The Race Against Time

  “Gone!” said Little Harry. “Gone, gone, gone.”

  “No,” soothed Mum, “there’s plenty of everything left, Little Harry. Take as much as you like.”

  “Gone,” said Little Harry again.

  “Maybe he wants a drink,” said Dad, picking up a steaming jug brimming with a dark, frothing liquid. He poured some for each of them. It looked a bit like coffee but tasted like electricity and lit up your brain. Jem wondered what it was. Lucy said she believed it was chocolate.

  “It doesn’t taste a bit like chocolate.”

  “In the past, the people here didn’t make chocolate into sugary bars; they made it into a hot spicy drink that was supposed to wake up your brain.”

  It must have woken up Jem’s brain because the next time Little Harry said “Gone,” he remembered with a sudden clarity that Little Harry is always right. If Little Harry said something was gone, then something was gone. Jem looked around the table to see what it might be. It was Red. Red had disappeared.

  As soon as he got outside, Jem heard a frantic rattling noise coming from the garage door. Red was trying to tug it open.

  “Red,” said Jem. “It doesn’t work like that. You pull it upward, and it kind of slides open. Here, I’ll show you.” But as he took hold of the handle, he thought, Why is Red trying to open the garage? So he said, “Red, why are you trying to open the garage?”

  “Gonna take this car and win that race,” announced Red with a shrug. “Lenny Man-Mountain said he’d give me twenty-five dollars to make sure Count Zborowski doesn’t win the race. So I’m going to go out there and win it myself. You can’t stop me.”

  “Actually, I can stop you. You don’t even know how to open the garage door.”

  “Come on, help me out here. Twenty-five dollars is riding on this!”

  “You were really going to run off and abandon my whole family in the jungle for just twenty-five dollars?”

  “What do you mean, just twenty-five dollars? Twenty-five dollars is a fortune. Do you know what I could do with twenty-five dollars?”

  “Look around you. These people live in this amazing place and eat amazing food, and they don’t have money at all.”

  “I am looking around,” said Red, “and I am forced to conclude that this is not New York.”

  “I know this is hard to understand, but in our time, which is your future, the entire world is being threatened by a super-rich supervillain called Tiny Jack and his evil nanny. Only Chitty Chitty Bang Bang can save the world. Without her, everything is lost. That’s what the Tooting family is doing here — we are on a mission to save the world. Do you think Dad would let twenty-five dollars get in the way of that?”

  “What about thirty dollars?”

  “No, I think he’d ask you to think about something more important, such as saving the world.”

  “What about twenty-nine dollars? Oh!”

  He said “Oh!” because all the time he had been talking to Jem, he had been fiddling with the handle of the garage door, and now, quite suddenly, the door opened, sliding smoothly upward to reveal a cool, dark space lit by the busy, flickering glow of ten thousand fireflies.

  “Wow,” said Jem.

  “I got to admit,” said Red, “that is pretty. Hey, do you reckon if I took a few jars of those little bugs home, I could get cash for them?”

  Jem said nothing. He wasn’t looking at the fireflies. He was looking at the empty space in the middle of the garage. The space where the car should go. If there were a car.

  Chitty had disappeared.

  “I knew it,” said Red. “They’ve been and gone and shared Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

  “The first thing we need to do,” said Dad, “is ask the neighbours if they saw or heard anything suspicious, then we’ll call the police.”

  “I’m not sure that early Amazonian societies had police forces,” said Lucy. “Or phones.”

  “Let’s ask the Queen, then. Go straight to the top.”

  A full moon hung above the square, silvering every corner of the town with its ghostly rays as they set out to look for the Queen. By that light they could see that it wasn’t just Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that was missing.

  It was everyone.

  In all the village, there was not a flicker of light, not a whisper of conversation, not a single snore. The entire place was deserted.

  “Marooned on the shores of the Amazon with no means of escape,” said Mum. “What fun!”

  “I don’t think Chitty has marooned us,” said Jem. “I think she’s brought us here for a reason. Look.” He showed them Chitty’s logbook. The last place that the Pott family visited was Venezuela. “That’s where we are. In 1966 they came here, and after that they disappeared. This is the last place they were ever seen. The painting of them in the house could be the last-ever picture of them.”

  “So the Pott family came here and suffered a terrible and mysterious fate. And now we are facing the same unspeakable doom.”

  “What exactly was the unspeakable doom?” asked Dad.

  “I can’t say,” said Lucy, “because it was unspeakable.”

  “No,” said Jem. “Chitty knows we need the Potts. She’s brought us here so we can find them.”

  “Not only can’t we find them,” said Dad. “We can’t find Chitty.”

  “It’s strange,” mused Mum. “The Queen seemed like such nice girls. You don’t think this could just be some giant game of hide-and-seek?”

  Red had never heard of hide-and-seek, and Lucy had to explain the rules to him. “Can you play it for money?” he said. “Can we play it now?”

  “Maybe we should wait till morning,” said Jem. “It must be dangerous playing hide-and-seek in a forest in the dark.”

  “First clue!” yelled Red, running to a spot where a trail of deep, muddy ruts that could only have been made by a pair of wheels led into the forest. “The only wheels round here are on your automobile.” He put back his head and yelled, “Coming! Ready or not!” and plunged into the jungle.

  Following a jungle path is very different from sailing up a jungle river. On a jungle river, you have space to look around. You can see where you’re going and where you have been. On the jungle floor, the trees crowd together so closely that every few paces you have to change direction, squeeze through a gap, clamber over a stump, wriggle round a knot of bushes. When you look back, there’s nothing to see but a confusion of trunks and branches smothering the floor.

  “How could they possibly have got Chitty through here?” asked Lucy.

  “They did it, though,” said Red. “Look. We got tracks here. Here. And here. Could be they can spot paths that we can’t. Come on.”

  Red plunged happily in and out of the shadows. The others tried to keep up, but he vanished from view.

  “Dinner!” shouted Little Harry.

  “Oh, Little Harry, we’ve only just eaten,” scolded Mum.

  “Dinner!”

  “Not now, Little Harry. We’re looking for Red.”

  “Dinner!”

  Only Jem noticed that Little Harry was pointing at something dangling from an overhanging branch. At first it was hard to figure out what the something was. It seemed as though part of the branch had been decorated with a colourful mosaic of tiny tiles, with an arm sticking out of the side. It was only after he’d looked at it from several different angles that Jem figured out what it was. Little Harry was right, of course. It was dinner. But it wasn’t a little boy eating dinner. It was a little boy being dinner. A gigantic anaconda had trapped Red in its coils and wrapped itself around him.

  “Mum!” gasped Jem.

  Red’s arm was waving frantically, so he must still be alive in there, somewhere among the glistening yards of hungry snake muscle.

  “Hey!” yelled Mum. “Stop that right now!”

  When Mum did her Furious Mum Yell at Lucy or Jem, they always dropped what they were doing immediately. It didn’t have the same effect on the anaconda. Possibly because snakes are
deaf. Mum, however, was not used to being ignored. It gave her an amazing burst of strength. She leaped forward, grabbed the back end of the snake, and swung from it with all her weight.

  “Careful, dearest,” said Dad.

  Mum’s mighty swing brought snake and branch crashing down. The moment it hit the ground, the snake uncoiled and Red’s head popped out.

  “Help!” he gasped, wheezing.

  “Never fear,” said Mum. The snake was already tightening its grip again, but Mum had Red by the neck and was pulling him out from between the narrowing coils. She managed to get him almost clear when the snake rolled its eyes as though concentrating really hard, opened its mouth wider than you could ever have imagined possible, and swallowed Red up to his knees.

  “Is this part of the game?” gasped Red. “Because if it is, can we stop playing now? I really don’t like it.”

  Mum turned to Dad. “I’ll hold on to Red,” she said. “You wrench the anaconda’s jaws open.”

  “My anaconda-fighting skills are limited,” said Dad, “but the word today is Don’t worry, Red. Tootings to the rescue.” Dad bravely tucked his hands in the anaconda’s jaw and pulled it wider than ever. By now Red was thoroughly lubricated with snake spit, so he slid out easily when Mum pulled on him.

  “Thanks, ma’am, you saved my life,” breathed Red, as Mum wiped off the snake spit with a banana leaf. “Does that mean I have to give you money?”

  “No, Red, don’t be silly.” Mum smiled.

  “Help!” yelled Dad. No sooner had the snake lost its grip on Red than it had whipped its tail around Dad’s waist and begun to squeeze. “Help! Help!”

  “Help him, Mum!” pleaded Jem.

  “He’s just teasing.” Mum smiled. “Of course your Dad knows how to escape from a hungry anaconda. Hasn’t he escaped from dinosaurs and gangsters already today?”

  “Actually I really do need help,” gasped Dad, turning slightly blue.

  “Your father knows how to escape from every difficult situation. He knows that all you have to do if you’re attacked by a boa constrictor or an anaconda is make yourself as big as possible — by holding your breath or sticking your elbows out — and then suddenly make yourself as small as possible by breathing out and tucking your elbows in. Then the snake loses its grip, and you can just wriggle out. That’s it. See? He’s done it. He was teasing you.”

  Dad stood for a while, with one arm held in the air, saying, “I’m fine. Absolutely fine,” over and over while trying to get his breath. “I really was teasing you.”

  “What did I tell you,” said Mum. “Tease. Your father is a hero. He wouldn’t let a snake defeat or even delay him. And now he’s going to find Chitty for us.”

  Great spears of early-morning sunlight were stabbing through the branches. Butterflies with wings like sheets of wrapping paper unfolded themselves. The creaking of insects rolled across the forest floor like a wave. Now that it was daylight, they could see clearly that there was no path. Nothing to follow. No reason to go this way or that.

  “This is probably that unspeakable fate you were talking about, Lucy,” said Mum.

  “Yes, the Pott family probably wandered aimlessly in the endless jungle, maddened by insects, weakened by thirst and fever, and finally eaten by snakes. Maybe their bones were in the stomach of the very snake that tried to eat Red.”

  “Ga gooo ga!”

  “What was that?” exclaimed Lucy.

  “Ga gooo ga!”

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!” said Little Harry — right as usual.

  “It’s coming from somewhere high up.”

  They could see now that one path slanted steeply upward, through the trees, toward the top of a hill. As they slogged up it, the sounds around them changed. The forest buzzed with the noise of insects, but as the path wound higher, the buzz turned to the chiming of birdsong. Higher still, the birdsong was drowned out by the booming of frogs and the natter of monkeys. Suddenly they could see air through the branches and for the first time realized how big the forest was. Clouds of leaves rolled by below like a separate green sky. There was even a low, constant roar, like the waves of the sea.

  “Is that a motorway?” said Jem.

  “It can’t be.”

  “But what could it be?”

  They climbed onward. All of them were thinking the same thoughts: What if this is the wrong way? What if we get lost? How could they possibly have got Chitty up here?

  “Look!” yelled Red, pointing to a long, snake-like object glinting in the mud. “Another snake! Mrs. Tooting! Help me!”

  “That’s no snake,” exclaimed Mum. “That’s Chitty’s exhaust pipe. We’re getting warmer.”

  “On the one hand,” said Dad, “that’s good news. On the other, it does mean that bits are falling off Chitty. Keep an eye open, everyone. We can’t afford to lose any of her parts.”

  The next few hundred yards of squeezing and scrambling took hours. On the way they gathered up one of Chitty’s door handles, a spring from her upholstery, her toolbox, and her back bumper. All the time, the roaring got louder and louder. They came to a place where the ground rose almost vertically for twenty feet. The motorway noise was deafening now.

  “We could climb up the tree and get onto the top of the bank this way,” said Mum, shinnying up the nearest trunk. “It’s not as hard as it looks,” she called. “All you have to do is . . . Oh.”

  “Mum?”

  “Mum?”

  There was no answer. Dad went straight up the tree trunk after her, lugging bits of Chitty with him.

  “Can you see her? Is she all right?” called Jem.

  “She’s . . . Oh,” called Dad.

  Then there was silence again.

  Little Harry and Jem and then Lucy and Red swarmed up the trunk to see what had happened. But when they got to the top, they, too, could only think of one thing to say. Namely, “Oh.”

  The noise that they had heard rumbling down the hillside and through the jungle was not a motorway. It was a waterfall. The highest waterfall anyone on this planet has ever seen. So high that its top was lost in the clouds. Looking up at it, it seemed that heaven had sprung a leak. Water fell like a vertical river, fell so far that most of it spread into a curtain of mist on the way down. Then dropped into a wide, black chasm in the side of the mountain. Bridging that chasm, shrouded in mist from the thundering water, was something more amazing even than that amazing cascade. It was a town. A town of houses and streets and towers and gardens. A town that arched like a rainbow across the deep black cliffs. A town that shone like a sunset.

  A town whose buildings were made entirely of gold.

  “El Dorado — the city of gold,” gasped Jem. “I thought it was just a story.”

  “The Queen thought Chitty was just a story,” said Lucy. “But we turned out to be real. Now the lost city of El Dorado turns out to be not so lost after all.”

  “Your father is so clever.” Mum smiled. “Some people can’t even find their own lost car keys. Your father has found a legendary lost city of gold.”

  “Obviously it’s quite exciting that we’ve found a legendary lost city of gold,” said Jem. “But we must remember it’s not what we were looking for.”

  “Isn’t that always the way,” said Mum. “You’re looking for one thing, but you find something else altogether. It’s the same when you lose your car keys and find your phone as it is when you lose a time-travelling car and find a legendary city of gold.”

  “This place must be worth a lot more than twenty-five dollars,” said Red. “It’s got to be worth a hundred dollars at least.”

  “A hundred million dollars would be nearer the mark,” said Lucy.

  “But what we really need is Chitty,” said Jem.

  A haze of tiny droplets from the waterfall wrapped the town in a mist, like tissue paper. Even though the street seemed to be deserted, it was full of movement. There were ghostly presences everywhere — shadows dancing on the mist, reflections washing ac
ross the golden walls, hummingbirds flirting and whirring, and the waterfall roaring like an invisible football crowd. The first building they came to was a little domed house with a sign on the door that read:

  Dad pushed open the golden door, which was warm to the touch and which moved on its hinges as smoothly and silently as silk. He stepped inside. The rest crowded in after him, and the door swished shut. The dome was made of gold that was beaten as thin as paper. Sunlight poured through it, making everything it touched glow golden. Mum and Dad looked like statues. The long, thick, curling things on the floor looked like golden pillows and cushions. Except that they were moving. Not to mention hissing.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” huffed Mum, “not MORE snakes!”

  There were half a dozen hungry anacondas in there.

  Dad put down the parts of Chitty he was carrying and tried the door, but there was no handle on the inside. “Reception” wasn’t reception at all. It was a trap.

  “This must definitely be the unspeakable fate of the Pott family,” said Lucy. “Digested in a walk-in snake pit. If we look around, we’ll find their bones. Then we’ll die.” As she said this, one of the snakes tried to gulp down her arm.

  “This is so annoying,” said Mum, rolling up her sleeves. “Come on, everyone, lend a hand.”

  The Tooting family spent the next ten minutes anaconda-wrestling. Every now and then, Mum would coach them — shouting tips or showing them new grips. “Watch your dad,” she’d say. “He’s unbeatable.”

  It was Red who spotted the last undefeated snake trying to sneak off down a little tunnel. When he dragged it back into the pit by its tail, he found that it had a piece of rope clamped between its jaws. When Red pulled it, bells rang merrily somewhere overhead.