by Adam Cece
‘Whoever designed this sign isn’t very smart,’ Cymphany said. ‘I mean, the lab isn’t very top secret if there’s a sign on the door that says “Top Secret”, is it? It would be better if the sign said “Broom Cupboard”.’
‘Or totally-not-top-secret lab,’ Tobias said.
Kipp ignored him. ‘Shall we go in?’ he said.
Tobias nodded enthusiastically. ‘Do ostriches fly?’
Cymphany frowned at him and held up her now-famous correcting index finger. ‘Actually, Tobias, ostriches can’t fly.’
Tobias stopped. ‘Oh, well in that case let’s just pretend I asked a question to which the answer is “yes”.’
Cymphany put her hands on her hips. ‘You know it would have been a lot quicker if you’d just said yes.’
‘Let’s just go in,’ Tobias said. ‘We’re wasting time standing here talking about whether it would have been quicker if I hadn’t brought ostriches into the conversation, and’—he paused and looked around—‘hey, where’s Kipp?’
The door was open, and Kipp was gone.
Cymphany and Tobias looked at each other.
Cymphany gulped. Tobias gulped. And without another word they both stepped through the doorway and into another hallway, where they found Kipp standing in front of a door. This hallway was even darker than the last one. But they could just make out another red warning sign on the wall.
The sign read:
Now, I must assure you at this point that I will not continue to describe every warning sign that Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany see as they venture further towards the secret lab. Needless to say, there are a lot of warning signs in the House of Spooks, and Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany are still going to see lots more of them, and they will completely ignore every single one of them. If I told you what all the warning signs said, it would fill this whole book, and it would have to be renamed Warning: Warning Signs Galore. So I’ll just make that the last warning sign I write out.
It occurs to me that whoever is in charge of the House of Spooks should have spent less time putting red warning signs up everywhere and more time making sure the door to the secret lab was actually locked.
Right-o, now that we’ve got that sorted, where was I? Ah yes, that’s right. Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany had ignored the warning signs, all seven hundred and ninety-eight of them, and had ventured down several hallways and discovered the secret lab and opened the unlocked door and stepped inside.
The secret lab was a big circular room with a domed ceiling and a walkway that ran high around it. Cymphany found some steps, and Kipp and Tobias followed her up to the walkway.
They all peered down to see a circular platform in the middle of the room, which had what looked like a ring of hairdryers on stands around it.
‘Well,’ Kipp whispered. ‘Either that’s a machine that dries hair in under four seconds, or something weird is going on down there.’
Beside the platform was a chair, with a tied-up man sitting in it. He wore a helmet with cables attached to it, and he was facing a large flatscreen television.
The top-hatted scientist, whom Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany had met in the foyer of the House of Spooks earlier, stood at a control panel with lots of flashing lights on it, on the other side of the hairdryer things.
‘Who is that tied-up man?’ Cymphany asked. ‘Is it…’
‘Yes, it is. It’s Conrad Creeps,’ Tobias said, alarmed.
Conrad Creeps was a well-known Huggabie Falls local. His weirdness was that he was scared of everything—absolutely everything. From pencils to pelicans, if it existed Conrad was scared of it. Conrad was even scared of not being scared of anything, so it was just as well he was scared of everything, but, then again, he was also scared of everything. As you can imagine Conrad Creeps had a lot of trouble getting anything done. He once tried to go for a walk but found it quite impossible because he was scared of streets, people, fences, hedges, air, sunlight and, worst of all, he was scared of walking. So it was very unusual to see Conrad outside his house. But he was also scared of staying at home. As you can see, talking about Conrad Creeps for too long can easily give you a headache, and I don’t want to give you a headache (which, by the way, is another thing Conrad is scared of), so I’ll stop talking about him now.
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany watched poor, tied-up Conrad Creeps and worried he might be scared. Actually there was no might about it, Conrad was always scared, but in this particular case he seemed to have a very good reason to be scared.
‘We should call the police,’ Cymphany whispered. ‘If only we had a mobile phone.’
Kipp paused for a second, watching Conrad, and shook his head. ‘Let’s hope the ghost-train ride has finished, and Mr Dark has worked out something fishy is going on round here and has called for help.’
Little did they know the ghost-train ride had finished some time ago, but Felonious Dark was still stuck in his cart and, because his legs were squashed close to his ears, he couldn’t reach into his pocket for his phone. But he was currently screaming for help, even though a warning sign beside him read:
Tobias nodded. ‘If I know Mr Dark, the police will be here any moment,’ he said. Which just goes to show Tobias didn’t know Felonious Dark at all.
Far below, a squirming Conrad Creeps was talking to the top-hatted scientist.
‘Please let me go. I’m scared of being tied up. Come to think of it, I’m scared of everything in this room, including that pencil over there, and scientists in top hats, and especially beeping helmets.’
The top-hatted scientist furrowed his brow—furrowing brows was another thing Conrad was completely petrified of. ‘Why does everyone keep assuming I’m a scientist just because I wear a lab coat? And anyway, there’s no reason to be scared—all we’re going to do is show you a few hundred more scary things and make a few hundred more scare balls—one for every person in town. That doesn’t sound too scary does it?’
Conrad’s eyes popped open. ‘That sounds like the scariest thing ever.’
‘Scare ball?’ Cymphany whispered to Kipp and Tobias. ‘What is a scare ball?’
Tobias shrugged. ‘Do you think it has something to do with the unbelievably scary things that are happening?’
‘I think’—Kipp pointed to the platform below—‘we’re about to find out.’
‘Well, okay then,’ the top-hatted scientist said to Conrad Creeps. ‘We don’t want to keep you here against your will so you’re free to go. I’ll get my assistant to release you. Unless…’ The top-hatted scientist smirked. ‘You’re afraid of being let go.’
Conrad’s face twisted in fear. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I can’t work out which thing I’m most scared of, but change is something particularly scary, so let’s keep doing this.’
The top-hatted scientist laughed. ‘Very well. Assistant, would you please turn on the Scare-a-Build 1000.’
At that moment a door opened at the side of the secret lab and a tall thin man in a striped suit walked in smiling and carrying a remote control. Conrad gasped. He was scared of smiling—it gave him shivers up his spine. But the smiling was a secondary concern—it was the remote control that was the most terrifying. Remote controls had buttons, and buttons were the worst!
When Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany saw who the man was they all gasped too, and then quickly clamped their hands over their mouths so they wouldn’t be heard.
‘That’s the last person I expected to see,’ Kipp whispered.
The man with the remote control was, as you might have guessed, Felonious Dark.
I’ve always been annoyed by the expression ‘the last person you expected to see’. Now, I don’t want to accuse Kipp of not telling the truth, but, when you think about it, Felonious Dark was in no way the last person he would have expected to see. The last person he would have expected to see would have probably been someone like Genghis Khan, because: a) he’s a famous ruler of the Mongolian Empire, and rulers of Mongolian Empires rarely ever visited Huggabie Falls in the winter, an
d b) he’s been dead for almost eight hundred years. And even Genghis Khan wouldn’t have been the last person Kipp would have expected to see—say if Julius Caesar, or Tutankhamun, all wrapped up in mummy bandages, walked in, then I think everyone would have been really surprised. But Felonious Dark was probably not even in the top one hundred people Kipp least expected to see. Even so, considering the fact that Felonious Dark was supposed to be on the ghost-train ride, and he’d looked like he didn’t even know the top-hatted scientist when he’d met him earlier, Kipp was quite surprised to see him.
‘It’s Mr Dark,’ Tobias said, which earned him yes-thank-you-we-can-see-that looks from Kipp and Cymphany.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Kipp asked.
‘I think we’re about to find out,’ Cymphany replied.
As Felonious Dark turned on the flatscreen television—which was attached to the big platform and the hairdryer things, which, as the top-hatted scientist had pointed out, was a Scare-a-Build 1000—he told Conrad Creeps to relax. But relaxing terrified Conrad, so he shut his eyes. But then Felonious Dark reminded him that he was also scared of shutting his eyes. So Conrad opened them again.
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany couldn’t see what Conrad Creeps could see on the screen, but they could see his horrified face. ‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’ Conrad screamed. ‘It’s horrible. It’s terrifying. Please. Turn it off!’
Cymphany gulped. ‘Wow, they must be showing Conrad something really scary,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Kipp. ‘It could be anything.’
The helmet Conrad was wearing started to blink and flash and make a humming noise. The wires attached to the helmet began to hum too, and jiggle, and Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany saw now that these wires were attached to the platform with the hairdryer things around the edge of it.
Suddenly, laser beams shot out of the hairdryer things, and these laser beams collided above the centre of the platform, sending sparks into the air. The hairdryer things swished left and right, sending the laser beams criss-crossing, until they began to form a mesh pattern, and soon the mesh pattern began to form a shape.
‘Wow,’ Cymphany said. ‘That’s amazing technology.’
‘Is it?’ said Tobias. ‘I have no idea what’s going on.’
‘If I had to guess,’ Cymphany said, sounding like a person who was often right when she guessed, ‘I’d say that we’re looking at a hard-light-hologram-generation machine. Sort of like a 3D printer, but it forms things out of hard laser light.’
Kipp frowned. ‘That can’t be possible. How can a thing be made out of laser light?’
‘Look. The thing is almost finished,’ Tobias said, pointing. And Kipp and Cymphany looked. In the middle of the platform the hairdryer things were putting the final touches on a thing, which was now standing fully formed and fully coloured, and the thing was…
Now it was Cymphany’s turn to frown. ‘A pigeon?’ she said.
The lasers stopped. And the thing that had formed—the pigeon—started moving. Its claws made little clacks on the metal platform as it bobbed about and cooed, seemingly searching for birdseed on the flat metal surface.
Tobias gawked at the pigeon. ‘It’s alive,’ he said. ‘But how can it be alive? It’s made of laser light.’
Cymphany shook her head. ‘It’s not alive. It’s a computer generation of a pigeon made of hard laser light. It’s quite impressive when you think about it.’
Felonious Dark did not look impressed. He spun the screen towards the top-hatted scientist, and Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany could now see what was on it. It was a picture of a glob of pigeon poo in someone’s hair.
‘It didn’t work,’ Felonious Dark said. ‘I thought Conrad Creeps was supposed to imagine the most horrifying version of whatever we put on the screen.’
But just as he said that the pigeon took off and started circling above Conrad Creeps, and Conrad Creeps wailed, because he knew what was coming—after all, he was the one who had imagined it.
What happened next truly was terrifying. The pigeon began to poo. But this was no ordinary pigeon, and this was no ordinary pigeon poo. It was as if the pigeon had a cannon in its behind and it began launching colossal mounds of pigeon poo. And all these gigantic pigeon poos, every single one of them, landed on Conrad Creeps. Conrad Creeps screamed with horror as the gigantic globs of pigeon poo pelted down relentlessly.
The top-hatted scientist hit a button on his control panel, and Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany saw now, in the middle of the platform, a small tennis-ball-sized metal ball that clicked and opened like a flower, and emitted a beam of light. The beam of light hooked onto the flying, pooing pigeon, and sucked the bird into the ball, which then clicked shut, and a light on the ball switched from green to red.
Where Conrad Creeps had been sitting moments ago, was now just a pile of pigeon poo. All that was visible of poor Conrad were his terrified eyes peering out and a small hole that led to his mouth. Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany could hear him sobbing.
The top-hatted scientist stepped up onto the platform and picked up the small metal ball, which now contained a super-pooing pigeon.
Four women in lab coats, who were presumably scientist henchwomen, wheeled a giant wooden crate into the room, which was full of hundreds of metal balls, all seemingly identical to the one the top-hatted scientist was holding.
The top-hatted scientist tossed the ball he was holding into the air, and just before it hit the lab floor, eight legs sprang from it. It landed like a spider and scuttled across the floor, its eight little feet making hundreds of tiny click-clack noises. Then it launched itself back into the air, landed in the crate and its legs retracted.
Felonious Dark cracked up laughing, not at the spider ball, but at the mound of pigeon poo that contained Conrad Creeps. ‘Oh that was fantastic. I tell you, if I was scared of a pigeon pooing on my shirt, that would definitely be enough to drive me out of town. I’m mean I’m not scared of a pigeon pooing on my shirt, and I still think that would be enough to drive me out of town!’
‘I don’t get it,’ Tobias said, sharing a confused look with Kipp and Cymphany. ‘What does all this mean? Apart from Conrad Creeps, who else is scared of pigeons pooing on them?’
‘Miss Gilly Ganderfence,’ Kipp said. ‘She lives down the road from me, on Digmont Drive. She’s petrified of pigeons pooing on her. Every time she leaves the house she carries an umbrella, and even then, if she sees a pigeon she runs back to her house screaming.’
Tobias chuckled. ‘She’d better hope that she never runs into that super-pooing pigeon. No umbrella is going to stop that poo.’
Cymphany glared at Tobias.
Tobias gave her a blank look back. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Don’t you get it, Tobias?’ Cymphany said. ‘Froggin Fillibuster was petrified of spiders, and he found a two-metre-tall spider in his kitchen. Yorrick Yugel was scared of sharks, and, inexplicably, one ended up in the vault of his bank. And the Dinosaur Fearers Anonymous group…’
‘A Tyrannosaurus Rex,’ Kipp said slowly. He and Cymphany nodded at each other.
Tobias looked back and forth between them. ‘Why do I feel like I’m the only one who has no idea what’s going on here?’ he said.
‘Those metal balls,’ Cymphany explained, ‘obviously contain hard-light holograms. Those holograms are obviously the most terrifying versions of people’s fears, which only Conrad Creeps could dream up, and I’m pretty sure they are being made to target specific people and their specific fears. Somehow the top-hatted scientist is going to make sure that his latest scare ball thingy gets to Gilly Ganderfence, and when it opens and projects that pigeon again, it’s going to be Gilly’s worst nightmare come true.’
‘But why?’ asked Kipp. ‘Why would anyone want to do this?’
At this point, the top-hatted scientist clicked his fingers and the four scientist henchwomen fetched shovels and began shovelling the pigeon poo away. Eventually, they revealed a shivering, poo-covered Conrad underneath.
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‘Please, no more,’ Conrad blubbered. ‘I can’t take any more.’
‘Well, lucky for you, Conrad,’ said Felonious Dark as he checked a clipboard. ‘That was the last one for today.’
‘Actually’—the top-hatted scientist raised an interrupting finger (an index finger again, for all you finger buffs out there)— ‘I think we’ll do one more.’
Conrad Creeps wailed.
Felonious Dark frowned. ‘Are you sure?’ He flipped a page on his clipboard. ‘We’ve done two hundred and thirty-seven today already.’
‘It’s a special one,’ said the top-hatted scientist, with an evil grin.
Felonious Dark shrugged. ‘Whatever. You’re the boss.’ And he turned the flatscreen back towards Conrad and clicked the remote control to bring up a new image.
‘Oh, no.’ Conrad’s lip trembled. ‘Not that,’ he yelped. ‘Anything but that.’
Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany couldn’t see the screen, but Cymphany shook her head. ‘This image must be very scary. Poor Conrad.’
The helmet atop Conrad’s head flashed and hummed, and the laser-shooting hairdryer things flared into action again. The pigeon was only a small thing, but this thing was even smaller. It took only a few seconds for it to form. It was approximately egg-sized, with tiny arms and legs, and it was green.
Kipp squinted at the thing. ‘It’s a Brussels sprout. A Brussels sprout with teeny arms and legs, and…is that a miniature kilt it’s wearing?
‘It’s so cute,’ said Cymphany.
Felonious Dark stared at the tiny kilted Brussels sprout in shock, but the top-hatted scientist smiled his evil smile at it. ‘Hello,’ he said.
And to everyone’s amazement the Brussels sprout spoke back. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m here to do a wee bit of poundin’. So get oot of ma way.’
Cymphany’s mouth dropped open. ‘Is that Brussels sprout speaking in a very bad Scottish accent?’
Kipp raised his eyebrows. ‘Who in their right mind is scared of a Brussels sprout that speaks with a very bad Scottish accent?’