‘Over my dead body,’ growled Penny. ‘You’re going to listen to Ralph and listen carefully. He hasn’t once been wrong about Jack or this house. Your swaggering won’t set us free, Kyle Salter, but this professor might. It makes sense to give the stone to the one person who’ll know what to do with it. So get down off your high horse and start searching for the things Ralph needs for this device. What were they again, Ralph, so we all know?’
She planted her feet and put her hands on her hips. Ralph sighed and rattled off the list.
‘Well?’ Penny said, giving Kyle the eye.
‘I repeat,’ he snarled, using his height to intimidate her. ‘What’s this gadget gonna do?’
‘Return us to full size, we hope,’ said Wally, pulling Kyle round to face him. ‘Then Jack’s yours. We all agreed, people?’
The group nodded.
Jemima, standing next to Wally, shuddered.
Kyle sloped his spear and looked around the faces before coming back to poke Wally’s shoulder. ‘I wanna be the first one big again, deal?’
‘Deal,’ said Wally, without taking a vote.
Neville sighed. He took a hammer and a cold chisel out of his belt. ‘I’d best get upstairs and set this chap free. Ralph, come and do the introductions, will thee? The rest of you mend your wounds – and start searching for these components, fast.’
As the group dispersed, Ralph whispered to his mum, ‘I want to see Tom.’
‘No,’ she said quietly, clasping his hand. ‘He’s very poorly. The quickest way to help him is to overcome Jack. Go with Neville. I’ll stay with Tom.’ And she kissed him once and told him she loved him. And for once, Ralph was comforted to hear it.
Over the next fifteen minutes, all manner of bits and bobs were delivered to the table in the tower room. This was Wally’s suggestion to the miniones: bring anything you can find that might be used in some kind of electrical gadget. He privately agreed with Ralph that the stone was some form of alien metal, a bit like the legendary dilithium crystals that drove the engines of the Starship Enterprise. It was clearly capable of destabilising force fields. You didn’t need the brain of a super-computer to guess that Professor Collonges was planning to construct a device that could tune into the wavelengths of the bipolar transgenerator and somehow scramble or reverse its functions. But could this be achieved by cobbling together coat hangers, hair grips, thimbles, clothes pegs, tin foil, bottle tops, mirrors, coins, the motor from Neville’s clapped out razor and the entire contents of Wally’s electrical kit? Mrs Spink had even brought a tasselled cushion – for the professor to sit on, she claimed.
Ambrose Collonges seemed to think so. He rummaged and clawed through the heap of rammel, throwing away anything he didn’t need and barking out requests for anything he did. There were plenty of tools to hand, and it wasn’t long before the smell of melting solder was charring the air and fizzing blue sparks were perforating the shadows in the tower room. Ralph had never seen genius like it. One of his favourite TV programmes was a thing called Scrapyard Challenge, in which teams of people were given the task of building a rocket, say, from the pieces of scrap they found around the yard. This was the same, in a scaled-down version. At first, it seemed impossible that anything useful could be made from the gubbins Professor Collonges was winnowing through, but the object that eventually came together, though looking deceptively simple, was, in actuality, impressively scientific.
It was not unlike a kitchen juicer (its body was a plastic measuring jug): round, with a funnel-shaped extension on top. Inside, through the curved transparent walls, wires twisted in pasta-shaped spirals, and mirrors trapped and bounced the light. The rod of Tom’s belt buckle swung back and forth, acting as a switch of some kind between two carefully-bent paper clips. A coat hanger aerial wagged and trembled. And in the funnel extension, a circle of hair grips was arranged in an overlapping, criss-crossing cradle, into which the professor now fitted the stone.
The insides of the jug turned silver-blue.
Ralph caught his breath. ‘Is it done?’ he asked. He checked his watch. Two minutes left. Salvation, just in time.
The professor stood back, grinning like a haddock. ‘Iterations, iterations, iterations…’ he muttered.
Ralph flagged a hand. ‘Shall I call the others?’
Ambrose Collonges slewed his eyes sideways. ‘Door,’ he hissed. He made locking gestures.
Ralph shrugged in confusion. Why would he do that? Why would he want to lock them in again?
Collonges gathered the device into his arms and carried it further across the room.
‘What does it do?’ Ralph asked. He was beginning to feel just a little uneasy about the professor’s selfish behaviour. He didn’t seem grateful for the help they’d given him. He hadn’t even said thank you for being unchained. And he certainly wasn’t acting like a man whose first interest was the liberation of his fellow prisoners. Ralph took a step forward. ‘Show me how it works.’
‘Back! Back! Or I’ll turn your eyes black!’
Ralph jumped back automatically. But was he suspicious or was he frightened? He couldn’t pin the feeling down. ‘Is it dangerous?’ he asked. For now he came to think about it, surely it had taken years in the lab for Collonges to develop the device on Jack’s wrist? This do-it-yourself-in-under-sixty-minutes version was completely untested. How many potatoes had exploded or atomised before the boffin had got the technology right?
Too late to be thinking that now. Collonges prodded a switch, made from a toggle off Mrs Spink’s cardigan. The gadget sent out a high-pitched whine. To Ralph’s amazement, a vortex of green light began to fan out from the tip of the aerial. The bats that were covering the windows screeched. Quickly, they took to the air again, fleeing through the ragged holes in the glass or sluicing away down the well of the stairs. Ralph heard shouts from the body of the house and knew there’d be a crowd in here once the bats had cleared.
‘What’s happening?’ he cried, cupping his ears to shut out the hum.
The professor licked his nose with the tip of his tongue in the manner of a man who was concentrating deeply. He twiddled two knobs made from plastic bottle tops and levered a clothes peg on the device, directing its signal out into the lounge. ‘Delta theta,’ he cackled.
Ralph peered into the lounge. There stood a perplexed-looking Jack, checking the settings on the transgenerator watch. The green pyramid was blinking rapidly. He tapped it, then twisted it left and right. The professor let out an evil laugh. His new device hummed and bobbled about the table. A ball of light bounced from mirror to mirror. From somewhere within it came a warning beep.
‘The red! The red! To be in my bed!’ Collonges tweaked the knobs again and the green light crackling out of the aerial turned a particular shade of red.
On Jack Bilt’s wrist, the same-coloured pyramid began to blink…
‘Don’t move that clothes peg!’ Ralph cried out. At last, he’d worked out what was going to happen. Touch the red and you’ll be in my bed. He meant his matchbox bed, here in Miniville. The professor had no intention of restoring the miniones back to full size, he was out to gain his revenge on Jack – by swapping places with him.
Ralph lunged towards the table. He grabbed the device and turned away with it, shielding it from the professor’s grasp. But as he fiddled with buttons and catches and pegs, anything that might be an on-off switch, his foot located a rolling pin (how that could have been used in an electrical gizmo was anybody’s guess) and he crashed to the floor, holding the device in the well of his chest.
Collonges was over him, roaring like a bear. The Frankenstein hands came forward again and were on Ralph’s neck as he screamed for help.
Schwuup! A spear flashed through the air, striking Collonges hard in the shoulder. He yelped like a puppy and slumped to one side. At the same time, the space above them shimmered and Miriam tried to come to Ralph’s aid. But the strange device had not been deactivated, merely retargeted. There was a pop, followed by a
n intense flash of light and Miriam’s form went whooshing through the ether, as if she’d been accelerated to ‘warp factor nine’.
Kyle Salter and Neville pounded forward. Kyle pulled the spear from Collonges’ shoulder. With the flat of his foot, he pushed the professor away from Ralph. ‘Tie him up,’ he said to Neville, and to Ralph: ‘Get up.’
Ralph struggled to his feet.
Kyle yanked him forwards by the hair. ‘So, you’ve never been wrong about anything, eh, mummy’s boy?’
‘Get off, Salter. I stopped him escaping.’
‘No,’ said Kyle, ‘we did that.’ He shook his spear tip under Ralph’s nose so the boy could smell the scent of blood. Then his gaze fell on the device. ‘Nice toy,’ he said and snatched it up. At last, Kyle Salter had what he wanted: command of the group and the power of the stone.
His triumph, however, lasted all of three seconds. First, Knocker gave out a warning howl. Then a meteor crashed into the side of the tank.
That was what it felt like, at any rate – some spinning object impacting unstoppably with the world as the miniones knew it. The boom alone was almost enough to shake the house to rubble. For several seconds there was utter confusion. Shoving Ralph aside, Kyle started yelling orders, thinking Jack had taken a hammer to the house.
Then Neville reported, ‘No, it were a plate. It flew into the tank wall and smashed to smithereens.’
‘A plate?’ said Ralph.
Neville rubbed his eyes. ‘Aye – oh ’eck, look out!’ He ducked as a dog bone flew towards them and ricocheted off the trestle table.
‘What’s going on?’ Kyle shouted at Ralph.
Typical. As if Ralph knew the answer.
But, as usual, he was the first to work it out. A hurricane was whistling through Annie’s house. Dozens of objects were lifting off their resting places and flying at great speed around the lounge. Air traffic control was non-existent. Ralph knew straight away there was only one force capable of producing such activity. A ghost. A very unstable ghost.
Miriam was out of Miniville – and how.
Jack Attack
Terrible forces, Ralph remembered her saying. Terrible forces would be unleashed if she went outside her place of haunting. The fabric of the universe would be disrupted, space would fold and a black hole would form in Annie’s front room. Well, maybe it wouldn’t be quite that bad, but there was certainly no doubting the physical evidence of Miriam’s distress. Her spirit was well and truly ‘troubled’ as Mrs Spink might say, and the extent of the trouble could be proportionately measured in flying tea mugs.
Ralph almost felt sorry for Jack. The builder never knew what hit him – literally. Stuff was winging in from all directions. It wasn’t just the cushions and the mugs in the lounge. The entire small, movable contents of the kitchen were being gathered into the growing whirlwind. The first thing to hit him was a copper-bottomed saucepan. It pranged off his pigeon chest, knocking him backwards, towards the sofa. He twirled and fell onto it, but the cushions just as quickly ejected him, sending him sprawling back into the ring, where a soup ladle dinked off his lanky-haired head and a fork buried its prongs into his thigh.
Justice. Of a sort.
Under normal circumstances, the miniones would have been leaping for joy to see their captor so tormented and humiliated. But no one in the house spared a thought for rejoicing, for they were in terrible danger, too. Although Miriam’s destructive brouhaha seemed to be directed exclusively at Jack, anything within its range was fair game. Several times, the Miniville aquarium had shuffled alarmingly across the trestle table. If it was sucked up and thrown across the room there were going to be serious casualties. And if it wasn’t thrown, how long would it be before it fell off the table and dashed itself against the floorboards, anyway? And if it wasn’t dashed, how long could the tiny house survive without being crushed by some flying object?
Like Knocker’s wooden leg, for instance?
Ralph had seen the malformed terrier go running for the space at the back of the sofa. But, in the middle of the floor, the mutt had been clonked by a flying ashtray. Dizzied and confused, he’d fallen over and rolled onto his back. The cyclone had pulled him through a half-circle, tugging at his spindly, upturned legs as if they were dandelions caught in a twister. The broom handle leg, ticking back and forth with all the fury of a crazed metronome, had quickly worked itself free of the elastic that held it to the stump of Knocker’s shrivelled limb. Then it was up and in the current. It shot to the ceiling, taking out the light bulb on its way, before rattling along a section of the cornice and dropping tamely into the tank. It landed, end on, centimetres from the east wing of the house. The boom was horrendous, the quake terrifying. Every brick in Miniville readjusted its mortar packing. On the base of the tank, a frosted white star of cracks and fractures radiated out from the point of impact. For half a second, the leg stood upright, then fell. Had it fallen against the roof of the house what hope would there have been for the miniones inside? But it didn’t hit the roof, it keeled towards the tank wall, lodging itself against a top corner.
A lucky escape – in more ways than one.
Neville was the first to realise it. He ran to the window and boldly peered out. ‘We can climb it,’ he said. ‘We can climb Knocker’s leg.’
‘Neville, get down!’ Ralph screamed. The fingernails jar had just gone up and the clippings were being sucked out and sprayed around the lounge. Jack took fifty in the head and chest. Dozens more whipped across the face of the tank, raining in at machine-gun speed through the broken, tower-room windows.
‘Agh!’ cried Neville, strafed by a row across the back of his neck.
‘Agh!’ went Kyle, paying the price for his arrogant striptease as nails ripped across his naked chest. ‘Do something, Perfect. How do we stop this?’
‘We can’t,’ Ralph shouted, sheltering behind the overturned table. ‘Not until Miriam calms down.’
That wasn’t good enough for Kyle. Ignoring his bleeding wounds, he grabbed Professor Collonges by the collar and pulled the old man into a nose-to-nose face-off. ‘Show me how to use this thing you’ve made. Tell me how to zap the ghost or I’ll throw you out the windows before she does.’
The professor blew a raspberry into his face.
Salter bundled him aside and picked up the gadget. He shook it. Nothing happened. He pushed the button. Nothing happened. He pulled the peg. Nothing happened. He twisted the stone inside its hairpins. Nothing happ— no, the gadget buzzed. He tried the stone again.
‘Put it down,’ yelled Ralph. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. You might end up swapping places with Jack.’
Why he was giving out such a warning to a boy who’d bullied him most of his life, Ralph couldn’t imagine. But no one in their right mind (and Kyle never had been, in Ralph’s opinion) would want to be in Jack’s shoes now. The pan Jack had used to fry Inspector Bone (who’d disappeared, Ralph noticed; now where had he gone?) was dancing in front of the bewildered builder, beating him backwards towards The Frisker. As Jack’s body fell between the gross rubber hands, the bulbs came on and flashed with the zest of a winning fruit machine. Then the gloves began to do their work, slapping Jack’s head, and only his head, sparring him upright for half a minute till his eyes rolled back and his mouth began to dribble and his melon of a brain must have turned to pulp. He slumped to the floor in a pin-striped heap. And from around the back of The Frisker came a hand. A hand showing weal burns at the wrist. It was Bone, somehow free from his clothes-line tangle. He flipped open a pair of cuffs and…
Snap. Jack Bilt was under arrest. Clamped to the long, if shaky-looking, arm of Detective Inspector Nicholas Bone.
‘He’s got him,’ Ralph whooped. ‘Bone’s nabbed Jack.’
If only Kyle Salter had been paying attention. ‘It’s working,’ he laughed, as a green charge crackled out of the aerial.
‘Leave it,’ cried Ralph. But his warning was too late. Disaster was about to strike. Though tied,
Professor Collonges could kick. He aimed a vicious poke at the back of Kyle’s knee. Kyle bucked and lurched forward, spilling the device high into the air. It fizzed and pulsed all the way to its landing, dumphing in the centre of a tasselled cushion.
A flash of green light enveloped the cushion and gave it a radioactive glow.
And then it proceeded to grow.
And grow and grow and grow and grow…
‘Out, boys! Now! Before you’re crushed!’ Neville yelled. And, diving past the cushion, he grabbed Kyle Salter round the waist and dragged him manfully towards the door. With the open stairs behind them, Ralph and Kyle were out of danger. But Professor Collonges was not. As the fabric of the cushion began to press against the walls, stretching to fill all available spaces, the mad inventor was trapped in a corner, unable to escape.
Neville ran forward to attempt a rescue, but could find no way past the growing mound. And so he took a saw from his belt and sliced it, cutting and stabbing in the hope that the woolly balloon would burst or he could chop a hole right through its centre and pull Professor Collonges clear. The feathers and dust of countless decades spilled into the tiny tower room. But that wasn’t all that came out of the cushion. By the time he’d realised what he’d released, Neville Gibbons was completely surrounded. The leading wave was heel-height and growing. The most frightening creatures Ralph had ever seen.
Dust mites.
Battleground Miniville
They had six, sturdy, triple-jointed legs and looked like bleached, translucent beetles. Protruding from their backs was a number of hairs that seemed to Ralph to have little or no function. They did not, for instance, appear to aid balance. For as the mites tumbled out around Neville’s feet, they stumbled, directionless, rather than ran, as if the sudden exposure to freedom and light had disrupted their sense of navigation.