The X-Factor

by Franklin W. Dixon

  XTREME SPORTS @ GX = SURFING IN A BATHTUB

  “Whoa,” I said, watching as a bunch of police officers swarmed toward the banner. It was still swaying a bit, indicating that someone must have just unfurled it. “McKenzie’s not going to like that.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Frank. “But at least a banner isn’t going to kill anyone.”

  He had a point. Unfortunately, McKenzie didn’t seem to share his relief. As we caught up to him, he was ranting and raving, sounding angrier than ever.

  “This is it!” he shouted at no one in particular. “It’s the last straw. I can’t take it anymore. Galaxy X was supposed to be a dream come true, but it’s turning into a nightmare.” He clenched his fists. “I’m ready to shut it down right now—for good!”

  Familiar Chase

  I traded looks with Joe. Now what? Was McKenzie serious about closing down GX, or was this just more of his infamous temper?

  “Look!” Joe pointed again. “Is that someone up there behind the banner?”

  I spun around just in time to see a figure leap to the ground beneath the banner and race off into the park. The person was wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled up, hiding his or her face. But I had a feeling I knew who it was.

  “Come on!” I cried, taking off after the figure. “I don’t think the cops even saw that.”

  The entrance to the BMX track was nearby. Our quarry ducked inside, grabbed a bike, and took off down the course.

  “Let’s roll!” yelled Joe, brushing past the GX employee manning the equipment shed.

  Soon we were on course, speeding over hills and taking jumps. It was actually kind of fun, though I did my best not to get distracted.

  “Why does this chase feel strangely familiar?” I panted as I crouched over the handlebars, pumping the pedals as fast as I could.

  Joe didn’t bother to answer. “Lenni!” he shouted instead as we rounded a curve in the trail, coming in sight of our quarry again. “Come on, dude. Enough with the big chase scene, okay?”

  The bike ahead kept going. But it slowed down a little. The rider glanced back over her shoulder.

  “Are you guys alone?” she called.

  “Do you see anyone else crazy enough to try to follow you?” Joe called back.

  Finally she stopped. We caught up and jumped off our bikes. “Whew,” I said. “You sure can ride.”

  Lenni smirked and pushed back her hood. “Yeah, I know. Pretty good for a girl, huh?”

  She shot a look at Joe, who made a face. I hid a smile. He still hadn’t fully recovered from the way she’d smoked him in GX’s skateboarding competition earlier in the week.

  “So it looks like you and your pals have been busy with the poster paint again, huh?” I said. “Nice banner.”

  She looked defiant. “Thanks. It’s some of our best work. But what’s with all the cops?”

  “You mean you didn’t hear?” said Joe.

  “Hear what?”

  We told her what had happened with the Bomber Pilot ride. Her eyes widened as she listened. Maybe she was a better actor than I thought. But she looked totally shocked, especially when she heard that a park worker had died in the crash.

  “Whoa, that’s hard-core,” she said somberly. “I can tell you one thing. Nobody I know would do something like that. No way.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But as far as Mr. McKenzie is concerned, you’re suspect numero uno thanks to all the trouble you’ve caused.”

  “He can think whatever he wants. It wasn’t me.” She paused. “Hang on, though. Come to think of it, there was someone skulking around this place last night.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, leaning on his bike. “You.”

  “And us,” I reminded him. “So was that you who dropped the flag on us?”

  “Huh? What flag?” She shook her head impatiently. “Listen. I was up there hiding the banner when I heard what I thought was a guard coming my way. I ducked down and peeked out. Someone went jogging past, heading over toward the Western stuff or somewhere over that way.”

  I glanced at Joe. “Interesting. Did you get a look? Who was it? A guard?”

  “I don’t think so.” Lenni played with a strand of her blue-tinged hair. “Whoever it was looked way too small to be one of Tyrone’s thugs. I’m not even sure if it was a guy or a girl, but it was someone sort of slim and kind of average height.”

  That could describe an awful lot of people. I couldn’t help wondering if Lenni was just trying to throw us off.

  While I was trying to figure out the best way to question her, she blew out a loud sigh. “By the way,” she added, “I assume you geniuses have already figured out I’m the webmaster of StopGX.”

  “What?” Joe squawked.

  I blinked, both surprised and not by the confession. True, we hadn’t quite put two and two together there. But it wasn’t much of a stretch to think she’d be behind something like that, considering her grudge against the park. Plus, I belatedly remembered that she’d mentioned the site unprompted during an earlier conversation.

  “So does that mean you’re the one who’s been sending us all those mysterious e-mails and stuff?” I asked. “You’re Skater Hater?”

  “No! That’s not me.” She shrugged. “I mean, yeah, of course I’ve seen that dude posting all around the Net. Even thought about banning him from my site—he seems pretty angry, you know? But I don’t really know anything about him.”

  Just then we heard the sound of more bikes approaching. “Uh-oh,” Joe said. “Sounds like someone’s coming after us.”

  “See ya,” said Lenni, dropping her bike and taking off into the landscaping.

  “Should we go after her?” Joe asked.

  “Why bother? She’s already proved she can lose us if she wants to.” I shook my head. “Do you think we can trust her? I mean, especially given what she just admitted about the website? That seems to be where a lot of the trouble starts.”

  “Yeah. Thanks to Skater Hater,” Joe said. “But she claims that’s not her.” He bit his lip and glanced in the direction Lenni had disappeared. “Think she’s telling the truth about the person she saw last night?”

  “Who knows? Anyway, even if it is true, the only one of our suspects it lets out is maybe Ox. I mean, Nick isn’t very tall, and neither is Sprat. It could still be either of them. Or that Zana chick. Or maybe even McKenzie himself, or some unknown person he hired to do his dirty work.”

  A park employee on a bike appeared over the nearest hill. “Yo, what’s the idea?” he demanded irritably, skidding to a stop in front of us. “You guys too good to wait in line for your turn like everybody else?” He looked around. “Where’s the other one?”

  Guess that meant not everyone was onto our real identities.

  “Sorry, dude,” Joe said. “Uh…”

  He was saved from coming up with an excuse by the ringing of his phone. He grabbed it and looked at the screen.

  “Who is it?” I asked as the park employee glowered at us.

  “Take a guess,” Joe replied grimly, holding it out for me to see.

  It was a text message from our old pal Sk8rH8r. This one consisted of a single line:

  NEW HORRORS AWAIT IF U DARE!

  Getting the Message

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I muttered, staring at the message. Frank shot a look at the guy from the BMX shack, who still looked kind of annoyed. “Um, we have to go,” Frank said. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”

  He shoved his bike toward the employee. The dude reached out automatically to catch it before it fell. I caught on quickly, pushing mine that way as well. The poor guy was so busy juggling three bikes that he couldn’t do anything but yell as Frank and I took off for the nearest exit.

  Soon we were outside. “So did that text make some kind of sense to you?” I asked. “Because I’m not getting it.”

  “I’m thinking it could have something to do with Horror House,” said Frank. “You know—that’
s the name of that funhouse type deal with the horror movie theme.”

  “Oh, right.” Now I remembered the place. It was this big wooden house that looked like every haunted house from every horror movie ever. Supposedly a bunch of real Hollywood horror directors had consulted with McKenzie on it, and the interior was supposed to be super scary. I’d tried to talk Frank into checking it out on our first day at GX, but he hadn’t gone for it.

  We hurried over to the Horror House. There was a line of people out front waiting to get in. While they waited, they could check out the graveyard that covered the center part of the lawn out front. It was animated, so every once in a while a headless corpse or something would pop out and make everyone jump and scream and then laugh. There were also a bunch of other thematic decorations around, like a snarling dog peering out from under the porch, a bloody ax swinging from a tree, and a pair of mannequins done up to look like recent slasher victims lying beside the path.

  “Check it out,” Frank said, pointing to said slasher victims.

  “Whoa.” My eyes went wide. The two mannequins were lying there looking as bloody and lifeless as always. But someone had stuck pictures of different faces over their usual ones. “Is that supposed to be—us?”

  “I think so.”

  We went closer. Yeah, once we got a good look, there was no mistaking it. Someone had taken a couple of fuzzy, bad, shot-from-a-distance-with-a-cell-phone-type photos of Frank and me, blown the faces up to life size, and stuck them on the slasher victims. The letters MYOB were written across the foreheads of each photo.

  “MYOB,” said Frank. “Mind your own business. Subtle.”

  “Yeah.” I shuddered. It was pretty creepy to see our faces on bloody dead bodies. Even fake ones. “What kind of obsessive person would do that?” My mind popped right on over to the most obsessive person around—Zana the superfan. Could she be behind this? But why?

  “Look!” Frank pointed toward the house. “There, in the window—is that Sprat?”

  I spun around. Most of the windows on the house were boarded up, streaked with fake blood, or otherwise covered. But a few on the first floor allowed a glimpse inside. I was just in time to see a familiar head of shockingly blond hair moving past one of them.

  “Yeah, that was him,” I said. “Think he was spying on us? Maybe waiting to see how we reacted to this little stunt?” I glanced at the mannequins and shuddered again.

  “Let’s go find out.”

  We rushed for the door, flashing our VIP passes to skip past the line. Most of the people waiting gave us dirty looks or yelled stuff, but the employee at the door let us right past.

  We entered the foyer. There was a body dangling from the chandelier and a bloody message—GET OUT!—scrawled on a mirror in blood. Deciding that probably wasn’t meant for us personally—not that we would have paid attention anyway—I stepped forward onto a dusty-looking Persian rug. As soon as I did, there was a scream from upstairs, and a severed head bounced down the curving stairway and disappeared into a gaping hole in the floor.

  “Cool!” I said, stepping forward to peer down after it. “I wonder if there’s just one head that falls over and over, or a whole bunch? They probably have some kind of head return thing, like at the bowling alley.”

  Frank shot me an irritated look. I swear, the dude has no sense of wonder or curiosity about the world.

  “It looked like Sprat was heading this way. Come on.” He hurried down a hallway off to the left. I followed. But the hallway was a dead end—literally. We rounded a corner at the end and found ourselves face-to-face with a bunch of chopped-up body parts.

  “Bad call, bro,” I said. “Got another guess?”

  We went back to the foyer and tried a door going in the same general direction. It opened into a formal dining room. A bunch more dead bodies were seated around the table. A woman was facedown in her mashed potatoes with a butcher knife sticking out of her back. Another guy’s bloody stump of an arm was dripping into a large soup tureen, while his hand floated in the soup.

  “Nice,” I commented as we hurried through. On the far side of the room was another door. This one turned out to open into a closet full of huge, hissing rats. I knew they were fake, but they sure looked real. We slammed the door shut again pretty fast either way.

  We kept going, trying different doors and finally finding our way into the kitchen. I was expecting to find more murder and mayhem in there, but it actually looked pretty normal.

  “Okay, which way now?” I asked, glancing at the three or four closed doors leading off the room. “It’s not going to be easy finding someone in this—”

  “AAAAAAAAH!” There was an unearthly scream, and a flaming, half-charred, screaming body burst out of the industrial-sized oven, heading straight toward us.

  My ATAC instincts took over. I flung myself to the side, flattening out on the floor.

  “Hey, cool!” said a new voice behind me.

  I glanced up. A couple of park guests were staring past me at the charred corpse, which was already flapping its way back into the oven.

  “Need a new pair of shorts, bro?” Frank reached down to help me up.

  “Very funny.” Feeling sheepish as I realized I’d totally fallen for one of the Horror House’s special effects, I brushed away his hand and climbed to my feet. “You have to admit that was pretty good, okay?”

  But there was no time to stop and admire the special effects. We kept going, stumbling around several more rooms and past more fake dead bodies. We finally caught up with Sprat in the upstairs hallway. He was checking out a body impaled on several broken railing posts.

  “Hey,” I blurted out, hurrying over. “We saw you in the window. Were you spying on us?”

  Sprat stared at me. “Dude!” he said. “Why would I do that? I don’t even know you, do I?”

  “I don’t know—do you?” Frank countered.

  Sprat grinned sheepishly. “Okay, okay, you caught me,” he said, spreading his skinny hands wide. “Are you going to kill me now?” He gestured toward the fake dead body. “Or I heard there’s a torture chamber in the basement—maybe you can punish me there. You know, peel my fingernails off or force me to listen to elevator music or something.”

  “We just want you to tell us what you’re up to,” Frank said grimly. “What’s with the funny faces outside?”

  “Funny faces?” Sprat blinked. “What are you talking about? I thought you were mad ’cause I figured out who you really are.”

  “Huh?” I said, shooting a look at Frank. This was kind of a strange confession so far. For one thing, Sprat didn’t seem to be taking it seriously at all. Then again, from watching his show I knew there wasn’t much he took seriously.

  Sprat shrugged. “Look, that Nick dude told me you guys are, like, some kind of secret agents or something. So when I spotted you out there, I was just, you know, checking you out.”

  Okay, that wasn’t exactly the confession we’d been hoping for. “So you didn’t stick our faces on the mannequins outside?” I demanded.

  Frank elbowed me in the ribs. “Listen, Nick’s full of hot air,” he told Sprat. “Secret agents? Come on!” He laughed loudly. It sounded pretty fake even to me. Sprat didn’t look too convinced either.

  Still, we did our best to talk our way out of it, then beat feet as soon as we could. Once safely back outside, we huddled behind a handy mausoleum.

  “So?” I said. “Think he’s playing dumb? Or honestly clueless?”

  “I don’t know.” Frank glanced up briefly as a huge black crow flapped out of the mausoleum and cawed at us. “I mean, he is one of our stronger suspects so far.”

  “True. We’ve seen him around for most of the pranks. Including the Bomber Pilot fiasco.”

  Frank looked thoughtful. “And we know he has the expertise to pull off most of the mischief. He’s always building bombs and hot-wiring cars and stuff on his show.”

  “Yeah, he loves that stuff. We should definitely keep a close eye on hi
m until we know more.” I sighed, watching idly as the crow flapped its way back inside to await its next victim. “So I guess this leaves us right back where we started.”

  Frank nodded grimly. “Nowhere.”

  That evening McKenzie summoned us to come to his house and fill him in on the mission. “Got anything to tell me?” he asked as soon as we walked into his home office. “Such as why I shouldn’t close this place down before it ruins me once and for all?”

  “Well, we do have a couple of new suspects we’re looking into, sir,” Frank said. “For instance, our people back at HQ just e-mailed us some new info they dug up on your head of maintenance, Ox Oliver. They discovered that he used to be a professional stuntman, and—”

  “Ox?” McKenzie shouted with laughter. “Forget it, boys. You’re way off track. Ox isn’t behind this trouble. Believe me, he’s trustworthy.”

  “Are you sure?” I put in. “Because we really think he—”

  “Tyrone! Are you home?” Delfina trilled, bursting into the room. When she saw Frank and me standing there, she giggled sheepishly. “Oh, hello, boys. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to see if Tyrone was ready for dinner.”

  Man. That Tyrone was a lucky guy. Delfina looked even hotter than usual. I remembered what Erica had said about her stepmother’s appointment at the hair salon the day before and decided to take advantage of the inside info. I mean, yeah, I knew she was already taken. But it never hurts to practice your skills, right? That’s a lesson Frank could stand to learn.

  “No apology necessary, Mrs. McKenzie,” I said with my smoothest smile. “By the way, you look particularly lovely today. Is that a new hairdo?”

  “Why, thank you.” Delfina touched her blond upsweep. “As a matter of fact, I did get it done yesterday. Although honestly, I’m surprised that Jean-Paul could do a thing with it, considering that little Tyrone Jr. was crawling around his feet the whole time!”