#shes pretty much powerless n relies on her dad most of the time

[ayearofpike]

Spooksville #16: Time Terror

Pocket Books, 1997 113 pages, 12 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-00264-3 LOC: CPB Box no. 257 vol. 26 OCLC: 36777822 Released May 1, 1997 (per B&N)

The robot toy in the alley behind the movie theater looks too awesome to leave alone. But when the Spook Squad starts messing with it, they find themselves back in the earliest days of the town. Luckily, they make it back home without any ill effects, but the curiosity of learning what this place is and why proves too much to not go back again. Of course, they can’t get lucky twice, and everything they see and everyone they talk to just ends up making their situation worse or weirder.

Quick metadiscourse: While doing research on Spooksville, I learned that only the first twelve books were republished to coincide with the TV series. This makes me wonder: do I need to also read the new versions of these if I’m trying to be a completist? I’m not going to worry too much about it right now, but maybe when I get to the end I’ll revisit them in a single post, as is my plan for the reprints of early Scholastic/Archway stuff.

On to Time Terror! It starts out a lot more straight-forward than we’ve come to expect from Spooksville, which has been hurling us into multiple twisted paths for the main characters pretty much right away. (Hey, when a book has to stay under 120 pages, he needs to start without preamble.) But here, the kids go to a movie and then find a robot clock in the alley behind the theater. They fiddle with it, and it unexpectedly sends them back in time, to the early foundational days of Spooksville. Watch figures out how to set it to send them back home before they can go mucking things up, and they agree that Sally should hide it in her garage so nobody else inadvertently finds it. That’s the first three chapters.

But if you know Sally (and by now you should) you ought to expect her to not leave well enough alone, despite her highly developed sense of impending doom. She gets the robot out, but before she can do anything with it Adam is there. It seems he didn’t trust her to leave it alone, and obviously he was right. But he’s a curious SOB too, and so Sally convinces him that they can finally learn why Spooksville is the way it is, if they can get back to exactly the same time they went to earlier. Of course, her house is in a different place, and they don’t quite set the clock the same way, so they materialize in the middle of a group of people who — guess what — take them for witches and imprison them alongside Madeline Templeton, who is slated to be burned at the stake that evening.

Cindy learns about this from Adam’s dad. Well, not THIS this, but he calls to ask if Adam is still hanging out with her, because he hasn’t come home yet. She calls Watch, who immediately knows that Adam must have been checking on Sally because he was tempted to do the same thing. They pick up Bryce and head over to Sally’s, where they find the robot in the middle of the garage rather than in its hiding place. As they argue about what it might mean, Bryce ... disappears. So do Watch’s glasses and watches and Cindy’s long blonde hair. But ... what’s the problem? Watch never wore glasses or four watches. (But then why is his name still fucking WATCH?) Cindy always had red hair. They came to Sally’s just the two of them; there wasn’t another guy in the group.

But their uneasiness about this situation is enough to make them realize that Adam and Sally must have gone back and changed something to make them unsure about what, to them, has always been the status quo. So they fiddle with the robot clock and end up ... in the far future, somehow. Watch must have fucked up. Lucky for them, a kid shows up and praises how they’re dressed as the Legendary Heroes, to get the full experience of attending the Spooksville City Museum. He’s been studying the Heroes and how they defeated so many deadly evils and terrors, so for today, his twelfth birthday, he wanted to experience the museum first-hand. Of course, all the adventures have been documented, so he knows all about the robot clock (or, as it’s been described in Cindy’s diary, the Time Terror) and how it works. So Cindy and Watch really have no choice but to commandeer the kid’s knowledge to get themselves back to wherever Adam and Sally are trapped.

(The kid’s name? Tweek.)

(I swear to fucking God.)

The future kids’ arrival in Old-Timey Spooksville (where, for some reason, everyone has British names in eighteenth-century California; thanks, white colonialism) distracts the lynch mob just as they’re lighting the fire to burn the three witches. Only the judge or governor or whoever he is sticks around, but obviously he’s powerless to prevent Madeline Templeton from freeing herself and the two kids, who she understands in her mystical wisdom to be friendly with her future descendant. He does try to go after the weakest one himself to save a little face (in this case, Sally, who’s struggling with smoke inhalation), but the witch trips him, which causes him to fall on his own sword. And that is the end of Jeff Poole. 

Poole. Oh. Oh shit.

After a quick detour to primordial Spooksville, Adam realizes his mistake and figures out the time robot through trial and error. They go home for his laser gun and then back to Old-Timey Spooksville, where the future kids have been tied to the same stakes to burn. Adam starts zapping dudes with the stun beam while Sally unties the others, and they all run for the witch’s castle to regroup and figure out what the hell to do. If Governor Poole were rendered unconscious before Madeline Templeton freed herself, they’re convinced, she wouldn’t have attacked him at all, so he’d live to sire the line up to Bryce. So Adam goes back to just before they escape but just AFTER the mob goes to hunt Watch and Cindy, zaps the governor with the stun beam, and then comes back.

Where Bryce is, having would-have come with Watch and Cindy on their original journey through time. (Hey, YOU figure out the verb tense there.) But he’s ... different. Stupid. Maybe mentally handicapped. We don’t, after all, really know what effect the stun beam has on human physiology. It’s probable that Adam inadvertently changed the ancestor’s genetic structure, which then refined its way down to Bryce mumbling about toy trucks and licking his palms. AND Watch can still see, AND they’re stuck in this castle which is under an attack not noted in the history books, which is SURELY gonna fuck something else up. Will Tweek ever get back home to finish celebrating his birthday?

There’s only one way to solve this problem once and for all. One of them has to go back (or rather, ahead) to just before they found the Time Terror and hide it. That way, they never touch it, they never go back to the past, they never change the way history is composed, and they all stay the same. But what does that mean for the person who does it? They’re a time-shifted variant of themselves existing in the same time, and if they ever cross paths with themselves it might be disastrous to the world. So Watch volunteers. He’s always been alone, he’s prepared to strike out on his own and not rely on his past, and besides he called it. 

So when the Spook Squad comes out of the movie theater this time, there’s nothing on the ground, even though they oddly expect something to be. Watch most of all — he’s having the weirdest case of deja vu. But they shake it off and continue on their merry way, oblivious to the strange kid hiding in the darkness bidding them farewell.

Just like in all time travel stories, there are a lot of unanswered questions about causality and paradoxes and whatnot. But honestly, I feel like Pike has done the best he could with the space available and the expectations of the audience and genre. It’s certainly a more complicated story than you’d expect to find in a junior-grade horror series book, and we can move forward without being too frustrated or confused by what it signifies. I’m assuming Future-Watch is gone forever? But then again, I thought Tira was gonna be in this one too. Let’s just keep plugging along without expectations. It’s safer.