The Beast with 1000 Eyes (3 page)

“Leery Castle is a tricky place,” Walter explained. “Down here, we have a complex series of hidden tunnels and pathways to take us to various rooms, laboratories, and storage compartments. There are more than two hundred rooms here.”

“Two hundred rooms?” Jesse cried.

“Whoa,” Damon said.

“Don't you get lost?” Lindsey asked.

“No, I have an office with television screens showing me key locations throughout the castle,” Walter said. “While Dr. Leery is away, I monitor all of them.”

“Hold up! You have Leery Castle TV monitors
everywhere
?” Damon gulped. “So last time we were here and I switched around those pictures on the wall . . .”

“Yes, Damon.” Walter made a face. “I saw it.”

“Or the time when I fed some larva crunch to Poe?”

“Saw it.”

I quickly scanned my memory for any weird things I might have done that could be caught on camera. As I suspected, there weren't any—wouldn't be very ninjalike of me, now would it?

“You are about to pass by some of our most top secret labs inside the castle. Watch your head, the ceilings get low in parts,” Walter cautioned as we proceeded down the corridor.

I ducked as we weaved our way, stopping to look at different doors along the hallway.

Lindsey stopped in front of a room that looked like an enormous fish tank. The sign out front said NO SWIMMING. Lindsey was excited at the prospect of going face-to-face with Octo-Blob. She loved those underwater B-Monsters.

But we kept moving.

Jesse got us all to stop at a door that felt cold and slimy. It was actually oozing a little bit around the edges. We knew right away what was in there: leeches! In fact, a small sign on the door gave it away: NOSALTATANYTIME. Of course, salt was a leech's worst enemy. In the classic
Space Leech
, scientists transport the leeches and abandon them on a planet made entirely of salt crystals.

A few feet away from the leeches, we saw a door that stretched up a full foot higher than Damon. This room was built for a giant! The door sign read BEWARE OF FUR BALLS.

“I bet Rodiak was here,” Damon said. “Whoa!” Rodiak was probably the biggest B-Monster ever, like some kind of mutant King Kong, only way furrier and with more teeth.

Walter stepped in and made sure the door to the Rodiak room was dead bolted.

“We don't want to open this one,” he warned. “In fact, I wouldn't recommend opening any of the doors without proper supervision. We do experiments in the rooms, but we cannot guarantee the results.”

I shuddered a little bit. The whole visit made me jumpy; not that I ever would have admitted my case of nerves to any of the other Monster Squadders.

Slowly, we continued down the hall, until I saw this sign:

“What's in here?” I asked.

Walter nodded and smiled. “Answers,” he said.

He reached into his pocket and produced a ring of at least fifty gold and silver keys. On the ring was a blue and white charm.

It looked exactly like an eyeball!

CHAPTER 3

GET SCARED

“Be very careful!” Walter commanded as he pushed open the door and flicked on the light.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

I screamed so loudly I thought my head might pop off.

Everyone else screamed, too.

Then I took a very big step backward.

The entire room was filled from floor to ceiling with eyeballs in jars.

“Can these eyeballs see me?” I asked Walter nervously.

“No,” Walter assured me. “It looks like the eyes can see you, but the eyes are nonfunctioning. They're in formaldehyde. We used them to create our own eyeball monster.”

“Talk about surveillance tactics,” Lindsey cracked.

Walter had shown us a few jars like this one other time when we battled Mega Mantis. He had some stored in the trunk of the Leery Castle limousine. But that was different. That time, I only saw four or maybe five jars.

There had to be at least four hundred jars in this room—each holding at least one pair of eyes if not more. That made almost one thousand individual eyes swimming around in stinky eye goop!

No matter what Walter said, they were
totally
looking right at me.

Every. Single. One.

“What exactly do you do with all these eyeballs?” Lindsey asked. She peered into one jar. Then Damon grabbed it and shook the jar like a snow globe.

“Don't!” Walter grabbed it back from him. The jar made a
squooshy
noise.

“You know,” Lindsey said. “It's like school in here.”

“How?” I asked.

“Too many pupils!”

Damon, Jesse, and even Walter cracked up. But I didn't. I was too busy searching for evidence that the Eyeball Beast was on his way.

“For years, we tested the eyeball's ability to blink, and transmit laser beams,” Walter explained as he led us around the room. “We tested weapons to destroy the eyeballs, too, but we stopped our research before finishing up
The Beast with 1000 Eyes
because we ran out of money
.
As far as Oswald Leery was concerned, the Beast with 1000 Eyes would never live to see another day once production was stopped . . .

“So you can imagine my surprise when you came to me with the notion that the Beast with 1000 Eyes is on the loose.”

“Where is the reel—the unfinished one?” Jesse asked.

“Oh my goodness,” Walter shook his head. “I'm not exactly sure what happened to the reel. That's a good question.”

Just then, an alarm sounded from a faraway part of the castle.

Walter flinched. “Oh dear!” he said. “I need to check that alarm. Lately it's been on the fritz. There are so many controls to manage in this castle! I'll be back in a jiffy. Try not to touch anything big, okay, Monster Squad?”

“Yeah, we know,” Lindsey joked. “You've got your
eyes
on us. Right?”

Walter sped out and left us in the half-dark eyeball room with the assortment of
squooshing
jars
.

“He's probably got security cameras filming us right now,” Damon groaned, searching the ceiling.

That place gave me the creeps. I gripped the top of a chair and repeated a mantra inside my head to keep my cool.

By mistake, I bonked the chair into a table. A jar rolled onto the floor. Thankfully, it didn't break, but the lid loosened and a little eyeball juice leaked all over the floor.

What a mess!

I grabbed a cloth hanging on the wall and wiped off my hands and the floor.

“Hey, look!” Lindsey cried. By moving the cloth, I'd revealed a poster on the wall. In fact there were posters all over the wall. With all the eyeballs competing for my attention, I'd missed the posters.

Teeny spotlights burned atop the frames. There were classic B posters like Damon's all-time fave,
Martian Mayhem
, and, of course,
Slimo
. There were some other, lesser-known film posters here, too, like
Beneath the Dirt
, a great, early B-Monster Studios movie about killer worms. And then there was a poster for the movie we all wanted to see.

I surveyed the art on the poster. It was the first time I'd really had a good look at the Eyeball Beast. He was nasty. Magenta-pink-skinned and covered (covered!) from head to toe in gross, bulging eyes. He even had eyes on his
heels
. . .

And he was chasing someone—none other than my Great Auntie San San!

CHAPTER 4

AS GROSS AS IT GETS

“Hey,” Lindsey called out. “Why don't we watch the movie? None of us have actually seen it. And I bet we'll learn more if we screen one of the copies. Walter must have a copy in the vault . . .”

“A movie screening is the best kind of research!” Jesse said.

“Okay,” I mumbled.

When Walter came back, we followed him toward the vault. He was sure there was a copy of the movie somewhere inside the vault. Of course there were hundreds of reels—mostly copies—scattered around. We scanned shelves for a solid ten minutes before I discovered a stack of movie reels placed on a low shelf. The shelf had not been touched in years; I could tell. It was layered with thick dust and cobwebs. I found reels with peeling labels. Most were marked COPY. Then I found one that was marked THE BEAST WITH 1000 EYES on one sticker with a COPY sticker placed on top.

Jackpot!

I handed the reel to Walter and he popped it directly into the projector. Then he dimmed the screening room lights. The music swelled. The words AN OSWALD LEERY PRODUCTION flashed across the screen.

“This better be good,” Damon whined.

The first shot in the film was a close-up of the Eyeball Beast in all of its bloodshot glory, each eyeball shaking and throbbing. I could see spider veins on the whites of all one thousand or more dangling eyeballs. The many eyes were different colors, too: blue, green, hazel, and even pitch-black. The B-Monster had fingertip eyes, too, on its palms; and crazy, blinking fingernails that made noise with each blink.

There was a lot to be learned by watching this movie. For starters, the Eyeball Beast was not born on some faraway planet or in the middle of a tornado. This B-Monster was made in a laboratory not unlike the labs we had just visited. And when the monster was “born,” it was just a lone eyeball that grew and grew and GREW into a cluster of eyeballs—like a seedling grows into a plant.

The Eyeball Beast wasn't a flying bug B-Monster like Mega Mantis or one of those free-roaming B-Monsters, like Slimo. It didn't live in a cave or in the pipes under the sink, either. This B-Monster grew up in the laboratory, where it was poked and prodded by a bunch of kooky scientists looking for answers.