Race Night

“These chocolates are covered in tooth marks!” complained Kimi.

  All the same, she insisted on eating half of them before she left the house with Horace at midnight. With the snake draped around his neck, and two hamsters hanging on his ears, Horace cantered down the silent streets to Ragbag’s house. Boo was out of plaster now, and swung from ear to ear pretending to be Tarzan.

  Ragbag was waiting for them. “The humans are asleep,” she whispered. “Have you got your burglar?”

  “Here she is.” Once he had posted Kimi, Horace was on tenterhooks until the snake emerged through the letterbox with the key in her mouth.

  “Easy peasy,” she sniffed.

  Ragbag pulled the tarpaulin away from the lawnmower. Then she dragged a wooden clothes airer out of the porch.

  “I’d thought we could leave this in the lawnmower’s place,” she said, “with the tarpaulin draped over it. Then my human won’t realise that it’s missing.”

  “Excellent idea!” Horace put the key in the lawnmower’s ignition and started up the engine. When he wriggled onto the seat, it felt like a smaller version of the tractor he had driven after his car ended up in a stream.

  “Welcome to the Houndmobile!” he announced joyfully. “All aboard!”

  After pulling the tarpaulin over the clothes airer, Ragbag and Silverside squeezed onto the lawnmower’s seat next to him. Tickety and Boo sat on his shoulder, while Kimi curled up in the grass box.

  Horace drove the lawnmower sedately down the drive. Compared to the tractor, this was easy. Once he was on the road, he opened the throttle.

  The result was disappointing. The lawnmower barely speeded up. It went no faster than a strolling poodle.

  “Come on, Horace!” squealed Boo in his ear. “Speed up! Step on the gas!”

  Horace tried. The engine coughed and chugged. The lawnmower went from strolling speed to ambling speed.

  “Faster!”

  “That’s as fast as it will go,” said Horace.

  “Not good enough!” grumbled Boo. “And it sounds all wrong. It goes Tickety tickety tickety.”

  “Hmph!” said Tickety. “I suppose you think it should go BOO.”

  “Yep. BOO, and GROWL and RARH like a mad dog,” said Boo.

  Silverside growled, deep in his throat.

  “Like that!” said Boo. “That sounds much better. Keep it up!”

  Silverside kept growling. It was a good, throaty growl. But it did not make the lawnmower go any faster.

  “Go go GO!” shouted Boo, jumping up and down in exasperation.

  “Did you say sixteen horse power?” snorted Kimi. “More like hamster power. Little fat hamster power, about as fast as a slug.” Boo bit her on the tail.

  “Stop that!” scolded Tickety.

  “That snake has no manners!” squeaked Boo.

  “Squabbling won’t help the lawnmower go any faster,” Tickety said. “What we need is a way to soup it up.”

  “Soup it up?” Horace pulled over and stopped. “How do we do that?”

  “Bungee ropes!” squealed Boo.

  “Bigger wheels,” suggested Silverside.

  “We could paint lightning flashes on it,” offered Ragbag.

  “And add tail fins,” said Tickety.

  “Will they make it go faster?” Horace asked.

  There was a strange sound down in the grass box. Kimi was laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Boo demanded.

  “I’ll tell you what you need to do,” replied the snake. “Dismantle the engine, bore out the cylinder, and install larger piston rings. Then remove the camshaft and modify the lobes, and finally adjust the main jet of the carburettor to increase the fuel flow.”

  “Hang on! Say it more slowly,” Horace begged. “I have to whatsit the thingummy...”

  “Oh, and you’ll need to do it in a machine shop with the proper tools,” said Kimi. “Unless you want to ruin the engine.”

  The dogs looked at each other. Their ears drooped.

  “Maybe we’ll stick with the tail fins,” Horace said.

  “And lightning flashes must make it go a bit faster, mustn’t they?” said Ragbag.

  “If I keep growling, that should help too,” added Silverside.

  “I’ve got loads of bungee ropes,” said Boo.

  “Right,” said Horace. “That’s the way to go!”

  His spirits lifted as he set off again at top speed. True, top speed wasn’t very high; but with all those improvements, by next week the lawnmower would go much faster.

  “Let’s go to the Faversaver car park now and practise,” he suggested.

  The dogs woofed agreement. With Silverside growling as loudly as he could, they chugged off to the supermarket.

  But there they found that others had the same idea. As they approached, they could hear the roar and scream of revving engines.

  Ragbag jumped down and ran ahead, then came back to report.

  “Those cats are already practising in their sports cars!”

  “Then we won’t,” decided Horace. “We don’t want to show our hand too early. We want to surprise them with the souped-up Houndmobile at the race night next week.”

  There was the noise of a snake snickering. “You’ll surprise them all right,” Kimi muttered.

  “But they won’t surprise us! We’ll sneak up now and spy on them,” declared Horace. “We’ll discover their tactics and their secrets.”

  He parked the lawnmower round a corner, jumped down and prowled cautiously towards the supermarket. Running under the cover of the low wall that surrounded the car park, he stuck his head up behind a bollard.

  He had to duck back down in a hurry. A sports car sped past so quickly that the wind from it ruffled his fur.

  The car screeched to a stop. A cat stuck its head out of the window. It was Fang.

  “Eighty-one miles per hour!” he yelled. “Beat that!”

  A few seconds later another car sped past in a blur of noise. This time the wind blew Horace’s ears inside out.

  The car skidded round in a circle before coming to a halt. “Eighty-five!” shouted Pibbles, the black cat in the driver’s seat.

  “Those cats are good!” Kimi said admiringly.

  “No, they’re not,” growled Boo. “They’re puffed-up big-headed show-offs. We’re going to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget!”

  “Of course you are,” said Kimi. “I think you need to aim for at least ninety miles an hour in your Houndmobile.”

  Horace felt a shiver of anxiety. He had never driven that fast. Would he be able to control the lawnmower at those speeds?

  “I know what we should do,” squealed Boo. “We should sabotage them!”

  “What?”

  “We should blow up those mangy cats and their stinky cars,” said Boo. “Or at the very least we should bite their brake cables so that they all crash horribly.”

  Tickety gave him a stern look. “Sometimes I wonder about you, dear little brother,” she said. “We are not biting any brake cables. That would be very dangerous indeed.”

  “All right,” said Boo, unabashed. “We could put sugar in the petrol tanks. Bananas in the exhaust. Glue in the engine.”

  “Certainly not! That would be unsporting,” Horace said. “We’re going to win this race fairly or not at all.”

  “Well, in that case there can only be one victor,” yawned the snake.

  Horace beamed. “That’s very supportive of you, Kimi!”

  She smiled sweetly. “Not at all.”

  Chapter Seven