So who had guided them?
‘Hamish! Have you seen Boffo?’ came a panicked voice from somewhere to the left of him.
Buster stopped the van. It was Mrs Quip. She had run straight up to them, obviously too upset to care what other people in Frinkley thought about the PDF.
‘Will you help me find my tiny, delicate angel?’ she pleaded.
‘Of course,’ said Hamish. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
A few more people glanced at the PDF now, with perhaps a little hope on their faces.
Alice noticed someone hanging around by the bushes. A tallish woman with short hair who looked scared about approaching. And then she found the courage to step forward, into the light. She was carrying a pad and pen, which she suddenly put away.
They all recognised her immediately. It was Horatia Snipe.
‘You!’ said Alice.
‘Can you help us?’ asked Horatia.
‘I’m Hamish Ellerby. You made fun of my brother,’ said Hamish. ‘That was mean.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Horatia. ‘The new owners made me do it. They don’t want us to write nice stuff about you. People love it! I’ve lost count of the number of readers who’ve sent me letters telling me they hope I’m offered a new contract and re-sign! Look!’
She pulled out a letter from her pocket and Alice read it.
‘That doesn’t say re-sign,’ said Alice. ‘That says resign!’
‘The bosses say it’s much more interesting if we’re mean,’ said Horatia.
‘Interesting for nitwits!’ said Buster.
A few Frinkley people looked at their shoes, a bit ashamed.
‘The owners never come into the office,’ said Horatia. ‘We just get emails telling us what to do and if we don’t we get the chop.’
‘Well, these new owners need to get a grip,’ said Alice. ‘Who are they anyway?’
‘Charmless Media,’ said Horatia. ‘They’ve been buying up everything in Frinkley. Sharm! Cars. Larch Molar’s Bags. They’ve even blocked the radio signals so that everyone here can only get their news from one place.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Hamish, sarcastically. ‘The Frinkley Starfish.’
‘Who’s your boss?’ demanded Alice.
‘I’ve never met her,’ said Horatia. ‘None of us have.’
‘What’s her name?’ asked Elliot, from the back of the van.
‘Mrs Salt Chard,’ said Horatia. ‘All anyone knows is her name and that her registered business address is offshore.’
‘Offshore?’ said Alice.
‘Well, specifically a boat,’ said Horatia. ‘HMS Carras. That’s all I know.’
HMS Carras? Something about that rang a bell with Hamish. Some distant, hidden memory he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Elliot pressed a piece of paper into Hamish’s hand.
‘Anagrams,’ he whispered.
Hamish nodded and folded the paper.
‘So can you help us?’ asked Horatia. ‘Can you help Frinkley?’
Hamish just didn’t know if he could trust Horatia Snipe, who he still suspected to be a fully paid-up member of the Association of Xtra Alternative Reporting. What if she was in touch with Scarmarsh? What if she was part of the trick? She could be lying about not knowing who she worked for . . .
Alice, however, had no such reservations.
‘You have a choice to make now, Snipe. Help the side of good or help the side of evil. Tell us where the old petrol station is, then take a permanent break from making fun of people.’
She put her hands on her hips. ‘What’s it to be?’
Horatia thought about it, then clambered into the van.
‘I think I know the place you mean.’
Babes in
the Woods
Horatia Snipe plonked herself down in the passenger seat of the ice-cream van and Hamish eyed her suspiciously.
In many ways, this woman was the enemy. The number of mean things she’d said about Starkley was breathtaking.
She also couldn’t stop dropping in bits of information about Frinkley, like they were on some kind of guided tour.
‘To your left is the new potato-recycling centre,’ she told them, ‘where more than three hundred potatoes are recycled every day!’
‘What do they turn them into?’ asked Venk.
‘Just into potatoes again,’ shrugged Horatia.
Snidey Ms Snipe didn’t seem so bad in real life. It was like if she had to look you in the eye, rather than hide behind what she said on the internet or in the paper, she had to be nicer. She gave Buster the directions to the old, abandoned petrol station in the woods.
‘Why would there be a petrol station in the woods?’ asked Buster.
‘Well, that’s why it’s abandoned,’ said Horatia. ‘It’s not like the squirrels needed any diesel. Bad planning really. No, it’s very quiet. No one ever goes there.’
‘You once said Frinkley was better than Starkley in every possible way,’ said Hamish, quietly, trying to see if she could be trusted. ‘You said Frinkley gave the world Mr Massive and if it was Starkley it would’ve been Pedro Puny.’
‘I did,’ said Horatia, her face falling. ‘Sometimes people do or say things they don’t want to when they’re struggling. I got myself into a mess where everybody expected me to be mean all the time. That’s why they’d read my articles. And I was afraid that, if I didn’t keep going, people would stop reading. Then Mrs Chard sent me a message to say I’d better keep going because it was good for the paper.’
‘There’s something I have to tell you about “Mrs Salt Chard”,’ said Hamish, deciding to take a chance on Horatia. ‘But in fact I think it might be better if I just showed you.’
‘Park here,’ said Horatia, as the van slowed under a dark canopy of trees as black as tar. ‘The petrol station is just past those bushes.’
The group crept through the woods from the little country road – trying to stay out of sight – and the first thing they noticed was the noise.
A growing hubbub.
The sound of machinery.
The low growl of engines.
Something was pumping. It sounded the way Hamish imagined an oil field to sound: all winches and pistons and pumps and hydraulics.
‘It’s just down this way,’ said Horatia. ‘I have to say, this is very exciting. I feel like a proper investigative journalist!’
Everyone was being careful not to step on any broken branches or sticks so as to be as quiet as possible. But the ground underfoot was dark and soft and covered in old pine needles.
Clover, who had her camouflage kit out in the van, had given everyone a ‘woodland’ helmet to wear, featuring pine cones, sticks and fake beetles. ‘All that noise! This petrol station doesn’t sound very abandoned to me.’
There were tree branches and leaves all over the road alongside them. Hamish looked up. Whatever had come down this road recently had been tall enough to knock into the trees.
‘The lorries,’ he said. ‘They must have come this way.’
‘Shhh,’ said Horatia. ‘I think whatever you’re looking for is up ahead.’
They dropped to their knees and started to crawl through the bushes on their elbows. A badger thundered past from nowhere. Foxes darted away. Something was really disturbing the wildlife.
‘Do you smell that?’ said Alice, sniffing the air.
It was the bonfire smell. Except now it didn’t just smell of fire. It smelled of fuel.
‘Petrol?’ said Alice.
‘No,’ said Hamish. ‘That smells different to this . . .’
He’d last smelled something similar when he’d been in London. At the very moment Scarmarsh blasted off into space.
They crawled further and then, bending away the thick branches of a bush . . .
‘Oh my gosh,’ said Horatia Snipe. ‘The babies!’
They had found them. So. Many. Babies.
But they seemed different.
‘What’s happened to them!?’
said Horatia. ‘They’re like wild animals!’
Hamish’s mind raced. It was as if the babies were involved in some weird tribal ritual. Some of them danced around in their nappies. Others slapped their chests and whooped. Some wore torches on their foreheads and spun around, as the lorries continued their chug-chug-chug noises in preparation for who knows what.
And there, in the middle of it all, strode a fearsome, giant figure.
‘Who’s that man?’ said Horatia.
‘That man,’ replied Hamish, ‘is a baby.’
Boffo!
Horatia looked like she wanted to faint. She stared at Boffo, still holding his Toppy Sparkles in one hand and some kind of spear in the other, and shook her head. He really was massive.
‘That must have been a difficult birth,’ she said, all pale. ‘I pity the poor mother.’
Boffo slapped other babies on the back with glee, sending a couple of three-month-olds flying. The Starkley and Frinkley infants were gathered round several of the lorries, in front of the strange old garage, and unrest was in the air.
‘I think they’re hungry,’ said Venk.
Sure enough, a moment later, Boffo started to pound his chest like a gorilla, then reached up to press a huge red button on the back of the first lorry.
The babies cheered as the tanker started to judder. A hose at the back began to buck wildly and rise and fall like a big red snake. Boffo picked it up and released the nozzle at the end, and the hose began spraying Formula One high up into the air. It rained down on the babies, who danced in it, opening up their baby gobs and guzzling it as it fell.
The second and third lorries did the same thing, as Hamish and the gang stared in horror from the bushes, the stench of cinnamon hitting their faces like they’d walked into a wall of it.
‘It’s like some kind of Baby Fuelling Point!’ said Alice, horrified.
Horatia clapped her hand to her forehead. ‘This is the story of the century!’
Other older babies lunked out from the petrol station. They had biceps and were the size of sumo wrestlers. One baby girl now had a full beard and what looked like a tattoo of an anchor on her arm.
This sailor baby grunted at Boffo, then picked up a nozzle from one of the petrol pumps. She started to spray Formula One into the air, its thick cinnamon aroma mixing with the smell of Scarmarsh’s rocket fuel until Hamish’s nose started to tingle.
Actually, talking of Scarmarsh, where was he?
And that was when – KASHUNK! – the floodlights came on.
Gigantic, enormous white floodlights.
The PDF hadn’t been able to see it in the dark, and they’d been too distracted by frolicking babies to take it in, but right behind the petrol station was a huge, glazed structure. It had different levels, each of them round. And there were long metal poles at the top. Hamish immediately knew what was at the bottom.
Rocket boosters.
It was the top of the Post Office Tower! The one that used to be in London, before it was stolen by . . .
‘ATTENTION, BABIES!’ Axel Scarmarsh boomed as he strode through the automatic doors of the Post Office Tower.
He seemed somehow taller than the last time Hamish had seen him.
He wore a black cape.
A black, well-cut suit.
A golden medal on a red ribbon.
‘Feed! Feed yourselves stupid!’ he shouted. ‘GORGE YOURSELVES on this special edition Formula One! The finest and most nourishing of all the formulas!’
Behind Scarmarsh stood two of his awful henchmen, the Terribles, dressed like midwives. They slathered and slickered, their terrible tongues trailing from their terrible mouths. One of them picked up a baby and cradled it, drool and slather pouring out and coating the poor infant’s head.
Scarmarsh laughed as he watched the babies spraying the hosepipes hither and thither.
‘Does your mother’s milk do for you what Formula One can?’ he said, staring down at Boffo and the sailor baby and another one whose nappy seemed to be made out of a giant British flag. ‘The mothers of Frinkley certainly seem to believe what they read in the papers! How simple the adult mind is! How easy to change people’s habits in just a few weeks! They were all too keen to fill their babies with this vitamin-boosted milk!’
The babies around him seemed almost to grow by the second, like they were filling with pride.
‘You have followed all my orders. You have mirrored the emotions of the Chosen One!’
Boffo grinned, pleased with himself, and hugged Toppy Sparkles tighter.
‘And now your parents are exhausted, weakened, docile,’ said Scarmarsh, and Hamish noticed that Horatia was writing all this down as fast as she could. ‘For too long now, I have tried to create my own armies, when all along I could simply have influenced one!’
Hamish’s mind was in overdrive.
Of course – it all made sense.
Scarmarsh had grown weary of creating monsters like the Terribles, or building robots like Hypnobots, or breeding plants like Venus spytraps. It was all so time-consuming. But babies were already here on Earth. If he could control the babies of the world, he could tire out the grown-ups. Wear down their resistance. He could make the babies wake thirty times a night if he wanted. Then cry and scream all day long. He could turn adults into exhausted zombies, unable to fight back because they hadn’t slept in weeks.
That explained why all the parents in the town square that day hadn’t noticed their babies’ weird behaviour! And why they were all asleep in front of their tellies by seven o’clock each night!
But what were Scarmarsh’s plans for the babies?
If he could link their emotions with Formula One and use Boffo as an amplifier, he could take their pure minds and make them do whatever he liked. He could send them into museums to rob all the artwork! He could send them into battles, like a fearsome Viking horde! He could make them test out cat flaps for reputable cat-flap companies keen on cheap market research!
Babies didn’t yet know the difference between good and evil. So all Scarmarsh had to do was feed them up on Formula One and control their emotions.
Using Boffo Quip.
But how was he controlling Boffo?
That was the bit Hamish didn’t quite understand yet. Hamish felt sure that, if he could work that out, he could stop all this.
Was Boffo radio-controlled? Had he been hypnotised?
‘Tomorrow comes the BABY BOOM!’ yelled Scarmarsh, as a Terrible in a mechanic’s outfit tinkered with the lorries beside him. ‘Be READY. Gather together for what will be ANARCHY!’
Hamish and the PDF all took sharp breaths.
‘Now RETURN TO YOUR HOMES AND YOUR CLUELESS, STINKING PARENTS AND PREPARE!’ screamed Scarmarsh, turning and disappearing back into the tower, flanked by his beastly Terribles.
And Hamish Ellerby and his friends dived for cover, as suddenly hundreds of terrifying, heavy-set babies thundered through the woods towards them, heading for home.
Abra-kebabra
‘So let me get this straight,’ said Horatia, bumping around in the ice-cream van, checking her notes. ‘The Formula One connects the babies?’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, hanging onto the sides of her seat as the PDF tore away from the woods. ‘And it makes them bigger. Stronger. And magnifies their emotions. An angry baby will be even angrier if it’s had Formula One.’
Horatia shook her head, amazed.
‘And if the chief baby is angry enough?’ she said.
‘It looks like Boffo is the Chosen One,’ said Hamish. ‘The others will “catch” his emotions. Babies can sense feelings.’
‘Why Boffo?’ asked Horatia.
‘He’s the most advanced, because he’s been on Formula One the longest,’ said Hamish. ‘He probably has to shave. What if Scarmarsh chose him because my mum has been spending so much time with Mrs Quip? What if it was a way of getting close to us? But why?’
He looked out of the window. Even though they were going at abo
ut forty miles per hour, he could see babies in the field next to them keeping up! Some leapt over fences; others pounded away on all fours with their tongues trailing out of their mouths.
‘What’s the link between your mum and Scarmarsh?’ said Horatia, writing everything down, grateful for such a scoop.
‘My dad has . . . a particular set of skills,’ said Hamish, not wanting to mention Belasko and the fact that his dad had just checked out of a space hotel. After all, Hamish had taken the Starkley Oath. ‘Scarmarsh is always trying to get at Dad. I think choosing Boffo was just another way of getting close to him. He knew my mum was good friends with Mrs Quip. It was a clever way of sneaking a spy into our house. No one ever suspects a baby of espionage.’
‘This is the strangest story I’ve ever worked on,’ said Horatia, pleased that, for once, she wasn’t just saying everything was terrible.
As Buster’s van skidded to a halt in Frinkley to drop off Horatia, the police were still out and about, comforting concerned parents and older siblings.
‘Look!’ yelled a police officer. ‘The babies!’
Looking sweet and innocent and as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, dozens of tiny, smiling babies started slowly crawling over the road towards Frinkley.
Not running, not bounding on all fours, just crawling, the way babies do. Even the newborns – fortified by Formula One – were managing it.
The whole town erupted in cheers.
‘They’re back!’ shouted a mum, running over to pick her baby girl up in her arms. ‘Oh, thank goodness! Where have you been?! Oh, my darling Nutella!’
More and more babies crawled through hedges, giggling and gurgling sweetly, not for one second making anyone think they’d been running with high knees through fields a moment before.
Nor would anyone ever have guessed that they’d been gorging themselves on Formula One from petrol tankers deep in the woods while an intergalactic bad guy and his monster sidekicks cackled and rubbed their hands with glee.
I mean, sure, all the parents desperately barked questions at their infants, like, ‘Where on earth have you been?!’ Or, ‘When did you start crawling?!’ But all the babies did in return was put on their angel faces and gurgle sweetly – and you know how much grown-ups love an angel face.
Hamish and the Baby BOOM! Page 10