The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  PING!

  PING!

  PING!

  Nothing happened. Well, except for a rhoetosaurus galloping towards us.

  ‘It won’t work!’ yelped Bruce. ‘I must have used up most of my allowance getting Miss Richards and her laptop here.’

  ‘Boys!’ snorted Phredde.

  ‘Well, you did too!’ yelled Bruce.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘that rhoetosaurus is getting awfully close.’

  ‘I could vampirise it,’ offered Mrs Olsen.

  I looked at Mrs Olsen and then at the rhoetosaurus. Somehow I didn’t think a 1.6-metre-tall vampire was really going to scare a fifteen-metre-tall rhoetosaurus. It would probably think Mrs Olsen was just a mosquito in a hat and sunglasses.

  ‘How about we run!’ I suggested.

  So we did.

  Chapter 10

  The Cave

  Well, I ran and so did Mrs Olsen and Miss Richards, while Bruce hopped—fast—and Phredde flapped her wings like a butterfly after twenty cans of cola.

  You don’t get to see the scenery much when your legs are pumping under you as you try to escape from a fifteen-metre-high rhoetosaurus, but I did look about a bit, mostly to make sure my feet weren’t going to trip over anything that would make me a nice snack for a rhoetosaurus.

  The late Jurassic looked pretty much like the Triassic, except the tree things were in different places and it was colder and there were more beetles. Lots of beetles and gnat-like things which choked us as we ran.

  It was still squelchy, but at least now we could see a hill with a cliff a little way off, and in the cliff there was…

  ‘A cave!’ yelled Phredde, fluttering by my ear.

  It was pretty dark-looking, and small too, but that was a good thing because it was far too small for the rhoetosaurus to fit in. We raced towards it, over the soggy ground, all mud and water, and round a few spots that were mostly water with hardly any mud at all—well, raced and flew and hopped. I think Phredde made it first.

  ‘Phew!’ I said, ducking under the stone lip of the cave while the rhoetosaurus thundered up behind me. I stuck my head out to see what it was doing, then stuck it back in again quickly to avoid two giant rhoetosaurus nostrils. I looked around the cave instead.

  Caves in movies and stories have big rounded openings and nice flat floors and you have to traipse a long way round twisty passages to find the dragon or the treasure, or the dragon and the treasure, or at least a great chamber of stalagmites and stalactites and stuff.

  This cave wasn’t like that at all.

  This cave was more like a deep wrinkle in the cliff. Its mouth was jagged, like a crooked grin, and its inside was only half as tall as I am, which was fine for Phredde and Bruce who fitted just nicely, but Mrs Olsen and Miss Richards and I had to sit, or bend right over, to fit in.

  I peered back into the gloom. Of course there weren’t any dragons back in the Jurassic or whatever it was we were in, but it just occurred to me that there might be other things that lived in caves. Prehistoric vampire bats (maybe they’d make friends with Mrs Olsen) or cave-a-sauruses or…

  ‘Is anyone here?’ I called. My voice was a bit wavery, to tell the truth.

  ‘Look, Pru,’ said Phredde patiently, ‘there aren’t any humans yet, and even if there were they wouldn’t speak English.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said crossly. ‘I just wanted to let anything that lives in the cave know we’re here so they can…’

  ‘Leap out on us?’ suggested Bruce.

  ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘But I’d just like to know if there was anything there to leap out on us.’ I gestured back into the gloom. ‘So it doesn’t take us by surprise.’

  ‘If I’m going to be eaten by a cave dinosaur I want it to be a surprise,’ said Bruce. ‘I want to be happy right up till it closes its jaws around my---’

  ‘Ahem,’ said Miss Richards. She’d been studying the floor. ‘I don’t think the cave is inhabited. See? There are no footprints in the dust.’

  ‘What if they fly?’ asked Phredde, perching on a jagged rock.

  ‘They’d probably leave droppings,’ said Miss Richards.

  I could see Phredde was about to inform her that phaeries fly but they use toilets like everyone else and certainly don’t leave droppings all over the place. So I said hurriedly, ‘I wonder what everyone else is doing.’

  ‘Probably watching cute little koalas,’ said Phredde gloomily.

  I’d never seen Phredde look so gloomy before, I suppose because we’d never been trapped in the past before with a rhoetosaurus after us. Actually, in spite of everything, I felt fine. Maybe it was just that now my two best friends weren’t able to PING, so they were just like me. Well, apart from having wings or looking like a frog, anyway. But on the other hand I felt guilty too, because I’d sometimes wished that they might sort of lose their PINGs…

  ‘Cheer up. It could be worse,’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘How?’ Phredde demanded.

  ‘Well, we could be attacked by venomous spiders.’

  A spider dropped from the ceiling of the cave onto my hair. Bruce zapped it with his tongue. ‘Not bad,’ he said, crunching it.

  Which reminded me. ‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘Phredde, how about you PING us up some hamburgers…oops, I forgot. Bruce, could you? Oh bother…’

  I suddenly realised what having two PINGless friends meant. This was even worse than being lost in the late Jurassic! ‘Er, has anyone any food?’ I asked.

  Phredde inspected her invisible bag. ‘Nope,’ she said.

  I hunted through my school bag just in case there was a pizza or two I’d missed. Nothing, except for the plastic spoon that went with my banana yoghurt—which was now just a faint and distant memory, having been eaten so long ago in the Triassic.

  ‘I’ve got a packet of cheese and lettuce sandwiches back in the library,’ offered Miss Richards. As the library was as distant as the twenty-first century that didn’t help my tummy much.

  Mrs Olsen peered into her Thermos. ‘There are still a few drops left,’ she offered generously. ‘You children are welcome to them. I’m still full of paracyclotosaurus.’

  Zap! ‘These beetles are delicious,’ said Bruce, snapping his tongue back into his mouth with a particularly fat beetle on the end of it. ‘Would anyone else like one?’

  ‘NO!’ said Phredde and I together.

  I glanced at Phredde. She shrugged.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The first priority is food—for those of us who don’t eat beetles and don’t have vampire fangs.’ I gazed out of the cave. ‘Does anyone know how to cook a rhoetosaurus?’

  Chapter 11

  How to Make a Rhoetosaurus Sick

  You know, it’s not easy getting lunch back in the Jurassic. A few pizza bars would really have brightened the place up.

  We decided not to eat the rhoetosaurus. First of all, anything that weighed twenty tonnes and was fifteen metres high would probably have been too tough to eat. And secondly…well, you try catching something that weighs twenty tonnes and is fifteen metres high.

  ‘Maybe we can find some fruit trees,’ I said hopefully, 7ls;like apple trees or…’

  Miss Richards shook her head. ‘No apples in the Jurassic,’ she said.

  ‘Not even dinosaur apples?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Fish!’ exclaimed Miss Richards. She’d booted up the laptop again. We peered over her shoulder at pictures of a rock with a fish traced on it. ‘That’s a freshwater fish called cleithrolepis,’ she informed us. ‘Of course that was in the Triassic but there may still be some around.’

  ‘It looks more like a rock to me,’ I said, looking at the picture on the laptop screen.

  ‘No, Prudence,’ said Miss Richards patiently. ‘That picture is of a fossilised fish. The original fish died and was covered with mud or lava and when it rotted it left a hollow that filled with other rock and left an imprint.’

  Well, to be hone
st, it didn’t really look like it’d be all that delicious even before it was fossilised and if someone had cooked it with batter and lots of chips and tomato sauce. But on the other hand, it looked better than beetles or a banana-yoghurt-coated plastic spoon or the bl…, er, red stuff in Mrs Olsen’s Thermos.

  The first thing to do was get past the rhoetosaurus so we could go fishing.

  ‘Maybe if we all shouted we could scare it away,’ suggested Mrs Olsen.

  So we did. The rhoetosaurus didn’t even blink.

  ‘What we need is a set of drums,’ said Phredde. ‘That might frighten it. Or the school recorder group would be even better!’

  What we needed was about ten tonnes of dynamite, enough to blow that rhoetosaurus into tiny rhoetosaurus fragments, but I didn’t bother saying so, ’cause no-one had enough magic left to PING up any dynamite.

  ‘I could try karate-kicking its toes,’ suggested Miss Richards. ‘Maybe it’s got sensitive feet.’

  I gazed at the toes. They were grey and horny and tough-looking. You could probably have run a tank over them and it wouldn’t have noticed.

  Miss Richards looked determined. ‘All animals have a vulnerable spot,’ she said. ‘That’s one of the first things you learn in martial arts. You poke crocodiles in the eyes and biff sharks on the nose and knock raging buffaloes right between the eyes…’

  I looked at Miss Richards with admiration. I knew she got pretty stroppy about overdue library loans and she was pretty great about keeping the books in line, especially when they wanted their bones.12 But this was supercool.

  Miss Richards stuck her head out of the cave then pulled it in pretty quickly when the rhoetosaurus stuck its down too. ‘When in doubt,’ she said slowly, ‘the best thing to aim for is the back of the mouth.’

  ‘Oh, great!’ I said. ‘All we have to do is leap twenty metres high and punch that monster in the tonsils.’

  ‘I can fly twenty metres high,’ offered Phredde.

  ‘No you don’t,’ I said. ‘Firstly because you’re not a martial-arts expert so you don’t know how to kick a rhoetosaurus in the tonsils, and secondly because you’re my best friend and I don’t want you swallowed up in a rhoetosaurus’s tummy.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Phredde. She considered. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she added.

  ‘I know I’m right,’ I said gloomily.

  Miss Richards was thinking. ‘No, Phredde was right the first time,’ she said slowly. ‘She can fly up there.’

  ‘But…’ I began. Miss Richards held up her hand. ‘No, she doesn’t have to kick its tonsils. When the rhoetosaurus sees her it’ll open its mouth to eat her…’

  ‘Great…’ muttered Phredde.

  ‘Then all she has to do is throw in something disgusting and it’ll decide we’re no good to eat and go away!’

  I looked round the cave. ‘But we don’t have anything disgusting!’

  ‘We’ve got Bruce,’ suggested Phredde.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Bruce. He thought hard. ‘I could catch a few beetles.’ He zapped out his tongue and hauled one in. ‘See?’ he said.

  ‘The rhoetosaurus wouldn’t even notice a few beetles shoved down its throat!’ protested Phredde.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘How about we make a big disgusting mixture? Bruce can add beetles and I’ve got…’ I thought for a second, ‘I’ve got my socks! They’re all sweaty and I can wipe them on the bottom of my joggers for extra yuk.’ One thing about living with a werewolf brother and tramping around Triassic swamps—you can be pretty sure there’s always some yuk on your shoes.

  ‘I don’t have anything disgusting…’ began Phredde, then she stopped. ‘Yes, I do!’ she said. She held up a snotty hanky.

  ‘There’s still a little blood in my Thermos,’ said Mrs Olsen helpfully.

  We looked at Miss Richards. ‘I used to be a really great spitter when I was your age,’ she said nostalgically. ‘How about you mix everything together and I’ll spit on it and---’

  ‘Oh, yuk!’ we all said together, then looked at each other.

  ‘You know,’ said Mrs Olsen slowly, ‘I think this is going to work!’

  * * *

  12 See Phredde and the Zombie Librarian.

  Chapter 12

  Snot, Bloo…, er, and Librarian Spit

  It looked disgusting, to tell the truth. Luckily, I had a bit of lunch paper in the bottom of my school bag so we spread it out and what with my socks and Phredde’s hanky (for a tiny phaery her sneezes produce an awful lot of snot) and a few dozen beetles (I squished them under my heel) all mixed in with the bl…, er, red stuff from Mrs Olsen’s Thermos and librarian spit…well, if I were a rhoetosaurus I’d gallop away pretty quickly if someone shoved that at my tonsils. ‘Ready?’ I said to Phredde.

  ‘R-ready,’ said Phredde a bit shakily, gathering up the yukky lunch paper by the edges. She fluttered up to the roof of the cave and peered out, just as the rhoetosaurus peered back down.

  Zam! Phredde threw the yuk bundle into the rhoetosaurus’s mouth like she was throwing a netball into the hoop.

  ‘Glop!’ The rhoetosaurus swallowed it, blinked and looked surprised.

  ‘Phredde!’ I yelled, ‘get down here now!’

  ‘Why?’ shouted back Phredde. ‘I want to see what happens.’

  ‘Phredde!’ I screamed, just as the rhoetosaurus opened its mouth again. Buuurrrp!!!

  The shock waves blew Phredde back into the cave and down into the gloom.

  ‘Phredde!’ I shrieked again, ‘are you okay?’

  ‘I…I think so…’ Phredde flapped a bit uncertainly back to the mouth of the cave. ‘W-what’s happening?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Bruce. ‘It’s just standing there, thinking. Or I think it’s thinking.’

  ‘Maybe it liked it,’ said Mrs Olsen dubiously.

  ‘It can’t have liked it!’ I said. ‘It was total yuk!’

  ‘But maybe rhoetosauruses like yuk,’ argued Phredde. ‘Maybe---’

  A rumble interrupted her.

  ‘Earthquake!’ yelled Bruce. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  ‘No!’ I yelled. ‘Bruce, stop! It’s not an earthquake, it’s…’

  Booooommmmm!

  ‘Indigestion!’ screamed Mrs Olsen.

  ‘Not just indigestion,’ breathed Miss Richards warningly. ‘It’s…’

  PLOP! PLOP! PLOP!

  ‘No!’ yelled Phredde. ‘Oh no! It can’t be!’ But it was.

  Chapter 13

  A Rhoetosaurus with Indigestion

  Have you ever been trapped in a cave with a rhoetosaurus outside with diarrhoea? Well let me tell you, it’s not funny.

  PLOP! PLOP! PLOP! Ploploploploploplop…

  ‘It’s getting worse,’ whispered Phredde, holding her nose.

  I peered out of the cave but there wasn’t much to see. Just big brown lumps of…well, if you think doggy doo is bad, just think what dinosaur doo is like. But not if you’ve just had your lunch. It almost made me glad I hadn’t had any.

  ‘Heh, heh,’ said Bruce to me, ‘you wanted apples.’

  ‘So?’

  He pointed out of the cave. ‘Dinosaur apples!’

  ‘Yuk!’ said Phredde. ‘That’s not funny, Bruce.’

  ‘Oh, the pong!’ breathed Mrs Olsen, holding her nose.

  ‘It’s as bad as the time the school garbage collectors went on strike,’ said Miss Richards.

  ‘Worse. It’s as bad as the time the meat pies went bad at the tuckshop and then the toilets broke down,’ said Mrs Olsen.

  ‘No, no,’ said Miss Richards. ‘Do you remember when someone put Edwin’s sweaty joggers in the staff room fridge and poured sour milk into---’

  ‘Er, excuse me,’ I said. ‘But I think we have a problem!’

  ‘Of course we have a problem!’ yelled Phredde. ‘We’re trapped back in the Jurassic in a horrible little cave and I’ve used up all my magic and don’t have any lunch and there’s a rhoetosaurus outside and a pong inside and…oh…’ She caught sigh
t of the brown tide slowly creeping over the dust and into our cave.

  ‘Exactly!’ I said. ‘In approximately six minutes that dinosaur doo is going to flood us out.’

  PLOOP! Ploooooooooooooooooooooooop!

  ‘Or even sooner,’ added Bruce helpfully.

  ‘I knew we shouldn’t have added those socks!’ cried Miss Richards.

  ‘I bet it was Phredde’s hanky that did it,’ contributed Bruce.

  ‘No,’ said Phredde. ‘I bet it was your beetles.’

  ‘Hold it!’ I yelled. ‘We don’t have time for this! What are we going to do?’

  Miss Richards quickly checked her laptop. ‘A rhoetosaurus has to have another vulnerable spot!’ she declared.

  ‘Think like a rhoetosaurus,’ I ordered Bruce. ‘Where would you feel vulnerable?’

  ‘Why do I have to think like a rhoetosaurus?’ argued Bruce.

  ‘’Cause you’re both reptiles,’ I said. ‘I’m not a reptile,’ said Bruce, affronted. ‘I’m an amphibian.’

  ‘Got it!’ screamed Phredde. She fluttered up and whispered in my ear.

  I looked at her with admiration. Phaeries don’t have much imagination usually, but when they do come up with an idea it’s usually a doozy. ‘That’s a brilliant idea! Do you think you can manage it?’ I asked.

  Phredde nodded bravely. ‘It’s better than drowning in dinosaur doo,’ she said.

  ‘Anything is better than drowning in dinosaur doo,’ added Bruce leaping back as the brown tide crept further into our cave.

  ‘Alright then!’ I ordered. ‘Find a rock! A big one! Bruce, help me scrape the goo off the flying carpet!’

  I spread it out on the cave floor. We were far back in the cave now because the front of the cave was flooded with dinosaur doo, so it was pretty dark and gloomy. Bruce squinted into the dimness. ‘The carpet’s almost dry,’ he said, patting the magic rug.

  I nodded and began scraping the mud off with my fingernails. They were going to look pretty revolting after this, but I reckoned that if we ever got back home Phredde could PING them better for me. And if we drowned in dinosaur doo, no-one was going to worry about my fingernails.