Samantha Spinner and the Perplexing Pants

by Russell Ginns

  Clack!

  The cart rolled over some kind of switch, and suddenly lurched onto a different track. Nipper craned his neck, trying to look back to the river, but he couldn’t see it anymore.

  Clack!

  The cart rolled over another switch and swerved onto another track.

  Nipper was still trying to find the river. He wanted to know what had happened to the monkey. He faced forward again to see—that he was heading straight into a wall!

  There was no time to jump out of the cart!

  CRASH!

  The mine cart smashed through the wall. Bricks, tiles, rocks, and splintered wooden beams flew everywhere. Dirt, dust, and ancient paint flakes filled the air.

  The cart zipped along, and the dusty cloud began to clear.

  Nipper realized he was back in the round chamber…and he was rolling straight toward the bottomless pit!

  He threw his body against the rear of the cart. It flipped back.

  CLANG!

  SCRA-A-A-A-A-PE!

  The cart skidded to a stop, inches from the edge of the pit.

  “Wruf!” barked Dennis, trotting up to the cart.

  The Blinky Barker light switched on, blasting Nipper with light.

  “Off!” ordered Nipper.

  “Wruf!” barked Dennis.

  Nipper took off the backpack and tossed it out of the cart.

  “It’s the bottom of the eighth inning with two outs!”

  The radio had switched on again.

  “The Red Sox still lead, four to zero!”

  He rolled out of the upended cart and onto the chamber floor, stood up, and took a deep breath.

  “Stay,” he told Dennis.

  Calmly Nipper walked to the pit’s edge. He took the scorpion ring from his pocket, raised it over his head, and threw the ring, straight down, as hard as he could.

  The emerald scorpion flashed once before it disappeared into darkness.

  Nipper stared into the pit and waited.

  He saw nothing. He heard nothing.

  “It’s a base hit for the Yankees!”

  He looked up. The radio blared from inside his backpack. He held his breath and waited.

  “Home run!”

  The announcer began to call hit after hit after hit. Nipper ran over to the pack.

  “Home run!…Triple!…Home run!”

  He sat down beside his backpack and listened to the radio.

  “Single!…Single!…Single!…Grand slam!”

  His Yankees were scoring so many runs, Nipper lost track of the score. It was magical! He felt like his head might explode…with joy!

  “It’s a home run!…And another home run!…Home run!…Home—”

  The radio cut off. Its batteries were dead.

  Nipper’s batteries were dead, too. He was exhausted…but it was over!

  It was over. His plan had worked. The Yankees were going to win, and they weren’t going to get kicked out of the league, and their bats weren’t going to get chopped into firewood. And no musical theater!

  He stood up, brushed sand from his pants, and grabbed his backpack. He had to get back up to the museum. As tired as he was, Nipper wanted to celebrate with a fellow true Yankees fan.

  Nipper marched triumphantly into the exhibit hall.

  The guide stood by his table with an eager expression on his face.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Yankees win,” said Nipper. “I did it. We did it.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful news,” said the man.

  Nipper held out the radio.

  “The battery died,” he said.

  “Give it to me,” the man answered quickly. “I’ll plug it in.”

  Nipper put the radio on the table, and the guide reached for a power cable dangling from a nearby outlet.

  “Turn it on, turn it on,” Nipper chanted eagerly.

  “I can’t wait to hear the postgame celebration,” said the guide as he switched on the radio.

  “What an amazing game, folks! The Yankees scored a dozen runs.”

  “And?” said Nipper to the radio.

  “And?” the guide repeated.

  “And then the Boston Red Sox came roaring back! They scored two hundred runs in the ninth inning. What a victory for Boston!”

  Nipper and the guide looked at each other, stunned.

  “And with their one hundred and forty-seventh loss, the New York Yankees will have to leave Major League Baseball. Their bats will become firewood, and their uniforms will become costumes for musical—”

  Nipper reached out and grabbed the radio. He tugged, pulling it free from the power cord.

  He and the guide stared at each other in shock. Their heads looked like they were going to explode. For almost a minute, the two true Yankees fans stood together in silence.

  “Hey,” said Nipper, glancing around the room. “Where’s that old baseball glove I gave you?”

  “Ugh,” said the guide. “I lost it. I’m so embarrassed. I hope it wasn’t very valuable.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Nipper. “If nobody ever lost anything, nothing would be valuable. At least, that’s what my uncle Paul always says.”

  The guide nodded. He reached for the Yankees pin on his shirt.

  For a moment, Nipper thought the man was going to remove the pin. Instead he polished it with his thumb.

  “I think someone needs you,” he said.

  “My sister?” asked Nipper. “Nah. She’ll do just fine without me. My dad’ll help her with math or lightbulbs.”

  “No,” said the guide. “Your lamp-dog. I think you left him somewhere.”

  “Whoops,” said Nipper, turning. “I’ll be right back.”

  “See you again soon, young fellow Yankee fan,” the guard called as Nipper rushed out of the room.

  “Dennis!” Nipper called as he entered the pit room. “Time to go home!”

  His voice echoed as he searched the room for the pug. No one was there.

  “Dennis?” Nipper repeated. “I said it’s time to…”

  He looked at the pit and gulped. Had the pug fallen in?

  Nipper stepped to the edge of the hole. He squinted into the darkness. It sure looked bottomless…and useless. In spite of everything, his Yankees were done.

  But it would be truly horrible if—in addition to not saving his team and not helping his sister—he’d gone and lost their dog.

  “Dennis?” he called again.

  As he stared into the darkness, he heard a faint scratching, tapping sound.

  Nipper looked over his shoulder. The sound was coming from around the corner, the exit across from where he had followed the monkey. He left the pit’s edge and walked through the doorway quickly.

  Nipper entered a room that he remembered very well. It was a treasure room filled with statues, trophies, jewels, and furniture. Shiny metal masks were stacked in a neat pile. A woven basket had tipped over, scattering dozens of huge red gems and gold coins across the tile floor. Everything glinted in the light of Nipper’s headlamp.

  When they’d first discovered this underground tomb, Nipper had wanted to bring a bunch of loot home so he could buy his team back. Samantha had convinced him it was a bad idea to take anything out of this place. She couldn’t have been more right about it. All he’d taken was one lousy ring, and it had wrecked his life!

  At the far end of the room, Dennis’s cone tapped against the lower part of a tall flat panel as he scratched at it with his front paws. The surfboard-shaped stone was the lid to a mummy case propped up against the wall. The pug alternated between scratching at the lid and licking flecks of powder that he had scraped free with his paws. Nipper could tell the dog had been at it for quite a while. The bottom of the lid looked like Den
nis had worn some of it away with his sharp toenails.

  “What are you doing, pal?” asked Nipper, stepping forward.

  Crunch!

  Nipper looked down. He’d stepped on a ruby, and it had crushed under his foot.

  “Fake?” asked Nipper.

  He knelt down and studied the crushed stone. All that was left of it was a clump of pink powder.

  Nipper stood back up and looked around the room. How much of the treasure in this room was real?

  He stepped to the side and bumped into a low table, toppling a statue of a bird.

  Crash!

  The statue hit the floor and shattered into a hundred dusty fragments. Nipper scratched his head. It was a fake, too. What else in this room wasn’t a real treasure?

  Next to him, on the ground, was a bundle of long slender rods. They were carved with elaborate geometric shapes. They looked like magic wands, the kind wizards used in storybooks.

  Nipper brought his foot down on the sticks, and crunch, they crumbled into small chips of sparkling white powder. He knelt down and touched the powder with his finger. He brought it to his tongue. It tasted salty. He crushed the rest of the wands into powder. It was all made of salt!

  Cree-e-eak. Smash!

  The heavy sarcophagus lid fell sideways and crashed onto the floor of the chamber, exploding into pieces and sending up a cloud of white salt flakes. They swirled around the room like a dusty snow flurry.

  “Watch out for the SNOW,” Nipper said quietly.

  The SNOW had been here. Somehow they had found a way to get in and out of this place, and they were using the room to store all their phony, salty treasure.

  Nipper looked back to the doorway that led to the pit room, and his eyes went wide.

  “Everything is connected to something,” said Nipper.

  He looked across the chamber at Dennis. The pug licked furiously at a chunk of the shattered sarcophagus lid.

  “Come on, pal,” said Nipper.

  “Wruf?” the dog barked, switching on the Blinky Barker light.

  “Off, off,” said Nipper, shielding his eyes from the bulb’s intense glare.

  “Wruf,” Dennis barked again. The light turned off, and the little dog followed him through the door back to the big round room.

  “It’s too late to save my Yankees,” said Nipper, walking to the edge of the pit. “But maybe it’s not too late to save my sister.”

  He stepped forward, picked up Dennis, and then walked to the mine cart that still sat next to the pit. The pug began to squirm.

  “Relax, pal,” said Nipper, climbing into the cart with the dog. “I have an idea.”

  He peered over the front of the cart, and into the blackness of the pit. Then he began to shift his weight, causing the cart to rock back to front.

  “Wruf!” Dennis barked nervously.

  The cart began inching forward.

  Dennis kept struggling, but Nipper held him tightly to his chest.

  “Here goes…everything!” Nipper shouted.

  The cart rolled over the edge and dropped into the pit.

  “Remember,” Samantha said as she and her father headed up the steps inside the main hall of the Detroit Institute of Arts. “Everything we’re doing is still super-secret. Try not to draw attention to us.”

  She glanced over at the tall black top hat bobbing on her father’s head, then looked down at the red umbrella she carried with her on a sunny summer day.

  Oh well. They would do their best not to stick out too much.

  “I’ll be careful,” said Mr. Spinner, adjusting his hat. “I’m just here to help with any math challenges we may encounter.”

  They reached the entrance to the courtyard of the Detroit Industry Murals.

  “And of course I’m prepared to handle any lightbulb challenges that may confront us on our journey,” he added.

  They hadn’t discussed lightbulbs on the trip from Seattle to Detroit. There hadn’t been any “lightbulb challenges” on the kogelbaan or during the salt mine ride. Samantha couldn’t imagine any during this particular trip. But her father was senior lightbulb tester at the American Institute of Lamps, so she knew he’d bring it up sooner or later.

  It sure wasn’t one-hundredth of a percent as annoying as hearing Nipper talk about the Yankees.

  “I wonder what the wattage is in these cases,” Samantha’s father said as they passed the suits of armor on display. “The color balance of the light is superb.”

  Okay. Maybe it was one-quarter of a percent as annoying as Nipper talking about the Yankees.

  Again Samantha had the feeling that her dad cared about lightbulbs, her mom, math, Nipper, math, Buffy, breakfast making, and her, in that order. But that was okay for the moment. She needed him to help with math so that she could find Uncle Paul.

  The room with the Detroit Industry Murals was more crowded than the last time Samantha had been there. Of course, today there was no phony blizzard warning from the SNOW.

  “It’s over there,” said Samantha, pointing to the planter beneath the large mural with the machinery.

  She led her father to the plastic plant and pointed to the red faucet handle.

  “Most people are looking at the murals, so they don’t notice anything strange about the water faucet,” she told him.

  Mr. Spinner touched one of the broad, flat leaves, and seemed to ponder something.

  “Plastic plants,” he said. “So there’s no reason to have a faucet here.”

  “Exactly,” said Samantha. “But don’t touch it until we get everyone looking in another direction.”

  “How are we going to do that?” asked her father.

  Samantha smiled. She stood up straight and pointed to the room’s entrance.

  “Wow! Look over there!” she shouted. “It’s a famous billionaire internet movie star supermodel sports celebrity!”

  Everyone in the courtyard turned to look at the entrance.

  Samantha winked at her dad. Then she reached through the plant leaves, grabbed the faucet handle, and gave it a twist.

  Chunka-chunka-chunka!

  Samantha looked up at the mural. Once again the mighty machine had begun to move. It emerged from its camouflaged hiding place in the mural and lowered two mighty robot arms.

  Clamp!

  Clamp!

  The arms grabbed Samantha and her father.

  “Holy high candle power!” shouted Mr. Spinner.

  Chunka!

  And the machine yanked both of them into the wall.

  Chunka!

  The mighty robot arm gently lowered Samantha onto the floor of a wide tunnel. She checked quickly to make sure she still had her umbrella over her shoulder.

  Chunka!

  Her father dropped beside her.

  “That was like a roller coaster,” said Mr. Spinner. “It’s too bad Nipper wasn’t here to enjoy it.”

  “He was here, Dad,” said Samantha. “I was here, too.”

  “I remember how much that boy enjoyed our trip to Pacific Pandemonium, when he—”

  “Look! There’s math,” Samantha interrupted, pointing behind him.

  Once again she felt like her dad liked Nipper and lightbulbs more than he cared about her.

  “Interesting,” said her father, turning to face the wall.

  He studied the grid of numbers for a few seconds. Then he began pressing panels.

  “Come join me,” he said. “I’ll start at the top left.”

  Samantha used her umbrella to tap the number thirteen.

  Together they pressed until twelve squares were lit with the Fibonacci sequence.

  The lights on the wall began to blink.

  “There was a clue here,” said her father, stepping back from the wall. “The numbe
r one appears twice at the beginning. If you had known about the Fibonacci sequence, then you might have been able to guess.”

  The lights starting blinking faster and faster….

  Hiss-sssss!

  The entire wall began to rise, like a giant garage door. Warm, salty air rushed out, and a tunnel was revealed, stretching out before Samantha and her father.

  She estimated the tunnel to be twenty feet from side to side, and just as far from floor to ceiling. The smooth walls seemed to be carved from solid rock. Overhead, clusters of glowing crystals dangled, bathing the tunnel with soft light.

  Statues lined the tunnel. Samantha recognized many of them from the ride through the salt mine. Others she recognized from all of Uncle Paul’s stories.

  “Michelangelo’s David, Rodin’s The Thinker,” she said as they passed each iconic sculpture. “Abraham Lincoln, from the Lincoln Memorial.” They were amazingly detailed replicas.

  “Are these made of salt?” asked Samantha.

  Her father stopped at a sculpture of a Chinese soldier. He rubbed it with his thumb.

  “Not this one,” he said. “It appears to be quartz.”

  He moved to a second soldier.

  “This one might be marble,” he said, squinting at the soldier’s hat. “Amazing detail work.”

  Ahead of them, a lion sculpture seemed to stand guard on each side of the tunnel. Samantha recognized them. They were copies of the famous lions outside the New York Public Library in Manhattan.

  Samantha shielded her eyes. In the distance, she could see that the tunnel opened into a much brighter chamber. She gestured for her father to join her behind the lion by the right wall of the tunnel. They both crouched and looked through the opening into the space beyond.

  “Whoa, Nelly,” Samantha whispered.

  A vast, dome-shaped cavern stretched out ahead of them, shining as brightly as the world outside on a cloudless day. It reminded her of a basketball arena. Instead of a scoreboard, however, a cluster of hexagonal crystals dangled from the top of the dome. Each one looked to be about the size of the mailbox leading to the magtrain down the street from their house, and they glowed brightly.