The road sloped uphill. Marty and I leaned forward as we climbed. The frightening cries and howls followed us up the hill.
As we neared the top, I saw several low buildings.
“Yes!” I cried. “Marty — look! We must be heading back to the main platform.” I started jogging toward the buildings. Marty trotted close behind.
We both stopped when we realized where we were.
Back on Shock Street.
Somehow we had made a circle.
Past the old houses and small shops, The Shock Street Cemetery came into view. Staring at the fence, I remembered the green hands poking up from the ground. The green shoulders. The green faces. The hands pulling us, pulling us down.
My whole body shuddered.
I didn’t want to be back here. I never wanted to see this terrifying street again.
But I couldn’t turn away from the cemetery. As I stared at the old gravestones from across the street, I saw something move.
A wisp of gray. Like a tiny cloud.
It rose up between two crooked, old stones. Floated silently into the air.
And then another puff of gray lifted off the ground. And another.
I glimpsed Marty. He stood beside me, hands pressed against his waist, staring hard. He saw them, too.
The gray puffs rose silently, like snowballs or cotton. Dozens of them, floating up from the graves.
Floating over the cemetery and out over the street.
Floating above Marty and me. Hovering so low.
And then as we stared up at them, they started to grow. To inflate, like gray balloons.
And I saw faces inside them. Dark faces, etched in shadow like The Man in The Moon. The faces scowled at us. Old faces, lined and creased. Eyes narrowed to dark slits. Frowning faces. Sneering faces inside the billowing, white puffs.
I grabbed Marty’s shoulder. I wanted to run, to get away, to get out from under them.
But, like smoke, the wisps of mist with their evil faces swirled down, swirled around us. Trapped us. Trapped us inside.
The faces, the ugly, scowling faces, spinning around us. Spinning faster, faster, holding us in the swirling, choking mist.
I pressed my hands over my eyes, trying to shut them out.
I froze in total panic. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe.
I could hear the shrill rush of wind as the ghostly clouds swirled around us.
And then I heard a man’s voice, shouting over the wind: “Cut! Print that one! Good scene, everyone!”
I lowered my hands slowly and opened my eyes. I let out my breath in a long whoosh.
A man came striding up to Marty and me. He wore jeans and a gray sweatshirt under a brown leather jacket. He had a blue-and-white Dodgers cap sideways on his head. A blond ponytail tumbled out from under it.
He carried a clipboard in one hand. He had a silver whistle around his neck. He smiled at Marty and me and flashed us a thumbs-up.
“Hey, what’s up, guys? I’m Russ Denver. Good job! You looked really scared.”
“Huh?” I cried, my mouth dropping open. “We were really scared!”
“I’m so glad to see a real live human!” Marty cried.
“This tour — it’s totally messed up!” I shrieked. “The creatures — they’re alive! They tried to hurt us! They really did! It wasn’t any fun! It wasn’t like a ride!” The words spilled out of me in a rush.
“It was really gross! The werewolves snapped at us and chased us up a wall!” Marty exclaimed.
The two of us started talking at once, telling this guy Denver all of the frightening things that had happened to us on the tour.
“Whoa! Whoa!” A smile crossed his handsome face. He raised his clipboard as if to shield himself from us. “It’s all special effects, guys. Didn’t they explain to you that we’re making a movie here? That we were filming your reactions?”
“No. No one explained that, Mr. Denver!” I replied angrily. “My dad brought us here. He designed the studio tour. And he told us we were the first to try it out. But he didn’t tell us about any movie being filmed. I really think —”
I felt Marty’s hand on my shoulder. I knew Marty was trying to calm me down. But I didn’t want to be calmed down.
I was really angry.
Mr. Denver turned back to a group of crew members behind him in the street. “Take thirty, guys. Let’s break for dinner.”
They moved away, talking among themselves. Mr. Denver turned back to us. “Your father should have explained to you —”
“It’s okay. Really,” Marty interrupted. “We just got a little scared. All of the creatures seemed so real. And we didn’t see any other people anywhere. You’re the first real person we’ve seen all afternoon.”
“My dad must be really worried,” I told the movie director. “He said he’d be waiting for us on the main platform. Can you tell us how to get there?”
“No problem,” Mr. Denver replied. “See that big house there with the open door?” He pointed with his clipboard.
Marty and I stared at the house across the street. A narrow path led up to the house. A pale yellow light shone inside the open front door.
“That’s Shockro’s House of Shocks,” the director explained. “Go right in that door and straight through the house.”
“But won’t we get shocked in there?” Marty demanded. “In the movie, anyone who goes into Shockro’s house gets jolted with twenty million volts of electricity!”
“That’s just in the movie,” Mr. Denver replied. “The house is just a set. It’s perfectly safe. Go through the house. Then out the back, and you will see the main building on the other side of the street. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you!” Marty and I called out at once.
Marty turned and started running full speed toward the house.
I turned back to Mr. Denver. “I’m sorry for yelling before,” I told him. “I was just so scared, and I thought —”
I gasped.
Mr. Denver had turned away. And I saw the long power cord — the power cord that was plugged into his back.
He wasn’t a real human. He wasn’t a movie director. He was some kind of robot.
He was fake like all the others. He was lying to us. Lying!
I turned and cupped my hands around my mouth. I started to run, frantically calling after Marty: “Don’t go in there! Marty — stop! Don’t go in that house!”
Too late.
Marty was already running through the door.
“Marty — wait! Stop!” I shouted as I ran.
I had to stop him.
The director was a fake. I knew he wasn’t telling the truth.
“Marty — please!”
My bare feet pounded the hard pavement. I plunged up the path as Marty trotted into the doorway.
“Stop!”
I flew to the doorway. Reached out both hands. Made a wild dive to tackle him.
And missed.
I skidded across the walk on my stomach.
As soon as Marty entered the house, I saw the flash of white light. I heard a loud buzz. Then the sharp crackle of electricity.
The room exploded in a flash of lightning. So bright I had to shield my eyes.
When I opened them, I saw Marty sprawled facedown on the floor. “Nooooo!” I let out a terrified wail.
Scrambling to my feet, I dove into the house.
Would I get shocked, too?
I didn’t care. I had to get to Marty. I had to help him out of there.
“Marty! Marty!” I screamed his name again and again.
He didn’t move.
“Marty — please!” I grabbed his shoulders and started to shake him. “Wake up, Marty! Snap out of it! Marty!”
He didn’t open his eyes.
I suddenly felt a chill. A dark shadow slid over me.
And I realized I wasn’t alone in the house.
I spun around with a gasp.
Was it Shockro? Some other scary creature?
/>
A tall figure leaned over me. I squinted into the darkness, struggling to see his face.
“Dad!” I cried as he came into focus. “Dad! Oh, I’m so glad to see you!”
“Erin, what are you doing here?” he asked in a low voice.
“It — it’s Marty!” I stammered. “You’ve got to help him, Dad. He’s been shocked and he — he —”
Dad leaned closer. Behind his eyeglasses, his brown eyes were cold. His face set in a troubled frown.
“Do something, Dad!” I pleaded. “Marty is hurt. He isn’t moving. He won’t open his eyes. The studio tour was so awful, Dad! Something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong!”
He didn’t reply. He leaned closer.
And as his face came into the soft light, I saw that he wasn’t my father!
“Who are you?” I shrieked. “You’re not my dad! Why aren’t you helping me? Why aren’t you helping Marty? Do something — please! Where’s my dad? Where is he? Who are you? Help me! Somebody? Help me AAAAAARRRRRRRRR. Help MRRRRRRRRRRRR. Dad — MARRRRRRRRRRRRRR. DRRRMMMMMMMMmmmmm.”
Mr. Wright stood staring down at Erin and Marty. He shook his head unhappily. He shut his eyes and let out a long sigh.
Jared Curtis, one of the studio engineers, came running into The House of Shocks. “Mr. Wright, what happened to your two kid robots?” he demanded.
Mr. Wright sighed again. “Programming problems,” he muttered.
He pointed to the Erin robot, frozen in place on her knees beside the Marty robot. “I had to shut the girl off. Her memory chip must be bad. The Erin robot was supposed to think of me as her father. But just now, she didn’t recognize me.”
“And what about the Marty robot?” Jared asked.
“It’s totally down,” Mr. Wright replied. “I think the electrical system shorted out.”
“What a shame,” Jared said, bending to roll the Marty robot over. He pulled up the T-shirt and fiddled with some dials on the back. “Hey, Mr. Wright, it was a great idea to make robot kids to test the park. I think we can fix them.”
Jared opened up a panel on Marty’s back and squinted at the red and green wires. “All the other creatures, and monsters, and robots worked perfectly. Not a single bug.”
“I should have known there was a problem yesterday,” Mr. Wright said. “We were in my office. The Erin robot asked about her mother. I built her. She doesn’t have a mother.”
Mr. Wright tossed up his hands. “Oh, well. No problem. We’ll reprogram these two. Put in new chips. They’ll be good as new in no time. Then we’ll try them out once again on the Shocker Studio Tour, before we open the park to real kids.”
He took the Marty robot from Jared and slung it over his shoulder. Then he picked up the Erin robot. He tossed it over his other shoulder. Then, humming to himself, he carried them to the engineering building.
I went invisible for the first time on my twelfth birthday.
It was all Whitey’s fault, in a way. Whitey is my dog. He’s just a mutt, part terrier, part everything else. He’s all black, so of course we named him Whitey.
If Whitey hadn’t been sniffing around in the attic …
Well, maybe I’d better back up a bit and start at the beginning.
My birthday was on a rainy Saturday. It was a few minutes before kids would start arriving for my birthday party, so I was getting ready.
Getting ready means brushing my hair.
My brother is always on my case about my hair. He gives me a hard time because I spend so much time in front of the mirror brushing it and checking it out.
The thing is, I just happen to have great hair. It’s very thick and sort of a golden brown, and just a little bit wavy. My hair is my best feature, so I like to make sure it looks okay.
Also, I have very big ears. They stick out a lot. So I have to keep making sure that my hair covers my ears. It’s important.
“Max, it’s messed up in back,” my brother, Lefty, said, standing behind me as I studied my hair in the front hall mirror.
His name is really Noah, but I call him Lefty because he’s the only left-handed person in our family. Lefty was tossing a softball up and catching it in his left hand. He knew he wasn’t supposed to toss that softball around in the house, but he always did it anyway.
Lefty is two years younger than me. He’s not a bad guy, but he has too much energy. He always has to be tossing a ball around, drumming his hands on the table, hitting something, running around, falling down, leaping into things, wrestling with me. You get the idea. Dad says that Lefty has ants in his pants. It’s a dumb expression, but it sort of describes my brother.
I turned and twisted my neck to see the back of my hair. “It is not messed up, liar,” I said.
“Think fast!” Lefty shouted, and he tosssed the softball at me.
I made a grab for it and missed. It hit the wall just below the mirror with a loud thud. Lefty and I held our breath, waiting to see if Mom heard the sound. But she didn’t. I think she was in the kitchen doing something to the birthday cake.
“That was dumb,” I whispered to Lefty. “You almost broke the mirror.”
“You’re dumb,” he said. Typical.
“Why don’t you learn to throw right-handed? Then maybe I could catch it sometimes,” I told him. I liked to tease him about being left-handed because he really hated it.
“You stink,” he said, picking up the softball.
I was used to it. He said it a hundred times a day. I guess he thought it was clever or something.
He’s a good kid for a ten-year-old, but he doesn’t have much of a vocabulary.
“Your ears are sticking out,” he said.
I knew he was lying. I started to answer him, but the doorbell rang.
He and I raced down the narrow hallway to the front door. “Hey, it’s my party!” I told him.
But Lefty got to the door first and pulled it open.
My best friend, Zack, pulled open the screen door and hurried into the house. It was starting to rain pretty hard, and he was already soaked.
He handed me a present, wrapped in silver paper, raindrops dripping off it. “It’s a bunch of comic books,” he said. “I already read ’em. The X-Force graphic novel is kind of cool.”
“Thanks,” I said. “They don’t look too wet.”
Lefty grabbed the present from my hand and ran into the living room with it. “Don’t open it!” I shouted. He said he was just starting a pile.
Zack took off his Red Sox cap, and I got a look at his new haircut. “Wow! You look … different,” I said, studying his new look. His black hair was buzzed real short on the left side. The rest of it was long, brushed straight to the right.
“Did you invite girls?” he asked me, “or is it just boys?”
“Some girls are coming,” I told him. “Erin and April. Maybe my cousin Debra.” I knew he liked Debra.
He nodded thoughtfully. Zack has a real serious face. He has these little blue eyes that always look faraway, like he’s thinking hard about something. Like he’s real deep.
He’s sort of an intense guy. Not nervous. Just keyed up. And very competitive. He has to win at everything. If he comes in second place, he gets really upset and kicks the furniture. You know the kind.
“What are we going to do?” Zack asked, shaking the water off his Red Sox cap.
I shrugged. “We were supposed to be in the backyard. Dad put the volleyball net up this morning. But that was before it started to rain. I rented some movies. Maybe we’ll watch them.”
The doorbell rang. Lefty appeared again from out of nowhere, pushed Zack and me out of the way, and made a dive for the door. “Oh, it’s you,” I heard him say.
“Thanks for the welcome.” I recognized Erin’s squeaky voice. Some kids call Erin “Mouse” because of that voice, and because she’s tiny like a mouse. She has short, straight blond hair, and I think she’s cute, but of course I’d never tell anyone that.
“Can we come in?” I recognized April?
??s voice next. April is the other girl in our group. She has curly black hair and dark, sad eyes. I always thought she was really sad, but then I figured out that she’s just shy.
“The party’s tomorrow,” I heard Lefty tell them.
“Huh?” Both girls uttered cries of surprise.
“No, it isn’t,” I shouted. I stepped into the doorway and shoved Lefty out of the way. I pushed open the screen door so Erin and April could come in. “You know Lefty’s little jokes,” I said, squeezing my brother against the wall.
“Lefty is a little joke,” Erin said.
“You’re stupid,” Lefty told her. I pressed him into the wall a little harder, leaning against him with all my weight. But he ducked down and scooted away.
“Happy birthday,” April said, shaking the rain from her curly hair. She handed me a present, wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper. “It’s the only paper we had,” she explained, seeing me staring at it.
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” I joked. The present felt like a CD.
“I forgot your present,” Erin said.
“What is it?” I asked, following the girls into the living room.
“I don’t know. I haven’t bought it yet.”
Lefty grabbed April’s present out of my hand and ran to put it on top of Zack’s present in the corner behind the couch.
Erin plopped down on the white leather ottoman in front of the armchair. April stood at the window, staring out at the rain.
“We were going to barbecue hot dogs,” I said.
“They’d be pretty soggy today,” April replied.
Lefty stood behind the couch, tossing his softball up and catching it one-handed.
“You’re going to break that lamp,” I warned him.
He ignored me, of course.
“Who else is coming?” Erin asked.
Before I could answer, the doorbell rang again. Lefty and I raced to the door. He tripped over his own sneakers and went skidding down the hall on his stomach. So typical.
By two-thirty everyone had arrived, fifteen kids in all, and the party got started. Well, it didn’t really get started because we couldn’t decide what to do. I wanted to watch a Terminator movie. But the girls wanted to play Twister.