There's a Spaceship in My Tree! (6 page)

“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, this 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.

The screen door slammed behind him and he heard something creak again, this time directly above him. He looked up. “A tree house!” he blurted out in envy.

“You don't want to go up there!” Scilla's voice called from the next yard. “I told you. It's haunted.”

Ghoulie glanced from her back up at the tree house. “The tree house? I thought you meant the house!”

“The house may be too, for all I know. But the tree house is a definite,” Scilla said as she swung up onto a branch.

“Whoever heard of a haunted tree house?” asked Ghoulie as he crab-walked up the slanted trunk. He figured he had maybe ten minutes before his dad got there, but he could at least get a closer look.

“Get real, Scilla!” groaned a voice below him. Ghoulie turned to see Beamer at the foot of the tree, starting to crab-walk up toward them.

Ghoulie turned back to Scilla. “Even if there were a ghost,” he added with a smirk, “it couldn't be much of a ghost if it lives in a tree house.”

“It was enough of a ghost to scare the heck out of Jared!”

It was like Scilla had exploded a cherry bomb. “D'ya mean Jared's been here?” Beamer yelped, bumping his head on a branch above him and nearly falling out of the tree.

“Priscilla! Priscilla!” an elderly woman's voice called, “Did you forget that you're grounded today?” It was Scilla's grandmother, calling from the second-story window at the near end of her house. “You come home right now and get busy on that homework, or you'll be grounded for a month!”

“Oops, I gotta go,” Scilla said with a fearful grimace, already scooting along the tree branch that crossed over into her yard.

“Scillaaaa! You can't go now!” Beamer yelled after her, irritated at being unable to hear the rest of the story.

“Sorry!” she called back as she dropped from the tree, “I'll see y'all tomorrow.”

Ghoulie gave Beamer a frustrated look. Their eyes locked meaningfully. Gulping in unison, they looked wide-eyed up at the tree house.

10
Reluctant Ghostbusters

The day after the chase through the park, Beamer gave Jared double the amount due, plus a nauseating truckload of “Sorrys.” Just to make sure Jared didn't give him a knuckle sandwich for change, Beamer paid him off before assembly in front of the teacher seats.

Of course, the real question was how this underage “C-movie” schmuck could keep getting away with stomping on everyone. All the kids were sure he was skimming off milk money for himself. By all rights, he should have been hauled into the principal's office a hundred times since school started.