Steve Cole Middle Fiction 4

by Steve Cole

  • Scan your most unfair and rubbish teacher and zap him or her into nothingness!

  Of course, I was just daydreaming about teacher-removals. I meant it as a joke. But then it hit me, what Mum had said: In the wrong hands, the Scan-and-Zapper could be the most massively dangerous weapon in history . . .

  Never mind teacher-removal. I imagined armies fighting wars: thousands of soldiers, each armed with a BRIAN™, zapping each other out of existence . . . I pictured mad world-rulers vanishing the water supplies of their enemies so whole populations would die of thirst . . . or a crazy supervillain splatting the sun and the skies going dark . . . or—

  Suddenly my phone buzzed and rang. I jumped about a mile, but once I’d scraped my nerves off the ceiling I was quite looking forward to a call from whoever was on the line: one of my old mates I’d left behind, maybe, or . . .

  No.

  There was no name or number on the screen. Only four words: You are in danger

  “AAAAGHH!” I threw the phone across the room. Unfortunately, it bounced off the wall and hit me on the head. “OWWWW!”

  The phone fell onto the floor. Then it stopped ringing.

  I peered down. The words had gone.

  “I . . . I must’ve imagined it.” Cautiously, I reached down and picked up the phone again.

  Another message appeared:

  Do not make me wave more beans in your face in an attempt to get your attention!

  “AAAAAGHHHH!” I screamed, and threw the phone at the wall again. This time I didn’t stick around for the ricochet, I just ran from the room and pelted downstairs.

  “Mum!” I rushed over to the basement door and tried the handle, but it was locked. “Mum, open up! Pleeeeeeeeease!”

  THUMP. Something dropped at my feet.

  My phone.

  My phone that I had just left back in my room.

  “AAAAAAAAAGHHHHH!” I yelled – my third scream in as many minutes (and my finest, too!). I stared down at the phone’s cracked screen. Another text message had appeared:

  Do not answer the door!

  “Huh?” I said.

  And then the doorbell went.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Mysterious Visitor

  (and Guess What? Could it be A GHOST?)

  The ring of the doorbell was a lively, electric chime, but to my ears, just then, it sounded like the clang of doom.

  A ghost had taken over my phone and now it was warning me not to open the door.

  Should I do what it said – as if it had my best interests at heart?

  Duh, Noah! I told myself. It’s a GHOST! It’s a dread spirit from beyond the afterlife! What, you think it came here to tuck you into bed each night and read you lovely stories?

  And, if this GHOST was telling me not to open the door, it probably meant there was a ghost-hunter waiting there – or an exorcist, maybe? Someone brave and kind who could actually do something about all this blood-curdling creepiness!

  I ran to the study window and saw a large rusty van in the street marked

  SEERBLIGHT SOLUTIONS

  FOR THE PROBLEMS YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU HAVE

  Weird, I thought. Then I peered to my left and saw a burly, boss-eyed man in a stained vest standing by the front door. He had a large empty sack slung over one shoulder.

  The doorbell rang again. I hesitated. When it said, ‘Don’t answer the door’, perhaps the ghost was on to something?

  Or up to something.

  “Mum!” I yelled again.

  The man outside heard me shout. He looked in at me through the study window – at least I think he was looking at me. His eyes stared off in two different directions at once, and he had one of those chins that looks a bit like a bum. He grinned and waved and pulled faces like I was a little baby in a cot or something.

  Verrrrrrrrrry weird.

  He went on waving and nodding and grinning. Awkward! Now I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t at home.

  “Mum!” I called again. “Someone’s at the door . . .”

  But no, cancel that.

  Someone was opening the door, even though it had been firmly closed. Hadn’t it?

  Was it the ghost again?

  I hurried to the door and put my foot behind it so it couldn’t open all the way. “Er . . . hello?”

  “Hello, sonny,” said the man in a gruff voice. “I’m Mr Butt, Head of Operations.”

  That took me slightly by surprise. Especially as he had the bum chin, too. “You’re . . . Mr Butthead?”

  “No, Mr Butt – Head of Operations at Seerblight Solutions. I’ve come to kidnap your mother.”

  My hair almost stood on end. “WHAT?”

  “I said, er, I’ve come to gift-wrap your blubber.” Mr Butt laughed nervously. “You know – whale blubber, seal blubber, dolphin blubber . . .”

  “We haven’t got any blubber.” I gave him what I hoped was a hard stare. “And, if we did, why would we want it gift-wrapped?”

  “That’s why you need Seerblight Solutions!” cried Mr Butt in triumph. “For the problems you don’t even know you’ve got. Let me see your mum so I can put her in this sack—” He broke off and cleared his throat. “I mean, explain the situation to her, ha ha.”

  “Mum can’t be disturbed,” I said, feeling really nervous now. My phone started buzzing and ringing from the floor. “I’d, er, better answer that. Bye!”

  I tried to close the door, but Mr Butt kicked it open and I fell back into the hall with a cry. He stepped inside and raised the sack. “Now then. We’ll go and see your mother together, shall we . . . ?”

  “Nooooooooo!” Panic leapt from my brain without a parachute. “Keep away!”

  But just then my ringing phone took off from the hall carpet like a rocket ship! It shot across the hall and smacked Mr Butt on the chin. “OOOF!” He was hit so hard he spun around on his heel through 180 degrees. Suddenly Mr Butt’s butt was bearing down on me, saggy and huge, twitching as if with a life of its own. But the bottom didn’t stay in my face for long: a swarm of drawing pins came flying from the living room and jabbed into his lower cheeks.

  Mr Butt leapt into the air and ran out through the front door, more pins pursuing him like little brass wasps. As he left, the door swung shut by itself. SLAM!

  I stood there, trembling. It was about the only movement I could manage. On the one hand, I was relieved that Mr Butt had gone. On the other hand, he’d only gone because my phone and some pins had flown impossibly through the air – which made me think I ought to be running out after him.

  My phone had stopped ringing; it lay silent and still, smoke rising from the case. I touched it but quickly snatched back my fingers. It felt red-hot.

  What was going on around here?

  “Mum!” I yelled, and ran down into her lab.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Mum! Right! Answers! Now! Let’s Go!”

  I’d had enough! The weird stuff around here had gotten worse since Mum started zapping things into nothingness. Coincidence? NO-incidence! (Ha ha, I am funny.) So, as you can see from the picture, I barged down those stairs meaning business.

  Sadly, Mum’s busyness meant she didn’t notice, especially since she was working with her headphones on. Grrrrrr. This was her space – the Mum-Cave, she often called it – a mashed-up mixture of hyper-high-tech stuff and out-of-date oddities. Various computers sat on lab benches between bubbling beakers and test tubes, while centrifuges and electron microscopes shared shelf space with sextants and dusty old books.

  “What’s going on, Mum?” I gave her my most impassioned look. I’m sure she would have been struck by its intensity and longing if she’d bothered to look up from her microscope.

  “Sorry, li’l dude, what was that?” Mum nudged her headphones off her ears. “Bit busy right now. Have we run out of beans?”

  “Stuff the beans!”

  “You want stuffed beans? Okay, next time I order online—”

  “I want you to SPILL the beans.”


  Mum looked back into her microscope. “But I cleared up the spilled beans, love . . . remember?”

  “That does it. I’m taking a hostage.” I snatched up the nearest thing on her desk – a small jar, a quarter filled with white powder. “Stop work and talk to me, or I . . .” I shook the jar over my head. “I’ll chuck this stuff down the toilet!”

  Mum glanced up at last – and, like a cartoon, her eyes seemed to bulge out of her head. “NOAH!” She tore off her headphones, shaking and pale. “Noah . . . put down that Salt of Igneous!”

  Something told me this wasn’t the sort of salt you dipped your chips in. “Huh?”

  “It’s the power source of my Scan-and-Zapper.” Mum was speaking quietly, through gritted teeth. “When excited correctly, it makes things disappear. When excited incorrectly, it could go off like a bomb and disintegrate the entire area.”

  “Ah.” Slowly, very slowly, I put down the jar. “In other words – pow-powder, huh?”

  “Ooh, pow-powder!” Mum perked up suddenly. “Yeah, man, that rocks! Modern. Snappy.” She mimed a guitar solo that made me cringe. “RIGHT ON!”

  “I was also thinking you could call your Scan-and-Zapper the Beam Removing Intricate Atoms in Nanoseconds™ – or BRIAN™ for short.”

  “Oooh, that’s cool, too! BRIAN™ makes the Scan-and-Zapper sound pretty friendly – for such a devastatingly destructive device.”

  I nodded. “With pow-powder powering it, no wonder my haunted phone told me I was in danger.”

  Mum frowned. “Your what now?”

  Finally, I had her attention! Before she could take it away again, I held out my poor bust-up phone and quickly offloaded all the weirdness I’d gone through since my close encounter of the bean kind.

  Once I’d finished, Mum just stared at me. She looked kind of guilty and a bit disappointed. “Oh, Noah. I know I’ve been working too much lately, and you’re missing my attention, but to break your own phone to try and support such a crazy story . . .”

  “I’m not making this up! It really happened.”

  “Be patient for just a while longer, okay?” Mum’s eyes were pleading. “I need just a little more time to learn how to reverse the effects, then I’ll be ready to present pow-powder to the world. Just think, your old mum will be famous and we’ll be rich!”

  “Does that mean we can move out of this dump?”

  “This ‘dump’ is the reason it’s happening! I’d never have stumbled on pow-powder if I hadn’t had help . . . help from a long, long time ago.” Mum pulled a key from her pocket, unlocked a drawer in her desk and pulled out an old, leather-bound notebook. “Help from my heroine – Baroness Jemima Smyth!”

  Wow, I thought (sarcastically, obvs). An old book. “Did you buy it on eBay or something?”

  “I found it here in this room, under a broken floorboard.” Mum pointed to a corner where a chunk of wood was missing. “It’s a kind of work diary from 1869 . . .” Mum waved the book around.

  Jemima first learned of pow-powder after reading ye olde super-rare alchemy textbook…

  She uncovered an ancient means of making pow-powder and set to work!

  By bombarding pow-powder with light and energy she could make close-by objects disappear…

  Jemima continued her experiments until she died suddenly in unexplained circumstances.

  “That’s a bit creepy,” I murmured. “Finding her secret notebook after all this time.”

  “It’s almost as if it found me.” Mum beamed. “Suddenly I had the chance to finish my heroine’s work! Modern technology makes it much easier to simulate pow-powder, and by adding a scanner – YEAHHH! – I can make sure I don’t vanish something important by mistake. Like the ceiling. Or you.”

  “Being vanished might not be so bad,” I said, finding a smile. “I wouldn’t have to eat beans any more. And if that weirdo Mr Butt comes back here . . .”

  “Noah, I told you—”

  “He was really here! He came in a van marked Seerblight something or other.”

  “What did you say? Seerblight?” Mum flicked through the pages of the old diary. “Well, isn’t that curious? Look here. The last entry . . .”

  She held up the book and, as I read Baroness Jemima’s final words, my spine buzzed like there was a fly trapped inside it:

  Mum shrugged. “Funny coincidence, huh?”

  Funny?

  I didn’t crack a smile all the way back upstairs to the toilet.

  CHAPTER SIX

  What I Saw When I Was Playing Video Games

  I sat in the living room and switched on the TV for company. But really I didn’t take in a word. My mind was too busy wrestling with mysteries – and coming off worst.

  A hundred and fifty years or so ago, Seerblight Solutions had called on Baroness Jemima at her home. Why?

  Today, they had called on me and Mum, right here at Baroness Jemima’s old house. Why?

  WHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYY?

  Pow-powder. That was the only link I could think of.

  Did Mr Butthead-of-Operations want to steal the pow-powder?

  How did he know what Mum was up to?

  I groaned. Like a mosquito in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, I felt totally out of my depth.

  Just who was the ghost? Mum thought I was making the whole thing up, but I knew whose name topped my list of suspects.

  Had the spirit of the long-dead baroness led Mum to her notebook hidden under the floorboards, hoping she would continue work on the pow-powder? What had Seerblight done to her – and was he/she/it/they planning to do the same to Mum and me?

  I was totally creeping myself out. It was time to take action. (After I’d been to the toilet for ‘a long sit’.)

  After I’d been to the bathroom and washed my hands, I locked every door and window in the house. Then I cracked open some (non-floating) beans and ate them cold from the can with a fork. I left a light on in every room. I stuck some dance music in the CD player and turned the TV on at high volume, too, so it sounded like the house was full of people and we were all having an amazing party.

  My plan was to leave everything on all night, to deter any unwelcome callers. Who in their right mind would try to break into a house full of people, eh? Unless they wanted to dance and party, of course.

  After a bit, I got fed up with all the noise so I went to my room. My phone wasn’t working, but I still had the iPad. So I killed time on that (and hoped dead time wouldn’t come back to haunt me).

  I did a bit of spook-browsing online.

  First, I looked up Seerblight Solutions. But that brought up nothing.

  Next, I typed in:

  Baroness Jemima Smyth|

  I paused, then got more specific:

  Baroness Jemima Smyth Dead Ghost|

  I hit ‘GO’.

  And the iPad went. It flipped apps: the search engine got lost and Maps launched instead.

  “Huh?” I stared at the screen, hairs prickling on the back of my neck. Typed into the search bar were the words:

  Baroness Jemima Smyth Dead Ghost

  A red pin with BJSDG written in it was sticking out from the map on the screen.

  A map that showed our house and the area around it.

  “Gulp!”

  Something had been typed in the Directions box:

  Do not leave your house

  Suddenly it felt as though my spine was the map, with tingles marking the way from one end to the other. Show the message to Mum, I thought – but then the iPad went dead, even though it had loads of charge. I stared at it, completely spooked. Then I hid it behind some books on the shelf.

  “I’m not leaving the house, Baroness Smyth!” I called out. “But I really hope you do!”

  No one and nothing replied.

  I sighed. I needed distraction. Screen games. Lots of them.

  I came back down into the noisy living room and decided to work out my frustrations with Aliens on the Brink – a first-person shooter game. A couple of years back, Mum made me
a game controller that looks like a gun, so I can channel my negativity by zapping ugly green aliens over and over.

  And so, innocently occupied in blowing the hell out of creatures from another world, I was able to forget my troubles for a time. I even turned off the stereo so I could better hear the ZAPPP! ZAPPPP! AROOOOOOOOO! WOW-WOW-WEEEEEEEEEP! SPLAMMO! as I waved my gun at the TV, shooting those aliens . . .

  Suddenly, as if pushed by invisible hands, the TV jumped off the stand. It hit the floor, and the screen exploded into glass and plasma, while I screamed and leapt backwards onto the sofa.

  I found myself staring at a massive sword – floating by itself in the middle of the room!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Coulda, Shoulda–Didn’t

  A tin of beans floating in the air is one thing. But a huge, gleaming, medieval sword?

  And, if that wasn’t pant-wettingly scary enough, a weird metallic echo sounded through the air: the classic ghostly groan – Whoaaaaaaa! – that people use when something is creepy. Only this Whoaaaaaaa sounded more like Wherrrrrrrrrre—? It was as if someone was groaning into a can. An empty can of Sprite, in fact, which was floating not far from the sword Wherrrrrrrrrrrre—?

  I watched in horror as the blade rose up through the air, and then screamed as it knocked the gun-controller from my hand. Wherrrrrrrrre—?

  Then the noise cut off and both the Sprite can and the sword fell onto the coffee table, shattering the glass.

  The crash was like a starting pistol (a strange starting pistol that made the sound of breaking glass instead of a gunshot, but there you go). I bolted from the room to fetch Mum.

  But there was more weirdness waiting in the hallway. A clattering, clumping racket like someone was stomping in iron shoes all over the kitchen tiles.