Playschool

by Colin Thompson

  It shattered into a million pieces that came crashing down into the desert, narrowly missing some very surprised camels.

  The only people to see it were a team of geologists who were about to ruin the beautiful desert by drilling for oil. When they tried to tell the world about an iceberg the size of fifty football fields falling out of the sky, they were recalled to Texas and locked up in a very secure hospital, though no one ever came up with an explanation of why fifteen penguins and a seal were found wandering about in the middle of a desert.

  ‘Merlinmary Flood, that was fantastic,’ said Mademoiselle Fifila Venus. ‘Ten out of ten and a gold star.’

  ‘Ten out of ten and a gold star, nah, nah, nah,’ Orkward Warlock muttered under his breath and kicked the smallest girl in the class on the shins.

  ‘Gold stars, gold stars,’ he cursed to himself as he went back to his room to kick The Toad. ‘You’ll see a million gold stars on sports day!’

  ‘Where on Earth am I going to get a tracking device?’ Orkward said to no one in particular.

  ‘Well, you’re not clever enough to, like, build one,’ said The Mirror.

  ‘Shut up, shut up,’ said Orkward.

  ‘The only person who could build one,’ The Mirror continued, ‘is Winchflat Flood, and I happen to know that he’s actually made one before to keep track of his sister Betty when she was a baby.’

  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’

  ‘I’m sure he’d lend it to you,’ sneered The Mirror, ‘seeing as how you like him so much.’

  ‘Hippie lavatory brain,’ said Orkward and wrote a rude word on The Mirror with his greasy finger.

  The door flew open and Matron marched in, followed by Romeo and Juliet.

  ‘There you are, you evil little boy,’ she said. ‘I want to see you about burning The Toad, but first of all I want you to tell me where he is. He ran away with my Enchanted Wax and I suspect you had something to do with it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Orkward lied.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Matron, grabbing Orkward by the ear and dragging him out the door. ‘You need to visit the sick bay, my boy,’ she added.

  ‘But I’m not sick,’ Orkward protested.

  ‘I know that,’ said Matron, ‘but you’re going to be.’

  As well as all the ordinary medicines like aspirins and sticking plasters, Matron had a whole range of special wizard and witch remedies. As she dragged Orkward along, the boy tried to put a spell on her. He muttered the ancient French spell that turns people into a pig’s bladder, and the deadly Welsh spell that makes you wear a hat with a torch on it and sing dreadful songs for weeks on end, but Matron was immune to everything. He even tried the spell that no one realises you’re doing because it sounds as if you’re sneezing – the famous spell that turns you inside out. But Matron had seen every spell that had ever been invented, and had inoculated herself against all of them. She had even come up with some pretty wild spells of her own.

  ‘You might as well stop all that,’ she said. ‘Far better wizards than you have tried. Okay, Nurse Romeo, I think we’ll give him a spoonful of cough medicine first.’

  ‘But I haven’t got a cough,’ said Orkward.

  ‘No, of course you haven’t. That’s why we’re giving you cough medicine, to make you cough up the truth.’

  Nurse Juliet poked her beak in Orkward’s right ear while Nurse Romeo pecked the top of his head on the other side.

  ‘AHHHHOOOWWWWWWWW,’ Orkward cried and, as he did so, Matron tipped a glass of cough mixture into his open mouth.

  ‘We’ll just give that a minute to start working,’ she said. ‘Though, come to think of it, nasty little liars like you sometimes need a second dose.’

  So the nurses attacked him again and Matron gave him another lot. It was disgusting – not just the awful taste, which was like a cross between strawberries and cow manure, but the terrifying feeling it sent through Orkward’s brain. It was as if every closed door inside his head was suddenly thrown wide open and he knew that no matter how hard he tried to fight it, he would tell the truth to whatever question he was asked.

  ‘Where is The Toad?’ said Matron.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Orkward. ‘The last time I saw him, he was on his way here to bring back your wax.’

  ‘Well, he never arrived.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Orkward whimpered. ‘Honest.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Matron. ‘Well, let’s start from the last time you saw him.’

  Orkward didn’t want to tell her about going into the forest to polish Narled, but every time he stopped telling the truth, he began to cough, not just a bit of cough like you get with a cold, but a deep down cough that brought up his breakfast and bits of last night’s dinner.

  ‘We were in the forest …’ he began.

  But the last thing he wanted was for anyone to know he had been to see Narled. So gritting his teeth, he tried to lie.

  Cough, bacon, cough, carrots, cough …

  ‘You went into the forest?’ said Matron. ‘You know that’s not allowed, don’t you?’

  ‘We were only a tiny bit in,’ said Orkward. ‘No more than a hundred metres.’

  ‘And that’s where you saw The Toad for the last time?’

  ‘Yes. He set off back here, just before me.’

  ‘You stayed behind to bury a jar with some of my stolen wax in it, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, I …’

  Cough, banana, cough, carrot, splutter …

  ‘I, er, didn’t …’

  Cough, porridge, cough, shoelace,23 and then Orkward collapsed on the floor.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  ‘Right,’ said Matron. ‘That’s enough for now. Get into bed and rest while the cough mixture wears off. We’ll talk about punishment for you burning him later. And don’t go bothering Winchflat in the other bed. He’s resting his genius brain. He was splitting the atom all morning and then invented an anti-gravity engine after lunch, and he’s totally exhausted. I don’t want to hear a sound from you. You can stay here while we go and find The Toad.’

  Matron locked her patients in and went to see Professor Throat. The thought of anyone, never mind an innocent like The Toad, being out in the dark forest all night, was very worrying. The two nurses flew around the school asking everyone if they had seen the poor creature.

  No one had.

  ‘And I’ll tell you something very unusual,’ Prebender Glorious told them with a sigh, ‘I haven’t seen Narled either. It’s probably a coincidence, but he always checks the quadrangle at the end of lessons without fail. Seventy-five years I’ve been here, and every single night I’ve looked out of my window and seen him making a final check round the place before dark.’

  After school, Professor Throat gathered everyone in the Grate Hall. The fire that burned in the Great Grate had been alight since Quicklime’s had been built seven hundred and fifty years ago. Doorlock the handyman was the fifteenth generation of his family to care for the fire, and not once in all that time had the fire ever died. Even in summer when the temperature in the remote Patagonian valley soared up as high as five degrees, the fire was kept alight. Generations of children and teachers had been warmed by its magical flames and hypnotised by the dancing elves that lived in its fiery heart.

  Among the staff and students, there were dozens of witches and wizards who could send their thoughts out into the world and find things.

  This was how the school had become so immensely wealthy – so wealthy that it didn’t have a bank account in Switzerland, it actually owned Switzerland, though they kept very quiet about it. Quicklime’s economics teacher, Aubergine Wealth, had sent his thoughts out into bank vaults to look over people’s shoulders when they were putting in the secret numbers to open combination locks. Then, when everyone was asleep, he sent his body over to join his thoughts and robbed them all blind.

  ‘I only do it for a great cause,’ he confided in Profes
sor Throat. ‘I am robbing the rich to help the even richer … us.’

  There was only one place in the whole world where no one could send their thoughts, and that was into the dark forest.

  Everyone sat very still and concentrated. The fire in the grate burned down to ash, almost dying before Doorlock came in with armfuls of fresh logs. The school buses sat impatiently in the quadrangle and around the world parents began to wonder what was keeping their children.24 Night fell in an enveloping silence while everyone searched the world high and low for The Toad. At midnight the children were all sent home and the staff made one final search.

  ‘He has to be in the dark forest,’ said Professor Throat.

  He began to feel rather guilty. Maybe turning the boy into a toad had been too harsh a punishment. Maybe it had driven him over the edge. Though one thing didn’t quite add up.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is that if he is in the dark forest, how did he get there? We all know it locks its branches against anyone who tries to enter.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ said Matron. ‘Orkward Warlock told me that Narled went into the forest. He said it opened its branches for him and then closed them again before they could follow him.’

  ‘You can’t believe anything that boy says,’ said Prebender Glorious.

  ‘You can when he’s had a dose of my cough mixture.’

  ‘Ahh,’ said Prebender Glorious, remembering his own childhood at the school and Matron’s formidable pharmacy. ‘So maybe Narled has taken The Toad.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him collecting children before,’ said Professor Throat. ‘It’s usually iPods and socks and bits of paper.’

  ‘And quite a lot of unfinished homework,’ Doctor Mordant laughed. ‘We’ve all heard that excuse, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Professor Throat, ‘but never children.’

  ‘But he isn’t a child, is he?’ said Matron. ‘He’s a toad.’

  ‘I know. I know,’ said the Professor. ‘But I don’t think Narled has ever taken any sort of living creature before.’

  They talked into the early hours and decided that at first light they would cover the valley from top to bottom to see if they could find The Toad or any way of getting into the dark forest.

  When he looked back later, The Toad was never sure which bits of that night had been real and which bits had been a dream. It had been too wonderful to be real, but then it had been too wonderful to be a dream too. The Toad’s dreams usually involved hopping across a very, very wide road very, very slowly while a huge truck with fifty massive black tyres hurtled towards him going very, very fast.

  The last thing he remembered that he knew was real was tripping over a tree root.

  Lots of little arms lifted the sleeping toad gently off the damp leaves and carried him deeper into the forest. He remembered voices like babies talking, voices that seemed to be inside his head, twittering baby talk that didn’t make words, just joyful twittering noises. And he remembered feeling happier than he had ever felt before.

  Then he was in a cave on a bed of soft grass and the six baby handbags were curled up around him and their mother was singing softly to send them all to sleep. And the song was there inside The Toad’s head, stroking his brain and washing away his sadness. And when the handbags were all asleep with their tiny thumbs stuck in their zips, Narlene beckoned The Toad away to the far side of the cave, where there was food and drink.

  ‘You have a good heart,’ she said to The Toad, though the words seemed to appear inside his head.

  ‘Can you all speak?’ he asked. ‘Even Narled?’

  ‘Only creatures with kind hearts can hear us,’ said Narlene. ‘That evil scheming boy you were with will never hear us.’

  The Toad began to pour his heart out to her. He wanted to tell her what Orkward was up to. He wanted to tell her how his parents had rejected him and how big the lonely thing inside him felt, but he hardly said more than a few words before he fell asleep.

  When Orkward woke up it was dark. He couldn’t believe his luck. Here he was with Winchflat Flood, the one person he needed more than any other. The trouble was, Winchflat knew he hated him and he knew that Winchflat knew he knew. If Orkward was to persuade the boy to give him the tracking device, he would have to come up with a damn good plan.

  Winchflat was still sleeping.

  Orkward began to cry. Winchflat stirred but did not wake up. Orkward cried a bit louder.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Winchflat in the darkness.

  ‘Oh, it’s nobody,’ sobbed Orkward.

  I recognise that voice, thought Winchflat. It’s that vile Orkward Warlock.

  ‘Is that you, Orkward?’ Winchflat asked, and, pretending he didn’t know otherwise, he added, ‘No, it can’t be. Orkward Warlock would never cry.’

  ‘Well, of course, the old Orkward Warlock never ever cried,’ said Orkward, ‘but things have changed.’

  Naturally Winchflat did not believe a word of this. No one would, except maybe the poor innocent Toad, but he decided to pretend he did, to see what the vile boy was up to. He was just glad it was pitch dark so Orkward couldn’t see him grinning.

  ‘Really?’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Yes,’ Orkward sobbed. ‘It’s my dear little sister Primrose. She keeps wandering away and I’m frightened that something awful in the dark forest might kill her.’

  ‘Oh dear, that’s terrible.’

  ‘What I need is some sort of tracking device, so I can always tell where she is,’ said Orkward.

  ‘Well,’ said Winchflat, ‘by an amazing coincidence, I’ve got one. I built it when my sister was a toddler. She kept wandering off too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You wouldn’t believe how far she’d go sometimes,’ said Winchflat. ‘Once we found her right up the top of the Eiffel Tower. Another time she was three hundred feet under the sea in the ladies toilets in the lost city of Atlantis. You know, I’ve always thought it was very strange that Atlantis was a lost city. I mean, how could anyone lose a whole city, and what on Earth were they doing taking it to the bottom of the sea in the first place? Then another time, we’d looked everywhere and she was right at home inside the fridge eating raspberry and rodent yoghurt. And then –’

  ‘Yes, well. How interesting,’ said Orkward, gritting his teeth to stop himself from saying something sarcastic. ‘So, er, do you still use it?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s sitting on a shelf in my workshop,’ said Winchflat. ‘Would you like to borrow it?’

  YES! said Orkward inside his head. God, you’re dumb. I don’t know why anyone would call you a genius.

  ‘Gosh, could I?’ he said out loud.

  ‘No problem,’ said Winchflat. ‘I’ll bring it to school on Friday.’

  After I’ve made a few slight modifications, Winchflat thought.

  As soon as the sun rose the next morning and the wizard buses had dropped all the students back at school, groups of teachers and children set out to look for The Toad.

  Radius Leg, the sports master and therefore the fittest member of staff, took a team of the older boys to the foot of the White Widowmaker, a sheer cliff of ice at the top of the valley. There was no way The Toad could have ever climbed the Widowmaker, but Radius Leg was one of those short little people who liked to show off how macho he was.

  Of course, any of the boys with him could have flown to the top of the cliff in a few seconds. They were wizards, after all. But Radius Leg said there was to be no magic involved. While he struggled up the deadly ice-face with ropes and climbing equipment, the boys sat under a tree and listened to their iPods. They knew that within fifteen minutes, their teacher would come crashing to the ground and they would have to carry him back to Matron to get mended. It happened all the time. There were enough bits of metal holding Radius together to build a small car.

  ‘Why don’t we just leave him here this time?’ Morbid Flood suggested. ‘Every time we carry him back to get fixed up he weighs
more and more.’

  Silent nodded vigorously.

  ‘We could always sell him to a scrap metal dealer,’ said one of the other boys.

  Sure enough, seven minutes later Radius Leg came crashing to the ground. He lay there happily groaning in pain for another seven minutes and then fainted. The valley where Quicklime College lay hidden was the highest valley in Patagonia and the White Widowmaker was at the top end of the valley. Its sheer face sealed them off from the outside world. The air was thin and barely a day passed at that altitude without a serious blizzard.

  The boys helped their unconscious teacher by relieving him of his extra weight, taking all the money and caramel toffees out of his pocket. Then they took one last look at him just to make sure he wasn’t regaining consciousness, and left.

  Within a few hours they were back at school warming themselves in the Grate Hall. They’d informed Professor Throat of the sports teacher’s position, but as winter wasn’t that far away and Gristleball wouldn’t be played again until next Easter, it was decided to leave him there.

  ‘He’ll thaw out in good time,’ said the Professor. ‘He always does, and it’ll save the school a bit on food. You did mark his position with a stick, though, didn’t you, just in case?’

  Up the mountain, Radius Leg, now buried under a fresh fall of snow, began to hibernate. It was not the first time this had happened. Nor would it be the last.

  Satanella Flood led a team of small animals down into the drains beneath the school.25 This was exactly the sort of place you might expect The Toad to go – warm, dark, and dripping with slime. There were a lot of strange creatures down there who were also warm, dark and dripping with slime. Most of them were the descendants of Doctor Mordant’s failed experiments that had been small enough to flush down the lavatory. These creatures had grouped together, fallen in love and given birth to even stranger creatures. Their leader, Scarcely, a cross between a roller-skate, a goblin and a paperclip, was one of the blessed few with the power of speech. He and Satanella were old friends.