CHAPTER 14

Dear Earthling,

I am in big, big trouble! After I finished writing your last letter I spent my first night in the lab. I know to be extra careful with Dad’s things but I’m afraid something terrible happened, which has changed the way I look—possibly forever!

I’d been having a very careful snoop around in drawers and cupboards when I spotted a large jar with a sheet over it. I thought about leaving it alone, as obviously Dad had covered it over for a reason, but as I have a very active imagination, I guessed the horrors I’d come up with in my own head would probably be much worse than what was actually in the jar.

I WAS WRONG!!

I pulled back the sheet to reveal a HUGE, FOURTEEN-LEGGED SPIDER suspended in a jelly like substance.

Personally I think eight legs are creepy enough. Those extra six sent me right over the edge! I panicked and accidentally knocked into a beaker of yellow slime that was on a low shelf behind me, and some of it splashed onto my bare ankle. I really should have wiped it off straight away but was in such a hurry to put the cover back on the mega-arachnid that by the time I got a paper towel, the mystery gunk had sunk into my skin and left a yellow stain.

The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was sleep in the same room as the many-legged horror, but I knew if I went downstairs, I’d get into big trouble for snooping. In the end I dragged my camp bed as far away from the covered jar as possible and after a long time fell into a fitful sleep.

When I woke up the next morning and stretched, I felt something hairy under the covers touching my foot. You can probably imagine what I thought it was! If there is a Grimace World Record for leaping out of bed, I smashed it that day.

The truth of the matter was much worse than I’d feared though. The yellow slime is some kind of hair growth formula that my dad’s been working on, and where it had sunk into my ankle, I now had a thick patch of dark hair!

I quickly put my socks and shoes on, but the hair was so long it poked out of the top of my sock! Not sure what else to do, I combed it round like some sort of leg scarf.

By the time I got to school, it had grown even more. I confided in Andi, and after he’d finished rolling on the floor laughing, he agreed to help me.

Luckily, he has a multi-tool hidden within a slot in his hip (which can deal with anything from unblocking a drain to soothing a crying baby), so we went into the boys toilets where he used the folding snippers to cut most of the hair away.

I was relieved at first…but by munch-time it had grown back worse than ever, so we had to go through the whole process again.

When I got home from school, I had to smuggle a pair of snippers out of Great Aunt Grumbeloid’s sewing basket so that I could have a secret trim each time I went to the bathroom. At first I flushed the clippings down the toilet, but when it started to get clogged up, I began stuffing them into my spare pillowcase.

As I write this I have a whole extra pillow, and the hair growth is showing no signs of stopping. I think I’m going to have to tell my parents in the morning, as I do not have any more pillowcases.

Did you ever have to confess to a wrongdoing?

Your friend,

Dethbert Jones