***
Later that day, Jake stood on the carpet and thought about the library book that Caleb had found. A swaying sensation filled his stomach and a quick glance down confirmed that the carpet had lifted him into the air. Jake felt a little wobbly, but he was able to stay up. He mentally thanked Seiya and Hillary for the skateboard lessons which had helped with his balance.
“That’s the one, huh?” Jake said triumphantly.
The separate images of flying and the book took turns coming into the consciousness of his mind’s eye.
“We think that the stone tablets might be something that Sinbad wrote. So, I guess that means that the legends of Sinbad are real – weird huh?”
The carpet floated around the room lazily as Jake talked.
“I told some others about you, I hope that’s ok.” There was no reaction from the carpet, so Jake assumed that it was fine. He sat down on the carpet and continued to talk while it continued to loop slowly around the room at different heights.
He told it about Caleb and Maiya and how nice it was to have their help.
“You know, if it weren’t for what you did, I don’t think I’d have friends. I mean Hillary only started talking to me after she saw us flying on Halloween.”
An image of Jake and Abel in the principal’s office came into his mind.
“Well, yeah, I guess she did do that before seeing us fly. Maybe she would have been my friend anyway. It doesn’t matter. I have you.” He traced his finger along some of the gold trim that made up the tree on the center.
“You know, Hillary said the weirdest thing - that when we went after those bullies, I really looked like a ghost. That was you, wasn’t it? You can do different powerful things?” Jake felt dumb asking that. Of course the carpet could do powerful things. It could fly and communicate with him - duh! But what else could it do?
“Will you teach me?” Jake asked.
The image of the library book came back into his mind, and Jake suddenly understood why he needed it.
“Oh,” Jake exclaimed, “hey, let me go and see if I can find another copy. The library can’t be the only place that has it. Maybe I can buy it from somewhere.”
The carpet effortlessly glided down to the floor and Jake said, “Ok, I’ll check online and be back when I find anything out.” He jumped up and ran out of the room.
The search was worthless and Jake went to bed early. In the middle of the night, Jake pulled out of a deep sleep aware of two things; one, that he had been drooling on his pillow (embarrassing, but at least no was around to see it) and two, that a faint scratching sound was coming from his window sill.
Scratch, scratch, scratch, and this time a scuttle, scuttle, scuttle.
Jake looked through slitted eyes toward the sound.
What is that?
He peered deeply into the darkness and could faintly see an object make its way from the window, then slowly begin to climb down the wall. Lying still, he tried to think. It was too big to be a spider and too small to be a rat. He looked over at his desk; the alarm clock read 3:30 am.
What should I do?
Without an idea in his head to go with, he did nothing, just watched the object get closer and closer to the floor. When it touched down, it suddenly emitted a red laser beam. The light shone under the bed, into the closet, and then it hovered on Jake for a few moments.
Should I snore?
Before he could make up his mind, the red light moved on, back to searching, while the object crawled around the room making eerie clicking sounds.
Jake saw a wide mouth glass jar sitting on his desk. He normally kept change in it, but fortunately Jake had emptied it earlier that day to buy treats from the Gas-N-Guzzle. As the thing continued searching, the light began to get dimmer, like batteries wearing down in a flashlight. The object scuttled forward, waving a weakened laser point on everything a second time.
Jake breathed out and silently counted to three. Then he jumped up, grabbed the jar and covered the object with it. Seemingly too weak to move, the thing in the jar lay still. Jake switched on a lamp and then looked at the object that he had captured. It was a scorpion, at least, it had the body of a scorpion, but it had been outfitted with a metal casing on top.
Is that real, or some sort of device?
Carefully, Jake slid part of an old shoebox under the jar. The scorpion legs began to twitch as they walked over the cardboard. Jake ran over to his desk and rummaged in a drawer until he found the lid. In a quick motion, Jake flipped the contents upside down and traded the cardboard for the lid and tightly screwed it on.
The red light on the scorpion blinked on and off and, now that it was secure, Jake took a good look at it. The metal on the scorpion was some sort of computerized body suit of armor. Jake turned the jar over to examine it from another angle.
Something about it was really disturbing. The pincers and eyes. The tail thrashing about. More than that though, it was the pulsating pattern of the blinking red light on the metal suit.
Jake left it on his desk and tried to go back to sleep, but the red light just kept flashing.
Blink…blink…blink…blink.
He wasn’t sure what to do, so he got up and threw a jacket over the jar and returned to his bed.
14. The Teacher’s Gift
After Thanksgiving break, Jake got to his history class early so that he could talk to Mr. Lewis.
“Mr. Lewis, I…um,” Jake cleared his throat, and the teacher glanced up, “I’ve been looking for something and I wondered if you knew where I can find it.”
“What is it, Mr. Bowers?” The teacher said as he looked back down at his papers.
“Well, I need to find a book. It’s really rare, and I can’t seem to find it for less than a small fortune anywhere on the internet.”
“Hmmm…” said the teacher.
“You mentioned it in one of your lectures, Sinbad’s Record: Early Methods of Document Preservation?”
“Yes, yes I did,” Mr. Lewis was distracted by the course of the conversation.
“Well, I’m doing a little research into flying carpets and I need a copy. Do you know where I can find one?”
At that, the teacher stared at Jake for a long time. Then he looked around and noticed other students slowly filing into the room.
“See me after class,” the teacher whispered. Then he motioned for Jake to sit down while he stood and began to stretch, but paused and said, “One more thing, Jake. Your report the other day was terrible. I expect you to re-do the assignment. It is very important that you take this ancestry work seriously. You need to delve in and find out where you are from.”
The bell rang and Mr. Lewis began to pass out papers to the quiet din of students talking and joking around.
“So, I asked Mr. Lewis about the book,” Jake told Hillary and Caleb.
“What did he say?” Hillary asked.
“We’re going to talk about it after class.”
“Oh, Jake, I saved this for you.” Hillary pulled out a package of cream-filled Skoopie Doopie cakes.
“Wow, thanks,” Jake said, “Hey, Caleb, do you want one?”
Caleb looked over at the Skoopie cakes and turned up his nose. “Those are almost entirely made up of high fructose corn syrup and lard.”
Jake looked down, shrugged his shoulders and with added flourish, popped the whole thing into his mouth. Caleb winced.
“Oh, and I forgot to tell you something,” Jake said through a mouthful of cake, “Friday night, this weird scorpion-thing came into my room. I think it was looking for something.”
“Was it looking for the carpet?” asked Caleb and Hillary in unison.
“I thought so, too, but when I looked the next morning, it wasn’t anywhere in my room.”
He was relishing the look of shock on his friend’s faces and then noticed that their teacher was standing over them, frozen and white-faced. Jake looked awkward
ly between Hillary, Caleb and the teacher.
“It’s okay though,” Jake said to try and calm everyone, especially Mr. Lewis, “my little sister took the carpet into her room, so I found it right after I woke up … she likes to drag it around.”
The teacher blinked several times and then fixed an exasperated stare on Jake.
“Students, I’ll be back in a moment, please read the beginning of chapter twelve in your textbooks.” Then Mr. Lewis muttered to himself as he walked out of the classroom, “which I’m sure none of you will do, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.”
“Jake,” Caleb said, “What exactly did the scorpion look like?”
“Well, it was in the middle of the night, so I thought it was a spider at first –”
“Spiders and scorpions are in the same family, Arachnida, joint-legged invertebrate animals with eight legs, but I digress,” Caleb adjusted his glasses. “You said that this one was weird, why?”
“I know that sounds strange, but there was a red light coming from it.”
“Both biological and artificial parts … like a cyborg-scorpion?” Caleb was staring at the open classroom window, “Did it have a metallic body?”
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“Was the metal a dark glossy gray?”
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“Was there a red light across the third body panel?”
“Um… yes,” Jake and Hillary looked at each other, “how did you know?”
“Oh, because there’s one crawling into the classroom through the window right now,” Caleb said with no emotion.
“What?” Jake and Hillary jumped out of their desks, but not before Tabitha shrieked.
“YUCK!!! What is that?”
The scorpion jumped from the window sill and glided onto the desk of the screaming girl, and a red light scanned her face. Then the arachnid moved from Tabitha’s desk and began to scan other students. The class was in complete chaos. Tabitha was in the corner screaming and crying, her friends huddled around trying to calm her down.
“It… j-j-just came at me…” she sobbed.
Students were screaming and running around the classroom. The scorpion scuttled up a row and then, with eerie precision, jumped onto another desk.
A few students circled around the scorpion.
“Dude!” Hakumele Wolfgramm drawled out the word.
Nic Patmos threw a pen at the arachnid, which bounced off the body. The scorpion jumped and thrust its tail forward, spraying out a green-tinged liquid at the boy’s face.
“Ouch, it stings, that’s sooo sick!” Nic said as he wiped his cheek with his shirt and the scorpion began to move around the desk making slow circles while taking scans of the students. If anyone came close it would thrash its tail menacingly.
“What is going on here?” Mr. Lewis called from the back of the door. It took the teacher two seconds to sum up the bedlam.
“Out of the way,” he shouted as he ripped off his leather loafer and ran toward the desk. He began to beat the scorpion with his shoe, first hitting the stinger, then the body intermittently with the hard heel of his shoe.
“Whoa! Mr. Lewis,” said Nic Patmos in awe.
The teacher kept beating at the arachnid, but it only aggravated the situation. Suddenly, it jumped at the teacher’s face, but Mr. Lewis dodged away. The scorpion fell to the ground, and then quickly began to scuttle around the room, pointing the red light on different students, looking for someone.
“Everybody get back!” The teacher ordered as he sprinted over to his desk.
The scorpion stopped in front of Jake, Caleb, and Hillary and began to scan the three of them with the red light.
“Mr. L..L..ewis?” Hillary gasped.
“Hold still,” the teacher called. He opened his desk drawer and whipped out an ornate dagger.
“Whoa!” the kids in the class were in awe of their teacher’s weapon.
Mr. Lewis knocked over two desks as he hurtled them to get to the scorpion, which, by this time, was zoning in on Jake. In a flash, the teacher used the dagger to flip the arachnid onto its back. Then, like a carefully trained chef, he diced up the soft underside of the scorpion which oozed out puss and blood. The body began to shake and the tail, now bent out of shape, rose up and splattered the green-liquid onto Jake’s pants.
“EW!!” The collective class groaned.
The teacher stood and used the back of his hand to mop sweat off his forehead. Then he adjusted his glasses, took in a deep breath and slowly stated, “We will be finishing class in the library today.”
The shaken students began to gather up their belongings and each group of kids had the same basic conversation.
“What was that thing?”
“I know, can you believe it?”
“Who knew that Mr. Lewis was so cool!”
The teacher was completely unaware that his students were actually praising him. He simply walked to the back of the classroom, grabbed a book off one of the shelves and threw it to Jake.
“I believe you are looking for this book,” Mr. Lewis said with a tired smile. “It’s on loan now, like the library. As you know, this is a very rare book.”
Jake read the embossed golden writing, Sinbad’s Record: Early Methods of Document Preservation.
“Wow!” It was the only thing that Jake could think of to say.
Mr. Lewis cleared his throat.
“Jake,” his teacher took on a very serious tone, “there are some things that I’m sure you want to talk over with me. There are a number of things that I need to tell you, but unfortunately, this afternoon is not the proper time for our discourse. I have to take care of some pressing matters.”
He pointed at the dead scorpion.
“For now,” he continued, “you must do your research.” He nodded toward the book. “Both this and your —”
“Ancestry report,” Jake cut him off.
“Yes,” Mr. Lewis said with a nod and a slight, weary smile, “so, you have listened.”
“I’m just not sure why it’s so important. I mean, come on Mr. Lewis, it’s just an assign—”
“Jake, I wish I had more time. Just trust me, and be very careful with both items in your possession.”