by Ivan Brett
“Ahh, home,” sang Julius, taking a deep breath of the cool night air. “It’ll feel so good to get these chains off.”
Casper chortled and swung his arms around. “Yeah, I bet Mum and… oh, no.”
“What is it?” asked Lamp, worried.
Casper’s face was leaden. “Mum and Cuddles. We left them alone all evening!”
“Oh, lord.” said Julius, lifting his heavy manacled hand to his mouth.
“Who will have fed Cuddles? Who will have changed its nappy?” Casper and Lamp were running now, with Julius clanking along frantically behind. Casper reached the porch, heart beating like a pneumatic drill.
Nothing out of the ordinary. No crying.
He pressed the doorbell. No answer. What had happened? Julius had arrived now and he pressed the doorbell again. Still no answer. Casper thought he heard a bump from inside. Where was Amanda? He couldn’t hear the TV. Where was Cuddles? He couldn’t hear any screams. Casper was now banging on the door and shouting through the letterbox.
Some steps. The door clicked open.
What greeted Casper was something he’d never seen before, not even in his dreams; something he didn’t expect ever to see at all. Standing at the door was Amanda Candlewacks, all tender and motherly, with Cuddles in her arms, happily gnawing on a hairbrush. Casper looked round at Julius. He too was lost for words.
Amanda blinked, taking in her first sight of the outdoors for years, and then smiled at her husband, her son and his friend. Then she looked down at Cuddles.
She smiled again. “It’s a girl!”
Acknowledgments
There are an awful lot of idiots I need to thank, starting with my mother, my greyhound, and the rest of my lovely family. Thanks to my guinea-pig-readers, Sevi, Tom and Frederick; to my ever-supportive agent Eve White; to my marvellous editor Harriet Wilson and all the idiots at HarperCollins; and to Amy, the biggest idiot of them all.
The alarm didn’t wake Mayor Rattsbulge at first; he just wiped the dribble off his chin, grunted and rolled over. He was having a cracking dream about hog-roasts, and really didn’t want to wake up before he’d reached the apple sauce. But then the noise seeped through the non-food part of his brain (a tiny section squeezed away behind the locum hamburgarium) and he leapt out of bed like he was covered in bees. He threw on his extra-large dressing gown and blundered out of his extra-large bedroom on to the pitch-black landing, tripping over the banister and tumbling down the stairs. He bounced at the bottom (thanks to his six bowls of jelly for pudding) and landed rather gracefully on his blubbery feet. Mayor Rattsbulge rushed out of the front door, stopping only to grab a Cumberland sausage from the jar on the hall table. It took him a good three minutes to heave himself to the other side of the lamp-lit village square, where a small crowd of villagers in their pyjamas had gathered by the door to the village vault.
Audrey Snugglepuss, the village gossip and baker of cakes, strode forward angrily and flicked her nightcap out of her face. “For crying out loud, Mayor Rattsbulge, I’m trying to sleep,” she warbled.
“Hear hear,” sung Clemmie Answorth, a slightly younger, nervous looking woman completely peppered with bruises, and still clutching her teddy. “What with all that racket, I fell out of my bed.” She did that a lot.
Mayor Rattsbulge wheezed and clutched his chest. “Ladies, please,” He leant on a lamppost but it buckled under his weight. “I’ve only just got here. Now, what’s the alarm?”
Mitch McMassive, the tiny landlord of village pub ‘The Horse and Horse’ and star striker in his local Table Football team, stuck his little hand in the air and squeaked, “Look, Mayor.” He trotted forward to the heavy wooden door and gave its brass handle an almighty shove. It groaned open groggily on its rusty hinges. “Someone’s broken the lock.”
The bolder villagers bundled through the door into the blackness, and tripped straight over an empty wheelchair. Clemmie Answorth screeched and tinkled through a glass cabinet, while all around dull thuds told stories of foreheads meeting walls and coming off the worse.
Audrey Snugglepuss fumbled for a light switch in the dark. Her first attempt found Mitch McMassive’s button nose, which snicked out of joint at the slightest press and failed to make the room any lighter. Her second attempt got Mitch’s nose again with similar, squealier results. Her third attempt at last found the switch and the vault was plunged into dazzling amber light.
“My nose!” honked Mitch McMassive through a crimson torrent running down his face. “I can smell blood.”
Betty Woons blinked awake and chuckled at all of the bodies rolling around her.
“Oh hello dears,” she warbled. “What are we all doing on the floor? Sleepover, is it?”
Mayor Rattsbulge was the first to notice. “Oh, my sweet lord…” he whispered, prodding a trembling finger towards the cabinet. A few silent moments passed as the villagers rubbed the glare from their eyes and spotted the empty space where the sword used to be.
The mayor swallowed, shaking from head to toe. “It’s… gone…”
Clemmie Answorth spluttered. “The sword’s gone?”
“Who used it last?”
“Well, I didn’t take it,” said Audrey Snugglepuss
“What about my nose?” squeaked Mitch McMassive.
“Anyone for jelly beans?” asked Betty Woons.
“SHUT UP!” bellowed the Mayor. “Shut up and find it. Find my sword!”
The pyjama-clad crowd screamed and ran out into the moonlit square, searching under doormats and tipping over flowerpots. Meanwhile, back in the vault, village gardener Sandy Landscape (who’d watched three whole detective shows on telly so he knew what he was talking about) edged closer to the cabinet. “’Ere… Mayor…”
“What is it?” sobbed Mayor Rattsbulge from behind his gravy-stained hanky.
“I found summink. Look yer eyes on that.” Sandy’s grubby fingers reached into the cabinet and pulled out something black and wiry. He held it to the light, and gasped.
It was a single cat’s whisker.
Copyright
1
CASPER CANDLEWACKS IN DEATH BY PIGEON!
Text copyright © Ivan Brett 2011
Illustrations copyright © Hannah Shaw 2011
Ivan Brett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ISBN 978-0-00-741155-9
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007411566
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Ivan Brett, Casper Candlewacks in Death by Pigeon!