The Eddie Dickens Trilogy

by Philip Ardagh

  ‘W-H-E-R-E’-S M-O-T-H-E-R?’ Eddie repeated, very loudly and very slowly this time.

  If this had been a public library, a stern librarian would have gone ‘Sshh!’ and pointed to a big sign which read ‘SILENCE’. But this was simply a private library in Awful End so …

  ‘Sshh!’ said a stern man, pointing to a big sign which read ‘SILENCE’.

  So much for the all-knowing narrator. Sorry.

  Because all the wall space was taken up by book spines – both real and wooden – the man had to hold up the wooden-framed SILENCE sign, which slightly lessened the effect.

  ‘Who on earth are you?’ asked Eddie, in loud amazement. He thought he knew all the strange people who worked on his great-uncle’s estate.

  ‘I’m your father!’ said a puzzled Mr Dickens, whose back was to the man, so he’d neither seen nor heard him.

  ‘Not you, Father,’ said Eddie. ‘Him.’

  Unfortunately, Mr Dickens didn’t hear his son’s explanation, so was mightily confused, until the man came into view. He handed Mr Dickens what to you and me would have looked like one of those large brass horns that come out of the front of those old-fashioned wind-up gramophones you see in films … but which wouldn’t have looked like that to Eddie or his father because wind-up gramophones and films were yet to be invented. The man stuck the small end of the horn into a startled Mr Dickens’s ear.

  ‘If I loan your father this ear trumpet then there is no need for anyone to shout,’ said the man, speaking directly into the brass horn. ‘I have been given the responsibility of cataloguing this entire library and I cannot be expected to do so, in the time allotted, if I am to suffer constant interruptions. Silence or, at the very least, hushed voices would, therefore, be very much appreciated.’

  ‘I can hear!’ said Mr Dickens, clasping the ear trumpet. ‘I can hear!’ he repeated, much louder this time. He gave a whoop of delight and, like any whoop of delight, it was LOUD, which greatly distressed the man.

  ‘Please!’ he begged. ‘A little quiet.’

  Eddie looked at him. He wasn’t much taller than Eddie and seemed to be mostly moustache. He wore pinstripe trousers and a black waistcoat and jacket, both of which were a bit shiny with wear. He had very little hair on the top of his head – though the moustache more than made up for that lower down – and what little hair he did have, he’d tried to brush across his bald patch.

  ‘I’m Eddie Dickens,’ said Eddie. ‘This is my father, Mr Dickens. We’re the great-nephew and nephew of Mad Uncle Jack, who owns this house … Did he ask you to catalogue all these books?’ There was doubt in Eddie’s voice because he couldn’t imagine Mad Uncle Jack arranging for something so sensible … not the man who was, at that very moment, supervising the repairs to his house using raspberry jam!

  ‘My name is Mr Lalligag and I was employed by the lady of the house,’ said the man.

  If Eddie had been puzzled and surprised before, he was stunned now. Even Madder Aunt Maud had employed a librarian to catalogue all the books in the library? That was about as likely as her having a sensible conversation with him. She lived in a hollow cow in the garden! Her best friend was a stuffed stoat which looked more like a stuffed ferret! Eddie was surprised she’d even remembered there was a library in the house!

  ‘When did you start?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘This very morning,’ snapped Mr Lalligag. Eddie thought the librarian would have made a very good ventriloquist because he couldn’t see the man’s lips move behind that most enormous of enormous moustaches. ‘Now, I would be most grateful if you would keep the noise down!’ With that, he turned and walked behind a stack of books, which was where he must have been when Eddie’d first come into the room and why he hadn’t seen him.

  ‘What a strange fellow,’ said Mr Dickens. ‘Rude, in fact. But this ear trumpet could be useful. Very useful indeed.’ He returned his attention to his copy of PUNCH.

  ‘Where’s mother?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘About eleven thirty,’ said his father.

  There was once a famous author named Charles Dickens – no blood relation to our Eddie Dickens in these adventures – who used to fill his books with masses and masses of characters with very silly names. Because his books were so long, it often became quite difficult to remember who was who, so he got around this by printing a list of all his characters at the front of each book, under the heading ‘CHARACTERS’ or ‘DRAMATIS PERSONAE’ (which is Latin for ‘DRAMATIS PERSONAE’).

  What with all these different people, such as Mr Lalligag, getting involved in Dreadful Acts so late in the day, I’m beginning to wish that we’d had one of those lists at the beginning of this book, but who’s to say that we can’t have one over halfway through this adventure? Who knows, it might even catch on. In fact, it makes more sense, because you’ll already have read about the people I mention whereas, if this went at the front, you’d have forgotten who half the people were by the time you actually came across them on the page. Good thinking, huh?

  Excellent. That’s settled then. We’ll have our list right here …

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  EDDIE DICKENS – the hero

  MR & MRS DICKENS – his parents

  DAWKINS – Mr Dickens’s gentleman’s gentleman

  GIBBERING JANE – an unqualified chambermaid

  MAD UNCLE JACK – owner of Awful End, where all of the above live

  EVEN MADDER AUNT MAUD – his wife, who lives with Malcolm inside Marjorie in the rose garden

  MALCOLM – a stuffed stoat, sometimes called Sally

  or

  SALLY – a stuffed stoat, usually called Malcolm

  MARJORIE – a large hollow cow

  MR CHEVY – a peeler

  THE GREAT ZUCCHINI – an escapologist

  DANIELLA – his lovely assistant

  MR SKILLET – his props builder

  MR MERRYWEATHER – his manager

  MR WOLFE TABLET – the famous photographer

  MR COLLINS – the ironmonger

  THE DETECTIVE INSPECTOR – a detective inspector

  MR LALLIGAG – who says he’s a librarian

  PLUS

  an assortment of ex-soldiers, and the escaped convicts up on the moors

  Not bad, huh? It looks quite classy, if the truth be told, as well as being a useful reminder of some of the characters we met so long ago you probably forgot about them. Speaking of forgetting, wasn’t Eddie supposed to be doing all he could to convince Wolfe Tablet to drop the charges, not looking for his mummy?

  *

  The next place Eddie looked was in the kitchens of Awful End. Ever since she and Eddie’s father had been cured of a very strange and smelly ailment, his mother was very particular about what she ate. When Eddie walked into the large, basement room, he found her talking to Dawkins, his father’s gentleman’s gentleman.

  ‘Hello, Dawkins,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Master Edmund,’ said Dawkins, with a slight bow. He was wearing a blue-and-white striped apron over his suit and was drying Malcolm the stuffed stoat with an Irish linen tea towel. Eddie deduced that Even Madder Aunt Maud must be close by.

  ‘Mother –’ Eddie began.

  ‘One moment, dear,’ said Mrs Dickens, whose hearing seemed to have recovered a lot quicker than his father’s. She was seated at the huge kitchen table, sorting broad beans into two separate piles: small and not-quite-so-small. She graded them by passing each bean through her wedding ring, which she’d slipped off her finger specially. Those that passed through the thin band of gold went on the ‘small’ pile. Those that didn’t fit through, or might have done but could have got[ten] a little squashed in the process, went on the ‘not-quite-so-small’ pile. When Eddie arrived, the ‘small’ pile was not quite so small as the ‘not-quite-so-small’ pile – in case you’re taking notes.

  ‘I’m discussing tonight’s menu with Dawkins, my love,’ she said. ‘I will be with you in one moment.’

  Eddie was only too aware that his
mother’s conversations were inclined to get rather long and convoluted, which is a polite way of saying ‘very confused indeed’. He tried to explain the urgency of his mission with a ‘But I need to get Daniella and Mr Zucchini –’ but Mrs Dickens would have none of it.

  ‘Sssh! Edmund,’ she said, raising both hands for silence. In the process, she sent her wedding ring flying towards Dawkins (who was carefully drying Malcolm’s eyes with the corner of the tea towel) and sent a broad bean flying towards Eddie.

  It hit him smack in the eye. Sure, it would have been more painful if it’d been a bullet or even a small rock but, boy, did it hurt.

  ‘Ouch!’ Eddie cried out, though he was probably thinking some very rude words inside his head.

  ‘NO!’ screamed his mother, as her wedding ring bounced off Malcolm’s leathery nose and headed for …

  You’re not going to believe what happened next. Even if you’d actually been there, you might have suspected that the whole thing had been rehearsed a dozen times to get it just right. If you saw it on stage, you’d clap at the skill and timing of it. If you saw it on film, you might turn to the person next to you and say: ‘I wonder how many times they had to film this sequence to get it right?’ If you watched it on video or DVD, you might pause it to see if there was any trick photography or careful editing …

  … because Mrs Dickens’s wedding ring bounced off Malcolm’s nose and went straight into the gaping mouth of Even Madder Aunt Maud, who’d, at that precise moment, entered the kitchen yawning, following one of the many ‘little lie-downs’ she’d had since being hit by Wolfe Tablet’s stolen hot-air balloon.

  She was so startled that she let out a ‘GULP!’ of surprise and, with that gulp, she swallowed the ring.

  ‘My wedding band!’ cried Eddie’s mother, not referring to Mrs Jonah Widdlington’s – no sniggering, please; that was her name – String Quartet, who’d played at her wedding reception – but to her wedding ring, which was now on its long and unpleasant journey to Even Madder Aunt Maud’s stomach and beyond.

  ‘What are you trying to do?’ Even Madder Aunt Maud demanded. ‘Poison me?’

  Seconds later, she found Eddie’s mother’s hands around her neck. Mrs Dickens was trying to make her cough up the ring, but Even Madder Aunt Maud didn’t know that. As far as she was aware, someone had tossed some foul-tasting pill into her mouth the very second she’d entered the kitchen, and now someone was trying to strangle her.

  What upset her the most, though, was that she was sure that the pill had come from the direction of Malcolm. Was Malcolm – her dear, beloved, Malcolm – in on the plot to kill her? Tears sprang to her eyes as Mrs Dickens continued to give her neck a good shake.

  Dawkins placed the stuffed stoat on the table and did his best to separate the two women as politely as possible, being only too aware that these were the ladies of the house and he was merely a gentleman’s gentleman.

  ‘Cough it up, Maud!’ Mrs Dickens was shouting.

  ‘Et tu, Malcolm?’ said Even Madder Aunt Maud – whatever that might mean – doing her best to out-stare the glassy-eyed traitor.

  ‘Ladies! Ladies!’ Dawkins pleaded.

  Eddie left them to it. It was clear that he was going to have to try to persuade Wolfe Tablet to drop the charges against Daniella and the Great Zucchini all by himself.

  Episode 7

  To the Rescue

  In which Eddie’s attempt to rescue the others results in him needing to be rescued too

  Wolfe Tablet had travelled to the area by hot-air balloon, and that balloon had now been impounded by the police ‘pending further investigations’ and was going nowhere. ‘Impounded’ actually means ‘held in legal custody’ but, in this case, it meant that the peelers had it tethered to the ground on a small patch of grass around the back of the police station (where they usually played football) and were taking it in turns to go up and down in it. One or two lost their hats, a few were airsick but, all in all, they agreed that it was great fun.

  Mr Tablet himself, meanwhile, was back in his rooms at the Rancid Rat, recovering from his ordeal, and it was to the Rancid Rat that Eddie was now headed. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Eddie didn’t get out much. When he wasn’t drawn into adventures that weren’t of his own making, he spent most of his time at home. And home was now Awful End. He wasn’t particularly familiar with the surrounding villages, towns or countryside. He didn’t have a bike. There wasn’t a local bus service, and there were no shopping malls or burger joints to hang out at with your friends back then. A trip to the ironmonger’s to buy a hook for the back of the loo door was an event, and a very rare one at that. So Eddie would have to ask how to get to the Rancid Rat.

  The best person to have asked would have been Dawkins because, as long as he had enough tissue paper, he seemed happy with life and was good and practical at most things. But he was still busy trying to calm Eddie’s mother and Even Madder Aunt Maud. There was no point in asking Mad Uncle Jack for directions. He’d once started to draw Eddie a layout of the gardens, but it’d turned into a picture of a frog carrying a parasol, which he then proceeded to colour in with green crayon, cut out and pin to the wall of his study, with great pride – his original task completely forgotten!

  Gibbering Jane was an ideal person to talk to if you had a query about knitting. What she didn’t know about knitting could probably be written on the head of a pin, and still leave plenty of room for the Lord’s Prayer and a list of your ten least favourite meals … but directions? Eddie wasn’t 100 per cent convinced she knew up from down, let alone left from right, or how to get to the Rancid Rat.

  As for Mad Uncle Jack’s band of ex-soldiers … Eddie did another one of his sighs, and decided to set off and ask for directions from the people he met on the way … which is all fine and dandy, so long as you actually meet somebody.

  An hour or so later, Eddie had to admit to himself what he’d been denying for the previous half-hour: he was well and truly lost. He wouldn’t be able to find his way back to Awful End, let alone the Rancid Rat. He had somehow found his way up onto the moors.

  If this was a film, I’d have a dramatic chord of music about now. If this was a book, I’d make it a dramatic end to an episode. Hang on. This is a book but, then again, Eddie didn’t know that, did he? All he could see was miles and miles of grass, boulders, gorse bushes and the occasional blasted tree. (I’m not swearing. I don’t mean blasted as in ‘These blasted shoes are giving me foot-ache,’ but blasted as in ‘blighted or withered’. In other words, even the trees up on the moors were fed up and leafless.) He’d lost sight of St Botolph’s and Awful End somewhere below, not only because the moors were undulating – went up and down a lot – and were hiding them behind a hill, but also because of the mist.

  In books such as these (not, as I’ve just said, that Eddie had the slightest notion that he was in a book such as this, or any other such book) mist and moors seem to go together. In fact, misty moors are a must. Get a moor without mist and you feel hard done by … so Eddie got the full works, and completely lost.

  If only someone would find me, he thought. He hated being up there on his own. But when someone did find him, Eddie wished that the someone had been someone different … because out of the swirling mist loomed the most frightening human being Eddie had ever seen.

  He was huge, for a start, with a neck as thick as his head, so you couldn’t tell it was a neck, and a face covered in horrifying scars. They reminded Eddie of the stitching on Malcolm, where his sawdust stuffing was showing through. This monster of a man had no hair on the top of his flat-topped head, but the hairiest ears Eddie’d ever seen, and chest-hair sprouting from the top of his crumpled suit … a suit which looked more like a pair of ill-fitting pyjamas, with arrows on them.

  If the arrows weren’t clue enough, the giant was carrying a huge, black metal ball – as big as a pumpkin – on a piece of chain, the other end of which was attached to his ankle with a manacle … Eddie was
left in no doubt that this was one of the convicts who’d escaped from Grimpen Jail.

  The convict bent down and looked poor Eddie straight in the eyes. ‘You ain’t going to scream, are ya?’ he asked, his voice deep and gravelly. His teeth were small and yellow and his breath smelled sour.

  ‘N-N-No, sir,’ said Eddie, polite as always.

  ‘Good,’ said the convict, ‘or I should have to snap your neck in two, like a dried twig.’

  ‘He would, too!’ said another escaped convict, appearing out of the mist to Eddie’s right. He’d moved so silently that Eddie did that almost-jumping-out-of-his-own-skin thing that surprised people do. ‘That’s why he’s called Bonecrusher,’ said the second man.

  This second convict was almost as thin as Eddie’s Mad Uncle Jack and was almost as frightening as Bonecrusher, but in a different way. He had long grey wisps of hair coming from his head and pointed chin, and had hooded eyes, which somehow reminded Eddie of a bird of prey getting ready to pounce on its unsuspecting victim. Staring into those eyes, Eddie could imagine a sharp brain behind them, cogs turning, hard at work.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ demanded Bonecrusher, grabbing Eddie’s arm. ‘You ain’t spying for the peelers, are ya?’

  ‘N-N-No, Mr Bonecrusher,’ Eddie assured him. ‘I’m lost. I’m trying to find my way to the Rancid Rat … My friends have been locked up by the police and I’m trying to get them freed.’

  ‘How very interesting,’ said the second convict, with a grin. ‘Come with us.’ He took Eddie’s other arm and, between them, he and Bonecrusher led him away through the mist.

  A matter of minutes later – though it seemed an endless journey to Eddie because he feared it might be his last – he found himself being led into a small cave in a rocky outcrop. It was there he met his third convict.