The Beast with 1000 Eyes (9 page)

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Authors: Laura Dower

BOOK: The Beast with 1000 Eyes
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I started to walk away with the others, but then I stopped. The amulet in my pocket had begun to glow as brightly as fire—and it got just as hot.
“Oh no!” I said, turning around. “San San!”
But I was too late.
Towering behind my aunt was the Eyeball Beast! His eyeballs were dangling all over the place, blinking faster than I'd ever seen them blink before. The beast's eyeball arms reached down and scooped San San high up into the air.
“We have to help her!” I screamed, assuming one of my karate poses. “What are we going to do?”
The kick! Brick's kick! I gathered all my strength and leaped high into the air. But before I could make contact, the beast took off with San San.
“Don't worry!” San San wailed. “Follow us! Follow us!”
“Where?” I cried.
“NERVE MOUNTAIN!” Jesse, Lindsey, and Damon yelled at the same time.
We took off after the monster. But our legs couldn't move so fast. The monster moved like lightning up the side of the mountain. We could hardly keep up.
“I don't see it anywhere!” I cried.
“Wait! Use the amulet!” Jesse cried.
I yanked it out of my pocket. It was hot again—almost too hot to touch.
“I bet we can use it to follow him,” Jesse said.
And then something dawned on me. All we really needed was to offer the amulet in exchange for San San!
“RIVE RE RACK RY RYEBALL!”
“Dirt!” Damon cried. He bent over on the mountain and rubbed his fingers in mud. When he poked his head up again, there was a dark smudge of black on his forehead. “It's like another eye—an
evil
eye—to make the monster go away! I read about it in one of the books I found this morning.”
But before I had a chance to say anything, Lindsey took the words right out of my mouth. “We don't need dirt. We have the amulet! Let's just give it back to the beast and he'll give us San San!”
“That sounds too easy,” Damon said.
We kept moving up the mountain. There were so many things to think of and do at once. I kept my eyes on the amulet's glow. We couldn't afford to lose the B-Monster again.
As we rose up over a bluff, I saw something I didn't expect to see so quickly. The Eyeball Beast had stopped! He was perched on a rock, eyes twitching. And on a rock next to the beast was San San!
Here was our chance!
CHAPTER 13
SNAP, KICK, THRUST
“HERE IS YOUR EYEBALL!” I screamed.
The beast turned around, eyeballs twitching at us. He wasn't backing off.
“Say it again!” Lindsey cried.
“TAKE YOUR EYEBALL BACK!” I cried.
It still wasn't working. The beast didn't know what to make of us. Maybe he thought we were trying to trick him?
Then I spotted an empty cup on the ground and remembered something I had read at the library.
Defeat the power of the eye with a vessel of spit.
Collect human spit in a cup; then throw it on the eye. The spit will destroy the curse—and the eye.
“Over here!” I commanded everyone to hide behind a rock so we could all spit in the cup.
“We need a lot of spit if we're going to get a thousand evil eyes,” Lindsey said.
“Excellent! I love spit!” Damon said. He made a gross noise and then spit.
“Damon! Gross!” Lindsey said. But she spit, too.
Jesse spit a lot. “Quick thinking, Stella,” he said, wiping his mouth and spitting again.
I passed the cup around and we spit until I felt certain we had enough to defeat the B-Monster. Carefully, I carried the cup up the mountain with us.
“Keep walking!” I yelled. The amulet was warming up again. “It's glowing!”
“Where did San San go?” Lindsey asked.
We scanned the immediate area for signs of struggle.
“WHOA!” Damon yelled. “Over there! She's on that other rock!”
My aunt was sprawled across a giant boulder. But why wasn't she moving? Was she sleeping? Oh no! Was she
dead
?
“San San!” I cried. I left the spit cup and raced over with the amulet. I wasn't going to let anyone mess with this ninja—or a member of this ninja's family. I needed the amulet's luck right now.
Before I could get to the boulder, something knocked me sideways. I went flying.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”
It was the Eyeball Beast!
He plowed into me and knocked me off my feet. The amulet flew out of my hands and disappeared in the underbrush. How would I get San San back without it—I was finished!
“STELLA!” the other Monster Squadders cried.
“Nobody messes with my aunt!” I screamed at the beast. “LEAVE US ALONE!”
The Eyeball Beast glanced at San San like it was going to grab her again. Then it looked at me like it might grab me! Then it looked back at San San!
“Rwo Ran Rans?” it asked.
“Kiiiiiya!” I yelped, striking a bolder pose. “I'm going to knock your eyeballs off one by one!”
The monster blinked.
I remembered San San's words to me: “Be brave.”
I remembered Brick's fancy footwork.
And just like that, a fight was on.
“Take that!” I kicked up one leg and sliced at the air. Then, from behind the beast, Damon, Jesse, and Lindsey gathered with large sticks in their hands. I needed to distract the beast a little bit more as they approached. Then they took the long sticks and began poking some of the beast's one thousand eyes.
The monster squealed and flinched as the sticks went into eyeball after eyeball after eyeball. The beast's eyes all oozed this funny-smelling splurt.
Everything
about this B-Monster was gross—with a side of gross.
“Ewwwwwww!” Damon cried, stepping back after a few pokes. “What is this monster made of? It reeks!”
They continued poking at the other eyeballs like they were playing Whac-A-Mole. Eyeball juice sprayed all over. The monster stumbled around blindly; moaning. Its blinks were more random now.
I moved in closer and cut the air with my arms, just like karate class.
Chop. Chop. CHOP!
“Stella, over there!”
I shot a look back at Damon. He indicated a small mound at the side from where we stood. Just past the mound was the mountain edge. It must have been a thousand foot drop.
“Time for a
real
cliffhanger, eh?” Lindsey shouted out.
All at once, all the things I'd learned for the test to get my black belt, came rushing into my head. I saw Brick again, leaping into the air.
No more messing around.
Time to be a kicking machine.
WHAM! BLAM! KAZZAM!
My legs whizzed through the air like whirlybirds. I was fleet-footed and the monster didn't see me coming. He was slower now that a bunch of his eyeballs had been poked. I was able to trick him into going in the direction of the cliff's edge. Jesse and Damon were right there, poking even more of the beast's eyes.
He stood up tall, all eight feet of him and stretched his eyeball arms way up into the air. That monster still had fight in him—but so did I! Then I realized what he was
really
doing. He threw his head back and opened his jaw wide.
“Don't look, Stella!” Lindsey cried. “He's going to use the eye on his tongue!”
Damon and Jesse screamed. “Look away!”
But I didn't look away.
I looked right at that Eyeball Beast's crazy face, until he poked his tongue out and the most powerful eye on the planet looked right back at me.
It was a lot larger than the other eyes. The white part was bloodshot and it pulsed like a vein.
“DON'T LOOK!” the other members of Monster Squad wailed again. “STELLA, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!”
But I knew
exactly
what I was doing.
CHAPTER 14
SPAT CITY
“Kiiiiiya!” I screamed and then I
really
let loose.
I leaped high into the air, as high as I'd ever leaped before for a spin twist kick. I just needed to see my target, just for a split second. All my energy, all my strength boosted me up. As I lurched forward, my feet made contact with the primary eye. It was a direct hit!
The monster flew backward through the air . . .
Over the mound . . .
And right off the mountain in a cloud of dust!
“NO WAY!” Damon and Jesse shouted in unison. “YOU DID IT!”
They ran over to the edge before I even got there.
Hundreds of feet below, the eyeball monster had crash-landed on a rock.
Splat City.
Lindsey put her arm around me like a real friend. Pretty soon, the four of us were standing there, arm in arm, hugging. Thank goodness no one got a picture of
that
.
“Do you think it's dead?” Damon asked.
On the ground, all around the Eyeball Beast, there were smushed, crushed, and smooshed eyes. A few twitched madly, as if they still worked. But, this beast was a goner. As dead as the rock it landed on.
“What's that?” Jesse cried.
Over to the side, a lone eyeball seemed to have detached from the beast. It pulsated like it might come to life. I remembered the jars of eyeballs in the castle. All it took was one eyeball to make another and then another. We couldn't risk it!
Jesse scrambled down the rocks with another stick.
“Take that!” Jesse cried, poking the runaway eyeball hard.
I looked away. All this monster-crushing splurt was making me woozy. I liked being the ninja and all that, but I was ready for all this B-Monster to go.
“Ding, dong, the beast is dead!” Lindsey sang to the tune of
The Wizard of Oz
song. “Ding, dong, the Eyeball Beast is deeeeeeaad!”
I believed them, but I wanted to be extra-certain this monster would not be coming back. So I ran back to get the spit cup. A little insurance wouldn't hurt anyone—except the beast, of course.
I hustled down the cliff, too, with the cup of our spit.
“Incoming!” I cried and poured the spit over the beast's quivering, dying body.
The whole thing evaporated into a fine, pink mist.
“That would have made a great ending for the original movie,” a voice said from behind us. “Leery would be proud.”
I turned to see Great Auntie San San stumbling toward us. She was alive and walking around! The trance had been broken for good!
“San San!” I cried. “What happened?”
“You saved the day, Monster Squad,” Great Auntie San San said, looking at the beast on the rock. “That's what happened. You saved the day. And you saved
me
.”
Except for a few bumps and bruises from her wild ride on the shoulders of the Eyeball Beast, San San was A-OK. We were all okay. Even after swimming down a river of tears and poking one thousand eyeballs up the mountainside—we survived.
“Kids, I found this on the ground over there,” San San said, holding up the amulet. “I'm happy to say that it brought us good luck after all.”
I took it from her, expecting the same amulet I'd had just a moment before. But now this amulet was cold. It wasn't glowing anymore. It had gone black.
“We have to tell Walter and Leery what's happened,” Jesse said.
“Hey,” Lindsey said, pointing across the mountainside where they stood. “We're practically at Leery Castle. Why don't we go there right now?”
I pulled out my cell phone and we dialed Walter Block. He told us to come over to the castle pronto.
“Wait!” Damon said. “We can't go talk to Walter yet. We still have to find the original reel.”

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