Chapter 3 – Escaping the Basement
“Aiming? At us? No way!” Alberto watched carefully. “That’s not any kind of weapon I know of. Besides, he doesn’t know we’re even here.” The old man flipped a switch near the stairs on the opposite wall, and a humming sound of electricity crackled to life. “Maybe we should move anyway, just to be safe,” Alberto reconsidered briefly.
Before they moved even two steps away from Rosie’s hiding place near the window, the man strode to the worktable and started plugging away at the keys on the laptop. Every third or fourth keystroke, the sound of the machine warming up raised another octave and another few decibels. The man’s voice shocked and scared them both, sounding like the mad scientist in an old late-night movie, cackling as he shouted “It’s working! It’s working!” A bluish-purple beam of light appeared from a hollow tube in the machine, and growing longer and longer with each change in the machine’s sound (which was no longer the thrumming of a giant hummingbird, but more like a buzzing, making Rosie think of the paper-covered hornet nest she had thrown rocks at last Spring, and earned a dozen stinging red welts). Rosie and Alberto stood silent witnesses as the storm-colored ray inched toward them, then enveloped the jar with the fern inside. The fern briefly looked blurry inside the corona of light, then clearer than ever as the jar seemed to disappear. The fern suddenly winked out, too, and the light faded as the machine made noises of winding down.
The twins, now hidden only by the dark shadows of two large wooden crates over a dozen feet from the window and the path of the beam, stood with their mouths open, forgetting their fear in the amazement and wonder at what was happening. Alberto spoke lowly, “He vaporized that plant.”
“He must hate plants as much as he hates our dogs,” Rosie added, then realized how stupid she sounded.
Less than fifteen seconds after it had disappeared, the glass jar and the fern suddenly reformed in midair, only two feet from the window Rosie had been hiding under just a minute before. Before they could grasp what was happening, the haze of light disappeared again and the jar crashed to the basement floor, shattering into thousands of tiny, sharp daggers of broken glass. The fern, now covered in crystalline shards, looked like it was otherwise unharmed.
“How could I forget something so simple as the elevation calculation?” Mr. Gaston almost shouted angrily at himself. “Stupid burglars must have distracted me… made me forget what step I was at…If I ever catch them again…” Rosie shuddered to think of the possibilities of how he might end his sentence.
Alberto tapped Rosie’s arm, and when she turned toward him he motioned for her to follow him. She violently shook her head, but before she could stop him, he had begun to crawl to a stack of what looked like milk crates full of moldy National Geographic magazines behind the white-haired man currently obsessed with whatever calculations he was entering into his computer.
What is he doing? she asked herself. He’s going to get caught! Alberto was standing on one small crate, leaning precariously over the rest so that he could see what the laptop screen was showing and trying to follow what the man was doing. Rosie could imagine too easily the crate sliding under his weight, or the larger stack toppling over, or any of a hundred other ways the scary scientist could be alerted to their continued presence in his home.
He typed in a few more keystrokes on the laptop, then looked up to sweep his gaze around the room. “Something organic…” Rosie’s stomach clenched again at the fear of Alberto being caught in his new hiding place, and nearly fainted when the strange old man jumped backwards, away from his computer workstation, and nearly bumped over the stack of crates Alberto was leaning against. The old man whirled around and flew up the steps, taking three at a time.
The door had just slammed against the crooked frame and Rosie could visualize it bouncing open again, when Alberto jumped to the laptop and started moving the mouse around.
“What are you doing!” she tried not to scream at him. “He’s coming right back!”
“Come here… I found a way out of here.” Alberto smiled as the machinery started to cycle through the warm-up process again. “Mr. Gaston has invented a teleporter, like on Star Trek. I think he just programmed it to transport just a few feet outside that window.”
“What about what happened to the jar?”
“We must have interrupted him when he was working on the calculations. He forgot to change from the elevation of the table to the floor. He changed it now for outside, back at ground level. I was watching him real close. I know what I’m doing. Trust me.” Alberto grinned at his sister briefly, then glanced toward the ceiling. He grabbed Rosie by the wrist and pulled her in front of the building laser beam. “We’ve got to go, now, before he comes back downstairs!”
“Why can’t we just wait, and let him test it again? It might not be safe?”
Mr. Gaston reappeared on the steps, cussing just loud enough to be heard over the now-buzzing grape-purple haze with electric blue bolts shooting around the pipe where it originated. He stopped a few steps from the bottom, and stared directly at the twins standing very close to his computer. “What are you kids doing? You shouldn’t be here!” he shouted.
“Too late to change our minds now…” Alberto moaned as their ears popped painfully, and the whole world seemed to be varied shades of electrified neon purple. The old man and the basement froze momentarily, then quickly morphed into the tall grass and the taller fence between the two houses, now shrouded in hues of purple, but now tinged with a sickly greenish-yellow. The multicolored fog dissolved and the twins thought they were falling briefly, landing after plummeting only two inches to the ground. Purple faded from everything, and the world swam back into true color. Alberto giggled quietly to himself.
“What?”
“Right in the nick of time, eh, sis?” Alberto started chuckling at his own joke.
“I guess his calculations were off a little,” Rosie said thinly as she smacked Alberto in the back of the head. “We were lucky we weren’t any higher off the ground.” She looked at the weeds between the house and the fence at the end of the back yard. “Let’s go home, now.”
“Not so fast, my little criminals,” said a gruff, angry voice behind them. Rosie’s arm was immediately seized by the clammy hands of Mr. Gaston, who already had his other arm around Alberto’s neck, covering his mouth and muffling a scream. The world went gray, then black as Rosie fainted, and dreamed she was floating on a purple sea with silent blue-white lightning streaking the skies.
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