There's a Spaceship in My Tree! (14 page)

“Jared!” Beamer and Scilla cried together, both lunging for him. But Jared merely flung Scilla down and stepped aside, allowing Beamer to plunge past him and across a table.

The windy noise outside had become much louder. Suddenly Jared's laughter choked off. A thick cloud of insects swarmed in the door. They seemed to ignore Beamer and Scilla — but not Jared.

“Get away!” he yowled, swatting at them. He spun around, slashing about wildly, and tripped out the door.

Outside, Jared found himself in a hurricane of insects — flying, jumping crickets, grasshoppers, katydids — hundreds of them — swarming around the yelping, swatting gang. They were pouring out of the balloon as if it was a cosmic black hole — a leaping, chirping, buzzing, furious barrage. And from every side, more came to join them. The tree was becoming one huge insect world.

Ghoulie, meanwhile, was gleefully recording every delicious detail of Jared's distress, zooming in for spicy close-ups, pulling back for wide-angle panoramas of this classic Kid vs. Bug Battle.

The balloon, having dropped its leaf and bug avalanche, billowed out. Now real balloons — the helium filled ones that had actually been holding up the sheet balloon — started spilling out from beneath the edge of the sheet. They flew up toward the cloudy sky, popping and exploding with all the noise of a fireworks display as they struck sharp twigs and pieces of bark.

Last of all, the sheet, finally emptied of its balloons, floated down to land on top of the boys — bugs and all — pushing their panic level up still another notch. But their efforts to escape only got them wound up together in a squirming, sticky, seed-covered cluster. Then they fell — in one rolling, yelping mass — taking the express route into the safety net far below.

Still whimpering and pawing at insects, real and imagined, they wrestled their way out of the sheet, crawled to the edge of the net, and dropped to the ground.

“Come on!” Beamer shouted to Ghoulie as he and Scilla dropped out from beneath the tree ship in their rope-swinging transporter/elevator.

“How's the action, Spielberg?” Beamer asked Ghoulie.

“I think we've got a hit,” he answered, patting his camcorder proudly.

By the time they got to the street, Jared and his terrified flunkies were already halfway down the block. Ghoulie kept the camera rolling, taking one last long shot of the tattered remains of the Skullcross Gang.

By the time Ghoulie lowered his camera, Scilla had caught up with them. “We did it, y'all!” she shouted, breathing hard. “We did it!”

“You did most of it,” Beamer said, giving her an extra high-five.

“You're not kidding,” she threw back at him. “Hey! What took y'all so long, anyway?”

“A little miscalculation,” Ghoulie said, rolling his eyes.

“What I want to know, though, is where you got all those bugs? That was awesome!”

“Bugs? What are you talkin' about?” Scilla asked puzzled. “We didn't put in any bugs . . . did we?”

“I don't know,” Beamer shrugged. “Maybe the molasses attracted them or something.”

“Gimme a break!” Ghoulie protested, “There must have been thousands of bugs.”

“I told you,” Beamer said thoughtfully. “It's no ordinary tree.” He turned and looked back down Murphy Street. “And this is no ordinary street.”

The clouds parted to give the sun a last peek at the world before it dipped below the rooftops. A breeze ruffled through the leaves, making tap-dancing sounds as they brushed against each other. Beamer glanced at Parker's Castle. Already the lights were glowing in the deepening twilight. Standing in the third-story tower window was the same shadowy figure he had grown accustomed to seeing there.

“Jared won't be able to touch a Star-Fighter!” Ghoulie cheered. “Not after today.” He tapped his camera as he snapped it carefully into its case.

Beamer settled into the “V” between two branches and took out his meteor fragment.

Ghoulie plopped down beside him. “I think you're right. That meteor did do something radical to this tree. It made it into a self-contained world with its own ecosystem! And, what's more, that energy field seems to reject certain brainwave patterns — the ones that come from people that Ms. Parker said had ‘malice' in their hearts.”

“So you're saying that the tree thinks Jared is a germ and spits him out?”

“Sort of, but this is the really cool part: I think that people with matching brainwave patterns add to the energy in the field. That's how we get those way-out adventures.”

“The finger of God,” Beamer mumbled as he juggled the stone in his hand. “Yep, I don't know how or why, but God touched us through this little rock from another world.”

“One of those ‘mysterious ways,' huh,” Scilla chimed in.

“Yeah, I got a feelin' God's got all kinds of mysterious things happening all the time that nobody notices,” said Beamer.

“Well, we sure noticed!” exclaimed Scilla. “We've already got enough mysteries here on Murphy Street to keep us busy 'till we're at least twenty. Beat ya' to the ship!” she suddenly yelled at Ghoulie. She hadn't finished her sentence before she was scrambling up the tree, with Ghoulie branch-hopping right after her.

One thing was becoming clear. Beamer
had
gotten his wish. This beaten-up, wacky old corner of the world
was
his home — right here on Murphy Street. That falling star almost a hundred years ago had pointed it out for him as surely as if it had carved his name on the sidewalk. Okay, so other kids had lived here before him and maybe gotten the same message, but right now was Beamer's time . . . and Scilla's and Ghoulie's. Who knows? There might be other Star-Fighters out there, waiting to be discovered — or waiting to discover themselves.

“Ready to beam up, Captain?” Scilla's voice called from above.

“Yep,” he said.

A moment later the transporter — their pulley-driven rope elevator — appeared beside Beamer. He hopped aboard and called out, “Beam me up!” As he moved upward through the branches, he heard once again the buzzing of the insects. But something was different.
The crickets
, it suddenly occurred to him.
They're singing. The crickets are finally singing.

Character Bios

Priscilla Bruzelski:

Age: 12 / 6th grade, Hair/Eyes: dishwater-blonde/green, Height: 4'9”

“Scilla”
refuses to be called by her full name because it's too prissy for this tomboy. She is smaller than your average twelve-year-old, but she makes up for her small stature with a fiercely independent, feisty personality. She lives with her grandmother whom she was sent to live with when her single mother remarried. She has a half-brother named Dashiell who lives with her mother and her mother's new husband. Her grandmother takes her to church every Sunday out of tradition. Scilla loves climbing trees, football, basketball, and anything that's not girly. She doesn't get along with the popular girls at school, but she doesn't mind. She has strong opinions and will fight for what she believes is right.

Benson McIntyre:

Age: 13 / 7th grade, Hair/Eyes: short, wavy, sandy brown hair/blue, Height: 5'

“Beamer,”
named from the famous “Beam me up Scotty” line in
Star Trek
, has an interest in all things science fiction. He hates his given name, so don't call him Benson. You might get a response in wry, sarcastic humor from this energetic teenager. He recently moved with his family from Southern California to Middle America. He has a younger brother named Michael and an older sister named Erin. His father, referred to as “Mr. Mac,” is a theater director, and his mother is a pediatrician called “Dr. Mac.” He loves playing on the computer, likes keeping up with the times, and considers himself on the cutting edge. Coming from a strong Christian family, he analyzes all problems with deep spiritual thought. His love for science extends to his speech, as he often speaks in sci-fi space metaphors.

Garfunkel Ives:

Age: 12 / 7th grade, Hair/Eyes: black/brown, Height: 4'10”

“Ghoulie”
got his name from the wide-eyed look he makes when he is excited. He's an intelligent boy who skipped a grade. He's small for his age and is the typical nerd who loves gadgets and computers, which makes him fodder for bullies. The constant bullying makes him jaded and sarcastic, and he would love to get revenge on the bullies. His father is a successful CFO of a large corporation and his mother is a highly-respected lawyer. His parents have little time for a spiritual life — or him — and have left his upbringing to the nanny. His parents have also left him with an extensive computer and gadget collection which he loves to use to quench his thirst for scientific knowledge.

1

The Cave of the Beast

Becoming a teenager is like living in a sci-fi movie. You keep morphing into somebody else while emergencies are popping up all around you.

Case in point: Beamer tripped on the rock steps leading into their secret cave network. As Ghoulie figured out later, it was because Beamer's leg had morphed one-eighth inch longer than it had been the last time he climbed those steps. Then while Beamer was rubbing his scraped knee, Scilla picked up a faint noise. They listened until they heard a distant rumble and a repeating clank.

They called themselves Star-Fighters — Beamer, the exile from California; Ghoulie, the African-American brain trust; and Scilla, the girl who could do anything a boy could, only better. They got the name because of the spaceship they found high up in Beamer's tree. It didn't seem like much at first. After all, it was only a ramshackle wooden tree house shaped like a spaceship — no graphics card, no 3-D accelerator, nothing you could shove into an Xbox. But, hey! You know what they say about looks being deceiving. That broken-down plywood box had already taken them to places no kid has gone before. And, in the process, they were finding a lot of strange worlds right where they lived — that being an ancient, pothole-ridden lane, only one block long, named Murphy Street. This cave labyrinth was one of those weird worlds.

Up till now, though, they'd used the caves mostly as just a shortcut home from school. But an unexplained clank, Beamer thought, was a good reason to start some big-time exploring. After all, a rumble could be lots of things — an earthquake, rushing water, whatever. A clank, though, was something else. Nothing in nature clanked.

So they were off. Beamer and Ghoulie were following Scilla, who was holding a lamp to light the way. She tracked the clanking and rumbling sounds up, around, and through the winding, cobweb-infested network of caves beneath Murphy Street. Luckily there weren't that many bugs, rats, and mice in winter. As usual, Scilla led them to a dead end.

“Scillaaaaa!” Beamer complained, remembering the time Scilla had led them into a brick wall when they were being chased by Jared and his bully goons. Now they were facing an unmovable rock wall. Actually, it was a pretty interesting wall. Symbols and pictures had been scratched or painted all over it — Native American, he guessed.