Attack of the Spider Bots

by Robert West

  Ghoulie pulled back his jacket sleeve to activate the stopwatch on his oversized wristwatch, which included a GPS and an LCD display, as well as Internet access. Yep, if there was a gadget out there, Ghoulie had it.

  “Good grief,” said Beamer, rolling his eyes. “Take a seat, Scilla. If he’s in NASA mode, we may be waiting here till next Tuesday.”

  “Better safe than sorry, you know,” Ghoulie chortled.

  While Beamer and Scilla sat morosely on a miniature stone wall, waiting for Ghoulie to time the train’s route, their mini-world transformed into night. Shadows grew longer as the soft line of light faded into the horizon. Then the moon rose, not full, just a thin crescent. Beamer wondered if it changed phases like the real moon. A night sky materialized. He could make out the Big Dipper and the constellation Orion. The planets were there too, though not to scale. They were, in fact, much larger than they looked in the real night sky.

  “Hey, look there!” shouted Beamer. “You can see the dead volcanoes and canals on Mars.” Jupiter had its red spot and Saturn, its rings. A comet, complete with its tail, also moved across the night sky. You could even see one galaxy looking like a whirlpool of light. Somebody had gone all out in the imagination and technology department to create this world.

  Scilla had crossed over to look in the window of a tiny flower shop, when a noise brought her to wide-eyed attention. She looked behind her and fell back into the stream. She screamed as she first swam, then crawled, and then ran away from the noise. With her head turned backward, she didn’t even notice Beamer until she plowed into him.

  Beamer fell splat and yelled, “What’s the matter? Can’t you watch where you’re going?” She was already back on her feet and burning shoe leather. “Hey!” he yelled after her. “A little ‘excuse me’ would be nice.” Then he heard an ear-crushing roar and whipped around. His face suddenly froze.

  3

  Escape from Netherworld

  Beamer had forgotten how to breathe, let alone move. The beast’s huge moonlit shadow was already on him. Finally Beamer’s legs began scooting him backward as a gigantic creature covered in scales climbed out of a deep gorge. Somewhere in the back of Beamer’s mind was the thought that the beast was probably just another animated toy, but — even in a diminutive state for this miniature world — Godzilla was pretty colossal.

  Beamer stumbled and then ran, with the monster’s feet thundering behind him. “Forget the timing!” he yelled to Ghoulie. “We’ve gotta take our chances.” Behind him, the beast was squashing cars and buildings and making the world quake. Whether the creature was real or not, they were here without permission, and who knew if somebody hadn’t invented this “dragon” to guard its treasure world.

  “I’m with you!” Scilla shouted as she splashed through the stream and scrambled up the ravine to the tunnel.

  Ghoulie didn’t need any convincing either when he saw the towering beast pounding toward him.

  Just as Scilla reached the tunnel, the train whistle blew her eardrums into “mute.” She jumped back just as the train sped out of the tunnel and roared across the bridge. By the time it passed, Beamer and Ghoulie had caught up with her. Godzilla roared again, and they leaped into the tunnel with a chorus of screams.

  Once more they made like hunchbacks running through the tunnel. Afraid that any moment they’d see the “eye” of the locomotive coming toward them, they finally resorted to running on all fours. They made it back to their tunnel exit just as they heard the locomotive screech around the bend.

  With enough relief that their legs wobbled, they retraced their way through the caves, following the rocket-shaped symbols they’d scratched into the rock walls at each turn. At one point, they again heard the clank that had drawn their attention in the first place.

  “Did you guys hear any clanking at the train set?” Beamer asked.

  “Not even a clink,” Ghoulie answered, shaking his head.

  “Me neither, now that you mention it,” said Scilla.

  They gave each other long looks and then glanced once more toward the sound. “Come on,” Beamer said as he lurched back toward their familiar exit. “One mystery at a time.”

  Following their usual route home, they climbed the rock steps out of the caves and cut through a greenhouse filled with glowing plants and birds and into Ms. Parker’s strange garden. It didn’t look so weird now, covered with snow. There was no sign of its usual population of carnivorous plants, crawling vines, and giant flowers. Finally, they escaped through the side gate which, though no longer broken, was now always left unlocked.

  Snow was one of the few things about this world called Middleton that Beamer liked better than his old home. It never snowed in L.A. Oh, you could see it in the distance, but you had to drive up to the mountains to touch it. Living with snow day after day was something else. Here you could step out your door and play in it all kinds of ways. He couldn’t understand why adults complained so much about it. So they had to do a little shoveling along the sidewalk and driveway now and then. But for kids, snow was great. If it snowed hard or long enough, you’d even get out of school once in a while.

  Unfortunately, the snow wasn’t going to tell Beamer anything about the person who had built that incredible train set.This was too big of a mystery to ignore. A few questions to the neighbors got Beamer started. Mrs. Ringwald, the red-headed woman who wore glasses the size of a small bicycle, had a reputation for keeping up on all the neighborhood gossip. She told him that Ms. Parker had a strange brother named Solomon. Beamer wasn’t sure what she meant by “strange,” except that she rolled her eyes when she said his name.

  Beamer’s next step was to check him out on the Internet. The Middleton newspaper’s online archives recorded that a “Solomon Parker” had opened a trolley company long before Beamer’s parents were born.

  Beamer found a picture of a trolley on the Internet. It looked pretty much like a bus. But then he noticed that it had poles on top leading to a grid of wires strung above the street. So it ran on electricity, thought Beamer. But what happened if the driver turned left when the wires went right? That was when he noticed that trolley wheels looked something like train wheels. Then he realized that a trolley could only go where the tracks let it go, like a train. Beamer took this to be a pretty good sign that Solomon Parker had something to do with the train set.

  The big question, then, was why Mr. Parker had left the train set running but abandoned all these years. That proved harder to answer than Beamer expected. For one thing, neither Mrs. Ringwald nor Mr. Springer, who’d been Ms. Parker’s gardener for years, knew where Mr. Parker lived. For another, his phone number was unlisted, and his official mailing addresses included the trolley station and a post office box. At least that is what Ghoulie had discovered. All three were in Beamer’s bedroom, putting their heads together to find the mysterious Solomon Parker.

  “A ghost would be easier to find!” Beamer exclaimed in frustration. “Which, for that matter, is what he might have become by now,” he added with a shrug.

  “Nope, there’s no death certificate, and somebody still picks up mail from that post office box,” said Scilla, feeling proud of her detective work over the past couple days.

  “Maybe he just wanted peace and quiet and moved to Fiji,”

  suggested Ghoulie as he tapped keys on Beamer’s computer.

  “Too many tourists,” muttered Beamer. “And a really deserted island wouldn’t have any electricity. I’ve got a feeling this guy likes gadgets too much to give up electricity.”

  “What about askin’ Old Lady Parker?” asked Scilla, who had lain back across Beamer’s bed. “She’s gotta know. She’s his sister, after all.”

  “Yeah, I thought about that,” said Beamer with a sigh. “But both Mrs. Ringwald and Mr. Schlesinger — you know, the guy with the long mustache and bushy hair — said they had a big fallin’ out years ago.”

  “But they must have sent each other Christmas cards or birthday cards?” she argu
ed.

  “Nope,” said Beamer, “haven’t spoken to each other for fifty years.”

  “Wow, that’s some fallin’ out,” said Scilla. “What do you suppose it was all about?”

  “Mr. Schlesinger said it was over money, and Mrs. Ringwald said it was over a house,” said Beamer. “So who knows? I can tell you one thing: I’m not about to ask Ms. Parker.”

  “Good thinkin’,” said Scilla, sitting up with a gulp. “She’s scary enough when she’s in a good mood. Who knows what she’d be like if we riled her about the brother she hates.”

  “So, you’re thinking she was in a ‘good mood’ when we talked to her those months ago?” asked Ghoulie. “If I remember correctly, she didn’t smile once the whole time.”

  “Probably no room left on her face for more wrinkles,” quipped Beamer. “Well, at least we’ve got an address for the trolley station,” he said as he leaned over Ghoulie and tapped the Print key on his computer. “Let’s see what we can find there.”

  A teachers’ conference gave the kids a day off from school. Beamer, Ghoulie, and Scilla took the opportunity to ride a bus downtown to the address of the old trolley station. The bus crossed a street that still had trolley tracks sunken into the pavement. It was a bit bumpy, but not as much as it would have been if the tracks were totally above ground like train tracks.

  When they stepped off the bus, the Star-Fighters stared in shock — except for Beamer, that is, who was immediately smacked in the face by a wind-tossed newspaper. The page wrapped itself around his face like it was going to suck out his brain. When Beamer finally wrestled it away, he too saw the trolley station. It was totally in ruins — fit only for things that crawled or hid in ghostly shadows. In fact, the entire neighborhood was a ramshackle collection of abandoned warehouses — a great place for a mob hit or a CIA rendezvous.

  Beamer now realized why the bus driver had raised one eyebrow so high when he showed him the address. The station took up an entire block and was surrounded by a chain-link fence with lots of Keep Out signs.

  “Now whadda we do?” grunted Scilla as she plopped down on a bench that was peeled nearly clean of paint. “I don’t think we’re gonna get much information from the rat population.”

  “And I think this has to be the coldest spot in the city,” muttered Ghoulie, pulling his overcoat tighter around him.

  Yeah, as in North Pole cold, thought Beamer. Not that Santa Claus would be found dead here. Frankly it looked like nobody wanted to be here.

  “What does it matter anyway?” asked Ghoulie. “Solomon Parker is old news. From the looks of this place, he was history fifty years ago.”

  “I don’t know,” Beamer murmured as he sat on the bench and put his elbows dejectedly on his knees. “Something just seems missing. It’s like a story with no ending.” Beamer suddenly felt a slight tug at his pocket. “Hey!” he yelled as he twisted around. A hand recoiled back through the slats in the bench — a hand holding his wallet! “What are you doing? Stop!” he cried as a boy wearing a hat with earflaps streaked away along the fence.

  4

  The Forgotten Ice Palace

  “Stop, you little thief!” Beamer yelled as he ran. Ghoulie and Scilla, right behind him, also filled the ghostly neighborhood with shouts. Suddenly, the boy ducked down and disappeared. A moment later, the Star-Fighters arrived at the spot and saw a break in the fence. Forgetting all the Keep Out signs, they slid beneath the wire mesh and quickly picked up the chase.

  They raced into the broken-down lobby of the trolley station and skated around the tattered benches and shattered ticket windows, taking a few pratfalls in the process. Everything was covered in snow drifts and draped with icicles and frozen cobwebs. The old walls probably hadn’t felt the echoes of so much noise for decades. Beamer finally skidded around a corner and out a side door. He slid almost immediately to a halt in the yard. Half a second later, Ghoulie and Scilla crashed into him from behind. Their eyes scanned the area like sonar. The pickpocket had disappeared. His trail of footsteps ended abruptly in the snow right in front of them.

  “What did he do, beam up to his spaceship?” asked Beamer in exasperation. He spun around to check out the station’s roof. The boy wasn’t there either, although he might have found a place to hide up there. It was a complicated roof. There were many roof lines, all steep and crossing each other like a series of mountain peaks. From this angle, seeing it wrapped in drifts of snow, the trolley station didn’t look so bad. It had the look of a rambling ice palace.

  “Holy tamole! Would you look at that?” Scilla said, shattering Beamer’s thoughts.

  He followed her gaze. The yard in front of them was a field of rusted-out trolley cars. Though enfolded in waves of snow like a choppy sea, they still stood in perfect order as if waiting to be called back into service.

  “Well, I’ve gotta find my wallet,” grumbled Beamer. “It’s got my lunch pass and library card. Mrs. Hotchkiss will never believe I lost it like this. That kid’s gotta be around here someplace. Let’s start checking the cars.”

  Searching Beamer’s room for a lost item was usually about as easy as searching the Amazon jungle, but this was much worse. Most of the trolley doors hadn’t been opened since the dark ages before television and were rusted closed. Some were blocked behind snow mounds the size of Mount McKinley. Others were guarded by some impressive ice-coated spiderwebs. Sometimes all they could do was jump up and glance through the windows. A few pogo sticks would have come in handy, especially since Ghoulie hadn’t gotten round to inventing anti-gravity boots yet. Beamer’s head was beginning to ache from all the jumping, when they finally found what they were looking for.

  The snow had been swept away from the rear door of one of the trolleys. And the windows were frosted, which meant that it was warmer inside than out. The door squeaked as they pushed the handle but folded open easily. The inside was free of snow, clean, and almost warm. There were no trolley seats in this car except for the benches that ran next to the wall. There was a lot of clutter, though — pretty much like any boy’s room on the planet.

  “What is this, his loot?” asked Ghoulie.

  “What else? He’s a thief, isn’t he?” said Beamer. Several stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers were piled up like the Leaning Tower of Pisa (nope, not pizza). Well, at least the jerk would be able to read the warrant for his arrest, thought Beamer.

  A pile of hubcaps — all polished up — scattered noisily onto the floor when Beamer brushed by them. There were bottles full of coins, an assortment of men’s ties, a box of watches, a pile of cigars, and another box full of women’s scarves, purses, and shoes.

  “Not much of a haul, if you ask me,” said Scilla as she picked up a little statuette of the Empire State Building. It was missing its top spire.

  “Yeah, I think my mom can do better in a morning of shopping garage sales,” said Beamer with a wry grin. He tipped the airplanes and spaceships that were hanging from a rack to make them swing back and forth. Action figures, trucks, and tanks — all missing pieces here and there — were arranged for battle on a bench below.

  They moved on toward the back of the trolley and found a few blankets and a ratty pillow set up on a bench next to a heater. “Well, at least it’s not too cold here,” said Ghoulie. “It looks like he’s using propane gas.”

  “Probably stolen, like everything else,” grumbled Beamer.

  “Maybe not,” Ghoulie corrected as he shook a propane bottle taken from a pile of them. “These are all only part full — probably leftovers that people had thrown away. The trouble is, it can be dangerous to use this stuff inside.”

  Shirts, pants, and other clothes were hung or draped on window hooks. In the very back of the trolley was a small, beat-up camping stove and some boxes and cans of food. A nearly empty bowl of cereal buried in half-frozen milk was sitting on a small bench.

  “All the comforts of home,” said Beamer with a smirk. Beamer was angry enough to think about taking the kid’s stuff
as payback, but then returning thievery for thievery didn’t sound quite right. He was pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t do it. He’d been taught to ask himself what Jesus would do whenever he wasn’t sure about the right choice. Of course, that meant he had to get to know Jesus pretty well. Luckily, although Jesus lived an incredible 2,000 years ago — back in the days of gladiators and emperors — four guys wrote whole books telling his story. No, Jesus wouldn’t take something that belonged to someone else, and he wouldn’t hurt someone in anger.

  “Well, at least we know where the kid lives,” said Ghoulie. “We’d better get home. The snow’s getting thicker in the sky out there.”

  Just then they heard a loud smack and saw an explosion of white on the front window.

  “What was that?” yelped Ghoulie.

  “A snowball the size of a cantaloupe!” shouted Beamer as he ran out the door. “Show your face, you thieving wimp!” So much for Beamer’s conquest of anger.

  “Any sign of him?” asked Ghoulie as he and Scilla came up beside Beamer.

  “Nope, but I’m not giving up on this guy. I’ll be back!”

  Beamer shouted like some half-pint Terminator. His voice echoed through the empty lot, but he heard no answer.

  The three friends took a few wrong turns, trying to find their way back to the torn patch of fencing. By then, the whirling snowflakes were as thick as chicken dumplings. Beamer still managed to find his wallet, minus a few dollars, lying next to the torn fence. So much for his snow-shoveling money.

  “Look at it this way,” said Scilla. “The kid didn’t have to return your wallet.”

  Beamer grumbled and muttered to himself as he put the wallet back into his pocket. He gazed one more time at the snow-frosted trolley station as the bus pulled up at the stop.