Attack of the Spider Bots Read Free Page A

caught up with her. Godzilla roared again, and they leaped into the tunnel with a chorus of screams.
    Once more they made like hunchbacks running through the tunnel. Afraid that any moment they’d see the “eye” of the locomotive coming toward them, they finally resorted to running on all fours. They made it back to their tunnel exit just as they heard the locomotive screech around the bend.
    With enough relief that their legs wobbled, they retraced their way through the caves, following the rocket-shaped symbols they’d scratched into the rock walls at each turn. At one point, they again heard the clank that had drawn their attention in the first place.
    â€œDid you guys hear any clanking at the train set?” Beamer asked.
    â€œNot even a clink ,” Ghoulie answered, shaking his head.
    â€œMe neither, now that you mention it,” said Scilla.
    They gave each other long looks and then glanced once more toward the sound. “Come on,” Beamer said as he lurched back toward their familiar exit. “One mystery at a time.”
    Following their usual route home, they climbed the rock steps out of the caves and cut through a greenhouse filled with glowing plants and birds and into Ms. Parker’s strange garden. It didn’t look so weird now, covered with snow. There was no sign of its usual population of carnivorous plants, crawling vines, and giant flowers . Finally, they escaped through the side gate which, though no longer broken, was now always left unlocked.

    Snow was one of the few things about this world called Middleton that Beamer liked better than his old home. It never snowed in L.A. Oh, you could see it in the distance, but you had to drive up to the mountains to touch it. Living with snow day after day was something else. Here you could step out your door and play in it all kinds of ways. He couldn’t understand why adults complained so much about it. So they had to do a little shoveling along the sidewalk and driveway now and then. But for kids, snow was great. If it snowed hard or long enough, you’d even get out of school once in a while.
    Unfortunately, the snow wasn’t going to tell Beamer anything about the person who had built that incredible train set.This was too big of a mystery to ignore. A few questions to the neighbors got Beamer started. Mrs. Ringwald, the red-headed woman who wore glasses the size of a small bicycle, had a reputation for keeping up on all the neighborhood gossip. She told him that Ms. Parker had a strange brother named Solomon. Beamer wasn’t sure what she meant by “strange,” except that she rolled her eyes when she said his name.
    Beamer’s next step was to check him out on the Internet. The Middleton newspaper’s online archives recorded that a “Solomon Parker” had opened a trolley company long before Beamer’s parents were born.
    Beamer found a picture of a trolley on the Internet. It looked pretty much like a bus. But then he noticed that it had poles on top leading to a grid of wires strung above the street. So it ran on electricity , thought Beamer. But what happened if the driver turned left when the wires went right? That was when he noticed that trolley wheels looked something like train wheels. Then he realized that a trolley could only go where the tracks let it go, like a train. Beamer took this to be a pretty good sign that Solomon Parker had something to do with the train set.
    The big question, then, was why Mr. Parker had left the train set running but abandoned all these years. That proved harder to answer than Beamer expected. For one thing, neither Mrs. Ringwald nor Mr. Springer, who’d been Ms. Parker’s gardener for years, knew where Mr. Parker lived. For another, his phone number was unlisted, and his official mailing addresses included the trolley station and a post office box. At least that is what Ghoulie had discovered. All three were in Beamer’s bedroom,