Attack of the Spider Bots (2 page)

“Help, help!” Ghoulie burbled as he splashed the water frantically. “I can't swim!” Then he saw Scilla standing up, hands on hips, looking down at him with a smirk. He felt his knees bump against the streambed and stood, giving Scilla a sheepish, red-faced look.

“What was that thing?” Beamer sputtered as he crawled, drenched and muttering, out of the stream.

“I don't know,” said Scilla, “but it could use some work on personal hygiene. I can still smell its breath.”

“Next question,” Ghoulie said as he peered through the darkness. “Where are we?”

A faint light grew in the distance . . . behind a range of hills.

“Are we outside?” asked Scilla. “It can't be night already.”

“Worse than that. It looks like sunrise,” groaned Beamer. “It's almost time for school.”

A soft line of light slowly crawled across the landscape, revealing more hills and valleys, then roads and a village. There was a church with a steeple, a train station, shops — some with windmills — and a group of houses.

“One thing's for sure,” said Scilla. “We're not in Middleton anymore.”

Something didn't seem right about the scenery. Beamer couldn't quite put his finger on it. Again they heard the beast scream, and they whirled around to see the one-eyed monster charge across a double-arched bridge.

“It's . . . it's a train!” cried Ghoulie.

Now there was enough light to see that the eye was the headlamp for a steam locomotive.
Looks about the size of our
living room sofa
, thought Beamer
.
That was when he realized what was wrong — the scenery was miniaturized!

“Holy tamole! D'y'all mean we're trapped in somebody's train set?” asked Scilla.

2

Lost World

“Well, for what it's worth, it's not your everyday train set,” said Ghoulie as he tripped over a water mill.“Ouch! There aren't many train sets you can stroll through like a walk in a park.”

“It's a whole other world,” said Beamer, “built inside a cavern!”

Beneath the bridge was a miniature mountain stream into which they had fallen. Farther away was a waterfall, which cascaded down a cliff to feed the stream. Somewhere back there was probably a wall, but the painting was so real that it looked like the range of mountains stretched for miles. The sky, too, seemed infinitely high above them, with wisps of clouds moving across —
Moving
!
The clouds were
moving
! Beamer thought with a start. He couldn't even see the projectors. The illusion was so incredible, it made him dizzy just thinking about it.
Maybe they
weren't in a cavern after all!

“Hey, do you suppose we've been transported to some faraway place inhabited by tiny people?” asked Beamer. “I could get used to a Gulliver lifestyle.”

“Yes, but that's a very tiny sunrise for a real world,” said Ghoulie, pointing to the brightening horizon.

Beamer took a couple of steps over the rail yard and the train station. There was a fair amount of animation. Cars, trucks, and vans — old ones — moved along the streets and highways. How old? Well, definitely way before Beamer's time.

“They couldn't be real, could they?” Scilla asked as she kneeled down to look at a garden of miniature flowers.

“Oh, sure,” answered Ghoulie. “Lots of plants can be grown in miniature — azaleas, cyclamen, and rhodo-something. Um,” he added as he stretched to see past a miniature hill. “I think I see an entire pumpkin patch beyond that ridge.”

At that moment, Beamer heard the whine of propeller-driven airplanes. He spun around to see a miniature squadron of WWII fighter planes diving toward him.

“Hey! We come in peace,” he announced like he'd dropped in from Neptune for a chat with the president. The whine of the planes grew louder. “Now hold on there,” he gasped as he started to back up, “I'm just a kid. Only really bad guys kill women and children.” Suddenly their guns fired. He started to dive to the ground, but not before he felt pings all over his body. “Ow! Ouch! Cut that out!” he cried as he swiped at the little pellets. “I'm being strafed!” Before he knew it Beamer was giggling and jerking about, laughing out of control. All those tiny pellets were driving him crazy! “Stop . . . Stop it!” he cried frantically between bursts of laughter.

Finally, the planes whisked past him and disappeared. Breathing heavily, Beamer's giggling turned into a gasp. “Whoa! Tickle warfare,” he wheezed, “the world's next weapon of mass destruction.”

Scilla was still laughing — at him. “You were so funny,” she guffawed. “You were jerkier than the scarecrow in
Wizard of Oz
.”

“Right — a barrel of laughs.”
She'll get hers,
he vowed.Finally breathing easier, Beamer looked up. He didn't think the ceiling was high enough for clouds to form naturally, but sure enough, one particularly dark cloud that was too low be a projection was moving closer.

Seeing the cloud's shadow on the ground, Scilla looked up just in time to get dowsed by a shower. She squealed in a pitch high enough to break every chandelier in Parker's Castle.

“Serves you right! Don't melt!” Beamer yelled, feeling a sweet sense of revenge.

Scilla muttered angrily as she wrung out her shirt sleeves.

“Go ahead and laugh, y'all. I wanna find the joker who's runnin' this thing!” she spit out. “I don't like his sense of humor.”

“What if nobody's running it?” asked Ghoulie with a shrug.

“D'ya mean it could be totally automated?” asked Beamer. “That's ridiculous! Somebody's got to take care of all this.” He looked around the cavern. “Come to think of it, somebody's gotta let us out of here!”

“I wouldn't count on a visit anytime soon,” answered Ghoulie. “I don't know if you guys noticed while you were doing your comedy routine, but this little world has a fairly high arachnoid population.”

Spiders!
Beamer didn't see any of the creepy little things, but there were plenty of cobwebs, and they weren't miniaturized.

“The animation keeps some places clear,” said Ghoulie, as he leaned down and ran his finger across the dome of an observatory. “But that's too deep a buildup of dust for a housekeeper to ignore,” he added, showing Beamer a glob of dust thick enough to be icing on a cake.

Scilla waved her lantern to wipe away a cloud of spider silk. Beneath it she saw a house that looked like a miniature of Parker's Castle. “Hey, y'all!” she cried as she leaned down to look in a window. “Look what we've got here.”

“What?” asked Beamer as he made his way over to her. Ghoulie was right beside him, and they dived in for a view at the same time.

“Hey!” she cried as she slipped down to her knees. “There's a train set in this little house that looks like a miniature of the one we're standing on!”

“Does that train set also have a miniature Parker's Castle?” Beamer asked, shaking his head.

“This is getting too weird,” said Ghoulie with a sigh. “And don't even think of asking if our Parker's Castle and Murphy Street are in some giant train set.”

“Hmmm.” Beamer scrunched his face thoughtfully as Ghoulie continued.

“Anyway, it's a good bet that we are under Parker's Castle.”

“But when you think of it,” said Scilla, “Old Lady Parker doesn't seem the type to play with train sets.”

“Yeah, you've got that right,” grunted Beamer. “So who's the engineer?”

Suddenly a loud blast and a
woosh
brought them leaping to their feet. A small rocket on a fiery tail was climbing up in front of a city skyline. It arched across the sky and disappeared. A moment later they all took a deep breath.

“Is that city supposed to be Middleton?” Scilla asked, turning her head sideways for another look.”

“Looks more like the Emerald City to me,” said Beamer as he climbed over a range of hills. True enough, in contrast to the quaint village near the stream, the city was ultramodern, with highways winding in and around the city like silver ribbons. “Here's the space port!” exclaimed Beamer. Yep, there were spaceships — old-style ones with fins — sitting on their tails on little launchpads. As he watched, one pad rose from below, carrying another ship to replace the one that had just taken off.

Beamer suddenly noticed that the artificial sun had moved all the way across the artificial sky. It was beginning to turn dark. “Hey, we gotta get out of here,” he barked. “Who knows what happens in this place after dark.”

“But how?” asked Ghoulie.

“Uh, what's wrong with the way we came in?” Scilla asked before Beamer and Ghoulie could work themselves into a panic.

“Trouble is,” said Ghoulie, the middle school brain trust. “I don't think there's room for both us and the train in the tunnel at the same time. We need to clock the train's circuit to see if there's enough time for us to scramble back up into the tunnel and down to our entry point before it comes around again.”

Ghoulie pulled back his jacket sleeve to activate the stopwatch on his oversized wristwatch, which included a GPS and an LCD display, as well as Internet access. Yep, if there was a gadget out there, Ghoulie had it.

“Good grief,” said Beamer, rolling his eyes. “Take a seat, Scilla. If he's in NASA mode, we may be waiting here till next Tuesday.”

“Better safe than sorry, you know,” Ghoulie chortled.

While Beamer and Scilla sat morosely on a miniature stone wall, waiting for Ghoulie to time the train's route, their mini-world transformed into night. Shadows grew longer as the soft line of light faded into the horizon. Then the moon rose, not full, just a thin crescent. Beamer wondered if it changed phases like the real moon. A night sky materialized. He could make out the Big Dipper and the constellation Orion. The planets were there too, though not to scale. They were, in fact, much larger than they looked in the real night sky.

“Hey, look there!” shouted Beamer. “You can see the dead volcanoes and canals on Mars.” Jupiter had its red spot and Saturn, its rings. A comet, complete with its tail, also moved across the night sky. You could even see one galaxy looking like a whirlpool of light. Somebody had gone all out in the imagination and technology department to create this world.

Scilla had crossed over to look in the window of a tiny flower shop, when a noise brought her to wide-eyed attention. She looked behind her and fell back into the stream. She screamed as she first swam, then crawled, and then ran away from the noise. With her head turned backward, she didn't even notice Beamer until she plowed into him.

Beamer fell
splat
and yelled, “What's the matter? Can't you watch where you're going?” She was already back on her feet and burning shoe leather. “Hey!” he yelled after her. “A little ‘excuse me' would be nice.” Then he heard an ear-crushing
roar
and whipped around. His face suddenly froze.

3

Escape from Netherworld

Beamer had forgotten how to breathe, let alone move. The beast's huge moonlit shadow was already on him. Finally Beamer's legs began scooting him backward as a gigantic creature covered in scales climbed out of a deep gorge. Somewhere in the back of Beamer's mind was the thought that the beast was probably just another animated toy, but — even in a diminutive state for this miniature world — Godzilla was pretty colossal.

Beamer stumbled and then ran, with the monster's feet thundering behind him. “Forget the timing!” he yelled to Ghoulie. “We've gotta take our chances.” Behind him, the beast was squashing cars and buildings and making the world quake. Whether the creature was real or not, they were here without permission, and who knew if somebody hadn't invented this “dragon” to guard its treasure world.

“I'm with you!” Scilla shouted as she splashed through the stream and scrambled up the ravine to the tunnel.

Ghoulie didn't need any convincing either when he saw the towering beast pounding toward him.

Just as Scilla reached the tunnel, the train whistle blew her eardrums into “mute.” She jumped back just as the train sped out of the tunnel and roared across the bridge. By the time it passed, Beamer and Ghoulie had caught up with her. Godzilla roared again, and they leaped into the tunnel with a chorus of screams.

Once more they made like hunchbacks running through the tunnel. Afraid that any moment they'd see the “eye” of the locomotive coming toward them, they finally resorted to running on all fours. They made it back to their tunnel exit just as they heard the locomotive screech around the bend.

With enough relief that their legs wobbled, they retraced their way through the caves, following the rocket-shaped symbols they'd scratched into the rock walls at each turn. At one point, they again heard the
clank
that had drawn their attention in the first place.