by Amber Benson
Trina had no idea what the machine had been used for, but she decided that it had to have been a dazzling silver color in its youth. Too bad it was so tarnished with age now that it looked dark bronze. It consisted of two large electrodes that sprouted from a squat round frame, and each electrode had three long wires running out of it that reattached down at the base of the machine. There was also a long silver lever soldered to the center of the machine, which Trina figured must be the on/off switch.
The ants seemed to think that the room and what was hidden inside it belonged to them. They swarmed all over the place, making the bottom half of the machine appear alive with movement.
As Trina marveled at the strange sight Caleb DeMarck pulled the secret paper that Noh had given him out of his shirt pocket and opened it. His eyes gazed at the mathematical equations with wonder, with every blink drinking in the lemon-juice ink code that Catherine Alexander had broken.
Trina assumed that the physics teacher had no idea that she was even in the room, so when he started talking, it startled her.
“You don’t even know what I’ve done!” he said, his tone full of excitement.
It took Trina a moment to realize that the physics teacher was talking to himself and not to her, making her giggle with relief. Meeting one realie who could see her was more than enough to last Trina a death-time.
“You left the clues, hidden so ingeniously that only someone as persistent as myself could find them,” Caleb DeMarck said, his voice rising in pitch as he spoke. “You were clever, but I was cleverer still.”
Trina wasn’t sure who or what the physics teacher was talking about, but the whole thing was starting to give her the creeps. She wished Nelly were here with her. Trina had a feeling that her friend would know exactly what to do. After all, Nelly knew way more about insects and science than Trina did.
“Now that I have the final piece of the puzzle,” Caleb DeMarck continued, his eyes on the machine again, “we can fulfill your invention’s destiny.”
He scanned the secret paper one more time, then pulled something white and fluffy from his pants pocket and sprinkled it in front of him. The ants greedily grabbed at the white stuff—the same stuff Trina and Nelly had seen the ants with earlier—and Caleb DeMarck took a step toward the machine. The ants cleared a path for him as quickly as their little legs could carry them. In that instant, Trina realized that the ants were under the physics teacher’s thrall!
Whatever that white stuff was, it was making the ants do anything Caleb DeMarck wanted them to do.
Trina watched as the physics teacher reached for the wires running out of one of the electrodes. He consulted the secret paper, then pulled two wires out of their sockets and switched them. Satisfied, he stepped back and reached for the silver lever sticking out of the machine’s belly. There was a loud crunch as he pulled the lever down. The machine roared to life, the two electrodes buzzing with electricity.
Without even realizing what she was doing, Trina took a step backward. There was something about the machine that terrified her, even if she couldn’t have said precisely what it was. She just knew instinctively that she needed to get out of that room as fast as she possibly could. She closed her eyes, imagining herself back in the burned-out West Wing’s foyer. Then she opened her eyes, expecting to see the portrait of the school’s cofounder, Eustant P. Druthers, staring at her.
Instead Trina found herself right back in the hidden room. For the first time in a very long while, Trina’s hands felt cold. She looked down at them, but they looked exactly the same: slightly translucent. A shiver ran down her spine—another feeling she hadn’t experienced in a very long while—and her eyes widened in fear. There was a giant glowing orb slowly unfolding itself before her eyes. She found herself entranced by the light. It was so beautiful. She didn’t know why she’d been afraid of going into it before. If she’d known how pleasant the whole thing was, she might well have welcomed it happening to her.
Trina slowly started to float toward the orb, her thoughts becoming muffled the closer she got to it. She was almost to the edge of the light when she heard someone calling her name. She didn’t want to turn around and see who was calling her. She wanted to go into the light.
“Trina!” the voice called, louder this time.
She turned her head, her eyes searching for the owner of the voice.
“Don’t do it! It’s a trap!”
Trina’s gaze landed on Noh.
“Trina, come back!” Noh screamed, her face pinched with worry. She stood directly behind Caleb DeMarck, who didn’t seem to have the least clue to whom Noh was talking. He looked around the room blankly, an expression of befuddlement on his face.
“Turn off the machine!” her new friend cried, pushing past the startled physics teacher and reaching for the silver lever.
“Don’t touch that!” Caleb DeMarck shouted, pulling more of the white stuff from his pocket and sprinkling it on the floor. Noh’s fingers had just grasped the shiny switch when she started to shriek. Trina looked down and saw that both of Noh’s legs were now covered in a swarm of squirming black and red ants.
Since Noh was so busy with the ants, her hold over Trina slackened and the call of the orb overwhelmed the ghost again. Trina turned away from her ant-covered friend, her eyes searching for the beckoning light. She saw that the orb was even larger than it had been before, even more luminescent… and without hesitation she began her journey into its shining depths.
Explanation: Part 1
Noh had been bitten by ants before, but never so many at the same time. She was tempted to reach down and squish the little buggers with her palms, stopping the nasty ant pinchers from embedding themselves in her skin, but she knew she had bigger fish to fry, and time was of the essence. Ignoring her stinging legs, she again grasped the silver lever sticking out of the base of the machine and pulled it. In the blink of an eye the silvery orb disappeared and Trina turned around, her eyes wide with shock.
Noh let out a loud sigh of relief, but then the pain hit her. She angrily started slapping the biting ants with everything she had. Caleb DeMarck, who up until that very moment might as well have been a statue for all the good he had done, scattered more of the fluffy white stuff at Noh’s feet. Almost instantly the ants ceased attacking Noh, and the ones that hadn’t gotten mushed crawled off her legs, swarming around the white stuff like it was manna from heaven.
Somehow just knowing that the ants weren’t covering her legs anymore made Noh feel a lot better. Her skin still stung from the twenty or so ant bites she’d received, but she knew she’d heal.
“Thank you,” Noh said, even though it had been the physics teacher’s fault that the ants had attacked her in the first place. She reached down to scratch the most painful bite on her kneecap, knowing all the while that she shouldn’t, then returned her gaze to Caleb DeMarck.
“I don’t understand your thinking, Noh,” the physics teacher said. “What right did you have to interrupt my experiment?”
Noh didn’t know where to begin. She was torn between telling the physics teacher exactly what he’d almost done and… well, there really wasn’t any other option than the truth.
“I don’t know what that machine does,” Noh said, pointing at the tarnished metal thing in the corner, “but whatever it is… I think it sucks up ghost energy.”
The physics teacher opened his mouth to speak, then immediately shut it again. He looked very confused.
“Ghost energy?” he said finally, his face turning white.
“Ever since I came to New Newbridge, I’ve been able to see ghosts. I’ve met three of them personally, and I think there may be a lot more,” Noh said, preparing herself for the worst. There was no way in a million years that the physics teacher was gonna believe her story—even if it was the absolute truth. She wished she had a truth-telling machine so that she would never have to worry about adults believing her stories. She decided that if this situation was only going to end badly, she m
ight as well tell the physics teacher everything.
“Um,” Noh continued, “you should also know that there’s a ghost here in the room with us right now. Her name is Trina and I think your machine almost ate her.”
The physics teacher’s face got even whiter.
“You said that the machine almost ate the ghost?” Caleb DeMarck repeated, his eyes searching for some sign of a ghostly presence. “How?”
It had taken a couple of minutes for the effects of the machine to wear off, but now Trina was mad. Since she was feeling more like herself again, she opened her mouth and started doing one of the things she did best: talking.
“Tell him about the orb and the light and the—,” Trina began, but Noh held up her hand.
“I’ll tell him everything, Trina,” Noh said to her friend. “I promise, but just let me think for one minute.”
The ghost girl nodded, remembering that she owed Noh her ghostly existence since she had stopped the machine from gobbling her up.
“If you tell me what you think the machine does, I might be able to explain how it works,” Noh offered after she’d taken a moment to put things in perspective. She didn’t have all the pieces to the mystery, but she knew that once Caleb DeMarck gave her a couple more clues, she’d be close.
“Well,” the physics teacher began proudly, “many years ago, when I was a student here, I stumbled upon something special, something secret at New Newbridge. I think I have to start there for you—and your friend—to understand.”
The Know-It-All
Caleb DeMarck had a hard time making friends. He just couldn’t understand why no one liked hanging out with him. He would have been very surprised to discover that it was because the other kids at New Newbridge considered him a know-it-all.
And not only was Caleb a know-it-all, but he was the worst kind of know-it-all. He was always the first kid to shake his head and snicker at anyone who admitted that they didn’t know something. He made the other kids in his class feel dumb when they got an answer wrong, or when they didn’t get an A++ on a test.
The saddest part of the whole thing was that Caleb didn’t even know he was the cause of his own problems. He just assumed that it was the other kids’ faults, that they were mean-spirited or jealous of someone who was smarter than them. He had no idea that that was exactly how the rest of the school saw him: mean-spirited and petty.
Since Caleb didn’t have any friends, he spent most of his time in his room, reading books and doing science experiments. It was during one of these experiments that he discovered a way to make his own friends.
New Newbridge has always been home to many different kinds of insect life. Every creature that creeps, crawls, or slithers is represented in some capacity at the school. You just have to go off on an insect expedition into the woods and you’ll find praying mantises, crickets, ladybugs, lizards, and spiders galore—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Yet, by and large, the real kings of New Newbridge have to be the ants.
There are at least nine colonies of black ants and seven colonies of red ants—and that’s just on the school grounds. Go into the woods and there are many, many more. They do more business on school property—and give Hullie more trouble—than all the students and faculty combined.
In truth, they rule the school.
And that is precisely why, as a student at New Newbridge, Caleb DeMarck found the ants so fascinating.
He loved to sit outside and document their movements, tabulate how productive they were, discover where they made their nests. He found one aspect of their lives to be of particular interest, and this became the thing that he fixated on the most: aphid farming. Ants herded aphids in the exact same way that human beings herded cows and sheep.
Intrigued, Caleb collected specimens to study in his room. He made copious notes and drew numerous sketches. He did all the experiments he could think of to explain the strange relationship between ants and their aphid pets. Of course, it didn’t take him long to realize that the ants had an ulterior motive for their aphid care and attention. Ants didn’t simply herd aphids for fun, they herded aphids for milk! Just like humans milked cows, ants milked aphids.
More important, Caleb found that when this nutritious aphid milk was administered in high enough concentrations—something Caleb could easily create in the school lab—they became so addicted to the aphid milk concoction that he could basically make the ants do anything he wanted them to.
Thus began Caleb DeMarck’s long-standing friendship with the ants, and it was through this relationship that Caleb discovered… the machine.
Caleb remembered the unusually warm day in March like it was yesterday.
Bored because it was a weekend and no one had asked him to join any of the Frisbee or touch football games outside on the school lawn, Caleb had followed the ants on an expedition into the school. For some reason, the ants ignored the cafeteria (which was their usual destination) and instead made their way through the building and downstairs into the gym. The swim team was preparing for the spring session, so the gym floor had been rolled away and the pool was empty, awaiting a good cleaning before it was refilled with water.
Caleb watched as, one by one, the ants marched down the side of the pool, across the pool floor, and into the shiny silver pool drain. Caleb had no idea where the ants were going, and he desperately wanted to find out, so he climbed into the empty pool after them.
He wasn’t small like an ant, so he couldn’t fit down the drain, but he had other skills… and one of those skills was using scientific reasoning to solve problems. He began pressing on the drain and then pulling on it where he could get a handhold. Suddenly without warning there was a loud crunch and the whole bottom of the pool began to descend.
Caleb stepped back away from the pit until he was sure that it was safe, and then he did what any other kid with a scientific mind would do: He followed the ants down into the hole.
Explanation: Part 2
And that’s how I found the machine. I don’t know exactly what it does, but from what I’ve seen, it appears to create electricity out of thin air.”
Caleb DeMarck looked down at his hands. He knew now that what he had said was very wrong. The machine didn’t create electricity out of air… it created electricity out of ghosts.
“I spent years trying to figure it out, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered this,” the physics teacher said, pulling Noh’s secret paper out of his pocket.
“That’s mine!” Noh said, her hands on her hips.
The physics teacher shook his head.
“No, this is your paper,” he said, pulling another, matching sheet out of his back pocket. “I found the first one in some old papers I checked out of the library. I knew that it didn’t contain the whole equation, but it was enough to get the machine up and running.”
“Then why did you need that paper?” Noh and Trina said at the same time, overlapping each other. Of course, the physics teacher only heard Noh’s question.
“I needed the secret paper you found to calibrate the machine properly,” Caleb DeMarck said. “I adjusted a few wires here and there, and this time when I turned it on, I didn’t almost freeze myself to death.”
Noh didn’t doubt his answer one bit. She remembered how terribly cold it had gotten when Henry had been sucked into the orb.
“We have to reverse the machine,” Noh said. “You’ve been using ghost souls to power it and that’s not fair!”
Noh expected the physics teacher to agree with her immediately, but instead a stubborn look spread across his features.
“How do I know that what you say is really true?” he said, his voice high and reedy like a petulant child’s. “I can’t see the ghosts, so you might be making the whole thing up. Maybe if you showed me the ghosts…”
Noh couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
It seemed that deep down inside, Caleb DeMarck was still that know-it-all boy who was blind to everything but
what he wanted.
And what he wanted right now was to see a ghost.
Noh knew the physics teacher wasn’t a bad person on purpose, he was just too self-absorbed to see that he was the cause of all the trouble around him. Still, she didn’t really want him to know about her evil eye stone. Sharing her secret with him might be inviting more trouble than it was worth.
But, she supposed, if she wanted to get Henry and the others back, she was going to have to take the plunge and do it.
“Okay,” Noh said, starting to formulate a plan in her mind. “I can make you see the ghosts, but you have to do exactly what I say. No questions asked.”
Excited by the prospect, Caleb DeMarck gave Noh an enthusiastic nod. The physics teacher seemed ready to do whatever she asked of him—Noh just hoped she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her life.
The Plan Goes Awry
And so that’s my plan,” Noh finished. “I don’t one hundred percent know if it will work, but I think it’s worth a try.” She had just explained to Trina and Caleb DeMarck how they might polarize the machine’s flow of energy and create a reverse black hole, forcing everything inside the orb to come out the way it had gone in.
“Let’s do it!” Trina said, ready for action as she floated beside Noh. The physics teacher nodded in agreement, even though he hadn’t heard Trina’s exclamation because she was still invisible to him.
Noh stuck her hand into her pocket and pulled out the evil eye stone. It felt heavier than usual in her hand. She hadn’t actually mentioned the evil eye stone when she had explained her plan, figuring the less the physics teacher knew about her ghost-seeing abilities, the better. Now as he watched her expectantly she decided she wasn’t quite ready to share her good luck charm with him just yet. She would wait until the last possible second before she would let him see any ghosts.