by Robert West
All three were exactly in step for the fifth hedgerow. Unfortunately, a trio of very proper middle-aged ladies stepped through a rosebush arbor right in front of them. It was not a pretty sight. The boys mowed them down like cornstalks. Actually, they didn’t touch them, but the surprise was enough. The ladies recoiled — one of them backward over a side hedge, another into a bed of pansies, while the third splashed into a fountain pool.
Beamer looked behind to see Jared’s head pop into view as he cleared the first hedge. With one hedge to go, the timed sprinkler system came to their rescue.
There was a yelp, and then — Phzzz! Plopp! Splatt! — their pursuers landed in a muddy skid, splattering even more yuck over the poor women.
By the time Jared’s mud wamps wrestled their way out of the bog, Beamer and his crew had gained several precious seconds.
As the seventh-grade brain trust, Ghoulie quickly calculated speed, trajectory, and the distance home, factoring in approximate leg length and muscle development. He concluded, “We don’t have a chance!”
To their left was the brick wall that skirted the side of the park. Murphy Street was the next block over, but to get there they had to go around the wall by way of the gate on Parkview Court.
Just then they heard a shout. It was Scilla scampering on an intercept course. “Hey! Y’all follow me!” she shouted, cocking her head toward the wall.
“Where?” Beamer gasped between gulps of breath as they veered after her.
“Just trust me,” she fired back at him.
That was easier said than done. Jared’s attack force was bearing down on them. And where was Scilla leading them? Straight into a ten-foot-high wall!
Winding through a maze of trees and bushes, Scilla suddenly dived between two humongous flowering bushes. Brushing leaves and flower petals from their eyes, her three followers found themselves staring at the wall. This was not a good moment.
“Great!” Beamer exclaimed. “Do you supply the firing squad too?”
“Keep your pants on,” she shot back at him. She slid aside a slab of plywood so covered with glued-down rocks and dirt and weeds that it looked like part of the ground.
“A hole!” Ghoulie exclaimed.
“A dark hole!” Michael added with a gulp.
“Get in there, quick,” she ordered, shoving him into the hole.
“Hey!” he protested. “What about spiders? And Mom’ll kill me if I get my school clothes dirty.”
“Jared will kill you if you don’t!”
He dropped in and was gone.
“Yo! Geek patrol!” Jared shouted from nearby, as he thrashed through the bushes looking for them. “Come out now and maybe I won’t turn you into chopped beef.”
Scilla and Beamer scurried into the hole behind Ghoulie like frightened groundhogs. Not half a breath after Scilla dragged the plywood back over the hole, Jared’s head poked through the bushes to see . . . nothing.
Meanwhile the fugitives found themselves climbing down a long ladder.
“A detour through the center of the earth wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” grumbled Beamer. Suddenly a tiny light flashed in front of his eyes; then another; then a hundred. His feet stumbled onto the floor and he whirled around in bewilderment. There were lights . . . everywhere!
8
The Haunting of Murphy Street
Beamer had been in caves before, but never in one that was lit up like Christmas.
“What is this, firefly city?” exclaimed Ghoulie, his eyes reflecting a thousand tiny lights flickering on and off.
“Wow!” chirped Michael as he jumped about trying to catch one.
“You haven’t seen nothin’ yet,” Scilla said as she removed an old-fashioned lamp hung on the wall. She turned a knob. There was no flame, but a large bulb suddenly glowed with a kind of liquid.
Michael touched the bulb. “Hey, it’s not even warm!”
“Yeah, and the light’s the same color as the light from the fireflies,” added Ghoulie.
“We can figure out this stuff later; let’s just get out of here,” said Beamer, looking around nervously. “You’re sure there’s a way out, aren’t you?”
“Of course, you ninny,” said Scilla, rolling her eyes. “It’s this way.” She led them trudging through a winding passage. They could hear the distant sound of trickling water.
“This has got to be the longest shortcut in human history,” grumbled Beamer.
“Yeah, but you don’t see Jared anywhere, do you?” Scilla shot back.
The passage opened up into a room the size of a large classroom, only twice as tall. Here the fireflies were even denser and portions of the walls glowed as well.
“Whoa!” gasped Ghoulie at the light show. He ran his fingers across the velvety-textured glowing stuff on the wall. “Seems to be some kind of moss.”
“Where do those go?” asked Beamer, eyeing several dark passages that led off from the room in different directions.
“Don’t know, but Grandma says the whole area around the park is honeycombed with caves. This way out,” she said, leading them to a staircase carved into the rock.
“Hey!” Michael blurted as Scilla scrambled up the steps. “Did you see the letters carved in this rock? It says R.I.P.”
“R.I.P. — what?” Beamer asked with his usual little brother put-down.
“Rest in Peace, duh!” Michael retorted.
As the light from Scilla’s lantern disappeared into the loft of the staircase, the others scrambled after her to escape the eerie glow of the cave.
A few minutes later Scilla pushed up a trapdoor, and they entered another place with creepy lighting. “Don’t tell me, another cave?” Beamer grumbled.
“More biological illumination,” said Ghoulie with a whistle. It wasn’t fireflies this time but a forest of plants that glowed in the dark.
Beamer lightly knocked on the dark wall. It clinked like glass. “We’re in a greenhouse,” exclaimed Beamer, “except the windows are all blacked out.”
“This way,” chimed in Scilla as she led them toward a door at the end of the building.
“Hey, I think I saw that one move,” said Beamer. They all gathered around a bush with glowing purple flowers. Suddenly a bird with glowing wings fluttered out of the bush. They all jumped back, screaming at the same time, “Aiiiii!!”
Still screaming, Michael ran to the door and flung it open.
“Ouch . . . Whoa!” yelped the others who were right behind him, wincing from the sudden assault of sunlight. Then they breathed a sigh of relief . . . that is, until their eyes adjusted.
“Just exactly what planet are we on?” gulped Beamer. They were in a garden — but not like any they’d ever seen.
“Nice place,” Ghoulie gulped as he scanned the dark spires that loomed over the garden. “If you like sleeping in a casket.”
Yep, you guessed it. They were in the backyard of Parker’s Castle.
“What’s the next stop — the torture chamber?” Beamer rasped at Scilla.
“Keep your shirts on,” Scilla barked back at them. “The gate’s over here.” She started down a path through the garden. “Just don’t touch anything!” she added.
Actually Michael had already started touching everything. A plant suddenly snapped at him. “Yipes!” he yelped. “It’s a man-eating garden!”
“Keep your hands to yourself,” Scilla repeated. “This isn’t your everyday garden.”
“You don’t say,” mocked Beamer.
Actually, it would have been beautiful if it hadn’t also been so weird. Many of the plants seemed right out of The Wizard of Oz. There were flowers the size of a bicycle wheel, giant orchids, and walls of flowering vines. Huge and bright, they seemed to move from more than the wind. There was, however, no yellow brick road.
“Grandma says this house was here even before Murphy Street,” said Scilla.
“How can you have a house without a street?” asked Michael.
“A hundred years ago, th
is whole area was a big estate — the park too.”
“What’s an estate?” Michael asked.
“It’s like a fancy farm,” Scilla explained.
“What do you suppose happened to the people who ate what they farmed?” muttered Michael, jumping back from a yellow flower that spit red dust at him.
Beamer suddenly tripped over a water hose into a wall of vines. The next thing he knew, the vine was crawling all over him, wrapping him up like a spider in a web. “Aiiiii!” he yelled. “Somebody get me out of this!”
Ghoulie jumped after him but only succeeded in getting himself in the same mess. They both yelped and writhed in full panic mode.
Scilla rushed to them, shouting in a whisper, “Quiet! You’ll get Old Lady Parker after us!” At the same time she grabbed a spray bottle that was sitting on a little stand and sprayed the plant. Immediately it shrank back. Another spray sent it into full retreat, unwinding its tendrils from the flailing, now quietly screaming, boys.
“Pipe down, you two!” Scilla whispered loudly. “She’s left little bottles of plant repellent all over the place and, anyway, it wasn’t going to eat you.”
“Just wanted a little snuggle, huh,” sputtered Beamer. “And we were supposed to know this how??” “Boy Eaten by Killer Bush” — some obituary that would make!
Around one more bend in the cobblestone road they came to the gate. It was big and heavy, made of black iron rods all twisted into fancy shapes. Beamer warily eyed a design at the top. It looked something like a dragon diving out of the sky.
“The lock’s been broken for years,” Scilla said as she triggered the handle. “They’ve never bothered to fix it. Most people wouldn’t be caught dead in Old Lady Parker’s yard anyway.”
“That’s probably because there’s a nine in ten chance that’s exactly how they’d be caught — dead!” quipped Beamer.
A moment later they were running across Ms. Parker’s front lawn, heading lickety-split toward Murphy Street.
“Made it!/Whew!/Thank you, God!” they all exclaimed in a collective sigh of relief that probably altered the air patterns around Middleton.
“No thanks to you!” Beamer snapped at Ghoulie, throwing his backpack to the ground. “You led them right to me!”
“Hey, I was just running,” Ghoulie shot back. “I didn’t have time to check the traffic report.”
“Well, next time find somebody besides me to save your behind.”
“The way I see it, she’s the one that saved both our behinds,” Ghoulie countered, pointing at Scilla.
“Yeah, if you don’t count all the narrow escapes along the way!” he shot back at him. Beamer spun around and strutted off red-faced toward his house, pulling Michael by the hand.
“Hey,” Ghoulie called to Scilla, “can I use your phone to call home? If I’m not home on time, my nanny starts calling the National Guard.”
“You’ve got a nanny?” Scilla asked.
“Yeah, my parents don’t get home until late.”
“Well,” Scilla said, looking up toward the house, “Grandma’s not home right now, and I’m not allowed to have any of y’all in the house when she’s not.”
“Come on,” Beamer called from his porch. “You can use mine.”
“Better watch it, though,” Scilla said out of the side of her mouth. “His place is haunted.” She laughed and skipped away into her house.
Ghoulie hesitated, eyeing Beamer’s house suspiciously.
Moments later he was looking up and around the entryway, checking every nook and cranny for some sign of an “ectoplasmic manifestation.” He’d heard somebody say that in a movie somewhere. It had something to do with gooey, slimy, glowing stuff that was a sign that ghosts were nearby.
Then he heard an eerie, high-pitched voice coming from the living room. “Mama, you’ve got to say something about me. Am I . . . am I . . . ?”
Ghoulie’s eyes grew wide when he peered through the hallway door. A large bug-shaped, one-eyed creature, growling in a high pitch, was careening across the living room, heading right toward him.
9
Double, Double, Toil, and Trouble
Ghoulie dived behind a couch, but not before the bug grabbed his pants leg. “Aiiiii!” he yelped, clutching his pants tightly to keep them from being sucked into the beast.
A woman dashed up behind the bug. She glanced at a manual in her hand and shouted, “Gopher, wait. I mean, Gophah, waaeet.” The creature suddenly stopped. She sighed and wiped the hair from in front of her eyes. “Gopher . . . uh . . . Gopha sahleep,” she pronounced carefully. The object obediently scooted across the floor into an opening in the wall which immediately snapped shut.
Haunted doesn’t begin to describe this place, thought Ghoulie as he pulled up his pants and tightened his belt.
“Can’t you keep that thing locked up?” a man asked in frustration.
“I’m trying,” the woman answered, “but it automatically leaps to life and starts vacuuming away whenever it detects a higher-than-normal particle content in the carpet. And with all the scientists and tech crews tramping through this house, the particle content is way up there.”
“We’d lived here a week before Mom found that manual,” Beamer said as he suddenly appeared next to Ghoulie. “Everything works by voice command around here.”
“Emily, you make me tired.” It was the squeaky voice again, now in a slightly lower-pitch.
Ghoulie stared at the man who was reading aloud in that weird voice and pacing mechanically across the floor. How could Beamer seem so normal with a father like that?
“That’s just Dad getting ready for tonight’s play rehearsal at the university,” Beamer said. “He’s a Professor who directs plays. Right now he’s trying to figure out how all the characters will move around on stage, so he’s reading everybody’s lines. The phone’s over here,” he added in a whisper. “Dad just goes a little nuts when he gets to play all the parts himself.”
It sounded more like a bad case of multiple personality disorder to Ghoulie. Keeping a wary eye on Beamer’s dad, he stood back up and turned to see Michael already at the phone.
“No, Georgie, you can’t come over now,” Michael said into the receiver. “My mom says there are too many people here already. Besides, it’s not our Xbox day, so — ”
Ghoulie jumped when Beamer grabbed his arm and tugged him toward the door at the end of the hallway.
“Are you gonna hafta go back to the park for those papers you lost?” Beamer asked.
“No way,” Ghoulie replied. “My neck’s worth more than a report on Moby Dick. Besides, it’s on my hard drive — words, pictures, even the sound effects I had attached to it on a CD. I’ll just make another copy.”
“Sound effects? That must be some report! What kind of computer have you got?” Beamer asked.
“The works,” Ghoulie said with a shrug. “You know, the usual absentee-parent guilt package.” The truth was, Ghoulie rarely saw his parents, except at breakfast and right before bedtime. But when it came to games and toys and high-tech wizardry, he had it all.
“Right,” Beamer murmured as he pushed through the kitchen door.
Beamer’s mother was now leaning over the stove saying, “Stove, plate fo’ah, ahwn, mae-di-uh’m.” One of the sections on the seamless stove top began to glow.
“It took Mom half a day to figure that one out,” said Beamer. “The hard part’s not the commands but how to say them. A couple days ago Dad found a website on American dialects, so Mom’s gettin’ the hang of it. The phone’s over there . . . uh . . . Ghoulie. Is it really Ghoulie?”
“No,” he said shrugging, “but Ghoulie’s what everyone calls me.” He threw down his leather-tooled backpack and picked up the receiver. He couldn’t remember when somebody had first called him that, but it had stuck.
“Do you want me to call you something else?”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t particularly like my real name either. It’s Garfunkel — Garfunkel
Ives to be more exact.” The name had come from some musician back in the sixties and seventies, so his parents had told him. But what kind of nickname could you make out of Garfunkel? Garf? Funkel?
The microwave oven beeped. As Beamer started toward it, Michael burst through the door and crowded in front of him to pull out a steaming bag of popcorn.
“Keep your pinkies out of my bag,” Michael said, stuffing his face full of white kernels.
“Share, Michael!” called their mother from another room.
While Beamer and Michael continued their daily after-school squabble, a girl with blonde hair bounded through the door. “Mom!” she yelled. “Everybody’s thirsty upstairs, with all the heat and stuff.” Has to be the sister.
“Okay,” Mrs. Mac called in again. “There are extra sodas and lots of water bottles in the refrigerator on the back porch.”
“Thanks!” the girl shouted cheerfully as she dashed out to the back porch.
Ghoulie heard his nanny’s voice on the phone and clapped his hand over an ear, trying to screen out the noise. “No, I’m okay!” he shouted into the phone. “No, you don’t need to call Dad . . .” Why does she always have to panic?
Carrying a frosty six-pack of soft drinks, the girl danced back into the kitchen, twirled around like a ballet dancer, and glided through the hallway door.
“Hey, what’s with her?” Beamer asked Michael.
“D’ya remember the guy who barged into her room by mistake?”
“Yeah, the scientist guy.”
“Well, turns out he’s gorgeous, ” Michael finished, stretching out the word to mock his sister’s mushy description. He sucked up a handful of popcorn like a vacuum and charged out of the kitchen.
“Really, I can just — ” stammered Ghoulie, his attention drawn back to the frantic woman on the phone. “Okay, okay, I’ll keep an eye out for him.” He sighed and hung up, then turned to find himself alone in the kitchen. He wandered onto the back porch and looked out at the backyard. One thing his family’s high-end condominium didn’t have was a backyard. Hearing something creaking in the wind, he walked out the door.