#i need to snatch him like those dinosaurs who steal eggs from others

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Spooksville #11: The Deadly Past

Pocket Books, 1996 116 pages, 11 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-55072-1 LOC: CPB Box no. 507 vol. 4 OCLC: 35120993 Released August 1, 1996 (per B&N)

The pterodactyl appeared out of nowhere and carried Cindy off, presumably to be devoured and digested. Now the rest of the Spook Squad has to track her down and hopefully save her, with the help of the mysterious Bryce Poole and a little advice from Ann Templeton. Can they find her? More importantly, can they figure out how the dinosaurs are getting into Spooksville, and how will they stop it?

Dammit, I already blew my joke by putting the We’re Back image on the Wishing Stone post.

I haven't mentioned that in the last couple of books Pike has given more description of the kids up front. I guess we're going on a year of Spooksville books now, right, and it's possible that people are getting into them without having read from the beginning. So we have wiry Sally, short Adam, beautiful Cindy, and mysterious Watch, who BY THE WAY still doesn't have a last name. Like, he tells people it's been so long since he's used it that he no longer remembers it. I'm worried about this twelve-year-old, you guys.

We don't learn it here either — the kids are too busy trying to rescue Cindy. She gets snatched first thing, or close to it anyway. The gang is out for a hike in the woods, and you'd think they'd know better by now, but sure enough that's where the pterodactyl attacks. It swoops in from a distant mountain peak and immediately goes after human children, like it knows they're going to be good to eat. They manage to scare it away with a big stick, but then they get trapped in a cave and the animal is coming after them. Sally lights the stick on fire and Adam shoves it down its throat, but it only stuns the bird long enough for them to get out of the cave. Not long enough to get to a better protected spot, because it snatches Cindy and flies off.

The rest of the crew is left to figure out what to do. Obviously a dinosaur grabbed our friend, she's dead, right? Watch hopes not. He's thinking that maybe the pterodactyl is a mother, and grabbed Cindy as baby food, but he recently read that flying reptiles were supposed to have slept during the heat of the day, so maybe the babies are still asleep. He steals a pickup truck to try to go after her, since he's the only one that can drive, and since Adam got a huge scratch running from the thing and needs stitches. But before they can get back to town, Bryce Poole shows up riding an apatosaurus. He's known about the breach in time for two days and is only just now coming back to warn Spooksvillians, which again makes Adam question his trustworthiness. Me too — Bryce Poole feels like one of those kids who always saw the movie before it came out and who beat all the video games before you ever got them. Did you really? I doubt it.

Meanwhile, Cindy's waking up in a giant nest, where there are four eggs as big as she is. Were pterodactyls that big? I feel like they were more like a turkey or a vulture (not able to look it up right now). Also, I believe the preferred term is "pteranodon." But whatever it is, one of them is hatching, and Cindy needs to get out. She climbs up out of the nest, which is on the side of a cliff, and to the peak of the mountain, at which point Mama Pterodactyl comes screeching back — and dives right past her at someone yelling down the bottom. It's Watch! He drove his truck through a temporal vortex and saw Cindy on the peak, and now he's taunting the monster into a cave that is too narrow for it. He takes it through a tunnel up to a higher point on the mountain, and when the 'dactyl is forced to back out, he drops a big rock on its head and knocks it out.

But now they need to figure out where they are and how to get back, and maybe along the way they can close the vortex to our world. They happen to spot a flying saucer at the base of a nearby volcano, which you know that's never good news. Behind the saucer is a tunnel going inside, and, well, it's not like Watch and Cindy have any other options. They observe some golden aliens with white hair working on some kind of computer box, but suddenly these guys get gunned down by big-headed aliens in black jumpsuits, who turn to the computer and do something else to it. While they're trying to decide what to do, Bryce and Sally show up through a magic portal. It seems that Bryce Poole apparently knows a shortcut along the Secret Path that will let them travel through time, and this very spot is where Madeline Templeton's grave lies 70 million years in the future. As smart as he is, though, he doesn't know enough about time or aliens to make a quick decision here — the big-heads capture the kids and chain them to the wall.

Where is Adam in all of this? He didn't think it was the right decision to just go blasting through space-time, and instead went to get advice from Ann Templeton, who is shooting dinosaurs with magic fire to keep them off her property. She can see what's happening with Adam's friends, and wants to help him save them from danger. But she won't give him all the answers outright — she expects him to do some of the work, because we learn better that way. She tells him that the aliens aren't actively trying to affect the time warp, but it will happen anyway. Then she shows him the shortcut to the Secret Path that Bryce and Sally just took.

He shows up in the cave with enough surprise to take down the big-heads and free his friends ... but now what? Ann Templeton's advice seems to indicate that this box was placed here to mitigate the time warp, and the big-heads have disabled it to let destiny take its course. But our heroes don't want dinosaurs in Spooksville, but they can't figure out how to restart the computer. Luckily, one of the goldies is waking up, and Watch manages to communicate to him that they want him to do what he was already doing. He resets the computer, points to the display, and then points to one of Watch's watches — like, hey kids, you have a countdown to get out.

They make their way back to the truck, because Watch would like to return it even though he broke a window and broke the ignition. But as they're driving back along the not-road, here comes that fucking pterodactyl again. It dives and screeches after the kids who have to ride in the truck bed, and Adam's shooting it with the laser he stole off an alien to no effect. So Sally has to save the day: she takes off her shoe and chucks it down the bird's throat. This stuns it long enough that they make it through the time portal just before it seals itself. And back in Spooksville, there's no sign that anything changed, because they changed the past and now the present is dinosaur-free.

So I guess Bryce is officially one of the Spook Squad now? I guess we'll find out in the next one. I'm really starting to wonder more about how the Lemuria thing and the alien thing and Bryce Poole and Mysterious Watch are going to tie up into a package. Or are they? I mean, in plowing through Pike this year I've certainly seen enough places where he just abandons a thread or tries to tie it off with a one-sentence throwaway wrapup. So maybe none of this will pay off. But I'll read the rest of the books before I sell him short. JUST LIKE ADAM OH SNAP