Shrinking Ralph Perfect

  Tom ignored him and said, ‘There are no showers or baths. It’s a standing agreement that we don’t swap complaints about body odour. We all accept we stink like polecats.’

  Penny blushed and looked away.

  ‘There’s a toilet facility on the ground floor. It flushes – just – if you pull the chain hard. The waste goes into a septic tank that Neville and I dug in the shallow strip of earth around the outside of the house. It’s makeshift and not at all pleasant. We keep it clean so the flies don’t come.’

  ‘Flies?’ Ralph took a gulp of air.

  ‘Big furry buzzy things,’ Kyle said (buzzing). ‘Any good with a spear, Rafe?’ He pointed to a cluster of sharpened stakes, stacked beside a bundle of home-made torches. Ralph took a shaky sip of water. Flies? They’d be half the size of Tom.

  ‘You’re free to sleep where you like,’ Tom said, ‘but so far we’ve all stayed together for support. As you can see, the bedding’s not ideal. If you have trouble sleeping, there are one or two tasselled cushions lying about. They’re as old and dusty as the house itself, but a little more comfortable than the cotton wool bud-tips Jack expects us to lay our weary heads on.’

  Penny forced her fingers through her curly brown hair, clipping it back above the level of her ears. ‘Why’s he doing this? Why is Jack keeping you here?’

  ‘We’re his workforce,’ said Neville.

  ‘His miniones,’ said Ralph.

  ‘He must have bragged to you about his inventions?’ said Wally, rubbing at the smoke burns on his face. Ralph wondered with a gulp just how ‘bad’ Wally had to be at his job. Judging by the spikes in his short, blond hair he’d suffered an electrical shock or two. He offered Penny a piece of sugar bead.

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘He said something about this house being his ‘prize exhibit’.’

  ‘It’s the feature of his seaside show,’ said Tom. ‘It’s the house we talked about that morning in your kitchen, the one that went missing from the Yorkshire Dales. He didn’t take it apart; he shrank it down so he could put it on display on the end of a pier.’

  Penny shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. When people see it they’ll recognise it, won’t they?’

  ‘Not if their minds can’t believe it,’ said Tom. ‘He wants Wally to wire up a sign above the door: MINIVILLE: THE TINY HOUSE OF HORROR.’

  Penny shuddered and clutched at her arms.

  Tom reached forward and boldly touched her hand. Ralph watched his mum’s thumb curl over the plumber’s work-hardened fingers and was glad she had someone strong to protect her. ‘Before he miniaturised me,’ Tom said quietly, ‘he told me how Miniville’s supposed to work. When we’ve finished building, he plans to set the house inside a sealed glass dome, a bit like a giant snow-shaker.’

  ‘And shake us up and down?’ Ralph reeled in terror. He didn’t fancy being a squash ball against these ceilings.

  ‘Rafe, shut up and listen,’ Kyle snarled, whittling away at the end of a spear.

  Tom went on, ‘In the glass around the dome, he’s going to install a number of prisms. The idea’s pretty basic: when you put your eye to one, you’ll see a distorted view of the house – the corner of a room, a seat-cushion, the bath. There’ll be hearing points, too. And smelling holes, we think.’

  ‘To what end?’ asked Penny, looping her hair.

  Neville stepped forward, puffing at a pipe. ‘Greed, Mrs Perfect: Jack reckons folks’ll pay a pretty penny to watch th’antics of t’Miniville ghosts.’

  On cue in the distance, the crazed voice shouted, ‘Help the teacher!’ (or something like that). Miriam wailed an angry response. The resulting blast of air blew out Neville’s pipe and bounced the door right back against the wall, springing a screw from its straining hinges.

  Penny and Ralph both yelped in shock. But as the door knob dropped off and rolled down the landing, Tom merely said, ‘You’ve done well there, Nev.’

  ‘Aye,’ Neville said, relighting his pipe. ‘Just a matter of adjusting tension in t’hinges.’

  ‘Done well?’ Ralph queried. The door was hanging like a broken wing.

  Tom laughed, a welcome relief in the gloom. ‘You haven’t quite got it yet, have you, Ralph? Jack’s not using us to do the house up; it’s the opposite he wants: for us to do the house down. He’s using expert craftsmen – and women – to make stairs creak and have lights flicker—’

  ‘And curtains billow,’ Mrs Spink chipped in, going past with a length of neatly-ripped voile.

  ‘—he wants the place to look and sound as spooky as possible. We’re creating—’

  ‘Noah’s Ark,’ muttered Penny.

  Several people looked her way.

  Neville moved a pencil stub from one ear to the other.

  ‘I know what Mum means,’ said Ralph. ‘When I was eight, we went on holiday to Blackpool. There was this boat near the pier called Noah’s Ark. When you walked through it, weird things happened: skulls appeared, or air would blow up your trouser leg, or you’d go through a hall of mirrors or something.’

  ‘Like a ghost train,’ Jemima muttered.

  ‘Yes,’ Ralph said. This house was like a living ghost train.

  Penny looked around the room, at the mouse holes in the skirtings and the black mould peppering the ageing walls. ‘And when you’ve finished ‘building’, what happens then?’ She checked the faces. All were blank.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ said Tom. ‘We’re hoping – praying – he’ll let us go.’

  Kyle snorted and flopped out onto a mattress. ‘He’s a loony,’ he muttered. ‘He’ll never let us go.’

  ‘Not with an attitude like that,’ Tom said. ‘If we work together, we will get out.’

  ‘Sure. And when we do, we’ll be dog meat. Magic.’

  Ralph looked anxiously at Tom and Neville.

  ‘Best tell him,’ said Neville.

  Tom rubbed his brow.

  This is bad, thought Ralph. Even Tom’s scared. Helplessness gripped him as the plumber explained: ‘The device Jack uses to miniaturise things keeps a record in a binary database. It logs the coordinates of each object shrivelled.’

  ‘You mean he always knows where we are?’ asked Penny.

  ‘Worse than that,’ said Kyle. ‘The devil dog’s got a tracker on its collar. If we run and Jack lets Knocker come after us, schlup—’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Jemima, pressing her fists to her ears. ‘I don’t want to hear this.’ A tear streaked down the valley of her nose. Penny went across and put an arm around her. ‘I want my mum,’ Jemima sobbed.

  ‘We all do,’ said Kyle, and in his eyes Ralph could see that the bully truly meant it.

  ‘What happens if you don’t do the work?’ he asked.

  Kyle drew a breath as sharp as a spear point. He pointed to a tall blue vase on the mantelpiece. At first glance, it looked like an ordinary piece of pottery, but when Ralph squinted closely he could see a boy’s face mixed up in the glaze. It was Luke Baker, one of the gang.

  ‘Luke wouldn’t do what he was told,’ said Kyle, ‘so Jack mixed him up with the particles of the pot. And when Sylvia tried to stand up for him…’ he cocked his head at Mrs Spink, ‘…he stretched her out like chewing gum. He can do anything with that thing: shrink you, move you, take you apart.’

  ‘That’s how you got into the hedge,’ Ralph muttered, remembering back to Jack’s clash with the gang. ‘He ‘beamed’ you into it, like on Star Trek.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me, Rafe, old chap.’

  ‘Oh, will you leave him alone?’ Penny growled.

  Salter just laughed and clicked his tongue.

  Ralph shied away, anxious and hurt. The prospect of spending the rest of his life on the bully’s patch was almost as frightening as the thought of becoming a human vase or of being haunted by Miriam. He drew in his shoulders, sensing her presence nearby again. It was odd. He thought he’d detected her the first time Kyle had called him ‘Rafe’, as though he’d attracted her t
o him somehow and now she was circling, waiting, watching.

  But why? Why would she want to haunt him?

  ‘We’re working on escape plans all the time,’ said Tom.

  Ralph snapped to attention, eager to hear them. But before any minione could speak of breaking out, the light in the room was partially eclipsed and every tiny face turned quickly to the windows.

  A giant hand was closing in fast.

  The Final Straw

  ‘What’s happening?’ Penny cried, leaping up. Around the room, the miniones were running for the corners or grabbing hold of anything stable they could find.

  Heart thumping, Ralph stood back a pace as a grubby-looking fingernail yanked the balcony windows open and some sort of tube crashed into the room. It was a long, double-width, waxed paper drinking straw. It slid in like a tank gun, knocking Rodney Coiffure off his feet. Wally ran over and dragged him to safety. For one horrible, heart-stopping second, Ralph imagined that Jack was about to indulge in a brutal game of blow football. His pulse came down a few beats when Tom said: ‘Stay calm, Penny. This is how Jack communicates with us. Hang on tight to something. If he shouts, it can turn a bit blustery.’

  With that, Tom, Neville and Spud O’Hare hurried over to the end of the straw, positioning themselves just behind the opening.

  With a whoosh like an express train going past, Jack’s voice came rumbling out. ‘Wakey! Wakey!’

  Ralph’s hair seemed to double in length as the power of the blast tried to tug it from its roots. The corned beef wind that was Jack Bilt’s breath picked him up as though he were a weightless leaf, and sent him tumbling across the floor. He grabbed for the corner of a mattress but missed, hitting the far wall with a painful thud. When he opened his eyes, he saw Tom standing at the mouth of the straw, bellowing up it through his cupped hands. ‘What do you want, Jack?’ He dived aside as Jack replied, ‘Smells.’

  Tom came back, this time accompanied by Spud and Neville. To Ralph’s astonishment, Neville gave Spud a quick leg up and pushed the roofer into the straw. Spud punched a chisel through the paper wall, put his head down and held on tight.

  ‘Smells? We don’t understand,’ hailed Tom.

  ‘Stinkies,’ said Jack, making Spud O’Hare flip like a sock on a washing line. Somehow, the roofer managed to hang on and even had time to crawl further up the straw and hammer in another chisel hold. ‘I want odours. Stenches. Reeks galore. It’s pegs on noses for you little worms. This is a job for Mummy. Got it?’

  ‘You mean Penny?’ Tom replied, stalling for time.

  ‘I mean Mrs Pretty Penny Perfect,’ Jack bellowed. The chandelier, already swinging on its chains, looped so high that it crashed loudly against the ceiling, blazing a shower of glass to the floor.

  Still Spud O’Hare climbed up the straw. He was over the threshold of the balcony now.

  ‘Knocker’s nobbled,’ Jack railed. ‘Drugged. Dogged out. Sherried like a bloomin’ trifle, he is. She meant to do me in, didn’t she? Oh yes. You tell Mrs Bake-Me-a-Cake to make the house reek like a wrestler’s armpit or her boy goes into the Unlucky Dip.’

  Ralph heard a glassy clink.

  ‘That’s Jack, tapping the tank,’ said Tom. ‘Ralph, he needs you to come to the balcony.’

  Ralph hobbled across. His ribs were on fire and his ankle was throbbing. Neville helped him on, telling him to look at Jack, not the straw. Spud was nearly halfway up it, between the outer wall of Miniville and the side of the aquarium.

  To Ralph’s horror, Jack slammed a sweet jar on the trestle table. The one full of nail clippings, from the cellar. He unscrewed the lid and waved a lollipop stick. Stuck to its end was a small chunk of corned beef. ‘See this?’ he boomed. ‘This is what happens if Mummy doesn’t work.’ And he plunged the lolly stick into the clippings, stabbing and stirring and finally pulling out. Ralph turned away with his hands to his face. All that was left of the meat were strands.

  ‘All right, Jack, she’ll do it,’ Tom shouted.

  ‘I’ll be sniffing,’ said the builder, pressing his hideous nostrils to the tank. ‘Don’t get lazy, Jenks.’

  ‘The work’s almost done. The house is ready. You can’t keep us here for ever, Jack.’

  ‘I’ll keep you as long as I like,’ Jack roared. ‘You snivelling little—’

  Suddenly, he paused and narrowed his eyes. Ralph filled up with terror. For he knew that Jack had spotted something, and that something could only be the tiny shadow of an Irish roofer climbing up a straw made suddenly transparent by a narrow chink of sunlight from the garden outside.

  ‘No,’ Ralph cried, as he saw Jack pick up the magnifying glass and hold it across the path of the light, focusing the rays to a laser-fine point. Within seconds, the straw was smoking and buckling. The tiny shadow inside it wriggled.

  ‘Jack, no!’ Tom shouted.

  At its centre, the straw burst into flame. It wilted and quickly dissolved into two. The minute figure of Spud O’Hare fell what, for him, must have been the best part of twenty feet. All Ralph could think of as he watched Spud drop, was spiders. How many had he caught on paper tissues and floated out of the bathroom window, reasoning that something as light as a spider wouldn’t hit the ground so very hard?

  Spud O’Hare, when he hit, was lucky to survive. In his youth, Ralph would discover later, Spud had served in the Royal Marines and knew how to land a parachute safely. Clutching to a canopy of burning straw, he glided, rather than fell, to earth. He landed heavily on the soles of his feet, collapsed and rolled sideways, into the base of the dying tree. The damp weeds growing up around the walls of Miniville snuffed out the flames that were licking at his jacket and combat trousers. He was knocked out, and that was his escape attempt done.

  Ralph sank to the balcony floor, holding himself in a very tight ball. The dangers involved in the attempted break out had brought the scale of their predicament sharply into focus. A growing tide of nausea reached his throat and a bubble of vomit burnt against his palate. Kyle was right, Jack was a madman. He could keep them here till the day they died. They were helpless mice in a cage called Miniville.

  There was no escape.

  A Ghostly Encounter

  ‘Tom, why can’t we just break the glass? Throw a brick at it. Smash our way out?’

  Penny was sitting on the edge of her mattress, knees drawn up, looking through the window at the dark wall of the tank. Several hours had passed since Spud O’Hare’s fall. The roofer, once revived, had managed to stagger back inside the house, where he was quickly attended to by Mrs Spink. She had once been a country midwife and knew a thing or two about basic first aid. She diagnosed a broken collarbone and put Spud’s arm into a makeshift sling she had cut from Neville’s carpentry apron. Spud had not returned to his leaky roof that day. But the strange practice of Miniville deterioration work had carried on in double shifts throughout the afternoon until Jack had ended the punishing schedule by throwing the blue sheet over the tank, just as though he’d covered up his parrot for the night. Barring Penny, Ralph and the gutsy Tom Jenks, all the other miniones, including Spud, had fallen into an exhausted sleep.

  ‘The tank walls are thicker than you think,’ Tom explained, eventually coming round to Penny’s question. He put a smoky candle on the boards beside her. Its flame sent long shadows snaking up the walls and arcing across the plaster-cracked ceiling. ‘We’ve tried hammers, iron spikes, battering rams, fire. Nothing comes close to cracking it.’

  ‘What about drills?’ Ralph said quickly. He was propped up on one elbow next to his mum. He’d seen Neville use a power drill that very afternoon to weaken and crack a floorboard joist. Someone must have tried a drill. Surely.

  Tom unbuttoned the neck of his boiler suit. He looked tired and overworked. Stressed, Ralph thought; disappointed that Spud had not succeeded. Nodding, he said, ‘We used a diamond-tipped bit at the highest speed possible. It was like trying to dig a tunnel through an iceberg with a toothpick; it barely scratched the surface. We’d nee
d explosives to really break through.’ He adjusted his position to untie his boots. ‘We were hoping we might get lucky with the sealant—’

  ‘Sealant?’ Penny queried, holding her nose as a waft of cold air brought a foul-smelling current into her nostrils. The house in general smelt pretty awful. Having been threatened with a nose like ‘Pinocchio’ if she didn’t start making ‘eggy odours’, Penny had asked if the toilet door might be left open for a while until she could think of ways to make a safer stink. Tom’s sweating feet were, strangely, not the answer.

  Throwing his laces wide he said, ‘Those beads of silicone you see around baths. It’s used in fish tanks to seal the joins and make them watertight. We stripped some back from a likely-looking corner, but we couldn’t find a gap that was large enough to slip through.’

  Ralph sighed and flopped back against his pillow (a tasselled cushion that smelt like the middle of an old dog’s blanket). Normally he loved a good, challenging conundrum, but he liked the safety net of answers, too. There was no back page to flip to here. This was real life and this was serious: how could the toys defeat their master? ‘What about upwards? Can’t we climb over?’

  Tom eased off his boots and gripped them in his fingers. There were holes in three of the toes of his socks. ‘Even standing on the chimney pots, the tank’s too high for ladders or ropes. The first week I was here, Nev and I had a crack at making suckers for our hands and feet so we could try to scale the glass.’

  ‘Like Spiderman?’ Ralph gasped. He was born under the sign of Cancer the Crab and his eyes were living up to the tag. ‘Wow. What happened?’

  Tom pushed back his sleeve. His arm was a mass of purple-yellow blotches. ‘This happened. And that was with four mattresses breaking my fall. Try to get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. If you need me, I’m the scouring pad nearest the door.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ Penny whispered, slipping almost fully-clothed under her bedsheet, the way she’d been advised to do by Mrs Spink.

  Tom smiled and let his gaze linger over her face. ‘I’ll get you out of here. That’s a promise.’ He winked at Ralph. ‘We’ll find a way, won’t we?’