Roxy & Jones

by Angela Woolfe

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Lara, who gave me the idea in the first place, with all my love

  WANTED

  Pretty, docile girl who needs a place to crash.

  Super room available for very little cash!

  Applicant must NOT MIND HEIGHTS and – vital! – have no issue

  With sort of … disappearing. (Please, NO PARENTS who might miss you.)

  A fear of witches, truth be told, would make arrangements tricky.

  But finding any tenant’s tough; I shouldn’t be TOO picky.

  Just one more thing: you’ll need LONG hair – a waterfall of blondeness.

  (Oh, dark-haired girls NEED NOT apply. For blondes I have more fondness.)

  Whoever comes to live here – church-mouse poor or filthy rich –

  You will really let your hair down! Trust me.

  1

  The Dodgy Old Clock, in the Soup Minister’s office above, chimed a quarter to midnight.

  Roxy Humperdinck, who was in an underground vault beneath the Minister’s office, knew that the time was not, in fact, a quarter to midnight.

  Her sister, Gretel, who worked as a cleaner at the Ministry, had once told Roxy that the clock on the Minister’s desk ran precisely thirteen minutes fast.

  So the actual time was eleven thirty-two.

  She still had to hurry.

  It was dark down here in Storage Vault C, and the torch on Roxy’s mobile phone barely dented the gloom. But it had been even darker in the tunnel that led to the vaults, so her eyes were starting to adjust. And at least the clock chime above had given her a rough sense of where she’d ended up. That chilly tunnel deep beneath the Ministry was twisty, dark and long. Roxy had lost her bearings several times, and had been relieved to reach the end.

  Which was right here, right where she’d hoped to end up: at the storage vaults.

  Roxy shone her phone onto the piece of paper she was clutching in her left hand. A sticky label in the top corner declared: PROPERTY OF STORAGE VAULT C. DO NOT REMOVE. Beneath this label was the truly weird rhyme she’d read when she’d first spotted the piece of paper, sticking out from under the bath, just a couple of hours ago.

  “Trixie T McWitch…” she read again now. “It must just be a joke. Witches don’t exist. Obviously.”

  In the gloom of Storage Vault C, at very nearly midnight, it felt a good idea to remind herself of this.

  Hold on. Was that … a … rustle?

  Probably just a mouse, thought Roxy.

  Please not a rat.

  She wasn’t usually the adventuring sort. In fact, she still didn’t know quite what had pushed her into coming down here in the first place. It was, frankly, a blur. She’d been brushing her teeth before bed, listening to music through her headphones as she always did, when she’d seen, in the bathroom mirror, that piece of paper sticking out from beneath the bath. If she’d known when she first pulled it sharply free that doing so was going to result in the bath’s side panel coming loose, and that jiggling it to try and fix it was going to result in the panel coming off entirely to reveal a flight of slippery stone steps leading down into somewhere that was quite obviously not normal under-bath plumbing … well, Roxy would probably have ignored the piece of paper and just carried on singing along to the new H-Bomb and the Missiles track blasting into her ears.

  But she was here now. Shivering through nerves and from the cold – she was in her pyjamas – and all too aware that she mustn’t be long. She had to get safely back to the bathroom before her sister returned from her late-night shift working at the Ministry Ball.

  “What am I even looking for?” she whispered to herself. More strange rhymes, claiming to be written by witches? It looked like a newspaper advert, but what kind of loon would place a newspaper advert like that? If there were more, would they even be here? Roxy ran the torch all around Vault C. The place could have been picked straight out of a catalogue called Creepy Underground Vaults-R-Us. Seriously. There were dripping stone walls, there was a damp flagstone floor, there were rickety bookshelves crammed with books and files…

  Maybe the answer lay there. Roxy took a few steps towards one of the shelves.

  “Don’t move!” commanded a girl’s voice from behind it.

  Roxy dropped her phone and opened her mouth.

  “Well, don’t scream!” The girl darted round the bookshelf and clapped a small hand over Roxy’s mouth. “Do you want every SMOG in the Ministry to come running?”

  Roxy shook her head for No.

  “Wait.” The girl sounded worried. “Are you a SMOG?”

  Roxy shook her head again for No.

  “Hmmm.” The girl moved her hand away and picked up Roxy’s phone. She shone the light in her eyes. “Well, you don’t look much like one, I guess. Not unless they’ve started training fourteen-year-old girls to be elite Soup Ministry Official Guards.”

  “I’m eleven,” Roxy croaked. “Not fourteen.”

  “Wow,” said the girl. “You’re a funny-looking eleven-year-old.”

  Which was rude, no matter how you looked at it.

  “Here,” said the girl, handing the phone back. “I’ve got a proper torch in my kitbag.”

  Roxy took her phone and shone the weak light shakily back at her.

  The girl was dressed – it was not at all clear why – as a giant buttercup.

  She was wearing a ruffled blouse in an awful shade of yellow. On her bottom half were violently green knickerbockers, green knee socks and a pair of trainers that looked as if someone had sneezed green snot all over them. Worst of all, though, was her headgear: a bright-yellow bonnet with a huge frill, tied beneath her chin with a shiny yellow ribbon.

  “Thing is, you’re ever so tall,” the girl was saying, as she disappeared, again, round the back of the bookshelf. When she emerged this time, she was carrying a battered leather kitbag that didn’t go at all with her awful buttercup costume. “That’s why I thought you were older. I’m twelve myself, but I’m titchy, so everyone looks tall to me.”

  It was true that the girl was incredibly short.

  And now that Roxy could see her properly, she realized there was something even more striking about her.

  “You’re … beautiful!”

  “Huh?”

  “Your face.”

  In the flickering phone-light, and once you saw past the blouse and the bonnet, the girl looked like an angel. Her huge eyes were fringed by sweeping lashes, her lips were the shape of a particularly pretty rosebud, her nose was a delicious little button and her skin looked as soft as peach fuzz.

  “Oh, that.” The girl shrugged. “It’s actually not as fun as you’d think, looking like this. People get jealous, and stuff. Now that’s better,” she went on, flooding the vault with light as she switched on her torch.

  The vault was even bigger than Roxy had thought. The flagstone floor was cracked and had puddles in places, and in one corner there was a flight of wonky stone steps leading up towards a narrow hole i
n the ceiling.

  “Is that where you came in?” Roxy asked.

  “Yep. Those steps lead up to a false fireplace in the Minister’s office.”

  “But how did you get into the Minister’s office in the first place?” Roxy asked. “This whole place is swarming with SMOGs. Even more of them than usual tonight, thanks to the Ball the Minister is hosting for Queen Ariadne’s birthday.”

  And the Soup Ministry Official Guards – SMOGs, for short – were a pretty terrifying bunch, too. They were armed with Instant Paralysis Lasers, or IPLs, that could turn you to temporary stone with one flash. It had been almost six weeks since Roxy had moved to Rexopolis, and the sight of a SMOG patrol still made her anxious.

  “Oh, I used a cocktail stick to pick the lock on one of the windows,” said the girl, nonchalantly. “I got it from one of the nibbles they were handing round at the Ball. Which. Were. Awesome. By the way.”

  “You’ve been at the Queen’s Birthday Ball? In the Ministry ballroom?”

  “Yes. Well, not at the Ball, as such. More, delivering two hundred silly, frilly cupcakes to the Ball.” The girl turned round so that Roxy could see the lettering on the back of her blouse: Buttercup’s Morsels. “My stepmum’s cupcake company. She practically wet herself with excitement when this order came in. Oh, and her name’s not Buttercup, by the way, any more than my name’s…” She stopped. A suspicious frown creased her face. “Anyway, you seem very interested in this Ball?”

  “I’m not really. It’s just that it seems like a pretty big deal. My sister is there tonight.”

  “Oh, lucky her. I hope she goes nuts on those nibbles. Because they were excellent. I managed to grab a few from the kitchens when I made my delivery. Sausages-on-sticks … mini sausage rolls … dinky little hot dogs—”

  “Nope, she isn’t a guest,” Roxy interrupted the girl’s misty-eyed recollection of sausages past. “She’s working at the Ball. She’s a cleaner here at the Ministry. Loos, mostly.”

  “Well, nothing wrong with loo-cleaning. Somebody has to do it, right? And it’s probably no less fun than standing around at some boring old party, with the likes of Minister Splendid looking down his massive nose at you. I tell you, you’d never catch me partying at a Royal Ball, not even if they served the best nibbles on the planet—”

  “Sorry,” Roxy interrupted again. “I get that you were delivering cupcakes. But I still can’t work out what you’re doing down here. Did you get lost, or something?”

  “Course I didn’t get lost! And man, you do ask a lot of questions! As it happens, Question Girl,” she went on, looking rather pleased with herself for coming up with this nickname, “I’m grabbing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – being here in the Ministry – to find something. Something really important.” The girl took a deep breath. “I’m looking for a book.”

  “You broke into the office of the most important minister in Illustria for … a book?”

  The girl nodded.

  “You wanted a book about soup that badly?”

  “I don’t want a book about soup at all.” The girl sounded bemused. Then she grinned. “Oh, I get it. You actually think this is the Ministry for Soup.”

  “But it is the Ministry for Soup. What else would it be the Ministry for?”

  “Typical.” The girl turned back to the shelves, rolling her eyes. “Obviously it’s too much to hope that when you bump into a person who’s sneaking around a labyrinth of underground tunnels, that person might be slightly curious about how this country really gets run.”

  “But I am curious!” Roxy exclaimed. “You just called me Question Girl, didn’t you?”

  “True. How did you get into the tunnels, by the way?”

  The girl didn’t sound all that interested, but Roxy welcomed the chance to tell someone about her extraordinary discovery.

  “Well, I was brushing my teeth tonight, in my sister’s bathroom … well, it’s my bathroom too now, I suppose. I came to live with my sister in the Soup Ministry Staff Quarters a few weeks ago. Anyway, I saw this piece of paper sticking out from under the bath, and when I pulled it, the panel came loose, and then I saw these stairs leading to … well, I suppose you’d have to call it a secret tunnel, really. It must be secret, otherwise my sister would have known about it. And she just thinks the taps don’t work, which is why we don’t use it, she says. We use someone else’s shower three rooms along when we want to wash. Which we do, often, by the way! We’re not stinky or anything, just because our bath doesn’t work! Anyway, I don’t know what I was thinking, really, but when I saw those steps … you kind of have to go down a set of mysterious steps into a secret tunnel, right?” Roxy gave an uncertain laugh. “It’s the kind of thing that happens in all the books and movies… And to be honest, with my sister working an all-night shift, I guess I thought I should seize the chance. She’d be furious if she knew I’d done this. Furious. Plus, well, I’ve not done very much, nothing remotely interesting, really, since I came to Rexopolis. I don’t know anyone my own age yet, so…”

  “Right.” The girl sounded like she was barely listening now, and Roxy could hardly blame her, to be fair, after that long ramble. She looked deep into Roxy’s eyes for a moment, without blinking. “Can I trust you?” she asked. Then, before Roxy could reply, she went on, “Actually, I reckon I can. You seem to know nothing about anything, it’s quite sweet. And you have a trustworthy sort of face. So are you going to help me look for this book, then?”

  Roxy had been about to object to the girl basically calling her ignorant and a bit stupid, but this last question took her by surprise. “Help you? Uh … of course! What’s it called?”

  The girl drew a ragged breath. Her confidence seemed to have deserted her for a moment, and she looked, quite suddenly, very small.

  “Mrstabithacattermoleschronicleofthecursedkingdom.”

  Roxy blinked. “Huh?”

  “The book. It’s called Mrs Tabitha. Cattermole’s. Chronicle. Of. The.” The girl swallowed hard, as if the words themselves were boulders, and she was struggling under the weight of them. “Cursed. Kingdom.”

  She pronounced the last-but-one word curr-said. Which sounded odd to Roxy.

  (Mind you, the whole title sounded odd to Roxy. Plain weird, if she was truly honest.)

  “A-ha!” the girl said suddenly, leaning down to one of the lower shelves. Something had caught her eye, and her bounce seemed to have returned.

  Intrigued, Roxy hurried over.

  The books on this shelf had leather covers, with peeling gold lettering on the spines, and either the strange girl had suddenly started to give off a faint whiff of mouldering socks, or these books were very old.

  “Voodoo, Hoodoo, Divination and Necromancy by Nanette Amuse-Bouche … oh, I read her name somewhere in Dad’s notes … Magic: A Beginner’s Guide by Phineas Bletherwick … intriguing, but another time, maybe…”

  “They don’t sound like books about soup,” Roxy began.

  “Well, what did I tell you, Question Girl…? Got it!”

  The girl seized a particularly small leather-bound book and gazed at it.

  “Mrs Tabitha,” she breathed. “It’s you.”

  It was a tiny bit alarming that the girl was talking to a book.

  It was even more alarming that she was calling the book Mrs Tabitha.

  But Roxy didn’t have the time to ponder the weirdness of this. Because just then, in the Minister’s office above, the Dodgy Old Clock pinged out the first chimes of midnight.

  “Midnight?” gasped the girl. “Already?”

  “No, no, it’s not, actually,” began Roxy, “that’s just the Dodgy Old …”

  “The last bus leaves at quarter past! If I miss it, it’s a nine-mile walk home. Man, I wish I hadn’t crashed that delivery bike again!”

  “… Clock, and it runs thirteen minutes fast, so it’s actually…”

  But the girl was already halfway up the stone steps.

  “Thanks, Question Girl!” she calle
d over her shoulder before scrabbling through the hole at the top. “Nice knowing you.”

  And then the fake fireplace slid back into position and the hole closed up behind her.

  “Wait!” Roxy called, darting forwards. “You dropped your book!”

  Because the girl had accidentally dropped Mrs Tabitha Cattermole on the way.

  And – in the crazy scramble out of the hole – one of her hideous green trainers had come off.

  “Hey!” Roxy called, again. “Can you hear me? Your book’s still down here! And you’ve only got one shoe!”

  But it was pointless. The girl had gone. The hole in the ceiling was shut.

  Roxy couldn’t risk going after her. There would be SMOG patrols up there, trigger-happy with their IPLs. Besides, she just wanted to get safely back to bed. The vault seemed blacker than ever now that the bright torchlight was gone, and she felt foolish and silly in her dressing-gown and slippers, on her half-baked attempt at adventure.

  Mind you, maybe it wasn’t that half-baked. She had discovered this Mrs Tabitha Cattermole book, after all.

  The strange girl had risked the SMOG patrols to come and find it. There must be something exciting in it. Something adventure-worthy. Something way more interesting (and hopefully a lot less creepy) than fake witches advertising for a roommate.

  Roxy put the old book into her dressing-gown pocket and – because she didn’t know what else to do with it – shoved the vile green trainer into the gap on the shelf where the book had been.

  Then, holding her phone up in front of her as if it might protect her from the dark rather than merely pierce it, Roxy hurried out of Storage Vault C and back into the inky tunnel.

  2

  Mrs Tabitha Cattermole’s

  CHRONICLE OF THE CURSED KINGDOM,

  CHAPTER THE SEVENTYE-FOURTH

  FOODSTUFFS IN THE CURSED KINGDOM, FROM THE TYME OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ SLUMBER TO THE DARK DAYES OF THE PERPETUAL WICKEDNESS

  The humble parsnip, truth to tell, was served at ev’ry meal;

  ’Twas mostly boiled (or, sometimes, mashed, if boiled did not appeal).

  This unpretentious tuber graced the Kingdom’s finest tables (except the Gilded Palace, where ’twas only served in stables).