by B. A. Frade
For a moment, it was completely quiet, and then there was so much noise. Crashing, shattering, and screams. I couldn’t see where any of it was coming from, and I didn’t know whether I’d changed the story.
I tried to see into the sand pit, but all I could make out was sand. Were my friends underneath it? Was it over? Had I lost?
My last thought before everything started spinning and the room went dark was:
Am I a ghost?
Chapter Eleven
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on a hard floor. I did a mental scan of my body. Toes, check. Knees, still there. Hips, belly, shoulders, neck, head, yep, I still had all those parts too. The good news was that I was all in one piece.
I blinked open my eyes and stared at a dark ceiling.
Slowly, I sat up.
“That’s strange,” I muttered to myself.
I was in my sleeping bag, in the room with my classmates. They were all still asleep. I rubbed my eyes.
Had it all been a dream? Was there really no ghost? No Scaremaster?
I yawned, blinked hard, then looked over to Connor’s bag. It was empty. There was no sign that he’d been there at all.
Slowly, so as not to wake Mr. Steinberg or the other kids in my class, I stood up.
In a whispered voice, I called, “Connor?” Maybe he’d fallen asleep somewhere else in the room? That didn’t make sense, but I was nervous that the only one who’d been saved when I stabbed the journal was me.
Where was Connor?
His voice came from across the room, near a case of purple crystals. “Nate… hurry…” He held up a book.
I could see it was the Scaremaster’s journal and the T. rex tooth was piercing the center.
Now I was certain. This hadn’t been a dream.
I tiptoed around other sleeping bags, toward Connor.
When I reached him, he whispered in my ear, “Follow me.”
We left the room and headed to the broad staircase. I was walking behind him, which gave me time to take a good look at Connor’s body. Blake had been blurred along the edges. Connor looked totally solid.
“Are you a ghost?” I asked as we climbed the steps to the dinosaur exhibit on the fourth floor.
He turned back toward me. “No,” he said simply.
“Am I?” I asked, pinching my own arms as I said it.
“No,” he said, again without explaining anything.
“The girls?” I asked. “Emily and Bella?”
“Alive,” he told me. “Come on. You’re walking too slow.” With his long legs, Connor leapt up the stairs two at a time. I struggled to keep up.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “What’s going on? What happened at the end of the story?” I was being stubborn and stopped. “I’m not moving until you explain a few things.”
With a mighty sigh, he paused at the top of the stairway, in front of the dinosaur movie theater. “You did it, Nate,” he said at last. “You saved us.”
“So why did I wake up on the floor downstairs with everyone else?” This was so confusing.
“I don’t know,” Connor told me. “Emily, Bella, and I popped out of the sand pit, but we were still in the same room. You were gone.”
“How’d you find me?” I had so many questions. I could tell Connor didn’t want to waste time answering them all. He was talking really fast to spit out the information and get me moving again.
“I went back through everywhere the Scaremaster’s story had taken us tonight. The dinosaur fossils, the bears, the birds, and finally down to where we started. If you hadn’t been in your sleeping bag, I was going to the gift shop next.”
I reached out and gave him a small punch in the arm. “Good thinking,” I said. “It was like you read the Scaremaster’s story backward.”
“Right,” Connor told me. “Except for one thing…” As he said that, I heard the growl. It was mighty and echoed through the dinosaur exhibit to where we were standing.
Connor grabbed my hand. “The Scaremaster’s story isn’t over yet.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked as he took off running. “I stabbed the book. You got out of the sand. And I woke up at the beginning. What more could there be?”
He held up the book and shook it in my direction. “The epilogue.”
An epilogue was the part at the end of the book that was like a last comment. The last bit that said what happened after the story seemed to be over.
“Epilogue?” I questioned as we arrived back in the room with the sand pit. I shook my head. “Oh!” I got what Connor meant. He was right. There was one last little bit of the Scaremaster’s story left.
Emily and Bella were standing near the pit, each holding a plastic bone from the pit. They were swinging those weapons at a re-formed T. rex skeleton.
The T. rex roared.
“Help,” Emily squealed. “We’ve been holding this thing off since you disappeared.”
“We sent Connor to get you,” Bella told me. “You defeated the Scaremaster before. Do it again, Nate. And hurry.”
It was then that I noticed Blake. He was sitting on a table in one of the classrooms, swinging his feet and watching the battle through the large window. It was a different classroom from where I’d broken the window. That room was still trashed. Nothing was fixed. The hole in the wall from when the T. rex had chased me was still there too.
Blake smiled and waved casually. He looked as if he was winning. His face was so calm, as if he knew that we’d soon be living with him after all.
“You’re going to lose, Blake,” I called out.
I was angry with him for all he’d done. If he thought we’d be friends with him after this, he was crazy. My blood was boiling as I looked down for something to throw. I didn’t see anything right away, but then, recalling how easily he’d broken pieces off the T. rex, I let the girls distract the sharp-toothed beast while I snuck under his open belly. I went around to the back and broke a fossil off his tail.
I was surprised. It came off easily.
I looked up to find that Blake was smiling at me through that glass window.
I’d never felt so much anger before. Everything he’d done that night and how he’d led us through the Scaremaster’s story had made me furious. I threw that bit of tail at the classroom window. The glass shattered.
Blake seemed shocked that I was strong enough to break the window.
Honestly, I was too.
I grabbed another tail fossil and hurled it. And another. And another.
“Wait!” Connor reached out and stopped me from ripping off the entire tail. “That’s it, Nate. You really are a genius.”
I didn’t feel like one. I just felt like a ball of raw emotion.
“I know how to get rid of the T. rex and defeat the Scaremaster at the same time,” Connor said. He asked Emily, “Is the pit still quicksand?”
He explained that if the room hadn’t been fixed, then maybe everything was exactly how it had been at the end of the story. Only the people had been saved. Nothing else had changed.
“I’ll check the pit,” Bella told us, sacrificing her shoe again. She tossed it into the sand where it immediately sank. “Quicksand,” she reported, then went back to battle with Emily. They both ducked as the T. rex opened his cracking jaw and snapped at them.
“Break it up,” Connor hollered. He rushed under the T. rex to where I was and started grabbing off chunks of fossil tail. “The Scaremaster said the dinosaurs in Utah died in quicksand. This one’s going to die that way too.” He lobbed two big bones over the wall of the sand pit, where they were sucked under the sand.
We dismantled the giant dinosaur as fast as we could. One of us would distract him, while the others tore off anything we could grab. Altogether a T. rex could weigh nine tons, but piece by piece, it was pretty light.
The hardest part was avoiding the head. That snapping jaw was dangerous and scary.
We pulled his body fossils off one by one and threw them i
nto the quicksand. The bones disappeared under the goopy sand and didn’t reappear.
Finally, we got down to the head. Without a neck, it didn’t have a way to move around, but it still wasn’t going to let us near it. When we got close, the head would roll away, and that massive jaw would snap.
Emily grabbed the plastic femur she’d been using as a weapon. “Cover me,” she exclaimed. She leapt forward and set that fake bone like a tent pole in the T. rex’s mouth. We could see him struggling against it as the plastic bone held his jaw open.
“Now we move it,” Emily said.
It was probably the most dangerous thing I’d done in my whole twelve years. We were fighting an animated T. rex skull that wanted to kill us. His jaw was stuck open, but it wouldn’t last long before his strong bite crushed through the plastic bone that Emily had used as a prop.
Each of us grabbed a side of the T. rex skull. It was larger up close than it had seemed when it had been chasing me through the museum.
In the end, it took the four of us and a few of those timber hitch knots with the last of my rope to lob that thing over the side of the sand pit.
The sand gurgled and glopped as it sucked that huge head into the depths and cemented it forever.
Things happened fast after that.
The shattered glass of the classroom began to repair itself. The wall where the T. rex had crashed through started to re-form.
“The quicksand is changing to regular sand,” Bella told me.
“That’s good news,” I said, relieved.
Bella pointed at the Scaremaster’s journal. Connor had set it down when we were drowning the T. rex in sand.
“Get rid of that thing, Nate,” Bella told me. “Hurry.”
I was glad to get rid of the book. In my best storytelling voice, I shouted, “THE END!” and lobbed the book over the side and into the pit.
The Scaremaster’s journal landed in the center of the sand pit. The sand began to swirl around the book, like a dusty whirlpool. A moment later, the journal was sucked into the tempest and disappeared.
Chapter Twelve
Blake was sad. “The Scaremaster promised…” he muttered.
He was in the main room with us now, standing by the sand pit. The book was gone and, with it, Blake’s dream of having sleepover parties every night with ghost friends.
Emily, Bella, and Connor felt more sympathetic than I did.
“He just wanted someone to hang out with,” Emily said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
I disagreed. “You can’t force people to be your friends.”
We left Blake on the fourth floor and snuck down to get back in our sleeping bags. It was nearly morning. The staff was going to wake everyone up soon for the tour of the dinosaur exhibit. I wondered whether the T. rex had rebuilt itself in the great hall. We’d find out soon enough.
“I get what it’s like to be lonely,” Connor replied. “Even with three brothers, sometimes I feel like that.”
Bella said, “Trying to feed new friends to a chomping dinosaur isn’t cool.”
We went on talking about Blake and what had happened until we reached the second floor, where we had to go separate ways.
“I’m glad we have each other,” Emily said. She gave us each a big hug before she and Bella went off toward their sleeping area.
I was exhausted.
Connor and I didn’t talk after the girls left us. Walking in silence, we went back to our own sleeping bags and curled up. When Mr. Steinberg woke us, it felt like we’d only been asleep for a minute or two.
I yawned as we went to breakfast.
Connor slept through the dinosaur movie. “Lived it,” he said before starting to snore.
I was glad to see the T. rex was back on display, and other than a small piece of gummy brachiosaurus on the floor near the iguanodon, there was no sign of what had happened the night before.
I was on alert. Blake was still in the museum, and I didn’t know if he had any other tricks up his sleeve. But as the day ended, there was no sign of him.
Connor’s brother Chris picked us up when it was time to go home. The deal was my mom drove us there, and he’d drive us home.
“How was it?” he asked as he piled our duffel bags into the trunk of his run-down sedan. Chris was nearly twenty and studying biology at the local community college. He looked like a taller, older Connor. Cameron was with him. Cameron was a sophomore in high school.
Charles, a senior, wasn’t with them because he was at a soccer game. They all looked alike, just like in the T. rex exhibit with the different size rexes. I couldn’t believe that Connor had ever fallen for their story that he wasn’t related to them.
“The tour was good,” I said. “I got a book about bears.”
“We saw a show at the planetarium,” Connor told his brothers as the two of us climbed into the backseat.
“That’s it?” Cameron asked, turning to look at us over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” Connor said, glancing at me. “Was there something else we were supposed to see?”
I caught the side-eye look between Chris and Cameron in the front seats.
“No ghost sightings?” Chris asked. “I mean, we warned you about the kid who lived in the museum.”
They were digging for information. I reached out and put a hand on Connor’s knee to warn him not to say anything about Blake.
“No, we didn’t see any ghosts,” I said.
That seemed to throw them off.
“We sent a surprise,” Cameron said. “Did you see it?”
I didn’t know what they were hinting at. By the look on Connor’s face, neither did he.
“Ah man,” Chris exclaimed. “Did Mr. S take away your phone?”
“Yes,” Connor said, slowly, trying to piece together what his brothers had done.
“A great prank ruined,” Chris moaned. He pulled the car around the parking lot and started to head toward my house. “We set up that whole ghost story, even put a video online.”
“We knew you’d search for the story,” Cameron admitted. “So we made a fake newscast.”
“Oh, that,” Connor said. “Yeah, I saw it.”
“We left it just long enough for you to see it. After a while, we took it down,” Cameron admitted. “It was only meant for you.”
That explained the partial video that Connor had seen outside the museum store. But it didn’t explain anything else that had happened last night.
“Hysterical, right?” Chris said, smacking his hand on the steering wheel. “We had my friend Joe edit the film to make it look like it really came from TV.”
“It was scary,” Connor admitted. He wrinkled his eyebrows. “Did you talk to the woman at the museum store about the ghost story?”
“What woman?” Cameron asked. “We didn’t tell anyone what we were doing. Did someone else make up a ghost story too?”
“Yep,” I said. “Ghost stories are very popular at the Natural History Museum.”
“We really thought we’d get you with ours,” Chris said.
Cameron started to chuckle. “We put a lot of effort into this. We made up the kid, made up the disappearance, and then loaded a video online so that if you wanted to hear more about it, you’d be convinced. Did it work?”
“Did you both stay up all night with spooky nightmares?” Chris asked.
We didn’t answer. Connor and I simply looked at each other in confusion.
“Wait. Are you saying there was never a kid called Blake who disappeared in the museum?” Connor asked.
Cameron answered, seriously this time. “No. There was never a kid named Blake.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Good morning, students,” Mr. Steinberg welcomed us to science class. “I hope you’ve all completed your homework.”
I sat at my assigned desk between Bella and Emily. Connor sat in front of me.
We all pulled out our homework as the bell rang.
Mr. Steinberg came around to collect
the papers. “Today, we are going to talk about how the dinosaurs died. Let’s see what you learned on our field trip.”
Emily reached over and poked me in the arm. She whispered, “We sank a T. rex in quicksand.”
Bella heard her and laughed.
Connor leaned back. “Shhh…” We’d sworn each other to secrecy. No one would even believe what had happened to us on the field trip, so we weren’t going to talk about it in public. If we did, there was a good chance we’d be branded as crazy.
“There are several theories,” Mr. Steinberg began, when suddenly, the classroom door opened.
It was Mrs. Hartford, our principal. “Hate to interrupt,” she said, pushing up her glasses and glancing down at her clipboard. “But we have a new student. He’s starting school today.” She stepped aside so that the new boy could enter. “I hope you will all welcome Blake Turner. Blake just told me he’s excited to make some new friends,” she said warmly. “And I’m sure he will find them here.”
With that, Mrs. Hartford left the room.
“Welcome, Blake,” Mr. Steinberg said. “We’re glad you can join us. Tell us all a little about yourself.”
Blake Turner looked exactly like he had in the museum. He was wearing the same baseball jersey and cap, with the same gray sweatpants.
Mr. Steinberg asked him to remove his hat during class.
I couldn’t stop staring at him. As he took off the baseball cap, his head seemed to shimmer a little, like the colors of his hair and skin blurred at the edges.
I gasped.
“I lived on the other side of town,” Blake told the class. “My parents move around a lot. They wanted to live closer to the museum.”
“We just had our annual field trip to the museum,” Mr. Steinberg said. “Have you been there?”
“Many times,” Blake admitted. His eyes were glued to mine. Neither of us could look away. “It practically feels like I live there.”
“That’s great,” Mr. Steinberg said. “Let’s get you a seat. We were about to talk about the demise of the dinosaurs. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to share.”