They put out the fire. The flames appeared to be their only defense, but they were afraid the heat might wake another of the creatures. Yet they kept their torches, and they went after Watch.
But it was hopeless from the start. The trees were so crowded that it took them half an hour to go a hundred yards. Plus the creature could move many times faster than they could. They trudged after their friend with heavy hearts, knowing they weren’t going to find him, not without help. As they paused to catch their breath beside a gurgling stream, Adam stared at the dying torches and shook his head.
“We have to go back to the path,” he said reluctantly. “We can’t face the cold man without fire, and these sticks will burn out in a few minutes.”
“But we can’t leave Watch,” Cindy cried. “Remember when we were trapped in the cave? He did everything he could to rescue us. We have to do the same for him.”
“I agree with Adam,” Sally said sadly. “We can’t help him this way. We need reinforcements, better weapons. We have to get back to town and warn everybody about what could happen.”
“No one will believe us,” Cindy said. “If you told me a creature’s gaze could freeze me, I wouldn’t believe it.”
“But you don’t believe anything I say,” Sally replied.
“We’ll have to deal with that problem when we come to it,” Adam said.
“But what are we going to tell people?” Cindy persisted. “We don’t even know what these creatures are. We have no idea where they come from.”
Sally was curious. “What was it like when the creature stared at you?”
Cindy lowered her head and shivered. “It was as if the blood in my veins were turning to ice—literally. And there was something else—it was like the cold man hated me for being warm. I felt its hate, its envy.” A tear slipped over her cheek. “I hope Watch is all right.” She raised her head and stared at Adam. “You think he’s still alive, don’t you?”
Adam wanted to say something encouraging but knew Cindy would see through his lie. He thought of how strong the cold man was, how quickly it moved. How powerful its strange eyes were. Adam didn’t have much hope for his friend.
“I just don’t know,” Adam said quietly.
Their bikes were still where they’d left them. The road back to town was mostly downhill, and they never pedaled so fast in all their lives. The cold wind stung their faces, their cheeks burning and freezing at the same time. Adam wanted to ride straight to the police station but Sally wanted to find Bum first.
“Bum knows a thousand times more than the police do,” she said.
“I thought you didn’t trust Bum.” Adam said.
“I trust no one,” Sally said. “But Bum likes Watch. He’ll do anything to rescue him.”
They found Bum, who had once been the mayor of Spooksville, down at the beach feeding the pigeons. He seemed happy to see them, but when they told him what had happened, he sat down with a weary thud. His glum expression worried them. They could have come to tell him about the breakout of the next world war and he might have laughed it off. He was that easygoing. But there was something in their story that touched him deeply.
“It’s the Cryo Creatures,” Bum muttered.
“What are they?” Adam demanded.
“Cryo means cold,” Sally offered.
“We know that,” Cindy said impatiently. “But what are these creatures?”
Bum sighed. “To put it bluntly, they’re bad news. I haven’t heard of them in a long time. In fact, they have never appeared during my lifetime before.” He paused and shook his head. “You say they got Watch?”
“Yeah, one of them does,” Adam said. “What will it do to him?”
“Make him cold,” Bum said softly.
“That’s all?” Cindy asked hopefully. “It won’t kill him?”
Bum put his hand to his head. “You misunderstand me. It would be better if it did kill him. When I say it will make him cold, I mean it will make him like itself”
Sally’s face fell. “You mean it will turn Watch into a monster?”
Bum spoke darkly. “By now it has already changed him. There is no Watch anymore. If you see him, he will try to change you.”
Adam felt his heart breaking. “But can Watch be changed back into a human?”
Bum rubbed his head. He appeared to be thinking hard about what to do.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. These Cryo Creatures—they’re ancient, and their power is very great. We may all be doomed.” He nodded to the ground beside the ocean wall where he sat. “Make yourselves comfortable. I have a story to tell you. It isn’t a pleasant story, but you have to hear it if you’re to know what you’re dealing with.”
Adam sat, even though he desperately wanted to rush off and save Watch. “Can you give us the short version? We have to try to help Watch, no matter what you tell us.”
“You can help him most by listening for a few minutes,” Bum said. “But what I have to say—you don’t have to believe any of it if you don’t want to. I won’t care. You can just see the story as a myth. But I can tell you that I believe it.”
Bum paused to clear his throat. As he told his story, he stared out at the ocean.
“A long time ago the world was not as it is now. You have probably heard of the lost continent of Atlantis, which was located in the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantis really did exist. During the same time period there was another land that has since vanished. This one was in the Pacific Ocean and was called Lemuria, or Mu for short. It was twice the size of Atlantis. You may be surprised to know that parts of the West Coast were once parts of Mu. Spooksville, for example, used to be an eastern city of Mu. I have often thought that one of the reasons Spooksville is such an unusual place is because it really belongs to another time and place. But that’s a story for another time.
“Atlantis and Mu existed for tens of thousands of years, but the two peoples were not always on the best of terms. Actually, they spent a lot of time fighting. But they had so much history together, they were also friendly for long centuries at a time. Still, they could never remain friendly. The main reason was that they were never left alone. You see, in those days the technology was far more advanced than it is today. They had machines that could beam you from one side of the planet to the other. Ships that could travel to other galaxies.
“I know in school your history teachers never talk about these things. Few people in the world realize how old civilization really is. How old mankind is. You see, we did not originate on Earth, but came from a star cluster called the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters as it is commonly called. You can see it in the winter sky if you look up on a dark night. The cluster is hundreds of light-years from Earth. Our most ancient ancestors came from worlds that circled those blue stars in the Pleiades. But the people of the Pleiades originally came from somewhere else. From a world that was long ago destroyed. No one can really say where it all started.
“People from the Pleiades and other worlds often visited Earth. Their spaceships landed in Atlantis and in Mu. The trouble was that the same star people didn’t visit Mu and Atlantis. There are many Pleiades worlds, dozens. They didn’t all get along either. I don’t know how they’re doing these days. The witch—Ann Templeton—might know. Some say Madeline Templeton, Ann’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother, was from one of those worlds. But that, too, is another story.
“So we had these two large lands, Mu and Atlantis, and they were being told what to do by different races. And these different star races didn’t like each other. Toward the end of Atlantis and Mu, the star people were at war, and they wanted the people of Earth to join their war. These different races from Pleiades saw the Earth as just another battlefield. It was a mess. The scientists from one planet were telling the people of Atlantis how to make a bomb to blow up Mu, while other star scientists were telling the people of Mu how to blow up Atlantis.”
Adam interrupted. “Why didn’t the people of Earth just tell these guys to get in their spaceships and fly away and leave them alone?”
Bum nodded. “That’s a good question. The reason the Earth people didn’t kick them out is that the star people knew more than they did. True, the Earth had originally been settled by the star people, but that had been millions of years before all this went on. By the time the star people returned and brought their troubles, people on Earth were way behind them. The star people had machines and devices that would have taken Earth people thousands of years to invent. I guess you could say the star people bribed the Earth people. “If you do this for us,” they would say to our leaders, “we will give you this secret.”
“But what does all this have to do with the Cryo Creatures?” Sally asked.
“I’m just getting to that part. I had to explain these other things first.” Again Bum paused to clear his throat. Actually, he sounded hoarse. Adam wondered if he had a cold. Adam imagined that living outside all the time was not easy.
“I have to make clear that not all the star people were evil,” Bum went on. “You know in any war there are good guys and bad guys. But I don’t think in this war all the good guys were on one side. I think it was mixed. Many of the star people who helped Atlantis really thought they were doing the right thing. I’m sure many of the star people who helped Mu thought they were doing the right thing, too. But I do know the star scientists on the Mu side made the Mu leaders a really evil offer. An offer so tempting that the Mu leaders could not resist.”
“If it was an evil offer,” Cindy said, “why was it so tempting?”
“Evil is always more tempting than good,” Sally said. “That’s life. All the fun things get you into trouble.”
Bum paused and smiled, although he remained serious. “Sally might be right, I’m not sure. But I do know that one secret group from the Pleiades told the leaders of Mu that if they would completely wipe out Atlantis, they would be given a chance to live for tens of thousands of years.”
Adam was impressed. “Did the star people live that long?”
Bum scratched his head. “They lived a very long time, much longer than Earth people. The leaders of Mu could see that. Each time the star people visited—every few years—they would hardly have aged at all, while the leaders would be getting old and wrinkled. These evil star people convinced the Mu leaders that they didn’t have to die, which was a lie. Even the star people died, eventually. It was just another bribe, a false bribe. Yet there was truth in it as well. Let me explain.
“If you cool something down, it lasts longer. If you freeze it, and keep it frozen, it lasts practically forever. You can do this with hamburger. Put it in the freezer in your refrigerator and you can eat it a year later. The meat won’t spoil. But the second you take the meat out of the freezer, it thaws out and grows old. Leave it out for a few days and it will rot. Do you get my point?”
“Yes,” Adam said, “But you can’t freeze people to make them live forever. If you freeze people they can’t move. They die.”
“That’s true with the technology we have now,” Bum said. “But don’t forget these visitors from the stars knew things we can’t even imagine. They told the leaders of Mu that—in exchange for wiping out Atlantis—they would show them how to transform the cells of their bodies so that they lived on a frozen substance called Cryo instead of on warm blood. Don’t ask me what this Cryo was made of—I don’t know. But somehow it allowed a person to be colder than ice and yet walk around and act like a living person.”
“Did any of the star people have Cryo in their veins?” Sally asked.
“That’s another good question,” Bum said. “The answer, as far as I know, was no. None of the star scientists visiting the Earth was a Cryo Creature. That should have warned the leaders of Mu that something was fishy. But I think these leaders were all selfish people, cowards, afraid of death. They took the bribe. They thought they would wipe out Atlantis and in exchange they would be made immortal.
“It’s not easy to destroy an entire continent. Even with nuclear bombs, you can’t make a whole land mass vanish. What the leaders of Mu decided was to get a little help from the asteroid belt. You know, it’s out in space between Mars and Jupiter—a bunch of huge rocks floating around the sun. These guys—they may have been evil but they were pretty clever. They hooked rockets and space drives onto a particular asteroid and began to steer it toward the Earth. They adjusted the speed and direction precisely. Just as Atlantis was coming around—as the Earth rotated—the asteroid was right there. Like a big rock flying right toward them.
“Of course the Atlantean people saw it coming. It darkened their entire sky. In the last hours they knew they were about to be wiped out and they guessed the leaders of Mu were behind it all. But what they didn’t know was that those leaders weren’t human anymore.
“But I have to back up for a moment. Once the Mu leaders had directed the asteroid toward Atlantis, they had fulfilled their part of the bargain. Never mind that the asteroid took a few weeks to reach the Earth. Even before it became visible in the sky, the evil star people drained the blood of each of the leaders of Mu and replaced it with Cryo. Then the star people quickly left. Maybe they left laughing.”
“Why?” Adam interrupted, fascinated by the tale, even though he wasn’t sure if he believed it. Bum was right—he had never read about any of these things in any history book. Then again, he hadn’t gone to school in Spooksville yet. Maybe they had a whole class devoted to prehistory. Bum replied to his question seriously.
“Because the Cryo stopped the aging process in the leaders, but it did other things to them as well, some of which were not very pleasant. The leaders became super strong and super fast. They also gained strange visual powers. Not only could they see far away, they could freeze people by glancing at them. In fact, they could make others like themselves, if they wished.
“But the problem was they were not really alive. They didn’t feel alive. They just felt cold all the time, and they hated the cold. They were like the walking dead. They envied normal people. True, they would live for a very long time, but they couldn’t enjoy anything. They understood this right away, even before the asteroid reached the Earth. They realized they had been tricked by the evil star people.
“But back to the asteroid. Like I said, it was headed straight toward Atlantis and the people there knew who had aimed it at them. But despite all their technology, they couldn’t stop it. An asteroid can be pretty big. This one was over twenty miles in diameter and it was traveling at hundreds of miles a minute. Sure, the people of Atlantis shot nuclear missiles at it, but it just kept coming, straight on course. They were in a real bind.
“They didn’t want to lie down and die, at least not without getting revenge. Just as the asteroid began to near the atmosphere, they fired off every weapon they had at Mu. From coast to coast, Mu burned. When the asteroid did strike, Atlantis was crushed beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Worse, it was forced beneath the Earth’s crust. That’s why there is almost no sign of it these days. The geological plates of the Earth shifted under the blow of the asteroid. Mu, which was already burning, also slid under the Pacific Ocean. Both great lands were destroyed together. Both great civilizations were wiped out, and people don’t even remember them today.” Bum paused. “I think it’s a sad story.”
“But what about the Cryo Creatures?” Sally insisted. “They’re our problem right now.”
“Yeah,” Adam said, although he had enjoyed the story. “Didn’t they all die when Mu was destroyed?”
“No,” Bum said. “Some of them escaped. From what I understand, several figured out ahead of time that Atlantis would attack before the asteroid hit. They left Mu and traveled to the North Pole, where they dug themselves into valleys of ice. They survived the fire from the bombs and the impact of the asteroid.” Bum stopped. “But now they’ve come back.”
“Why?” Adam asked. “Why here? Why today?”
Bum was thoughtful. “They may have come here because Spooksville is one of the few surviving pieces of Mu. But why they have come today, I don’t know. From what you described, someone must have brought them here—since they were frozen solid. But who that someone was—your guess is as good as mine.”
“All this is very interesting,” Sally said. “But how do we stop them, other than blowing up all of Spooksville?”
Bum spoke seriously. “That might be the only way to stop them. This city is not the only place in danger. Prom what I know of their history, the Cold People could sweep over the entire world. It may have been a good thing Mu was destroyed when it was. Before the asteroid hit, the Cold People who remained in Mu were already altering their own people. They’re like vampires, changing people to be like them.”
“Look,” Adam said, getting impatient. “We can’t blow up Spooksville. You have to give us a second option.”
“You mentioned how the creature fled from the fire,” Bum said. “That’s a key right there. We have an army surplus store just outside of town that sells all kinds of exotic war equipment. They have a few flamethrowers. You might want to buy them.”
“They’re not going to sell flamethrowers to kids,” Cindy protested.
“They might,” Sally said. “I know the owner of the store, Mr. Patton. He stole his name from a famous World War Two general. He believes every man and woman should walk around armed at all times. He’ll sell you a tank if you have the money.”
Bum nodded. “He might even give you the equipment on credit, if he’s convinced the city’s really in danger.”
“Aren’t you going to come with us?” Sally asked. “We need your help if we’re to fight these things.”
Bum scratched his unshaven chin and thought a minute. “I would rather leave town and try to forget that any of this is happening.”
“Coward,” Cindy muttered under her breath.
Bum half-smiled. “I said I would rather leave. I didn’t say that I would. Sure, I’ll help you fight them. God knows if we don’t stop them here, we’ll never stop them.” Bum stood. “Come on, let’s get to the surplus store.”
They all stood. But Cindy appeared to have reservations about their plan.
“Why don’t we go to the police?” Cindy asked. “That’s what they’re here for—to help in times of emergency.”
Sally snorted. “That may be true in other cities. But in Spooksville the police are afraid to answer a call to get a cat out of a tree. Too many of their buddies go out on calls and never return.”
Cindy was doubtful. “I think we have to at least warn them. Adam, would you come with me? We can catch up with Sally and Bum in an hour or so.”
“An hour is a long time when you’re dealing with creatures that can multiply,” Sally warned. “But of course Adam will go with his dear Cindy just because she asked. He does whatever she asks because he loves her, and she acts like she loves him. It doesn’t matter that the safety of the entire world is at stake. Isn’t that true, Adam?”
“Well,” Adam said, caught off guard. “I think we should let the police know.”
Sally and Bum exchanged knowing glances.
“We’ll pick out the flamethrowers,” Bum said.
“We’ll have them gift wrapped before these guys show up,” Sally agreed.