Whales on Stilts! (7 page)

She got up and walked over to a window. She touched her fingers to the glass. She peered through.

Nothing.

There were windows all around the living
room. She looked through all of them. She couldn't see anything but the front and side yards.

She felt a prickling at the back of her neck.

Slowly she turned.

Nothing.

But in the next room, in the dining room-there were windows there, too. If someone was standing outside, in the bushes, in the dark, Katie would be visible. Very visible. Well lit. Inside. She would be seen through the window, down the hall, and through the open doorway, standing stock-still, looking out blindly into the darkness.

There could be someone there.

Katie walked carefully into the dining room. Nothing to fear but windows.

They were black with the suburban night of Horror Hollow.

She rested her knuckles against the glass and looked through. There were the bushes, where she had pictured someone standing. There was
no one standing there. In the neighbors' yard, there was a turtle sandbox.

The eyes were behind her.

She swiveled. Something flickered past the living room windows.

She started lowering the shades in the dining room. She would shut all the shades in the house. At least that way, no one would be able to see her. She could fight them more effectively if they didn't know where to find her.

She looked up. There was motion in the room with her—

No—only a mirror. It was just her own reflection in the mirror over the sideboard. Katie backed toward the wall. Her back was pressed against it.

She heard a ratcheting.

The front door.

She realized,
It might not be locked.

She galloped across the room and saw the knob slowly turning. Breathing in gasps, she
grabbed the lock and twisted it. She pulled the chains across.

Now there was no sound from the outside. Nothing. Whoever it was, was biding his or her time. Waiting for Katie to open the door and look to see who was there.

Someone or something was trying to get in. Seriously trying to get in. Other doors. She thought about other doors.

Katie ran into the living room. Yanked the drapes shut. The kitchen door. Was it locked?

She headed back.

No, no—she knew it was locked. She had locked it earlier, when she took out the garbage. Time to call the police. She started up the stairs toward the phone.

As she reached the top of the stairs and was about to turn the corner to go to her room to phone, she realized that there was a huge window at the end of the upstairs hallway. Someone in the backyard would be able to see
her, frightened, running for the phone. Someone would know just where she was.

Nothing else for it. She had to get to the phone.

She peeked around the corner.

There was the window. Nothing. Just a dark, midnight blue.

Then the blue moved.

And revealed a red glaring floating eye.

 

The eye was looking for her, looking at her, a huge eye, a single eye.

Katie screamed and leaped backward and flattened herself against the wall of the stairwell.

A second later the window exploded. A blast of red light filled the hallway. She heard her sister's graduation photograph blow up as well as the pictures of Uncle Luke getting Kool-Aid dumped on his head by that nurse.

A whale. It was a whale, a walking whale on stilts, with deadly laser-beam eyes. Her grandpa had always said this time would come.

What to do? She started running down the stairs—but then thought again and scrambled back up.

She peeked around the corner.

There was the eye—
VLAM!—
blasting away at her again. Chunks of plaster and wood flew through the air. She stumbled backward and slid down several steps. She crouched there. She didn't know which way to go.

Suddenly she heard an ominous crunching.

The shrubs. The whale was pacing along on its stilts through the shrubs, trying to find a different window to shoot through.

He was heading for the back. Katie darted down the stairs and headed for the front door. It was time to make a break.

She reached the bottom of the steps and heard the whale thrashing around in the backyard. She was almost to the door—

—when someone started pounding on it.

Someone was trying to get in.

“Katie!” Lily yelled. “Katie! Open up! There's a giant whale on stilts outside your house!”

“Oh, thanks,” said Katie with some sarcasm, unlocking the door and opening it. “I thought it was just squirrels going after the hummingbird feeder.”

Lily rushed in. “I called the police from your neighbor's house.”

“They're on their way?”

Lily looked troubled. “They didn't seem too...uh... when I said...”

“They didn't believe you, did they?”

“Well—”

Suddenly there was a loud laserlike noise
^*
from upstairs, and plaster shot down the stairway.

“He's getting in!” shouted Katie.

“I have a plan!” Lily shouted back.

“Okay! Whatever you say!” shouted Katie.

Lily ran into the dining room and threw open the drapes. She pushed the window up and shouted, “Over here! Over here!”

“What are you doing?” Katie exclaimed. “Don't open the drapes!”

“Help me with that!” said Lily, running to the other side of the dining room.

“What? My mom's collectible
Streetcar Named Desire
plates?”

There was a stomping noise from outside. Bushes crushed beneath huge iron cuffs. The whale was getting closer.

“No! The mirror!”

They ran to the mirror above the side table and lifted it down. Katie was starting to catch on. She and Lily knelt behind the mirror, facing the windows, and yelled through the open window, “Here! Over here, you stupid whale!”

Suddenly the whale's huge face dipped down into view: his red glowing eyes, his blue-gray hide, his big snarling baleen mouth. On his head was a kind of metal cap with an antenna.

The red eyes started to sparkle.

“He's going to shoot!” said Katie.

The girls ducked.

The whale fired his laser-beam eyes.
The girls felt the jolt as the laser beam bounced off the mirror.

Of course the girls didn't feel the jolt as the laser bounced off the mirror, because lasers are just light. This story is highly scientific, and I would never mislead you. I want to depict whale eye-laser technology as accurately as possible.

Instantaneously the laser doubled back on itself, a continuous stream of light—using all the standard oculo-incendiary prohulsifiers and megegolisms that you'd expect—and it flashed through the air,
searing the whale itself!

The girls heard him screech in pain, in that way whales do. He had been badly burned.

He fired again. Once again the girls didn't feel the impact of the lasers on the mirror. Once again the laser beams ricocheted—one hit the whale full in the snout, and the other one flew off and smashed a wall-mounted soup tureen depicting Marlon Brando as Stanley.

The whale bellowed in pain and anger.

Lily and Katie dared now to look over the top of the mirror.

The whale was staggering. They could see his tall metal stilts, big hydraulic things, stumbling around the lawn.

“We got him!” shouted Katie.

The whale was headed back down the driveway. He was in retreat.

The girls ran to the front door. They opened it. The whale was jogging down the road away from the house, lightly on fire. Cars swerved to avoid his huge sticklike electrical legs. A driver rolled down a window and screamed, “Stupid whale! Whadaya think this is, the Bering Strait?”

The girls breathed a sigh of relief.

For the moment they were safe.

It is a general rule that things on stilts never strike the same place twice. Except some clowns, when you don't pay them back for some stupid vintage hot rod they bought you.

But that's another story.

*
You know what I mean. I'm talking about
vooooeeeeep—KPCHKWOW!!!

It wasn't long before the authorities arrived. Even though the police didn't believe in things like giant walking laser whales, the Horror Hollow Neighborhood Association was very used to vampires, madmen, flying saucers, and Bigfeet— so a walking whale really wasn't much of a stretch. Some of the people from the Neighborhood Association came over, with blankets and hot cocoa, to see if Katie was all right and to help clean up some of the mess. The house was scorched and many of the windows had shattered. A wall upstairs lay strewn across the bedroom.

Katie and Lily sat in their blankets in the jumbled living room, talking.

Lily said, “I came over to tell you that in three days, Larry is going to release his whale army.”
“Oh no ...,” said Katie. “What'll we do?”

Lily thought hard. “We're going to have to figure out some weakness of the whales.”

“What about using more mirrors?”

“We'd have to cover everything with mirrors to be safe. There must be some other way.” Lily frowned, thinking hard.