by B. A. Frade
“Nope,” I admitted, and started digging in the sand. I found a triceratops horn.
Connor got a sauropod claw.
Bella was the big winner with a sharp T. rex tooth. It was almost a foot long. “Is this yours?” she taunted the T. rex, who was snarling at us.
Blake couldn’t hold him off much longer. We were armed and ready.
“Okay, Blake,” Emily said. “Let him loose!”
When Blake stepped back from the T. rex, I swore I heard him laugh.
I looked at my friends. None of them seemed to notice the echoing chuckle. They were all ready and poised with their weapons.
“When the T. rex breaks through the sand pit wall, smack him hard to try to break him apart,” Emily told us.
I was the big killjoy. “What’s that going to do? He’s possessed. His bones will just pop back up into place, and he’ll regenerate.”
Bella agreed with Emily. “We are going to smash him into a zillion bones so we can break out of here and get away.”
I’d already had that fantasy in my imagination. It ended with me getting eaten.
There had to be another way.
“Wait!” I shouted. “What about the Scaremaster?”
“Huh?” Connor turned to me. “What about him?”
“You said we need to change the story,” I reminded him. “The T. rex is being controlled by the Scaremaster. If we go after the Scaremaster and his story, then that should stop the T. rex.”
“That’s a terrible plan,” Blake said, now next to the T. rex. He’d moved, closer to the sand pit. “Smacking at the dinosaur with fake bones is the best idea.” He flashed a smile at Emily.
She grinned back.
The T. rex was just standing there. I didn’t understand why he hadn’t attacked us already. Something was off.
Blake said, “Attack the dinosaur. Come on. Smack him like a piñata.”
I immediately understood that was exactly what we shouldn’t do.
“Blake’s tricking us,” I told my friends. “He still wants us to be ghosts like him. And that means we need to get eaten by the T. rex.”
“That’s not true,” Bella told me. I noticed she’d gotten her second shoe back. Blake must have given it to her after he dropped it. “He wants to be our friend.”
“Friends forever,” Blake said, agreeing.
“Friends forever,” I said. “Forever! Don’t you see? That’s how the Scaremaster’s story ends.” I turned to Connor. Surely, he’d be on my side. “We’re still in the story. Nothing’s changed.” My eyes flitted between Blake and the T. rex. In my mind, they were obviously linked. It was the Scaremaster’s story, but Blake was somehow controlling the dinosaur. That was why we hadn’t been ghostified yet.
“You’re just jealous,” Bella told me. “We have a new friend. We’ve been spending time with Blake. We like him.”
“He wants you to like him!” I insisted. “He wants us to stay here.”
“Not you,” Blake corrected me. “I like Bella, Connor, and Emily.” Blake pinched his lips together. His voice was low. I didn’t think the others heard him. “But you just aren’t as fun as them.” And as he said it, I was magically pulled out of the sand pit, as if by imaginary strings, leaving my friends behind.
“Can’t you see what is happening?” I shouted as I was hauled backward and stuffed into one of the classrooms. The door slammed shut. This was terrible. I tried the knob, knowing before I even twisted it that Blake had somehow locked the door. I could see what was happening outside through the glass. My friends were swinging their weapons at the T. rex while Blake stood, smiling, in a corner. I had to stop this!
I looked around the classroom. This was one of the rooms where teams would go to put together the bones they’d found and make a dinosaur skeleton. There were long tables. Diagrams of several dinosaurs. I opened a cabinet and found construction paper, glue, and some rope. There were instructions on how to make dinosaur pictures to take home.
The worst part was that there were no door keys hanging on a hook and nothing I could use to break out of the room.
I didn’t know if my friends could hear me, but I had to make contact. They wouldn’t be able to hear through the glass, so I was determined to crack it.
I slammed the plastic triceratops horn against the glass, over and over until a small crack appeared. Then I yelled through the crack, “Blake wants friends. You were dropped in the sand pit so the T. rex could gobble you up. If we don’t do something, you’ll all live here with him.”
“You’re ridiculous. That doesn’t make sense! Connor yelled back. “Blake’s helping us.”
“No! Blake’s controlling the T. rex. It’s all a trick.” I looked around the room once more for another way out. There wasn’t one. I took my triceratops horn and started slamming it against the window again.
The window finally shattered into a hole big enough for me to squeeze through. I carefully climbed out through the shards of glass, just as my friends slammed their weapons into the T. rex skeleton. The T. rex broke apart, and with a giant crash, the bones fell to the floor in a pile.
“See?” Connor said as I ran into the room. “Blake was right. He told us how to defeat the T. rex.”
Emily and Bella hugged each other.
I felt the pull of those invisible strings dragging me back. A second later, I was going to be locked in another classroom. That was when I saw the small silver knob of the sand pit door.
I lunged forward, grabbed it, and held on. It felt a little like I was fighting against a tornado. My feet slid along the floor as the spirit of the Scaremaster, or Blake, or something fought me. I gripped the knob tighter and twisted with all my strength.
“Let’s go,” I told my friends. “Hurry.”
I kept twisting, only to realize the knob was turning loosely in my hand. The door wasn’t opening. First, I couldn’t find the knob, and now that I had found it, it didn’t work. This was all some kind of evil, sick game. “Figures,” I moaned.
“You’re trapped in the pit,” I told my friends. “This proves that Blake is the bad guy here.”
“It doesn’t prove anything. There’s no danger,” Connor said. He pointed to the pile of fallen T. rex bones. “We have all the time on Earth. Nate, go find a key.” He said to Blake, “Come on. Stop fooling around with Nate. He’s never really been able to take a joke. No sense of humor.”
“This isn’t right,” I said as the strings that were dragging me back suddenly disappeared. I slumped to the museum floor.
“The Scaremaster has something to say,” Blake told me. He’d moved quickly across the room and was now standing above me, smirking.
I stood and faced him. “I hope it’s that you’re going to live alone.” I was angry, and the anger bubbled inside my chest. He was tricking my friends, but they liked him so much that I couldn’t convince them that the ghost boy was evil.
I grabbed the Scaremaster’s book out of my bag. There was part of the story that was now nagging at me. If we weren’t going to be eaten by the T. rex, how were we going to become ghosts in the museum?
What do you want? I scribbled hard with the pencil.
His answer was simple:
Some scientists think the dinosaurs died when an asteroid hit the earth. Others blame changes in climate. There were sticky tar pits in some regions. But in the state of Utah, this is how the dinosaurs died.…
Utah? What did I know about dinosaurs in Utah!?
I looked over at my friends and gasped with horror.
The sand beneath them had turned to quicksand.
They were sinking.
Chapter Ten
Blake cheered. He clapped his hands. “This is awesome!”
“No!” I screamed as I ran back to the locked door at the side of the sand pit. I pulled and tugged at the handle. The harder I tried to open the door, the more Blake laughed.
“Do you still think he’s on your side?” I asked my friends. They were ankle-deep now and dropping fast. The
sand was thick and sticky. It was pulling them down, and the harder they struggled to get free, the more the quicksand grabbed them and tugged.
“Don’t move!” I shouted. “It makes it worse.”
“Save us,” Connor called back. I was about to reply with “How?” but then I realized he was looking at Blake, not me. “The Scaremaster is trying to drown us in the sand pit.”
Blake pretended that he couldn’t hear. “What?” he called to Connor. “Speak louder.”
My voice was getting hoarse from all the shouting, but I did my best to yell back. “He’s the one that’s making you sink. He’s working with the Scaremaster.”
“Blake,” Emily called out. “Get us out of here!” She was also ignoring me.
Blake looked over at me. The expression on his face was joyful. “I’m going to have three new friends,” he cried. “And you’ll have none.”
Inside the pit, Connor, Emily, and Bella were now in sand that came up to their knees.
It was Bella who first realized that I was the good guy, not Blake. “Nate, do something!” she cried. “I don’t want to be a ghost in the museum.” She cast her eyes at Blake and said, “Sorry. But I don’t.”
“We’ll be together,” Blake told her. “We can see the planetarium show as many times as you want. And we can prank the visitors with that attacking bird trick I did. You should have seen how scared you all were.” He grasped his belly while he laughed. “It’s going to be so much fun when we’re all living here.” Blake stopped laughing and said, “It’ll be a sleepover party every night.”
Connor and Emily finally understood.
“Blake,” Connor said, “we can come visit you. We don’t have to live here.”
That was a good try. Connor was still the best at those convincing arguments. Only this time, it didn’t work.
Blake waved his hands, and my friends sank down to their waists in the sand.
“The change won’t hurt,” Blake assured them. “You stop breathing for a moment when the sand covers your face, but then it’s over.”
He sounded like a doctor giving a shot.
“When you open your eyes again, you’ll be just like me,” he finished, as if that were a good thing.
“Help, Nate!” Emily shouted. “Don’t let him do this.”
I didn’t know how to stop it. All I had was the map, the Scaremaster’s journal, a pencil, and some licorice.
Licorice.
Okay, so that was a place to start.
I reached into the shopping bag and pulled out the candy.
“There’s no time for a snack,” Connor told me. His voice cracked with stress.
“I’m not hungry,” I replied over my shoulder as I ran back to the classroom where Blake had trapped me. He couldn’t trap me in there again because the glass was shattered, but I wondered if he’d drag me off to another room. Between Blake and the Scaremaster, anything was possible.
I stopped before climbing over the broken glass and stared back at Connor. I opened my eyes wide, and thought hard thoughts, hoping to send him a signal. I did not believe in mind reading; that would be silly. But I did believe that Connor and I had been friends for such a long time that maybe he could figure out what I was doing and help.
“Hey, Blake,” I heard him say as I saw the sticky sand engulf his waist. “Tell us about the”—he stalled for a beat—“kinds of pranks we can play on museum visitors. That sounds fun.”
“Yeah,” Emily said, getting the point. “The bird thing was terrifying.”
“I know,” Blake said with a chuckle. “I’ve only done that one once before. I like to work with the bears. They’re my favorite. Teddy—that’s what I call the big grizzly—he’s such a jokester. I can’t wait for you to meet him. Did you see how he scared Connor?”
Connor nodded. “I was terrified. Especially when I was inside the display, behind the glass.”
Blake nodded. “Teddy can wiggle just an ear. Or one little finger. Or inch closer to the display glass while no one is looking.… The tourists go nuts, wondering if something changed. It’s hysterical.”
This was working. My friends weren’t sinking anymore, and I could move more quickly without feeling like Blake was watching my every move.
“And the rats in with the birds of prey—how cool was that?” Blake continued. “None of them were hurt, of course. All the animals are friends. It was all staged for your benefit. But it was great, wasn’t it?”
While Blake rambled on, I crept over the shards of glass and back into the classroom. Inside that cabinet, I’d seen some rope. It wasn’t a lot, but it would be enough. Tucking the rope into my shopping bag, I slipped back into the main area, ducked behind the pile of T. rex bones, and opened the licorice package. It wasn’t the candy I wanted. It was the book of knots.
Just because I knew that the figure eight was the best knot for climbing didn’t mean I’d ever made one. I wondered if there was a better knot for what I had planned. Maybe the Palomar, the one Connor mentioned when we first found the book, was the right one for this? It was meant for fishing after all, and I was going fishing for my friends.
I flipped through the pages of the small book and found the one I needed.
It was a timber hitch. This was a knot that could be used to drag a tree log, so it should be strong enough to drag three kids out of a sand pit. I looped the end of the rope around my own waist and tied three small knots for gripping into the long part of the rope. My friends could hold on, and I would walk backward, pulling them out of the sand.
I made the knot around me tight. After that, I quickly threw one end over the side of the sand pit where Emily could grab it.
“Grab a knot and hang on tight,” I told her. “Don’t let go.”
She found a place to hold on, then pushed the rope to where Connor and Bella could also reach. They all had to drag their hands out of the sand to get the knots. That little movement pulled them down more into the sand than if they’d stayed still.
I moved back to where the rope was tight, then pulled back. I grunted and groaned, but the quicksand was like cement. It was hard-packed, thick, and pasty. The sand wouldn’t let my friends go.
Blake was laughing hysterically now. The moment I’d thrown the rope into the pit, he’d stopped talking about museum pranks. To my surprise, he hadn’t tried to stop my rescue mission. Now I understood why. He knew this wouldn’t work. The rope was too thin and was already fraying. And I had to admit, I was too weak to pull three people out of quicksand.
To Blake, this was just a huge joke. And the punch line was that my friends would become ghosts like him.
Suddenly, Connor dropped the rope. The sand had reached his neck. He gasped for air. “Nate,” he choked out my name. “Change the story.”
Bella’s tooth fossil was on the sand. After she dropped her rope knot, she still had a hand free. It was awkward, but she managed to throw the fake fossil at me over the edge of the pit. I caught it and ran a finger over the fake T. rex tooth. It wasn’t very sharp.
“Stab the book!” Emily said just as the sand touched the bottom of her lip. She spit some out of her mouth.
My hands were shaking when I pulled the Scaremaster’s book out of the shopping bag.
Using the tooth as a stake, I stabbed at the book’s cover. It didn’t make a dent. Instead, bits of plastic broke off the fake fossil. “It’s not working,” I cried, glancing into the sand pit to see that the sand was now up to Connor’s mouth as well. Only Bella seemed to have her whole head free. This was probably the first time she wasn’t “first.”
“You’re too late,” Blake jeered at me. “When we’re friends, hanging out all day and night in the museum, you won’t ever be invited to visit, Nate. Not ever!”
I didn’t even look at him. Stabbing at the book was getting nowhere, so I opened the cover and tried stabbing at the pages.
“The book is made of the toughest paper I’ve ever seen,” I complained.
“Glurg,” re
sponded Connor.
That wasn’t good. I spun to face him. He was breathing through his nose now because the sand was covering his mouth.
I needed something sharper to stab at the pages. But what?
“Glugggg!” repeated Connor in a throaty growl.
Don’t ask how that translated in my head to “tooth” but it did. I was sitting near a huge pile of dinosaur bones. In that pile was one of the sharpest things in the entire prehistoric world. The T. rex had tried to bite me with his teeth, and now I was going to use them to save my friends.
I grabbed one of the T. rex teeth from the fossil pile and held it in my hand. It was huge. Nearly a foot long.
“Got it,” I called back to Connor.
I was careful not to touch the sharpest part, grabbing the back of the tooth and raising it like a spike.
“Good-bye, Scaremaster,” I yelled, gathering my energy to slam the tooth through the possessed journal’s cover. I took a deep breath.
A roar swelled behind me. I paused, feeling heat on my neck. A clinking noise filled the hall, echoing all around me. I wished I hadn’t turned to look right then because it might have been over if I’d just stabbed the book.
Another roar filled the hall as the T. rex’s bones clicked back into place one after another. The T. rex was rebuilding himself, and I had no doubt that he was going to want his tooth.
“You aren’t going to change the story,” Blake challenged me. “The Scaremaster promised me a happy ending.”
The T. rex gathered himself together. Looking up, I could see the gaping hole where the tooth I held should have been.
I couldn’t let him have that tooth.
There was a strange pull on the fossil. It felt like a magnet was trying to tear the tooth from my hand and suck it back into that giant T. rex’s mouth.
I held firm.
The T. rex gnashed his jaw directly over my head. I was certain that I was going to be the next ghost in the museum. Me first, then my friends.
There was only one thing to do. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the fact that in about ten seconds I was going to be dinosaur food.
I raised my hands and, using every muscle in my body, I slammed that tooth down. It was so sharp that it easily pierced the Scaremaster’s journal cover and dug through the pages.
