Hamish and the Neverpeople
Page 17
‘When I say “we”, I mean you and me, pal.’
His dad looked up into the sky.
‘You see, Starkley isn’t all that it seems,’ he said. ‘The town has a secret. One which even the Superiors don’t know yet. It’s all to do with the town clock . . .’
But, as interesting as that was, Hamish had already stopped listening.
Because he’d noticed something very strange happening.
He’d put his Chomp down on the grass. But now it was sort of twitching.
He stared harder, and it twitched once more.
A big twitch.
Why was a Chomp twitching?
‘Dad,’ he said, but his dad was still talking about whatever he was talking about. ‘Dad?’
What the heck?!
The Chomp was now a couple of centimetres off the grass.
It was levitating!
Hamish looked around. There was an empty can of Cherry Pepsi by a bin . . . but it wasn’t on the ground. It had been because Hamish had seen it and made a mental note to put it in the bin.
But now that can was . . . sort of floating.
He felt The Explorer start to pull upwards on his wrist, and watched as his arm rose, involuntarily.
What was happening?
His dad kept talking, and Hamish scanned the town.
Hey – what was that? Did a leaf just shoot up into the air?
His friend Robin had been doing headers with a football nearby. But now he just stood and stared, as his ball kept climbing high into the sky.
To his right, someone screamed. The bag of shopping they’d been carrying was now floating away, like a balloon on the wind.
‘My squirrel!’ yelled old Mr Neate, as a bewildered Hans-Joachim got caught in a tree.
‘Dad,’ said Hamish, tapping him, urgently. ‘LOOK!’
A whole car was starting to rise upwards . . .
Shop signs were straining against the nails that held them down . . .
All the sweets in the window of Madame Cous Cous’s International World of Treats began to ping out of their positions, splattering one by one on the ceiling.
All over Starkley, sensing something was wrong, people started to dash indoors as they felt themselves beginning to rise into the air.
Only the town clock stood still, unaffected.
‘Oh, no,’ said Dad.
‘What is it?’ asked Hamish, panicking, as his dad grabbed him and pulled him back towards Lovelock Close.
‘It’s a GravityBurp!’ said his dad.
‘What’s a GravityBurp?’ asked Hamish, confused.
‘A sort of energy blip that messes with the very laws of nature for a moment or three,’ his dad replied. ‘You see, Hamish, the fight isn’t over! What are they trying this time?’
And, as they burst through the front door of their house to find both Mum and Jimmy completely flat on the ceiling and very confused, for the second time in his life, Hamish Ellerby knew one thing.
That every end . . .
. . . is just another beginning.
THE END
Or is it . . . THE BEGINNING?