The Beast with 1000 Eyes (6 page)

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Authors: Laura Dower

BOOK: The Beast with 1000 Eyes
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“Osu?”
“Yes! Lots of osu!”
The second alert on my cell phone alarm went off.
“Oh! I have to go!” I said.
I pulled the amulet necklace over my head and pressed the elevator button.
“Keep the amulet close to you at all times,” San San said. “It will protect you.”
Just then the elevator doors opened. I hustled in.
“Kiiiya, Ninja!” San San called to me before the doors closed.
“Kiiiya!” I called back.
When I got back down to the lobby, I raced outside and headed for the karate studio. I felt badly that I'd missed a proper practice. After all, getting the black belt was supposed to be at the top of my “to do” list. But my time with San San was more important right now.
Walking along, I imagined the Eyeball Beast that I'd seen in the movie. My stomach flip-flopped at the thought of all those eyeballs. I kept my head down and my feet in fast forward all the way to Dojo.
Whooooooooooooo
. Was that the wind?
I stopped. “Hello?” I asked the night air.
Whooooooooooooo
. It was the wind.
“Hello?”
My nerves were tingling.
“Hello?” I called out a third time. “Is someone there? I mean it, if you're there please come out right away.”
Squooshy. Squooshy. Squooshy.
I looked to the left. I looked to the right. Hold on! The bushes were rustling! There was something here . . . something in the darkness . . .
Then I noticed a faint glow.
The amulet was warm. It was yellow.
Squoooooooooooosh.
Carefully, I leaned closer to the cluster of bushes near the sidewalk where I stood, and then I saw something incredible. There were little white dots of light inside that bush, peering back out at me like . . . eyeballs?
There was no time to think. I had to run, down the block, way past the bushes, all the way to Dojo Academy. It was the Eyeball Beast! For real!
When I flew into the karate studio, I thought I needed to explain what had happened and why I missed class. But Front Desk Lady was busy helping another family. So was Sensei. When Mom honked from outside, I simply flew back out the door.
All the way home, I looked for more eyeballs staring at me from between branches and bushes along the road, but I didn't see anything again.
I fingered the amulet for luck and kept it on as I slept. The way I figured it, San San's charm would protect me just in case that thing from the bushes showed up in my bedroom in the middle of the night.
The next day, when I dressed for school I kept the amulet on under my shirt. Maybe it would even bring me luck on my science quiz?
I couldn't wait for lunch period. I had soooo much to tell the squad.
Before I could say a word to the squad, however, Damon said, “Yo, what's with the eyeball necklace?”
The amulet was poking out from under my shirt. Lindsey saw it, too.
“Where'd you get
that
?” she asked.
I told the squad about my visit with San San and the amulet.
Then I told them about what I saw in the bushes.
“You saw the B-Monster? For real?” Damon squealed. “It could have been a cat.”
“Or fireflies,” said Jesse.
“Fireflies and cats don't go ‘squoooshy, squoooshy,'” I said.
“If you end up being right and the new B-Monster does turn out to be the Eyeball Beast, it'll be pretty impressive,” Damon said as he raised his palm for a high five. When I went to slap it, he pulled it away at the last second. “
If,
” he said.
I'd show him . . .
CHAPTER 8
GLOW AWAY!
I couldn't stop thinking about the Eyeball Beast. Would he show up at school? Would he put the student body into a trance?
During math, I got my answer.
My neck started feeling superhot.
My amulet started to glow again.
What was going on?
As soon as the bell rang, I leaped out of my chair. With one hand, I grabbed the back of Lindsey's sweater on the way out of the classroom. With the other hand, I shoved the necklace under my shirt.
“Meet me in the stairwell. Five minutes. Tell the others,” I said. I had to run out of there quickly before someone saw my neck light up like a Christmas tree. But by the time I got to the stairwell, the amulet was back to its dull state. No glow.
“Stella!” Lindsey came busting through the stairwell's steel doors. “What's so urgent?”
Damon and Jesse raced through the doors a moment after that.
I tried to act cool, like I knew
exactly
what was going on, even though I didn't have a clue.
Everyone examined the amulet for me. We passed it around. We all tried it on. It didn't change one bit.
“Why would the amulet start to glow?” Jesse asked aloud.
I thought about the movie and all the things we'd seen so far.
“Maybe it's trying to tell us something,” I suggested.
“That's it!” Jesse said. “The glow is a signal. Remember when we fought against Mega Mantis? All those little swarms of bugs would appear before the B-Monster came on the scene?”
We all nodded.
“B-Force!” Lindsey cried. “Of course! Sometimes there is a powerful energy before the B-Monster shows up. It shows itself in different ways. It could be lots of flying insects . . .”
“Or a glowing amulet!” I cried. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
“Wow,” I said. “San San told me that she got the eyeball amulet when she was making
The Beast with 1000 Eyes
. It was just a prop she took from the set. After that, it became her lucky charm. But I don't think she knew that it had the power to glow.”
The school bell rang loudly. A crew of kids pushed and shoved their way into the stairwell, jostling us as they traveled from their last class. School was over.
“Let's meet in front after school and figure this out,” I suggested. “We can stop over at Auntie San San's. Maybe she can help us figure out what makes the amulet glow.”
After school, we walked toward Riddle Towers. Lindsey noticed that the amulet's light kept getting brighter and brighter. That wasn't the only change.
“H-O-T!” I cried.
“What's the problem?” Jesse asked.
“How hot can it be?” Damon snapped.
I handed it to Damon but he could hardly handle it, either. It was like we were playing a game of hot potato.
“You hold it!”
“No, you hold it!”
Lindsey finally grabbed the amulet and shoved it inside her camera case.
“I'll hold it,” she declared. “Until we get to San San's.”
The Monster Squad turned off the main road and headed for a shortcut to the Riddle Towers parking lot. We passed by a fountain and a public garden and then the carousel in the park and we were about to cross over a little stream when Lindsey grabbed my shoulder.
“Stella! Did you see that?” she whispered.
I looked around. “See what?”
“Something in the bushes,” she said. “Do you think ...”
I looked over at a blooming bush. It shook a little bit.
Were
we being followed? The shaking bush started to shake a little bit more and more and then—
“RIT RACK!” something growled at us.
Lindsey and I froze in our tracks.
“Did you hear that?” I asked, but she couldn't say a word. Up ahead, the boys whirled around, too.
“RIVE RIT RACK!” the thing cried out again.
“What
is
that?” Jesse yelled.
“What is it saying?” Lindsey asked. She grabbed for her camera again, but when she unzipped the case, it flew open and the amulet landed on the sidewalk.
Now it was glowing so brightly, it looked like it had batteries inside.
“RIVE RIT RACK!” The noise came again.
The boys rushed back to us. “Let's go!” Jesse shrieked. “Fast!”
“RIVE RIT RACK!”
“What does it mean? What is it saying?” asked Lindsey.
“I don't know—but it's got to be the B-Force again!” I called out as I ran. “It's got to be the Eyeball Beast. He must be right here! The amulet glows brighter as it gets closer to us!”
The squad might not have been convinced yet that it was the Eyeball Beast following us. But I was. It had to be. Between the glowing amulet and my dream, it just fit together.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Damon asked.
“Move it!” I shouted. “Riddle Towers is right over there!”
CHAPTER 9
“RIVE RIT RACK!”
San San's apartment building lobby was empty when we ran inside.
The doorman was not at his post.
I pressed the UP button and waited nervously. I figured that, at any moment, the Eyeball Beast would come bursting through those beautiful glass doors! I sent San San a text message: We're on our way up. Open the door!
When the elevator opened on the penthouse floor, San San was waiting. “Quick! Inside! All of you!” She led us inside and triple-quadruple-locked the door behind her.
“Whoa! Look at this place!” Lindsey cried when she saw all the art on the walls and photographs on the tables. Lindsey snapped off the lens cap on her camera and took a few photos. Even in the midst of a B-Monster crisis, that girl had her camera ready.
“What's going on?” San San asked.
“It's amazing. You guys really do look exactly alike,” Lindsey said as she snapped a photo of San San and me.
I guess movie star looks just run in my family.
“Why are you all out of breath?” San San asked.
“Something large and scary sounding was chasing us down Main Street,” Damon said.
“What?! What did it look like?” she asked.
“We never got to see it,” Lindsey answered.
I pulled the amulet out of my jeans pocket. It wasn't glowing anymore.
I held it up and asked my aunt, “Where did you get this . . .
exactly
?”
“I told you. It was a prop in the movie,” she explained. “I used it for a good luck charm.”
“How come you never told me that it glowed?” I asked.
“I never knew! It glows?” she asked.
“The amulet glows at certain times,” Jesse said. “And its temperature rises, too.”
“It gets hot? I've had that for years,” San San explained. “It never glowed or got hot for me . . .”
“Never?” I asked. “Ever?”
“Oh dear! I never should have taken it! Give it back to me now and I'll make sure that it gets thrown away—”
“No,” I said, holding up the amulet. “We need this charm more now than ever! I think this amulet may be a way to help lead us directly to the Eyeball Beast!”
Jesse explained calmly. “On the way over here, we heard these crazy sounds coming out of a row of bushes,” he said. “At the same time, the amulet started to glow like crazy. It was as if the glowing stone and the sound from the bushes were connected.”
“Then the beast started to scream at us,” Damon said.
San San looked confused. “You
heard
the beast speak?”
She grabbed the scrapbook from
The Beast with 1000 Eyes
and flipped through the pages as if she were looking for clues.
“Oswald Leery never finished the film,” San San explained. “But there was a full script. I have it right here.”
She fingered through the script.
“Aha!” San San cried.
She read from a scene that had never been filmed. In the director's notes, there was a line: As the monster runs through the streets, the loose eyeball should glow.
“So it
was
B-Force!” Jesse cried.
“Hey, I'd want my eyeball back, too, if it fell out,” Lindsey said.
Great Auntie San San sat on one of her sofas and placed her face into her hands. “I'm so sorry, kids. Did all this start when I gave you the amulet, Stella?”
I shook my head. “No. Someone must have screened the original reel of
The Beast with 1000 Eyes
,” I explained. “Was it
you
, Auntie San San?”
San San shook her head. “No, no, it wasn't me Stella. I never had a copy of that movie.”
All of a sudden, my jeans pocket felt warm. The amulet inside began to burn hotter and hotter. I yanked it out. It was glowing even more brightly than before.
“Egads!” Great Auntie San San said. “It really is alive!”
“The monster must be close,” Jesse said.

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