungry and silently wishing for a plate of kimchi jeon—kimchi pancakes.

  “What are you looking for?” Cindy said. Ben glared at her, and she immediately made an Oops, sorry! face. Then she continued, her voice hushed this time. “I keep forgetting to whisper.”

  “Well, don’t forget! If we wake up Mom, she’s gonna have a fit.” Ben continued scanning the website. “Anyway, I’m searching for any info on the statue. Maybe someone’s responded to the photo I uploaded.”

  “See if it says anything about gloppy footprints!” Cindy whispered, excitedly.

  “You can’t just search for ‘gloppy footprints,’” Ben said. “That’s not how the search engine works!”

  “I bet that’s exactly how it works,” Cindy said, pushing her older brother away from the keyboard. Before he could do anything, Cindy had typed “gloppy footprints” into the Tales to Astonish search window.

  “Hey!” Ben interjected. “I was typing! Besides, you’re not gonna get any…”

  Cindy pointed at the computer screen, a broad grin on her face. The first hit she got revealed a thread called:

  GLOPPY FOOTPRINTS???

  “…results.”

  Ben pushed his sister away from the computer, then clicked on the link, which took him to a new thread. Beneath the words “Gloppy Footprints???” there was a thumbnail picture of something monstrous. It was kind of shaped like a huge person, but it was amorphous, like a blob. It was shambling, oozing along, leaving a trail of gloppy footprints behind it.

  “Whoa!” both kids shouted in unison. Their eyes went wide, and each clamped a hand over the other’s mouth. They hoped their outburst wouldn’t wake up their mom!

  “Ben, gloppy footprints! That looks like the glop that was on the bottom of our shoes!” Cindy said.

  Ben nodded. “This is so freaky,” he agreed. He clicked on the thumbnail image, which took him to a page in Tales to Astonish’s Monster Lore section. He scanned the page quickly, but before he could start reading the article, an eerie glow filled the room.

  “The light!” Ben said, as he and his sister moved to the window. “There it is again.” Looking toward the town square, they saw the same strange light they had witnessed the other night. The glow pulsed just as it had before, like a heart beating.

  “What do you think it is?” Cindy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben replied. He jumped away from the window, opened his dresser drawer, and pulled out a flashlight. He pressed the button and waved his hand in front of it to make sure it still worked.

  “Suit up!” he said. “Let’s go find out!”

  IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT when Ben and Cindy sneaked out of their house. Their mom was long asleep, and they were careful not to step on any creaky stairs or bang any doors on the way out. There was a chill in the air, and each wore sweatpants, a hooded sweatshirt, and sneakers. The beam from Ben’s flashlight illuminated the street as they walked into town. In the distance, they could see the glow coming from the town square.

  “I still can’t believe this town doesn’t have streetlights everywhere,” Cindy said, shaking her head.

  “Why would they?” Ben answered. “Nobody in this town goes out after ten o’clock.”

  “I also can’t believe you said ‘Suit up.’ Like we’re the Avengers or something.”

  Ben laughed. “I should have shouted ‘Ben and Cindy, assemble!’ Would that have been better?”

  Cindy looked at her brother. “Worse. You would have woken up Mom and you would have sounded like a bigger nerd than you already are.”

  The kids followed the same path they had taken on their walk home from school. That’s when Cindy noticed it.

  “The footprints,” she said quietly. She pointed to the sidewalk beneath them.

  “What?”

  “The footprints,” she said, more insistent. “Our footprints. The gloppy ones, from this afternoon.”

  “What about ’em?” Ben said, looking ahead toward the town square, now in view. The eerie glow continued to pulsate from the location.

  “They’re not here anymore,” she said. “They’re gone.”

  “So what?” Ben said. “The street cleaner probably took care of them.” Then he thought about that for a minute. “Except this rinky-dink town probably doesn’t have a street cleaner. Okay, that’s another weird thing to put on the list.”

  They walked down the street and saw a police car parked outside of a gray house with a dark blue roof. That was Sheriff Cyphers’s home. Ben looked up at the house and its darkened windows. “It’s hard to believe that right now, even as we speak, Don Cyphers is inside that house, sleeping like an angel,” he said.

  Cindy laughed. “More like a devil,” she added. “Seriously, why do you let that clown get to you? He’s just jealous of you.”

  Ben thought about it for a second as they walked past the house. “I don’t know,” he started. “Maybe because he could crush my head like a nut?”

  “He could not,” Cindy jumped in. “If he so much as looked at you funny, I’d deck him.”

  “Yeah, you probably would,” Ben said. “But remember—with great power, there must also come great responsibility!”

  “Oooh, that’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that,” Cindy said.

  Soon enough, Ben and Cindy were in the center of town. It was desolate, quiet—and there wasn’t another soul around. They finally saw the source of the glow.

  The statue.

  “Wait, does that statue look different to you
?” said Cindy.

  Ben raised his eyebrows and nodded vigorously.

  It was true. Somehow, the statue had changed positions again. Now it looked like both of its “arms” were raised up, as if it were about to grab something.

  “Look!” Ben shouted. “It’s not the statue that’s glowing—it’s what’s beneath the statue!”

  That’s when both kids saw the glop—glowing, bright orange—begin to ooze out from the pavement beneath the statue. It squeezed out of the cracks, until a puddle of it had formed on the ground. Then, more than a puddle. It pooled up all around the statue and began to flow onto it. The goo seemed to have a life all its own as it swooped and swirled in the air. The glop crept up the statue’s “legs” as Ben and Cindy watched.

  “This is absolutely freaky,” Cindy said. “You’re getting pictures of this, right?”

  Cindy didn’t need to ask. Ben stood right next to her, phone in hand, snapping away.

  “I am getting pictures of this,” Ben said. “And I am wondering why we are not running. Shouldn’t we be running?”

  The glop continued to flow all around the statue, until it had covered it completely. Somehow, more glop oozed out from the cracks in the pavement below, and rose up the statue. It looked bigger now, almost like it was growing.

  And then it moved.

  “WE HAVE A REAL live monster in our town!” Cindy shouted, punching her big brother on his left arm.

  “Ow!” Ben said, rubbing the spot on his arm. “Did you have to punch me?”

  “Yes! I did! Because it is that exciting!” Cindy said.

  Ben took more pictures with his phone. “Exciting isn’t even the word for it. It’s amazing, unbelievable…astonishing!”

  The massive, glop-covered statue continued to move, its arms lowering to its side. Then the thing’s head turned.

  Toward Ben.

  It seemed to stare right at him. Its “face” was a swirl of slime that seemed to shift every few seconds. The slime dripped from its “face” and onto the ground. Then the Glop bubbled and rolled along the ground, back onto the thing’s body.