Fly Frenzy

by Ali Sparkes

  “But don’t you see, Josh?” said Petty. “I can make humans turn into spiders! Why not go a step further? Mix up a bird formula with the reptile formula? Maybe I could create a DRAGOSWITCH Spray too? Wouldn’t you like to find out?”

  Josh and Danny started to bite their lips and tap their fingers against the tabletop. It was an amazing idea.

  “Oh come on!” urged Petty, putting the cube back into its box. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to try out being a dragon one day! And all you have to do is help me find the missing cubes! They can’t be far away. I wouldn’t have hidden them in Timbuktu! They’re bound to be close to my lab. So you could help me look! And maybe try out a few sprays with me. I promise you’ll be quite safe!”

  It was the look on Petty’s face that made Josh and Danny stop the finger tapping and lip biting. She looked like a spider herself now, beckoning them into her web.

  “No,” said Josh.

  “No,” agreed Danny. “You’re nuts!”

  Petty opened her mouth.

  And then there was a loud, anguished scream. It came from outside. Danny, Josh, and Petty Potts ran down the hallway. They were out at the front of the house in seconds. Mom was outside, staring at her hedge.

  The lovingly tended hedge birds had been cut off.

  “Who would have done such a thing?” gasped Mom. She gazed woefully at the mangled stumps of twig that were left. There was no sign of the hedge birds, other than a scattering of their leaves on the pavement.

  “Well, you don’t have to be a genius to work that out,” said Petty Potts. “Even though I am one. It’ll be Mrs. Sharpe. Or her loathsome son.”

  “No!” Mom looked shocked.

  “Well, you don’t think she keeps winning Best Garden every year by playing fair, do you?” asked Petty. “Her garden’s not that good.”

  “But—but how could we ever prove it?” gasped Mom.

  “Well, unless you happened to have a video camera aimed at your garden for the last hour, you can’t!” said Petty. She looked at Josh and Danny with a wide, innocent smile. “If only you could somehow get into their house and be a fly on the wall . . . ”

  Josh and Danny stared back at her. She wasn’t really suggesting . . . ? She didn’t really mean . . . ? Did she?

  “Shall we go back inside, while your Mom phones the police?” asked Petty.

  “Thanks, Miss Potts,” sighed Mom. “But I don’t think the police can help now. The judging is tomorrow. It’s not even as if I can cheat and wire the birds back on. They’re gone! But if you could have Josh and Danny a little longer, I think I need to sit down and have a quiet cup of tea.”

  “You didn’t really mean that—did you?” demanded Danny as soon as they shut Petty’s front door. “About being a fly on the wall?”

  “Now remember,” said Petty, leading them through the kitchen and out into the back garden. “I told you that I would never spray you with BUGSWITCH again. Funnily enough, I do happen to have the bluebottle housefly variety all set up to go, right now. But I would never spray it on you.”

  Josh and Danny followed her through waist-high weeds, across her garden, and into the shed. “Or ever make you press the time-delay button that enables you to start the spray. Then you could get yourself inside the special spray tent before it goes off.”

  “Don’t listen to her! Don’t go into her shed!” said Danny. Josh got a glittery look in his eyes.

  Petty stepped into the shed. She walked past the rarely used lawnmower, the spade, and the rake. She pushed aside the old sacking on the back wall to reveal a red metal door. She turned the handle. It opened on to a short flight of dark steps, leading down to a gloomy corridor. Danny couldn’t stop Josh from following her through.

  “But we could get over into Mrs. Sharpe’s house, though—really easily!” said Josh. They went down the corridor. It smelled like old bricks and earth and other more peculiar scents from a room at the end. “Her garden backs onto ours. We could fly in through her window, have a look around for evidence, and then get back again in two minutes!”

  “But . . . it’s so dangerous!” gasped Danny.

  “Well, you don’t have to come,” said Josh. “But nobody messes with my mom’s hedge and gets away with it! Not if I can help it!”

  “Of course, I could never recommend that you come in here,” went on Petty. They arrived in her lab. It was full of odd machinery, gadgets, and a square tent of plastic sheeting right in the middle. “Or come into the control booth and hit any of the buttons. That would be the very last thing you would want to do.”

  Josh went into the booth after her. It was the size of a large cupboard. It was lit with the green glow of three computer screens, covered in numbers. In front of the screens was a large control panel. The buttons on it were marked with various creepy-crawly shapes, like those in the BUGSWITCH cubes. He saw the spider button next to a beetle button, just down from an ant button. Below that was a button with a bluebottle shape on it. A fly. A fly on the wall . . .

  Josh didn’t waste any time. He hit the button.

  There was a sudden humming noise. A blue light came on in the plastic tent. He ran across and pushed his way inside it through a narrow gap. The hissing started, and a fine yellow mist sprayed across his legs.

  “Josh! What are you doing?” yelled Danny.

  “It’s OK—it won’t take long. Back in two minutes,” said Josh.

  Danny slapped his forehead and groaned. He knew he couldn’t let Josh go on his own. “This is such a bad idea!” he muttered. He stepped into the tent with his brother.

  “Oh my. What have you done?” said Petty, cheerfully. “Now, remember, it’s only temporary. You’ll need to get back fast. You don’t want to revert to boys while you’re still in Mrs. Sharpe’s house.”

  Josh began to feel peculiar. The plastic sheets around him swished into a whirly pattern. Then they shot upward, as if he was falling. Yet he could still feel the concrete floor under his two feet. Ah—no. Scratch that. Under his six feet.

  “WAHAAY!” shouted Josh. Danny towered above him like a giant. His nearby foot, in its muddy sneaker, was the size of a truck. Josh seemed to be looking through thousands of little hexagonal lenses. And he could see all around him without even moving. He was bug-eyed!

  “WHEEE-RRRE IIIIIzzzzz HEEEE?” he heard Danny bellow in a deep loud voice. It vibrated right through his highly tuned black body.

  Josh felt his six feet move off the floor. He realized that the ticklish feeling on his back was coming from the whirring of his own two wings.

  “WEEE-HEEE!” he gurgled, full of excitement. He rose up in the air like a Harrier Jump Jet. A moment later, he was staring, amazed, into Danny’s huge face. His own blue-black body was reflected in the two gigantic shiny orbs of his brother’s eyes. His new bluebottle head was almost triangular in shape. His immense bulging golden eyes softened the corners. Two tiny stubby feelers (called palps, he knew, from his wildlife books) wiggled where his nose used to be, with a little spiky antenna on each. Josh stuck out his tongue. What emerged from his chin area was a black sticklike thing that bent in the middle like an elbow. A spongy blob was on the end.

  “Woo-hoo!” shouted Josh. “I’ve got a proboscis!”

  “JOOOSH?” boomed Danny’s humongous face, the fly’s eyes crinkling up in wonder. And then Danny disappeared into a tiny dot, way down on the floor. A few seconds later, he was up in the air next to Josh.

  “Josh! Josh!” he squeaked. His bug eyes bulged with amazement. “I can fly!”

  “It’s a buzz, isn’t it?” giggled Josh. He flicked his peculiar mouthparts about with excitement.

  “And I can see my own butt!” marveled Danny. “Without turning my head around!”

  “Well, that makes it all worthwhile!” chortled Josh. “It’s your special fly eyes! They’re designed so you can see all the way around, in case of predators. Now! We have to hurry. Follow me. I know the way to Mrs. Sharpe’s house.”

  He cou
ld just make out Petty slowly waving a huge pink hand at them. He shot out through the gap in the plastic tent. He flew past the open lab door, back up the steps to the shed, and out into Petty’s garden. Danny was just behind him. It didn’t look so much like a garden now. More like an immense jungle with a tangled mass of exotic trees spreading below them as far as their bug eyes could see. The jungle sent up intense smells of greenery, flower pollen, and something gorgeously brown and sticky from the other side of the fence. It was near Piddle’s basket.

  Danny whirled about in astonishment. The sky was filled with aircraft, thundering, thudding, zooming, and whining past. “It’s an air show!” he yelped. He dodged what looked like a small black and yellow helicopter with a terrifying face. Two blue jets darted past so fast he got spun around in midair.

  “Where did all these aircraft come from?”

  “They’re not aircraft, you dingbat!” said Josh. He hovered up alongside Danny, his dangly black forelegs blowing in the breeze. “They’re other insects. Look out for the black and yellow ones. They’re wasps. They’d happily eat us if they could. The dragonflies—those blue jets—can be pretty fierce too. But I think they’re just looking for girlfriends.”

  Josh pivoted in the air like an expert pilot. He zoomed off toward some giant trees at the end of the garden. Danny followed. Being a fly felt amazing!

  “I can’t believe I ever thought flies were annoying!” he called to Josh. He zoomed up behind him and looped the loop. “They’re brilliant!” He felt rather guilty about the brilliant flying machine he had pulped against the bedroom wall with a rolled-up comic just last week. And even guiltier about the one he ate when he was a spider.

  In no time at all, they were across the back fence, between the huge tree trunks, and over Mrs. Sharpe’s neat and pretty back garden. They headed for the house. Now they had to get inside and find out whether the Sharpes had ruined their mom’s hedge.

  They shot in through an open upstairs window. They found themselves in a vast bathroom. Huge vats of smelly potions sat on a glass shelf. It made Josh’s sensitive antennae twitch. A boulder-sized lump of greeny-white stuff on the basin sent up an intense minty whiff. Toothpaste! Josh realized.

  “Everything smells ten times stronger, doesn’t it?” he shouted to Danny. “Danny? Oh—yuck! Danny! Stop that!” shouted Josh.

  Danny jumped and rose up with a shudder.

  “You weren’t really going to drink that, were you?” asked Josh.

  “No—of course not!” spluttered Danny. “I—I didn’t realize I was on the edge of the toilet, did I? I didn’t know what it was . . . It just smelled . . . ”

  “Kind of . . . tasty?” muttered Josh. “Like bathroom soup.”

  Danny pivoted around in the air to stare at his brother. “It’s because we’re flies, isn’t it?”

  “Yep,” said Josh. “To a fly, pee is soup.”

  “And that really nice smell from near Piddle’s basket . . . ?”

  “Let’s just get going, shall we?” said Josh, briskly. “We’ve got work to do!”

  They flew around the edge of the bathroom door. They dropped through the warm updraft of air from downstairs. Now they could hear voices. Heavy, slow, and human.

  Following the voices, which vibrated around them, they arrived in the kitchen. It smelled incredibly sweet. Mrs. Sharpe was making cakes. Tarquin was with her. He was sitting at the kitchen table.

  “Shhh!” said Josh. “Let’s wait here and listen for a while. See if they own up to chopping up Mom’s hedge.”

  And then the room flipped over.

  It didn’t seem strange that the room had flipped over. To Josh and Danny, now standing on the ceiling, being upside down felt like the most natural thing in the world.

  “This is so cool!” said Danny. “And ooooh, that cake mix smells so good!”

  “Sshh! We need to listen to them!” said Josh. It wasn’t easy. Just like the last time, when they’d shrunk into spiders, human speech sounded much deeper and slower than usual. After a while, though, Josh felt his quick fly brain adapt. He began to understand what Mrs. Sharpe and Tarquin were saying.

  “Good work, Tarquin,” said Mrs. Sharpe. “Are you sure nobody saw you?”

  “Of course not, Mother!” sniffed Tarquin. “I am not an idiot, you know!”

  “Good. Just as long as you’re sure. Even though my garden is obviously the best in town, the judge could have been charmed by those dreadful tacky topiary birds. Now there’s not much chance of that! Did you hide them, like I said? I wouldn’t put it past her to cheat and wire them back on.”

  “Yes, Mother. They’re in the front room.”

  Josh and Danny gasped. Petty was right!

  “The front room? Are you crazy? What if the judge comes early and finds the evidence all over the carpet?” Mrs. Sharpe waved her wooden spoon around in fury. A large blob of cake mix splodged onto the floor. A wonderful scent hit Danny like a wave. He just couldn’t help himself. He dropped down from the ceiling, turning a somersault in the air. He buzzed straight for the floor.

  “Danny!” called Josh. “We haven’t got time for snacks! We have to find Mom’s hedge birds!”

  “I can’t . . . help . . . myself . . . ” wailed back Danny. He landed on the pale yellow blob, which rose up like a small hill from the red floor tile. His proboscis stuck out of his face and squelched down into the glorious squidgy mess.

  Something gooey shot out of the end of his proboscis, making the cake mix go squishier still. Now he could suck it up like a milk shake. Oooh! It was delicious!

  Josh landed beside Danny with a plop. “Come on,” he said. “Time to go!” But before he could say another word, his own proboscis had shot out and was busy spitting goo out too. A second later, Josh was also sucking up cake mix and fly-spit smoothie.

  Then there was a sudden whoosh of wind behind them. A terrifying thrumming noise. Josh and Danny looked up to see a huge orange crisscross square hurtling toward them.

  “ARRRGH!” yelled Danny, shooting high into the air. His proboscis snapped back into his face like a pinged rubber band. “It’s a flyswatter! They’re swatting us!” Josh had figured this out too. He zoomed across the kitchen so fast his vision blurred. Danny flew close behind him, yelling, “GO! GO! GO! GO!”

  A second later, they were in the hallway. Then Josh turned left. He flew into the front room. “Look!” he yelled, angrily, pointing with one of his front legs. There on the vast field of swirly red carpet lay three leafy, twiggy birds, cut from Mom’s hedge.

  Now Tarquin was marching into the room with Mrs. Sharpe at his heels. She still held the flyswatter. Tarquin had a trash bag in his hand.

  “Pick them up then,” said Mrs. Sharpe. “No—wait. We’ll have to pull them to pieces first. Just in case the garbagemen spot them.”

  And she went to pick up Mom’s favorite hedge bird creation.

  “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” yelled Josh and dive-bombed Mrs. Sharpe’s face. He aimed for her nose—a huge pink outcrop on the massive pink slab of her face. Before he could rethink the idea, he had shot right up her left nostril.

  It certainly distracted her. As Josh rolled over in the nasty, windy, hairy cavern, Mrs. Sharpe shrieked and spluttered and sneezed. Josh hurtled back out again in a blast of nose goo.

  He ended up stuck to the leather sofa in a green globule. Danny, meanwhile, flew down and shot under the sofa. He zoomed low over the thick clumps of dust and hair and the twisted sculptures of candy wrappers on the shadowy carpet. He aimed for the line of light at the far side. He planned to shoot quickly up the back of the sofa and get ahold of Josh from behind. He didn’t want to attract the flyswatter that Tarquin was now twitching about in the air. But just a few inches up the back of the sofa, something pushed hard against Danny’s head. It stopped him in flight.

  It felt as if he’d flown into the goal during a soccer game. Like a big net. A big, sticky, net. A big, sticky, shivering net. Danny shouted and tried to get back down off the n
et, but it stuck to him like . . . like . . . like . . . A WEB!

  In the dusty darkness, eight red eyes suddenly lit up. Eight long, hairy legs began to pick their way down the silken ropes toward Danny.

  Danny didn’t know as much about wildlife as Josh did. But he knew this much—the spider was coming to meet him for lunch.

  And Danny was on the menu!

  Josh had just managed to slither out of the giant booger. He was edging away over the back of the sofa when he heard Danny scream. He could only just hear it over Mrs. Sharpe. She was still sneezing and gasping and blowing her nose noisily. Josh peered down from the top of the sofa and saw a terrifying sight.

  A huge hairy spider was flipping Danny over and over with its legs and wrapping him up in silk. Danny was struggling hard. But he was no match for the spider. A female, judging by her size and skinny palps, thought Josh.

  “Look!” he shouted down. “This is all a mistake! He’s not actually a fly at all, and neither am I!” The spider paused, looked up at Josh, and narrowed all eight eyes. Then she came running for him, obviously wanting him for dessert.

  “Fly away!” called up Danny, in a rather muffled way. Several bands of silk were across his face. Josh did, whizzing up out of reach. Then the spider scuttled back down to her main course.

  “It’s all right, Danny,” yelled down Josh, hovering above. “She won’t kill you right away . . . she’ll just . . . um . . . bite you . . . a bit . . . ”

  “A bit?” squawked Danny.

  “Yeah . . . and paralyze you with her venom . . . and . . . ”

  “And?” mumbled Danny, through a mouthful of silk. “And what?”

  “Make you runny before eating you.”

  “Well—thanks for that!” called back Danny. “Knowing exactly what to expect makes me feel so much better!”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll rescue you!” called back Josh.