The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  Of course the clinking had stopped again. And there was nothing moving in the corridor.

  Nothing at all.

  ‘It’s…it’s just the same!’ I whispered.

  Phredde gave a startled shriek, then tried to muffle it. ‘No it isn’t!’ she gasped. ‘Look!’

  She pointed at the suit of armour down the corridor.

  ‘What about it?’ I hissed. ‘It was there last time we looked.’

  ‘But it’s MOVED!’ cried Phredde softly.

  I blinked. So it had. The armour had been right down one end of the corridor last time, and now it was right down the other end.

  ‘That’s what it was!’ croaked Bruce. ‘Clink, clink, clink…it was the noise of the metal armour on the floor.’

  ‘But suits of armour don’t walk by themselves,’ Phredde protested.

  ‘They do if they’re ghosts,’ I informed her.

  ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’ Phredde’s voice sounded even more uncertain. ‘There has to be someone in it. Someone playing a silly joke. Maybe Edwin from school—he could have snuck in without anyone seeing him. He knew we were going to have horror movies tonight because I ran into him in the video store.’

  Well, that made sense. It was just the sort of thing Edwin would do, try to terrify us by pretending to be a ghost, which was why Phredde had turned him into a soccer ball last term, till Mrs Olsen made her turn him back again.

  ‘Come on,’ whispered Phredde.

  I don’t know why we were all still whispering, if the ghost was only Edwin. But it seemed the right thing to do.

  So we tiptoed down the hall…well, I tiptoed, Phredde flew, and Bruce hopped—till we were right in front of the suit of armour.

  It looked just like a normal suit of armour. Not that I’ve seen many suits of armour—not really examined them anyway.

  But it looked just the way I’d have thought a suit of armour SHOULD look.

  Well, the only way we were going to be able to tell if there was anyone inside was to lift the visor—that’s the sort of door thing that covers the eyes.

  ‘Who’s going to lift the visor?’ I muttered.

  ‘You,’ croaked Bruce softly. ‘My tongue can’t reach that far.’

  Phredde nodded. I doubt that Phredde’s tiny fingers could have managed a heavy metal visor either.

  So I tiptoed forward, and lifted the visor…

  …and shrieked, and dropped it again.

  ‘What is it!’ cried Phredde.

  ‘Nothing!’ I yelled. ‘There’s nothing in there!’

  ‘Then why did you scream?’ croaked Bruce reasonably.

  ‘Because don’t you see? If that’s not Edwin in there, it has to be a ghost. You can’t SEE ghosts. That’s the whole point.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ insisted Phredde, more uncertainly than ever.

  ‘Well, if you don’t believe me, you have a look,’ I yelled. ‘There’s nothing in there!’

  Phredde bit her lip. Her wings were fluttering madly, the way they always do when she’s upset. ‘Okay,’ she whispered.

  There was a faint PING!, and the visor was magicked up, and Phredde fluttered over to it, and peered inside. Being Phredde of course, she could fit her whole head inside the visor, so she had a really good look all the way down.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded, as she fluttered out again.

  Phredde’s face was faintly green, a bit like Bruce’s face would have been if he’d happened to have been a green frog, instead of a Crinia signifera.

  ‘Nothing,’ she whispered. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Told you so.’ I said.

  And then we all looked at each other. What were we going to do now?

  ‘I don’t want to live in a haunted castle,’ said Phredde tremulously. ‘We’ll have to move out…’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the suit of armour that’s haunted,’ offered Bruce helpfully. ‘Maybe if you got rid of the armour…’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We need to think about this.’

  So we all went back to Phredde’s sitting room, and shut the door tightly, just in case there was a ghost trying to eavesdrop.

  I made Phredde magic up some more pizza—Mrs Olsen says carbohydrates are good for shock, though as she’s a vampire I don’t know how she knows for sure. Is blood a carbohydrate? I must ask her.

  So we sat there munching, and listening to the sounds of the elfin orchestra floating up from their toadstools, and the phaery laughter, and Uncle Mordred’s great big dragon laugh, and it started to seem so nice and NORMAL that I half began to think we’d been worrying about nothing.

  After all we HAD been watching a horror movie, and the light HAD been out. Maybe we’d made a mistake, and the suit of armour had always been down that end of the corridor.

  Maybe the clinking sound had just been from the plumbing, if phaery castles have plumbing.

  Or maybe it was a possum on the roof, not that possums usually go…

  Clink, clink, clink…

  Phredde froze with her pizza halfway to her mouth. I swallowed mine in shock, and started to choke, and by the time I’d got it heading down to my stomach where it belonged, Bruce was halfway to the door.

  ‘Come on!’ he croaked.

  ‘Come where?’ I choked.

  ‘We’ve got to catch it in the act!’

  Well, I didn’t see why we had to catch it in the act at all, but I wasn’t going to be left out.

  So I dashed across the room, pizza crumbs bouncing off my T-shirt, and Phredde zoomed after me in racing pigeon mode, and I opened the door (which wasn’t as slimy after Bruce’s tongue as I’d expected).

  And there was the suit of armour, clinking down the corridor.

  It was heading away from us this time, not back to where it came from.

  ‘After it!’ yelled Bruce, leaping down the corridor.

  ‘Stop!’ shrieked Phredde, wings flapping like a butterfly gone berserk.

  Well, I wasn’t too sure why she wanted it to stop—as far as I was concerned it was welcome to go as far as it liked, and preferably further, just as long as it was a long way from any castle I was likely to visit.

  But after all, Phredde’s my best friend—and even Bruce isn’t bad, for a frog—so I went racing after it too.

  The suit of armour wasn’t so much clink clink clinking now as wham wham whomping. I mean that armour was going FAST!

  Down the corridor, down the stairs…Bruce was hopping like he was practising for the froggy long jump and Phredde’s wings were going so fast they looked like a fan set on maximum speed.

  I was getting out of breath, but still the armour went on running. It was waving its sword around now too.

  Across the entrance hall, then out the front door. The armour gleamed in the floodlighting…

  Clink clink clink…

  Over the drawbridge, through the gardens at the side of the castle. That ghost sure was fit, carrying all that armour.

  The bushes grew thickly near the back garden, and for a moment we lost sight of it.

  ‘There he is!’ shrieked Bruce, leaping over a garden seat.

  ‘Catch him!’ screamed Phredde, as the suit of armour dashed past the elfin orchestra on their toadstools and into the crowd of phaery dancers.

  The orchestra stopped playing, and a couple of the elves hid under the toadstools. The dancers stopped dancing.

  But the suit of armour kept running, its sword waving high in the air.

  ‘Yield, dragon!’ it yelled suddenly. It had this really deep voice.

  And Uncle Mordred looked up and cried ‘Never!’ in this even deeper voice.

  Everyone sort of stepped back as the suit of armour dashed at Uncle Mordred, and Uncle Mordred put his head down and charged at the armour.

  And suddenly they met CRASH in the middle of the phaery green, and both of them went tumbling over and over and lay still.

  ‘Mordred!’ shrieked Phredde’s mum. ‘Are you all right?’

>   Uncle Mordred picked himself up.

  ‘Of course I’m all right,’ he said testily. ‘Why shouldn’t I be all right? It’s Sir Percival you should be concerned with. I gave him quite a bump there.’

  ‘Bump yourself,’ said the suit of armour, and suddenly it was taking its helmet off, and there was a KNIGHT inside. Or a knight’s ghost, anyway.

  Well, I suppose it was a knight. He looked like a knight ought to. He had grey hair, and a long grey moustache that curled up at the edges and these bright fierce blue eyes. ‘I bumped you,’ insisted the knight, or the ghost, or whatever he was.

  ‘In your dreams!’ argued Uncle Mordred. ‘You’ve never bumped me in your life.’

  ‘I have so too,’ began the knight, when Phredde interrupted.

  ‘Uncle Mordred, how come you know the ghost?’

  ‘Ghost? What ghost?’ demanded Uncle Mordred.

  ‘That ghost there.’ I pointed to the knight. ‘When we looked inside the armour ten minutes ago there was no one there.’ I told him. ‘He must have rematerialised again.’

  ‘Remat what?’ asked the knight.

  ‘Rematerialised,’ I informed him. ‘It means you became visible again.’

  The knight blinked. ‘But I was never invisible to start with,’ he protested in his deep voice.

  ‘But when we looked in the armour…’ began Bruce.

  The knight blushed. ‘Oh, then,’ he muttered. ‘Just had to stop off at the bathroom, what? Bloke can’t go to the bathroom with his armour on. It rusts, you know.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bruce.

  ‘But what were you doing in the corridor?’ I demanded.

  Uncle Mordred gave his dragon chuckle. ‘Waiting to pounce on me, I imagine,’ he chortled. ‘Not that it did you much good, did it Percival?’

  ‘It did indeed,’ argued Sir Percival. ‘I took you by surprise tonight all right.’

  ‘Me? taken by surprise? You’ve never taken me by surprise in your…’

  Phredde’s mum gave a polite cough. ‘Ahem,’ then sent a stern look at her brother. ‘If you two have quite finished interrupting, perhaps we could all get back to our dance.’

  So that was the end of that.

  The elves came back out from under their toadstools, and the music started again. Uncle Mordred and Sir Percival trotted back to the kitchen, and Uncle Mordred made cocoa, and the five of us sat by the fire in the great hall drinking it.

  ‘You see Percival and I were at school together,’ explained Uncle Mordred, curling his great tail around himself on the sofa. ‘Even at school I was fascinated by dragons.’

  ‘And I was fascinated by knights,’ put in Sir Percival, stroking his sword absently with one gloved hand.

  ‘So naturally we became friends with so much in common. Because after all, what good is a knight if he doesn’t have a dragon to hunt, and it gets pretty boring being a dragon if there’s no knight to pursue you.’

  ‘So we’ve been doing it for years,’ said Sir Percival. ‘I try to take him by surprise. That’s what I was doing in the upstairs corridor—spying on Mordred. That’s how I caught him unawares.’

  ‘You did not!’ roared Uncle Mordred.

  ‘I did too…’ began Sir Percival heatedly, lifting his sword.

  ‘I prefer being a frog,’ said Bruce suddenly.

  Well, if he meant to change the subject, it really worked.

  Within a few minutes the three of them were arguing the relative merits of being a frog, a dragon or a knight, and Bruce was telling them all sorts of facts I’m sure they didn’t want to know about, gill development and loss of habitat, and Sir Percival was explaining about the knightly code of chivalry and Uncle Mordred was booming about sustained fire production and how hard it was to get really good coal to chew any more.

  Phredde glanced at me and I glanced at her.

  Then we tiptoed back upstairs and watched The Vampire’s Curse and Saturday Night Werewolf and all the rest of them by ourselves. And no ghost interrupted us.

  In fact it was all pretty uneventful around our way, until Phredde’s mum caught a cold and crashed the world’s computer system.

  But that’s another story.

  Aaaaaaahhhtchooooooo!

  You know, it’s funny how little things can lead to great big things…

  Like the time I found a grubby Band-aid and it led to Phredde and me being chased by a mummy. (No, not my mummy, an ancient Egyptian one. It’d been dead for 5,000 years and boy, did it smell like it. But I can’t tell you about that yet, ’cause I’m still trying to work out how to explain it to Mum. Parents get stressed over the least little thing, sometimes, and it wasn’t like the mummy caught us. Well, not for long anyway.)

  And there was the time that Phredde’s mum decided to do the ‘Introduction to Computers’ course down at the local tech with my mum, and she almost destroyed the world.

  You know how parents get—I was zipping around on email and so was Phredde (we’ve even got our own email address) so Mum and the Phaery Splendifera decided it was time they learnt about computers too. You know, sometimes I think that generation doesn’t have the right sort of brains to be technical.

  Come to think of it, though, I suppose this story REALLY started when Phredde got a cold. (That’s the problem with stories—they sort of sneak up on you so you don’t know that one’s begun till it’s over.)

  Phredde and I were sitting up our tree in the schoolyard, waiting for the volcano to explode and discussing whether Bruce would look better if he was a green frog instead of a brown one, or maybe even pink with purple spots—when Phredde said ‘Ahhhhtchooo!’ and half the leaves fell off the tree.

  For such a small phaery she’s got an awfully big sneeze.

  ‘Bless you,’ I said.

  ‘Dank you,’ said Phredde, reaching for her hanky.

  Of course she didn’t have one—I mean, unless you’ve got one of those mums or dads who are always shoving a hanky in your pockets, who carries a hanky with them all the time?

  So Phredde went PING! and there was a small bright purple hanky (to match her hair) just floating in front of her nose.

  Phredde grabbed it and blew, and I said, ‘I think you’ve got a cold.’

  ‘Bodder,’ said Phredde.

  There was a gentle PING! all around me.

  Phredde blew her nose again. The hanky vanished, and Phredde said, ‘Well, that’s got rid of that.’

  ‘What, the hanky?’ I asked.

  ‘No, the cold,’ said Phredde carelessly.

  I stared. ‘But it takes a week to get over a cold.’

  ‘Not if you’re a phaery,’ said Phredde smugly. ‘You just give it to something else.’

  ‘Like who?’ I asked suspiciously, then felt ashamed of myself. Phredde’s my best friend. There’s no way she’d magic me a cold.

  ‘I gave it to the tree,’ said Phredde.

  ‘But trees can’t catch colds!’ I protested.

  ‘I know,’ said Phredde. ‘Trees can’t even sneeze. That’s why it won’t mind that I gave it to it.’

  Well, I suppose it made sense if you were a phaery.

  ‘Why didn’t you just make the cold disappear?’ I asked.

  ‘You can’t just make things disappear,’ said Phredde seriously. ‘That’s the Law of Conservation of Magic. You have to send them somewhere. Like when I made the dentist disappear that time. She didn’t really DISAPPEAR. I just sent her off to Uluru till after it was my time to see her.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. I’d wondered what had happened to the dentist. She had looked a bit sunburnt when she got back…

  ‘Pru,’ asked Phredde.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘What’s it like having a cold?’

  I blinked. ‘Haven’t you ever had one?’

  ‘Not for more than a few seconds. I always got rid of it…or Mum got rid of it for me when I was small. Even when I broke my ankle skateboarding Mum gave it to my bicycle.’

  ‘But bicycles don’t hav
e ankles!’

  ‘Sure. That’s why it didn’t matter if its ankle was broken.’

  Like I told you, phaeries…

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘your nose gets gummed up and dribbles so you have to blow it, you sneeze and your eyes go all pink and so does your nose and you look disgusting.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Phredde. She considered for a moment. ‘It sounds sort of interesting.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘It’s horrible.’

  Phredde shook her head. ‘I bet having a cold is like going to Antarctica. If you HAD to live in Antarctica it’d be horrid, all cold and dry and ice. But if you decided to go there for a holiday it’d be wonderful. You’d see the icebergs and the penguins…’

  ‘Phredde,’ I said. ‘Sometimes you’re weird.’

  ‘No I’m not,’ declared Phredde, fluttering her wings stubbornly. ‘I just want to know what having a cold is like. Everyone else has colds! Why not me!’

  ‘Because you’re a phaery,’ I explained patiently.

  ‘I just want to be like everyone else,’ insisted Phredde stubbornly.

  There was another PING!, and Phredde’s eyes were pink and her nose was dribbling again.

  Then with another PING! the purple hanky was back too.

  ‘Ahhhhtchooo!’ sneezed Phredde happily, and grinned at me.

  Then the volcano exploded, and Miss Richards shrieked a bit because some of the lava went through the library window again. (Phredde’s mum really needs to repair the volcano. It’s gone all wonky.)

  So we had to go into class.

  Well, it was a long day.

  We had a geography test for one thing. I got just about everything wrong and Amelia kept getting just about everything right and smiling over at me and whispering, ‘But it’s really EASY’ in this sweet little surprised voice. (Just you wait till we have a maths test, Amelia. I’m really good at maths.)

  And Bruce, who sits in front of me, kept shooting his tongue out and catching flies whenever Mrs Olsen wasn’t looking (we’re not allowed to eat in class) and crunching them, which made me feel sort of sick, especially when he spat out the wings. So it wasn’t surprising I couldn’t concentrate on the capital of Belgium and the main exports of Japan…

  And Phredde kept sneezing and sniffing and blowing her nose right behind my ear, and I started wondering how long it’d take before I got a cold too.