by Jamie Smart
FLEMBER ISLAND.
A pained, horrified gasp rose up behind him, and Dev spun around to see Zerigauld Sourface, his bony fingers curling into even bonier fists.
‘You ’orrible little snoop! You nosey little b-b-b-buttock!’
Instinctively, Dev hid the Flember Island book behind his back, before slowly stuffing it down into his trousers. ‘I … I was just looking. I didn’t think there were any books left in Eden …’
‘There ain’t! Mayor confiscated them all! Hates the things ’e does, says they encourage troublesome thoughts,’ Zerigauld snarled. ‘As if you needs any more of those!’
He clamped his fingers onto Dev’s nose and dragged him through the shop. ‘I couldn’t get rid of them though,’ he mused. ‘I’m a collector y’see. I collect. It’s in my blood. Can’t well be destroying such artefacts.’
Dev saw a softness wash across Zerigauld’s eyes, but then it was gone again.
‘You’ll not be telling anyone what you found ’ere, you understand? Not anyone. Don’t even be thinkin’ about it.’ He picked up a crate of cheese-covered candles. ‘Ere, take these instead, and find somewhere to dump ’em. Somewhere discreet. And then come right back – there’s still plenty to do.’
Dev lifted the crate to his chest. The thick, ripe stench of cheese once again filled his nostrils. He gagged as he carried it away from the marketplace, he dry heaved all the way down the hill, and his stomach boilked as he turned onto Bumnickle Lane. Finally, he could take it no more, and he guiltily rolled the crate into some hedges.
Then he looked around to make sure no one was nearby, hauled the book out from his trousers, and found a nice stone step to sit on.
‘Maybe you’ll show me what’s over The Wall,’ he whispered, chewing his bottom lip as he turned to the inside cover.
‘Is that a book?’ Beneath the awnings of his waffle shop, Arnold the waffle maker poked his big cheerful face through an open window. A cloud of delicious waffle smells billowed out around him, like a wonderful, sweet-smelling fart.
Dev slammed the book shut again, and shuffled himself on top of it. ‘I just … I was throwing things away for Zerigauld. Stopped for a rest.’
Arnold tried to peer round Dev. ‘He’s got books in that shop, does he? Been years since I’ve seen one of them.’
Dev hurriedly tried to change the subject. ‘Something smells good.’ He smiled.
‘Ah!’ Arnold smiled, raising a dumpy finger in the air. ‘That’ll be the waffles!’
He disappeared back inside his shop. Within an instant he had reappeared in the doorway. In his bare hands he held a tower of waffles, whipped cream and small red berries all illuminated by a single sparkler. Syrup dripped through his fingers.
‘On the house, for my most regular customer!’
His moustache pushed right up into his cheeks, and his bushy eyebrows waggled up and down. ‘I call it the Flember Day Special,’ he said, passing the waffles to Dev. ‘I’ve been hiding away for weeks, not talking to anyone, absolutely dedicated to perfecting the recipe.’
Dev pinched off a chunk of the soft dough and bit into it.
‘It’s sprinkled with bobbleberries,’ Arnold continued. ‘You know, bobbleberries only grow at this time of the year.’
‘Fur a monpfh,’ Dev took another mouthful, ‘then they burshht, but de sheedsh catcshh the wind and …’
A lump of waffle wedged in Dev’s throat. Spots of colour flashed in front of his eyes. He lurched forwards, clawing at his neck, just as Arnold’s palm slammed between his shoulders, propelling the lump up and out of his windpipe. It skidded along the cobbles like a stale bun across a pond.
‘Goodness me!’ Arnold flustered. ‘You turned bright red for a minute there.
Almost thought you were a bobbleberry.’
Dev took a few deep breaths. Then he grabbed another lump of waffle and stuffed it into his mouth. ‘Itsh just rilly delicioushh.’ He grinned. ‘Yer ver good at wahffles – CHOMP! – Arnold.’
Arnold looked at Dev, and shook his head.
‘Well, there’s still a bit more time to perfect the recipe before Flember Day.’
Dev’s face fell, and his chewing slowed to a halt. Flember Day. Those words were usually a great source of excitement to him, but now they just hung like a dead weight around his neck.
‘I’m not allowed at Flember Day,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of half-chewed waffle. Then he swallowed, loudly.
‘Ah, yes, I heard what happened.’ Arnold apologetically twiddled with his apron straps. ‘Sorry, Dev. That can’t be a nice feeling at all.’
Dev tore off a bit more waffle, and pressed it into his mouth.
‘Best you put that book back then, before anyone else sees you reading it.’ Arnold winked. ‘You wouldn’t want to make things worse for yourself.’
The BOOK. Dev shuffled back on top of it, as if that might make Arnold forget all about it.
Arnold patted him on the head, smiled sympathetically, and stepped back inside his shop. ‘Shout if you start choking again,’ he called out.
‘Will do!’ Dev saluted, another bobbleberry-covered chunk heading towards his mouth. He listened for the hiss and clunk of Arnold’s waffle irons starting up again. Then he reached for the book. A few moments ago it had felt like a treasure, but now it just felt like a burden.
Something else to be told off for.
‘I’ll just have a quick look,’ he sighed. ‘Then I’ll put it straight back.’ But before he had a chance to even open it, the book slipped through his syrup covered hands. It dropped onto the ground with a thud, its covers fell open, and a bundle of torn, scrappy pages spilled out from inside.
The more pages Dev turned, the more they reminded him of his own sketches. A flurry of writing and drawings. Thoughts, frantic thoughts, the kind of thoughts that appear in your brain far faster than your hand can write them down.
These loose pages weren’t about the island.
They were about an idea.
‘What’s that?’ Mina’s shadow appeared over the pages.
‘Mina! Um, it’s … it’s nothing.’ Dev grabbed the Flember Island book and slipped the pages back inside. Then he he leapt up and hugged her as carefully as he could.
‘Are you OK? Your arm? Does it hurt?’
‘Only a little bit. It smells funny too.’ Mina raised her bandage-wrapped wrist under Dev’s nose. ‘Wiv the … lello … bean clothes.’
‘Yellowbean cloves?’ Dev laughed. ‘Well, those’ll help you get better. But we really shouldn’t be talking, your dad would be angry.’
‘You gotta fix my Boja Bear.’ She held her red teddy bear out towards Dev. It was a lumpen, sorrowful-looking thing. Its fur was damp and matted, laden with grit, and stuffing spilled out from the hole where its arm had once been. Where it had lost an eye, a turnip had been wedged into its eye socket.
‘I’m really sorry I ran him over with the Washtopus,’ Dev sighed.
‘You can fix him!’ she beamed ‘You made him. When I had bad dreams!’
‘Boja Bear will scare the scares,’ Dev chuckled, remembering Mina’s delighted face when she first saw him. ‘But you’re older now, you can scare the scares away yourself.’
‘But … Boja Bear.’ She pressed Boja Bear into Dev’s face, until its red fur was tickling up inside his nose.
‘Mina – mmf – no.’ He gently pushed her back. ‘I can’t do anything. I can’t help you any more. Your dad would be furious if he even saw us talking.’
Mina’s eyes began to glisten. Her bottom lip wobbled. ‘But …’ she protested. ‘But I want to imbent things, just like you do. You fix things.’ She waved Boja Bear in front of him. ‘You can fix him.’
Dev turned away, and stared sorrowfully at the ground. ‘I think you should fix him yourself,’ he barely whispered, a lump forming in his throat. ‘I’m sorry, Mina.’
She stood there for some time, waiting for Dev to turn back around. But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the str
ength to see her looking disappointed in him. Finally, she made a loud snorting noise, spun around and stomped noisily down the street.
‘I’m best left alone,’ Dev grumbled, allowing the book to open in his hands, and idly flicking through the pages. ‘I’m busy anyway. I have things to do. First things first, I need to take this book back beforrrrre …’
Borrowing one.
To fuel the other.
The words leapt from the page, spiralling up into Dev’s brain, firing every neuron they passed as if they were setting off a line of cannons.
His heart pounded.
All his hairs stood on end.
He turned, staring at Mina, at poor Boja Bear being dragged along the street, and a thousand different thoughts smashed together inside his head.
‘I wonder …’ He gripped the book tightly to his chest. ‘I JUST WONDER!’
9
An Experiment
‘See what it’s showing?’ Dev panted, holding the page up in front of Mina’s nose. She sniffed a loud, snotty sniff, and shook her head.
Dev continued. ‘But look at the drawing.’
Still nothing.
‘Flember! It keeps the tree alive, but when the tree dies that flember passes onto something new!’ He flicked through the pages. ‘This book … It seems to be saying we could copy that process. Borrow flember from one thing, and put it into …’
He looked down at the red teddy bear in Mina’s arms. ‘Boja Bear is pretty tatty, you know. His stitching is coming apart, he’s too flimsy to stand on his own.’
‘You can fix him!’ Mina smiled a huge, gap-toothed smile.
‘I could fix him, yeah. Orrr … I could improve him.’
‘Can he have three eyes?’ Mina chirped, hugging Boja Bear tightly. ‘And twelve arms?’
‘I was thinking even better than that, Mina.’
‘FIFTEEN arms?’
‘Let’s leave the arms.’ Dev reached out for Boja Bear’s paw. ‘What if, instead, we could bring Boja Bear to life?’
Mina gasped. A long, longggg gasp, which at first made Dev’s heart sing, but then seemed to be going on a little too long, so long he was worried she might pass out.
‘This book, Mina! The book will tell me how to do it. How to turn Boja from this floppy, tatty teddy bear into a living, breathing creature!’
Finally, Mina breathed out with a loud BHWOOOOOO!
‘A real-life Boja Bear to keep you safe.’ Dev flinched, remembering her terrified face just before the Washtopus knocked her into the fountain. How she had dropped the carrot, and instinctively held Boja Bear out in front of her. Something, anything, to lessen the blow.
‘You need someone to protect you,’ Dev sighed. ‘And I don’t think that someone is me.’
‘Boja Bearrrr!’ she giggled. ‘Will he dance? I wanna dance with him!’
‘I think he might.’ Dev patted the book. ‘Dance, play, laugh and blow great big raspberries.’
‘Not as loud as m—thppbthhhhhhh!’ Mina started blowing one midway through her own sentence. Dev joined in with a laugh, and the air between them became a happy mist of noise and spit.
He took Mina’s hand. ‘To the – thbbththhh – workshop!’
Together, they FRRPED, THPPPTBTHHED, laughed, PRPPPED, giggled and HONKKKKED all the way down the narrow alleys of Lower Eden, quietening down only as they passed Percy’s Scrapyard and then resuming the raspberry blowing orchestra up, up along the cliff face. Before long they were back on lush grass, walking through the shade of the spindletrees. Then up the front steps of Dev’s house, and giggling all the way inside.
The door to Dev’s workshop opened with a long, loud creak. He took a deep breath – familiar smells of rosemint, camphor and the smoky fumes of a few burnt-out experiments. Dev never felt like he was home until he could smell these things. Until he could see rack upon rack of bottles and jars lining the walls, all different shapes and sizes, all caked in dust. The labels long since worn away. Their contents long since forgotten. Crates, too, each filled to the brim with scraps of paper. The many thousands of plans Dev had started, all the inventions he’d never have time to build. And scattered across the floor, so many bits. Bits of bicycle, bits of engine, bits of clock. Bits of bits. They looked, to the casual observer, to be thrown randomly around the workshop, but Dev knew where every bit lay. And where every bit could one day go.
Mina ran past, out onto the workshop balcony. ‘Did you use this ramp to fly?’
‘Sure did!’ Dev smiled. ‘I didn’t have enough thrust though. The Cheese Boots weren’t ready when I needed them! Not stinky enough!’
‘Daddy drinks hibbicus beer and that smells horrrrible.’ She pinched her nose, sticking out her tongue. ‘You could use that!’
‘Hmmm, hibbicus.’ Dev thought about it as he walked over to his workbench. ‘That could work.’
He cleared a space, opened the flember book and flipped through the loose pages straight to chapter four. ‘But right now, we have other priorities!’
He tugged on the chinstraps of his helmet. As he did, the pointed ears slid apart and a tangle of thin metal arms folded out from inside, holding a variety of magnifying glasses and spotlights which slotted, one by one, in front of Dev’s face.
‘Tinkering Helmet, activated.’ His magnified eyes blinked down at a ridiculously excited Mina. ‘Let’s get started!’
‘Fascinating.’ Dev grinned. ‘I mean, I don’t actually HAVE any of these things, but I’m nothing if not resourceful!’
He rooted through the cupboards below his workbench, throwing all manner of coils and springs across the floor before finally grabbing a bundle of wires, a silver plate, a birdcage, two clamps and an egg whisk.
‘Mina, this book is amazing. First I thought it was about Flember Island, then about flember itself, but it’s actually about BOTH of those things. The flember in the island!’ He hugged her up off the floor.
‘Life, Mina! We can borrow some from the ground!’
Mina squealed with delight and then, on Dev’s instruction, picked a tiny whitedrop flower from the row of plant pots on the windowsill. Dev put her back down and placed the flower onto the silver plate, before carefully clamping one of the wires to its thin stem.
‘I mean, it’s not like we’re doing anything different from what happens in nature,’ Dev continued. ‘This flower has already borrowed flember from the ground and it’s … well, it’s storing it. Then one day it’ll give that flember back so new things can grow. It’s all a big loop. Round and round.’
Mina nodded with the look of someone who didn’t understand, but was still excited about absolutely everything that was happening. She picked up a screwdriver and waggled it in the air. ‘I wanna help imbenting!’
‘Inventing,’ Dev replied. ‘And we nearly have all we need …’
Dev studied the picture for some time. Then he pounced onto his shelves, climbed up to the very top and pulled out a small wooden chest. Inside, he kept stones – round ones, square ones, hard ones, soft ones, green and blue and every colour of the rainbow, every curious and unusual stone he’d ever found on his travels around the village.
He pulled out a misshapen lump of dark crystal, and held it up to the sunlight. Tiny flecks of colour danced around inside. ‘This must be a flemberthyst.’ He grinned, jumping back down. ‘I just thought it looked pretty.’
‘BOJA BEARRRR!’ Mina suddenly yelled, raising Boja Bear above her, and stomping around in a circle. ‘REAL … LIFE … BOJA … BEARRR!’
‘Just a few more minutes,’ Dev said, turning to the next chapter in the book. ‘There are still a few more pages to read …’
‘Gold. Gold? Where am I supposed to get gold from?’ Dev muttered.
‘DEV, I’M SO EXCITED I MIGHT WEE.’ Mina tucked Boja under one arm and tugged on her blue bunches, dragging them down in her fists.
‘ME TOO!’ Dev cried, slamming the book shut. ‘We’ll leave the gold out for now. So are you READY?’
; Mina pulled her helmet goggles down over her eyes. ‘LET’S GOOOO!’
They high-fived, then Dev turned to place the crystal inside the birdcage, before snapping the handle from the egg whisk and wedging it into the top. He then picked up the wire and threaded it from the clamp on the whitedrop flower into the birdcage, wrapping it around the bars and then out the other side.
‘From one, to the other.’ He nodded. ‘Mina, if I may?’
Mina handed Boja Bear over to Dev. Dev removed the turnip from his eye socket and clamped the wire inside. Then he seated the bear beside the device.
The weird, cobbled-together device.
‘Well then,’ Dev chuckled as he pulled the straps of his helmet once more, and all the glasses, lights and twisted metal arms sprang back inside.
‘Let’s bring a teddy bear to life.’
10
An Awful Screaming
Dev turned the handle of his Makeshift Flember Transference Device (official name yet to be decided upon). The birdcage hummed. The flemberthyst crystal started to wobble.
‘Faster!’ Mina yelled.
He spun faster. The birdcage hummed louder. Faster. Faster. The wire to the whitedrop flower writhed and twisted. Faster. Louder. The silver plate rattled. The whole workshop began to rumble. All the jars and bottles clinked and clunked together. Louder. And faster. And louder. Dev gritted his teeth, his whole body buzzing like it was about to pop, his feet struggling to stay on the floor.
And then he saw it.
A soft, blue glow from the whitedrop’s petals. Brighter and brighter, fizzing and glimmering, wafting out like a mist made of stars.