by Laura Dower
“What does it mean?” I asked.
Walter took a deep breath.
“There is something I need to show you, Monster Squad,” he said. He pointed down a long corridor behind him. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell you all about a secret area in the castle. It might help you, Stella, to figure out that dream.”
I peered down the hall. I knew the vault was back there.
But what else?
“Dr. Leery calls this the belly of the castle,” Walter said as we walked toward it.
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, though. Bellysounded like we were about to be eaten up.
“Are there other rooms?” I asked.
“Oh yes. Dr. Leery’s deepest, most well-hidden tricks are here,” Walter said. “Are you kids ready to explore?”
Ready? Was he kidding? I was jumping out of my skin.
“Can I take pictures?” Lindsey asked, holding up her camera.
“As long as you don’t show them to anyone besides me, Leery, and your fellow Monster Squadders. What I am about to show you is highly confidential.”
“What’s here? Do these rooms help to identify which B-Monster will arrive next?” Jesse asked.
“Sort of.” Walter shook his head. “Inside these rooms are possible clues. But as Dr. Leery says, the only sure proof of a new B-Monster is acute visual contact.”
“A cute what?” Damon asked.
“Acute visual contact,” Walter said. “That means that a B-Monster must make a public appearance. The members of the Monster Squad can only stop a B-Monster once they’ve seen him.”
As we walked along, Walter led us past the familiar door marked VAULT, the place we’d been many times before to find and watch reels. The cold, stone walls seemed to move in on us a little bit and I tried to think of something un-scary, but my brain kept playing tricks on me.
We passed doors with more dangerous-looking signs like KEEPOUTORELSE! and DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT MASK.
“Leery Castle is a tricky place,” Walter explained. “Down here, we have a complex series of hidden tunnels and pathways to take us to various rooms, laboratories, and storage compartments. There are more than two hundred rooms here.”
“Two hundred rooms?” Jesse cried.
“Whoa,” Damon said.
“Don’t you get lost?” Lindsey asked.
“No, I have an office with television screens showing me key locations throughout the castle,” Walter said. “While Dr. Leery is away, I monitor all of them.”
“Hold up! You have Leery Castle TV monitors everywhere?” Damon gulped. “So last time we were here and I switched around those pictures on the wall . . .”
“Yes, Damon.” Walter made a face. “I saw it.”
“Or the time when I fed some larva crunch to Poe?”
“Saw it.”
I quickly scanned my memory for any weird things I might have done that could be caught on camera. As I suspected, there weren’t any—wouldn’t be very ninjalike of me, now would it?
“You are about to pass by some of our most top secret labs inside the castle. Watch your head, the ceilings get low in parts,” Walter cautioned as we proceeded down the corridor.
I ducked as we weaved our way, stopping to look at different doors along the hallway.
Lindsey stopped in front of a room that looked like an enormous fish tank. The sign out front said NO SWIMMING. Lindsey was excited at the prospect of going face-to-face with Octo-Blob. She loved those underwater B-Monsters.
But we kept moving.
Jesse got us all to stop at a door that felt cold and slimy. It was actually oozing a little bit around the edges. We knew right away what was in there: leeches! In fact, a small sign on the door gave it away: NOSALTATANYTIME. Of course, salt was a leech’s worst enemy. In the classic Space Leech, scientists transport the leeches and abandon them on a planet made entirely of salt crystals.
A few feet away from the leeches, we saw a door that stretched up a full foot higher than Damon. This room was built for a giant! The door sign read BEWARE OF FUR BALLS.
“I bet Rodiak was here,” Damon said. “Whoa!” Rodiak was probably the biggest B-Monster ever, like some kind of mutant King Kong, only way furrier and with more teeth.
Walter stepped in and made sure the door to the Rodiak room was dead bolted.
“We don’t want to open this one,” he warned. “In fact, I wouldn’t recommend opening any of the doors without proper supervision. We do experiments in the rooms, but we cannot guarantee the results.”
I shuddered a little bit. The whole visit made me jumpy; not that I ever would have admitted my case of nerves to any of the other Monster Squadders.
Slowly, we continued down the hall, until I saw this sign:
“What’s in here?” I asked.
Walter nodded and smiled. “Answers,” he said.
He reached into his pocket and produced a ring of at least fifty gold and silver keys. On the ring was a blue and white charm.
It looked exactly like an eyeball!
CHAPTER 3
GET SCARED
“Be very careful!” Walter commanded as he pushed open the door and flicked on the light.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
I screamed so loudly I thought my head might pop off.
Everyone else screamed, too.
Then I took a very big step backward.
The entire room was filled from floor to ceiling with eyeballs in jars.
“Can these eyeballs see me?” I asked Walter nervously.
“No,” Walter assured me. “It looks like the eyes can see you, but the eyes are nonfunctioning. They’re in formaldehyde. We used them to create our own eyeball monster.”
“Talk about surveillance tactics,” Lindsey cracked.
Walter had shown us a few jars like this one other time when we battled Mega Mantis. He had some stored in the trunk of the Leery Castle limousine. But that was different. That time, I only saw four or maybe five jars.
There had to be at least four hundred jars in this room—each holding at least one pair of eyes if not more. That made almost one thousand individual eyes swimming around in stinky eye goop!
No matter what Walter said, they were totally looking right at me.
Every. Single. One.
“What exactly do you do with all these eyeballs?” Lindsey asked. She peered into one jar. Then Damon grabbed it and shook the jar like a snow globe.
“Don’t!” Walter grabbed it back from him. The jar made a squooshy noise.
“You know,” Lindsey said. “It’s like school in here.”
“How?” I asked.
“Too many pupils!”
Damon, Jesse, and even Walter cracked up. But I didn’t. I was too busy searching for evidence that the Eyeball Beast was on his way.
“For years, we tested the eyeball’s ability to blink, and transmit laser beams,” Walter explained as he led us around the room. “We tested weapons to destroy the eyeballs, too, but we stopped our research before finishing up The Beast with 1000 Eyes because we ran out of money. As far as Oswald Leery was concerned, the Beast with 1000 Eyes would never live to see another day once production was stopped . . .
“So you can imagine my surprise when you came to me with the notion that the Beast with 1000 Eyes is on the loose.”
“Where is the reel—the unfinished one?” Jesse asked.
“Oh my goodness,” Walter shook his head. “I’m not exactly sure what happened to the reel. That’s a good question.”
Just then, an alarm sounded from a faraway part of the castle.
Walter flinched. “Oh dear!” he said. “I need to check that alarm. Lately it’s been on the fritz. There are so many controls to manage in this castle! I’ll be back in a jiffy. Try not to touch anything big, okay, Monster Squad?”
“Yeah, we know,” Lindsey joked. “You’ve got your eyes on us. Right?”
Walter sped out and left us in the
half-dark eyeball room with the assortment of squooshing jars.
“He’s probably got security cameras filming us right now,” Damon groaned, searching the ceiling.
That place gave me the creeps. I gripped the top of a chair and repeated a mantra inside my head to keep my cool.
Ninjas don’t get scared!
Ninjas don’t get scared!
Ninjas don’t get scared!
KLUNK!
By mistake, I bonked the chair into a table. A jar rolled onto the floor. Thankfully, it didn’t break, but the lid loosened and a little eyeball juice leaked all over the floor.
What a mess!
I grabbed a cloth hanging on the wall and wiped off my hands and the floor.
“Hey, look!” Lindsey cried. By moving the cloth, I’d revealed a poster on the wall. In fact there were posters all over the wall. With all the eyeballs competing for my attention, I’d missed the posters.
Teeny spotlights burned atop the frames. There were classic B posters like Damon’s all-time fave, Martian Mayhem, and, of course, Slimo. There were some other, lesser-known film posters here, too, like Beneath the Dirt, a great, early B-Monster Studios movie about killer worms. And then there was a poster for the movie we all wanted to see.
The Beast with 1000 Eyes.
I surveyed the art on the poster. It was the first time I’d really had a good look at the Eyeball Beast. He was nasty. Magenta-pink-skinned and covered (covered!) from head to toe in gross, bulging eyes. He even had eyes on his heels . . .
And he was chasing someone—none other than my Great Auntie San San!
CHAPTER 4
AS GROSS AS IT GETS
“Hey,” Lindsey called out. “Why don’t we watch the movie? None of us have actually seen it. And I bet we’ll learn more if we screen one of the copies. Walter must have a copy in the vault . . .”
“A movie screening is the best kind of research!” Jesse said.
“Okay,” I mumbled.
When Walter came back, we followed him toward the vault. He was sure there was a copy of the movie somewhere inside the vault. Of course there were hundreds of reels—mostly copies—scattered around. We scanned shelves for a solid ten minutes before I discovered a stack of movie reels placed on a low shelf. The shelf had not been touched in years; I could tell. It was layered with thick dust and cobwebs. I found reels with peeling labels. Most were marked COPY. Then I found one that was marked THE BEAST WITH 1000 EYES on one sticker with a COPY sticker placed on top.
Jackpot!
I handed the reel to Walter and he popped it directly into the projector. Then he dimmed the screening room lights. The music swelled. The words AN OSWALD LEERY PRODUCTION flashed across the screen.
“This better be good,” Damon whined.
The first shot in the film was a close-up of the Eyeball Beast in all of its bloodshot glory, each eyeball shaking and throbbing. I could see spider veins on the whites of all one thousand or more dangling eyeballs. The many eyes were different colors, too: blue, green, hazel, and even pitch-black. The B-Monster had fingertip eyes, too, on its palms; and crazy, blinking fingernails that made noise with each blink.
Sploosh. Sploosh.
There was a lot to be learned by watching this movie. For starters, the Eyeball Beast was not born on some faraway planet or in the middle of a tornado. This B-Monster was made in a laboratory not unlike the labs we had just visited. And when the monster was “born,” it was just a lone eyeball that grew and grew and GREW into a cluster of eyeballs—like a seedling grows into a plant.
The Eyeball Beast wasn’t a flying bug B-Monster like Mega Mantis or one of those free-roaming B-Monsters, like Slimo. It didn’t live in a cave or in the pipes under the sink, either. This B-Monster grew up in the laboratory, where it was poked and prodded by a bunch of kooky scientists looking for answers.
Why did the monster have so many eyes? Was it to see better? Did it have X-ray vision? The scientists poked the beast with needles and paddles and pretty much anything they could get their mitts on but they never were able to find an answer.
And no big surprise, but the beast was very unhappy. One day, it just snapped. All of its googly eyes opened wide at the same time and it started to blink, and the more it blinked, the more bad things started to happen in Riddle.
The scientists were the beast’s first targets. It put them in a coma by blinking at them. Eventually, it busted out of the lab and hit the real world. That was when it saw Iris, my aunt’s character, for the first time. The beast chased Iris everywhere, but she never stopped running—not even to catch her breath. This made it mad. It started trashing everything—buildings, roads, machines, and then it did something scarier than anything: It cried. Out of all one thousand eyes.
Next, the beast moved into a movie theater. It seemed to put the moviegoers into a trance just by using its blinking power. The camera panned around the theater. People’s eyes glowed, entranced.
And then the beast opened its mouth. I thought for sure it was about to say something. That maybe it would shout, “DIE!” and be super dramatic.
But the monster opened its mouth to speak and instead of words—a giant, bulbous, oozing eye came out of its mouth! It had an eye attached to its tongue!
There are movie monsters who have venomous fangs or sharp, deadly claws. But an eye that pops out of a creature’s tongue? That’s about as gross as it gets.
All at once, the entire movie theater began to glow, and without warning . . .
Pzzzzzzzfffffft.
“Huh?” I cried out in the darkness.
I looked to my left and right. Were the other Monster Squadders still here? What was going on?
Jesse’s voice piped up from the dark. “Well, we knew the movie ran out of money . . .”
“Yeah, but we didn’t know it would end there! What a scam!” Lindsey said.
My mind raced.
The dream.
The eyeball room.
The tongue. And now . . . Walter swept in and stood up on the little stage. He turned up the lights.
“Look, I don’t want to alarm you, kids, but while we were watching the film, I phoned Dr. Leery and told him about your theory. He wants to speak with all of you right away.”
CHAPTER 5
LOCKS AND CLOCKS
Walter took us into a small office and asked us to squeeze onto a long sofa. He powered up a large computer and turned up the volume so we could all hear.
“Greetings, Monster Squad,” Leery said. “So we meet again.”
There was a lot of blustery wind in the background, so we had to lean into the computer in order to see and hear him. “Walter tells me that you believe the Eyeball Beast is the latest monster to hit Riddle. As you now know, this monster starred in a movie that was never shown to the general public. But if you believe that he’s rearing his head, and somehow this movie was screened, we have a serious situation.”
Up on the videophone, Leery’s face was tucked into the hood of a parka, so we could just see his black glasses framed in fur and icicles. In the background were dancing penguins. I think I spotted a polar bear floating on a floe.
“I’ll be honest, I have my doubts about the Beast with 1000 Eyes,” Leery said, his voice cracking. “But I believe in you, Monster Squad. And if you do end up coming face-to-face with the monster, there are two essential things you must know if you have any chance of beating him.”
“First!” Leery said. “The monster is covered with eyeballs—more than a thousand of them. And if he blinks all of his eyeballs at you at the same time, you may be put into a trance or a deep sleep.
“Second! A glance from any or all of these eyeballs could possibly leave a mark on your skin. But fear not! This is only temporary, like an eyeball tattoo. Unless, of course, he glances at you with his primary eye, the one located on his tongue.”
I gasped.
“Primary eye?” I cried. “Is that the eye on the tongue from that creepy scene in the movie?”
The image of Leery went to static for a moment and then we watched him push back the hood of his parka and lean closer into the camera again.
“Monster Squad,” Leery said, “you have a lot of research to do. Look up eyes and find out how they work. Find out all you can about superstitions related to eyes. There must be answers there! Good luck!”
As soon as Leery signed off, Walter shut down the computer.
“Are you kids clear on what you need to do?” Walter asked.
We all shrugged. Was anything ever really clear when it came to Monster Squad?
“So we still haven’t even seen the B-Monster up close, right?” Damon said.
“But we’re going to assume it’s the Eyeball Beast,” Jesse said. “We’re going to back Stella. We’re in this together.”
I puffed out my chest a little bit.
“Thanks, Jesse,” I finally said, crossing my arms tightly in front of me.
The truth was, there was no harm in investigating now. We could always rule it out later. I was just pleased to finallyget the support of my fellow Monster Squadders—especially Damon.
After Walter turned off the power in the screening room, he offered to drive us home. It was getting so late! As we rode along, the wheels inside my head started turning, too. I had a genius idea! Walter dropped the others off first. Then he drove to Dojo Academy because I told him I had karate class. I went into the studio like normal, but as soon as I got inside the karate studio locker room, I made a U-turn back to the front desk.
I approached Front Desk Lady.
“May I borrow your Yellow Pages?” I asked.
Front Desk Lady dropped the phone book on the counter with a thud. I flipped through the pages until I got to the letters H, I, J, K, L . . .
Got it!
I had one measly hour before my Mom picked me up—and a ton of work to do. I set my cell phone timer for fifty minutes and hustled outside. There was no time to waste. The air outside was brisk so I walked faster than usual. My destination was 101 Main Street. Within five minutes, I was already staring up at a steel engraved sign: Riddle Towers. What a fancy building! Ornate glass, revolving doors, and a formal-looking doorman standing guard!