by Simon Cherry
“No,” said Eddy. “And don’t sit on that sofa. It’s my dad.”
Chris P gave Eddy a hard stare.
“Yeah, right. I suppose he was an armchair when he was a boy and then grew up to be a three-seater?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Eddy. “Come on. My bedroom.”
“Your boyfriend’s cracking up,” Chris whispered to Hen as they climbed the stairs.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Hen. “And he’s not cracking up. But even if he was he’d still make more sense than you.”
“We might be able to get some magic to work for us,” said Eddy, when Hen, Chris, Six and Mitzee had settled round his room. “There’s one person in Tidemark Bay who hasn’t used their wish. We need to find out who.”
“Easy,” said Chris P. “It’s me. I just couldn’t think of anything to wish for. I’m rich. I live in a huge house. I’ve got loads of stuff. I’m clever. And good-looking. And popular…”
“And wrong,” Hen muttered under her breath.
“…I mean, what else could I want?”
“Fantastic,” said Eddy. “We need you to wish for a palace. But you will have to think very carefully about what it looks like. We should probably draw a picture, so that as little as possible can go wrong when the Wizard makes the wish come true.”
“And why should I do that?” said Chris P.
“So we can win the challenge and get everything back to normal,” said Eddy.
“I’d just be giving my wish away,” said Chris P. “What do I get?”
“You get to help everyone,” said Eddy. “And you just said that you can’t think of anything you want.”
“Except that I just have,” said Chris P.
“Got it,” said the Wizard.
The room rippled gently.
A huge bag of potato crisps appeared in Chris P’s lap.
“Crisps?” said Hen. “I can’t believe that you used your wish on crisps, when you could have helped us all.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you left me behind and played a trick on me and made me bang my head,” said Chris P. “Maybe you will think of it next time before you call me stupid and think I’ll fall for ridiculous stories about furniture. Anyway, they are not just any crisps. I wished that I could invent the world’s most delicious potato based snack. And here they are.”
He crunched into one.
“Oh, yeah, they are goooooood. Far too good to give away.” He stood up. “Right. I’m off. Have fun trying to save the town.” And he stomped out.
“Sorry,” said the Wizard.
“It’s not your fault,” said Eddy. “You can’t choose what people wish for. But we’ve got a big problem with the palace. We’ll never build anything in just one day.”
“I don’t want to be unkind, Babes,” said Mitzee. “But you sound like those Whispering Sands. Can’t, can’t, can’t.”
“I’m trying to think of can, can, can,” said Eddy. “I’m just not getting very far.”
“What about that book you got from the auction?” said Hen. “The one with all the stories about genies and things. Is there anything in there that could help us?”
“I had a look through it before you arrived,” said Eddy. “Couldn’t find anything. But help yourself.”
He handed the book to her.
“I can’t read any of this,” said Hen, flicking through the pages. “Oh, look. Here’s that drawing of the guy jumping out of the tree. The one that gave you the idea of building the wings to escape from the nest. You never told me what the story was about.”
“I still haven’t read that bit,” said Eddy, looking over her shoulder. “It says – oh.”
“What?” said Hen.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Eddy.
“Tell me,” said Hen.
“Okay. It says, ‘The story of how a foolish inventor made wings from giant feathers and broke every bone in his body. Warning. Do not try this at home’.”
“And it was because of that drawing that we did try it,” said Hen.
“Yes,” said Eddy. “But we got it right. Which just shows that you must be a much better engineer than that inventor.”
“Nice of you to say so,” said Hen. “Hang on – what’s this piece of paper in the front of the book? It says, Skirts – 2. Blouses – 3…”
“I remember that,” said Eddy. “It’s no use. It’s just a list of things that Madeleine Montagu took on her trip.”
“It’s not just a list,” said Hen. “There’s a poem at the end. Listen.”
“If you face your final challenge
And all hope seems to be dead
Just remember the solution
Is already in your head.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Eddy. “If I had an answer in my head, I’d have found it by now. Unless… What if it doesn’t mean this head?” He tapped his forehead. “What if it means – that head?” He pointed at the statue on his bookshelf. “Maybe she found out a way to beat the Genie, and hid the secret in there.”
He picked up the statue and shook it. From its hollow insides came a faint noise.
“There is something in there,” said Eddy. He turned the statue upside down and examined its base.
“Look. There’s a circle of clay here that’s a bit lighter than the rest. I think it’s plugging a hole.”
Hen pulled a hammer and chisel out of her tool bag and handed them to Eddy. He gave the clay circle a sharp blow. It pinged and shattered into fragments. He turned the statue the right way up again and shook.
A thin roll of paper fell out. Hen smoothed it open.
“There’s writing on it,” she said. “It’s very small. And very faded. But I think I can make it out.” She peered at the tiny letters.
She peered at the tiny letters and read aloud:
“That’s not as helpful as I hoped it would be,” said Eddy. “How do you cheat when it comes to building a palace?”
“Nobble the other side,” said Hen.
“He’s a genie. How do you nobble a genie?” said Eddy.
“Steal someone else’s palace?” suggested Six.
“From where?” said Eddy.
“Don’t build a palace,” said Mitzee.
“You can’t win a palace building contest without a palace,” said Hen.
“Except maybe you can,” said Eddy. “I think I’ve got an idea. But we’re going to need a lot of help. We need to get the whole town together for a meeting.”
They piled out of Eddy’s bedroom. They knocked on doors. They spoke to people in the street. Eddy rang everyone he knew in town. And they asked them all to spread the message that there would be a meeting down at the Community Centre and that this was the only chance for Tidemark Bay to get back to normal.
Two hours later, a huge crowd had gathered.
Eddy climbed up onto the stage at the far end of the centre. The sour smell of the rotten ice cream in the harbour hit the back of his nose as he took a deep breath and began to speak.
“We’ve all seen weird things happening around town in the last couple of days. I’m here to tell you why – and, more importantly, how we have a chance to put it all right again. And I’m sure that’s what we want, isn’t it – to get everything back the way it was before?”
“What if we like it how it is now?” A voice came from one side of the crowd.
“I wasn’t talking to you rabbits,” said Eddy.
“Oh, charming, mate. Anybody got a carrot?”
“Perhaps some of you feel like those rabbits,” said Eddy. “Maybe your wishes came out quite well.”
“I got a new bedroom carpet,” shouted someone. “And the pattern won’t look too bad once I get used to it.”
“My washing up does itself,” said another. “And some of it hasn’t broken.”
“But a lot of people are in a mess,” Eddy continued. “So the fairest and best thing for everybody is to lift the curse that has made all this happen.”
“That’s right,” said another. “We’ll all be watching ourselves on the screen and laughing about it in a few weeks.”
“My dad’s turned into a sofa,” said Eddy. “How could a TV programme do that?”
“Special effects,” said a voice. “They can do anything these days.”
“Believe me,” Eddy said, “I know it’s not a TV show.”
“Course it isn’t,” said someone else. “We’ve all been hypnotized. None of this is really happening.”
“It’s the government,” a man shouted. “They’ve put something in the water.”
“I heard it was laser beams from mobile phone satellites frying our brains,” said a woman.
“You’re all wrong,” said a man in a purple anorak. “It’s a tear in the fabric of reality, made by mega-gigantic, multidimensional, super-intelligent zombie space squids who are eating their way in from a parallel universe.”
“It’s none of those,” Eddy yelled. “It’s magic!”
“Magic?” said the man in the purple anorak. “Now you are being ridiculous.”
People started tutting. Some drifted away from the edge of the crowd.
“It’s true,” Hen shouted, clambering up onto the stage beside Eddy. “A few days ago I wouldn’t have believed it either. But I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
Some more people started to walk away.
“Look,” said Eddy. “I’ll show you. This is the Wizard who is behind it all.” He pulled the vase out of his backpack. Wizard Witterwort wafted out of it, green and wispy.
“Like I said, special effects,” the voice came back. “And that one’s rubbish. All blurry.”
“Is that the best you can do?” someone else shouted. “This is just a bunch of kids messing us around.”
“They aren’t listening,” Eddy said to Hen.
People were leaving in groups. The crowd was getting thin.
But then a woman put her hand up.
“I believe you,” she said. She put her other hand up. “Magic is the only possible explanation for things like this.” And then she put her other hand up. And the other one, as well. Sophie Milldew was not walking away.
“Me too,” said Jeremy Grubb, pushing his wheelbarrow full of hair.
There were about fifty of them in the end – many of them bearing the signs of wishes that had gone wrong. Fifty people who stayed to hear Eddy explain all about the curse, and how it would be lifted if they beat the Genie of the Baked Bean Tin in a contest to build a palace.
“No problem,” said a man in the middle of the crowd. Eddy noticed that he had screwdrivers where his fingers should have been. “I can see you’re looking at these,” the man said, holding his hands up. “I wished I always had my tools in my hands instead of having to search for them in my tool bag. I’m a builder, see. I can put up a palace for you. How long have we got?”
“It has to be ready tomorrow,” said Eddy.
“You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?” said the builder. “It will take weeks. Months.”
“That’s what we thought,” said Eddy. “Which is why we have come up with a plan. We’re not going to build a palace. We’re just going to make the Emperor – he’s judging the contest – believe that we have built a palace. It’s called cheating. We’re going to make two rooms look like a whole building. Hen will explain.”
Hen unrolled a set of drawings.
“I’ve done these designs,” she said. “We need to make some big wooden frames and stretch canvas over them. They are our walls. We’ll put doors in some of them, and use them to set up two rooms, with a door between them. We’ll roll out carpet for the floors, and stretch cloth across the top for the ceilings. With me so far?”
They were.
“So here’s how we fool the Emperor. He walks into the first room, looks around a bit, and then goes through the door into the second room. As soon as he’s in the second room, we close the door behind him. We then take down the first room. We carry all the pieces round to the other end of the second room, and build them up again. When we open the door at the far end of the second room and he walks through, he will think he is in a third room. Why wouldn’t he? He’s moved forward, and there are four walls around him. But the third room is just the first room in a new place. And while he’s in there, we take down the second room, move it to the other end of the third room, and suddenly we have room number four. And so on. It’s like two people playing leapfrog – each room hops past the other one in turn. We can make room after room after room with just two sets of walls. We’ll make them all look different by swapping round the carpets and ceiling cloths and decorations. The way I’ve designed it, it will all slot together really quickly.”
“How quickly?” said Sophie Milldew. “Are you sure there will be time to do it while the Emperor’s in each room?”
“It’s a palace of fun,” said Eddy. “We put some sort of entertainment in every room to keep him busy while we rebuild. We can give him a tour of a vast building that isn’t even there.”
“It’s ingenious,” said the builder. “Or maybe it’s just plain daft. I suppose we will know which when we find out whether it works.”
“So,” said Eddy. “Are you all going to join us?”
They were.
“I can help with the walls. I’m president of the Tidemark Bay Amateur Dramatic Society,” said Maurice Burbage. He had finally managed to get out of bed after his terrible shock. “We build things like that all the time for our stage sets. We have all the wood and canvas that you need.”
“And you can have my curtains for the ceiling cloths,” said the woman who lived across the road from Eddy.
“They’re all enormous. Plenty big enough.”
“I’d like to help with the entertainment.” Everyone burst out laughing as a glum-looking young man stepped forward.
“I’m funny,” Dylan Plimpsoll went on. Everyone hooted again. “Even when I’m not trying.”
Eddy thought his sides were going to split.
“Sometimes I think it’s especially when I’m not trying,” Dylan said flatly.
Hen giggled so hard that she nearly fell off the front of the stage. Laughter rolled round the Community Centre.
“You,” Eddy said, struggling to get his breath, “are definitely booked. Right, everybody. Go and get a good night’s sleep. We’ll meet early in the morning up at Tidemark Manor.”
Eddy was too anxious to get to sleep straight away that night. But he was too tired to stay awake for long.
He dreamed about what was going to happen tomorrow. About the Genie creating a magnificent white marble building so beautiful that it made the Taj Mahal look like a garden shed. And about the Tidemark Bay team creating a jumble of wood and canvas so rickety that it made a garden shed look like the Taj Mahal.
Early in the morning he cycled up to the Manor. The Genie was already at work when he arrived. At least, he assumed that the Genie was at work. Strange noises were coming from the middle of a great ball of fog that hid whatever he was doing.
“Pay no attention to him,” Eddy told his Tidemark Bay team. “Just concentrate on what we have to do.”
And concentrate they did.
Hen led the construction team. Together they sawed and drilled and hammered and shouted rude words when they accidentally hit their thumbs.
Mitzee led the decoration team. Together they brushed and rolled and sloshed shades of pink and orange and purple and green across sheets of canvas and occasionally across each other when they got a bit carried away.
Eddy led the entertainment team. Together they sorted out who was going to perform when, and tried to stop laughing at Dylan Plimpsoll while they were supposed to be rehearsing.
“I wish I could help,” said Wizard Witterwort. “I used to be able to make wonderful shadows with
my hands. Rabbit, bird, elephant, all sorts. They were such fun. Of course, that was when I had hands. And a shadow.”
“If we can pull this off,” said Eddy, “you’ll soon have them back.”
By the middle of the afternoon, they were ready to practise putting the rooms up and taking them down again. It was tricky at first. Walls wobbled. Ceiling cloths fell down on people standing beneath. They accidentally rolled out a carpet over a sleeping dog that had chosen the wrong place to lie down. By the time they got the hang of it all, there was only half an hour to go before the judging began.
Eddy ordered everyone back to their starting positions. They set up the two rooms, and stashed the spare furniture in a large tent to the side. Then they put up the fake front wall for the palace. The design team from the Tidemark Bay Amateur Dramatic Society had painted it. It was as good as anything they had ever made – which unfortunately meant that it wasn’t much good at all. It might just have fooled a very short-sighted person who had forgotten their glasses. As long as it was dark at the time. But it was all they had.
The Genie stepped out of the giant ball of fog. He was followed by two men with big muscles. The muscles weren’t the most noticeable thing about them, though. The most noticeable thing about them was the fact that they were grey from head to foot.
“They look just like the two statues from the bottom of the garden,” said Hen.
“They are the two statues from the bottom of the garden,” said the Genie. “I got them to help me with some of the heavy lifting. A bit of strength is always useful on this sort of job.”
“And just what sort of job is it?” said Eddy. They still had no idea what was hidden inside the fog.
“You’ll see,” said the Genie. “Are you ready? The Emperor is on his way.”
“How is he coming?” said Hen. “Driving?”
“You could say that,” said the Genie. “He always likes me to lay on a spectacular entrance for him.” He pointed up into the sky. “There he is.”