Goosebumps the Movie Page 9

  “Finish it, Zach,” Hannah murmured.

  I knew she was counting on me. They all were.

  I took a deep breath, and then I finished it:

  “ ‘As the monsters converged, Zach closed his eyes, opened the book, and the monsters were swallowed back into the world of paper and ink, NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN. THE END!’ ”

  I yanked the last page out of the typewriter.

  “What happens now?” Champ asked.

  The praying mantis was gnawing on the Ferris wheel bolts. Any longer and the monsters wouldn’t need to come up here to get us—because we’d all collapse down to the ground in a deadly heap.

  “We’re about to find out,” I said.

  I shuffled the pages together and put them inside Stine’s leather manuscript cover, then closed the book.

  “It’ll work,” Hannah said. “I know it.”

  The mantis chomped one last bolt, and there was a terrifying scream of metal. The Ferris wheel rolled right off its base.

  “Hang on!” I cried, grabbing tight to the closest rung as we started spinning out of control.

  The Ferris wheel car spun round and round … and the manuscript flew out of my hands!

  “Grab it!” I shouted, reaching desperately.

  The Ferris wheel tipped over on its side and smashed to the ground like a gigantic quarter. We all tumbled onto the ground, somehow miraculously in one piece, but …

  “The manuscript!” I looked around, but couldn’t see it anywhere. “Do you have it?”

  We’d rolled far enough that we were safe for the moment, but the monsters would be coming for us, and fast.

  Hannah shook her head.

  There was a groan from inside the Ferris wheel car. Champ crawled out, looking wobbly but triumphant. He raised the manuscript in the air. “Caught it.”

  I grabbed the book. All I had to do was open it, and all the monsters would be sucked inside.

  All the monsters. It suddenly hit me, what that meant.

  I froze.

  “Come on! What are you waiting for?” Champ said. “Open the book! All the monsters will be here any second!”

  “Open the book, Scaredy-Cat!” Hannah cried.

  I opened the book.

  The tornado was stronger than before. It was like a black hole, sucking in every monster in sight.

  Whoosh … whoosh … whoosh … scarecrows, werewolves, gargoyles, gnomes, all of them flying through the air past us, sucked and swirled into the vortex of the book.

  The force knocked the book out of my hands. It landed on the ground, just in time for the humongous blob to be pulled in and sucked away from Stine.

  Slappy leaped onto him, wrapping his little arms around Stine’s neck, and together they hurtled toward us. Slappy was powerless against the force of the book.

  “I don’t like this!” Slappy screamed. “The weather forecast didn’t call for a tornado! Slappy isn’t happy!”

  “Neither is Stine!” Stine roared, struggling to peel Slappy away with all his might. “Stupid dummy!” he shouted, giving Slappy a vicious kick that sent him straight into the heart of the vortex.

  Slappy clawed at the dirt, trying to hold on. But Stine stepped down hard on his fingers. I heard a loud craaack.

  “Now we’re even,” Stine said.

  The dummy swirled into the furious wind, shrieking as he disappeared back into the swirling void. “See you in your dreams!” he called just before he vanished.

  Champ slammed the book shut, and the wind went still.

  “I did it!” he shouted, pumping his fists in the air. “I saved us!”

  I looked at Stine and shrugged. He just grinned at me.

  So did Hannah.

  They rebuilt the town. Fortunately, there wasn’t all that much of it in the first place, so it didn’t take too long.

  Pretty soon, everyone had managed to forget about the night the monsters invaded, or at least they pretended to. I guess it was easier for them to think they’d imagined it than to believe that monsters existed, that they could come back.

  They didn’t realize that some things never come back.

  The school closed for a couple weeks so they could repair the damage. Champ and Hannah came over a lot to watch TV and play video games. Champ was always coming up with some excuse to get out of his house. Down in his basement he had a copy of every Goosebumps book ever written, and he told me that sometimes, in the middle of the night, he was pretty sure he heard the characters talking to one another.

  But that was just Champ being Champ. Probably.

  I found stuff to do. I hung around with my mom sometimes. And I saw a lot of Stine, who’d started going out with Aunt Lorraine.

  Hannah and I spent as much time together as we could. We went on long walks at night, always avoiding the graveyard and the amusement park. One evening we even checked out Sushi Wednesday. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be.

  Finally, the school opened its doors again. I was almost glad to go back. It was weird, though, driving over there with my mom, almost exactly as we had on my first day. How could everything feel the same when so much horror had happened here?

  Mom pulled into her parking space. “Okay, I’ll give you a sixty-second head start,” she said, winking.

  Maybe not everything felt the same. “It’s okay, Mom. Let’s go in together.”

  She grinned at me. Then, as I went to open the door, she locked it before I could.

  “So immature,” I teased, but it was good to know some things would never change.

  School was different.

  Really different.

  I’m talking Invasion of the Body Snatchers different.

  Suddenly, I was the most popular kid in the building. Everyone knew my name, everyone wanted to say hi to me and be my friend, or act like it. Apparently, when you help save the student body from being eaten by an army of monsters, it makes you kind of popular.

  I followed Champ into English class. It was a big day for us—not just the first day back at school, but the first day with a new teacher.

  The classroom buzzed with speculation, everyone offering guesses for who our sub would be.

  I just sat back in my chair and listened. I couldn’t wait to see their faces when they found out.

  Mr. Boyd’s replacement stepped into the room. His hair was neatly slicked back, his glasses pushed up high on his nose.

  “Hello, my name is Mr. R.L. Stine, and I will be your new English teacher. It seems Mr. Boyd is still recovering from injuries sustained by a mutant insect.”

  Stine didn’t even wait for a reaction before turning to the board and starting his lesson.

  “Now, every story ever told can be broken up into three distinct parts: the beginning, the middle, and … the twist.”

  I’d had enough twists. I was looking forward to a nice, long, boring, uneventful year. Or maybe life. I figured I’d had my adventure, I’d gotten to be a hero, and now there was nothing left to do but my homework. And hurry home to see Hannah.

  “Um, now that you’re teaching here, do you ever think about letting Hannah come to school?” I asked Stine as we walked toward the parking lot after school. He’d offered to give me a ride home. “After all, your secret’s kind of out of the bag.”

  “Not a day goes by I don’t consider it,” he said. “And today’s the day I finally realized something.” He paused for a minute. “I can’t keep her locked away forever like my manuscripts.”

  I was puzzled for a minute. Then Stine pointed down the hall. There was Hannah! She was carrying a backpack, just like any other Madison High student. And she was heading our way.

  “Hannah!” I hurried toward her.

  “Easy with the hands!” Stine called after us.

  I waved at him, and then took Hannah’s hand in mine. “So, now that you’re the new kid in school, can I give you a tour? No monsters this time around, I promise.”

  Hannah smiled up at me. “I’d love that.”

&nbs
p; Before he left the school building that day, the author decided to visit his old typewriter. It was back in its display case, and this time there was no Stephen King pen next to it, competing for kids’ attention.

  He looked fondly at the old machine, thinking of all the good times they’d had together.

  Not to mention all the horrifying, terrifying, hair-raising times … but wasn’t that kind of the same thing?

  Maybe, someday, he could risk writing something again. Nothing too terrible, of course. Nothing with a carnivorous rhododendron or a seven-story guinea pig, but a story. It would be so satisfying to get his fingers on the keys again (once they’d healed, at least). It would be like scratching an itch.

  He was thinking so hard about typing that when one of the keys started to move, he assumed he was imagining it.

  But no: The I key was trembling. Then, with a sharp clack, it snapped down, as if pressed by an invisible finger.

  Stine’s breath caught in his throat.

  The N key clicked down next. Then the V.

  No, Stine thought. Please, no. It can’t be.

  The typewriter didn’t listen to him. Someone else was in control now. One impossible key at a time, it spelled out:

  THE INVISIBLE BOY’S REVENGE

  Stine could see his horrified reflection in the glass. And beside it, he saw something else. A greasy child-sized handprint.

  It was time to play.

  When Zach and his mom moved to Madison, Delaware, the first people they met were their neighbors, Mr. Shivers and his daughter, Hannah.

  Hannah seemed cool, but her dad was really creepy.

  Hannah took Zach to her favorite place in town, an abandoned amusement park.

  But when they got home, her dad was waiting for them. And he was furious.

  At school the next day, Zach made a new friend—Champ.

  That night, Zach heard a scream from Hannah’s house. He was sure something was wrong. So he called the police.

  When the police didn’t find anything, Zach and Champ decided to investigate on their own.

  Inside, they found Hannah safe and sound. But they accidentally unleashed a monster from inside her dad’s manuscripts!

  The kids followed the Abominable Snowman to the local ice rink.

  They couldn’t stop the monster, but Hannah’s dad did. He turned out to be the famous horror writer R.L. Stine!

  The next thing the kids knew, Stine’s evilest creation, Slappy, had released all the monsters from Stine’s books.

  And it was up to Zach, Hannah, Champ, and Stine to put them back where they belonged.

  Could the kids and Stine defeat every single monster from every single Goosebumps book?

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  First printing 2015

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-83607-4

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