Eddy Stone and the Mean Genie's Curse

by Simon Cherry

Eddy and the rest of the Tidemark Bay team stood open-mouthed as they watched four winged white horses coming in low over the treetops, pulling a golden chariot behind them. To a fanfare of invisible trumpets, their hooves touched down on the lawn, and they came to a gentle halt.

  The Emperor stepped down from the chariot.

  “Nice wheels,” he said to the Genie. “Very swanky.”

  “Thank you, O master,” said the Genie. “And if you think the chariot was swanky, wait till you see the palace of fun that I have made for you.”

  He twirled his hands in the air.

  The ball of fog began to spin round and round, faster and faster, forming a tall cone that rose into the sky.

  But no one was watching it go. They were all staring at what had been hiding inside it.

  A magnificent white marble building stood on the lawn. It was so beautiful that it made the Taj Mahal look like a garden shed. The two walking statues twined their arms together and lifted the Emperor as if he was in a chair.

  “Do join us,” the Genie said to the Tidemark Bay team, as the statues carried the Emperor towards the palace.

  Eddy was feeling more worried than ever as he followed. He knew that if the inside of the Genie’s palace was anywhere near as good as the outside, the Tidemark Bay team were in trouble. Big trouble.

  The inside of the Genie’s palace was not as good as the outside.

  It was better.

  Eddy’s heart sank as the Genie showed them into an elegant hallway. A huge stained-glass window pictured the moment when the Emperor had surprised the Duke of Grimglower with a faceful of pie.

  “Like it,” said the Emperor, who was walking between the Genie and Mitzee.

  They passed along an avenue of elegant pillars, and into a vast room that sat under a glass-domed roof. Brightly coloured birds flitted among the lush tropical plants that stood around its walls.

  “Pretty,” said the Emperor.

  In the centre of the room, a beach of white sand led to a brilliant blue swimming pool the size of a small lake. A waterfall that cascaded down from a tall rock sent ripples across its surface.

  “Cool,” said the Emperor. “You can’t beat a nice paddle when the weather’s hot.”

  “And along here,” said the Genie – by “here” he meant a passageway where rainbows of light glittered off the crystal walls – “are two fun ideas that were suggested by one of the local people.”

  The passage divided into two.

  “On this side,” the Genie opened a tall double door, “is what he called a state-of-the-art cinema system.” Eddy peered inside. Rows of plush seats, maybe two hundred of them, faced an enormous screen.

  “And on this side,” the Genie opened a matching door, “we have the track for the go-karts.”

  “What are those?” said the Emperor.

  “They are karts, master,” said the Genie. “They go.”

  The air was filled with the stutter of an engine, as a kart whipped round the corner of the track in front of them. It whizzed past, leaving only a whiff of hot oil in the air, and the echo of the driver’s cry of “This is brilliant!”

  The Genie paused for a moment until the air settled again, then said, “It is considered to be quite exciting, master.”

  “That looked like Chris P driving the kart,” said Hen. “I’m sure of it. So not only is he not part of our team, he’s giving help to the other side. What a rat! If I get hold of him I’ll…”

  Nobody heard what Hen was planning to do to her brother, as he whizzed past on his kart again with a cry of “WA-HOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  “So, is that the lot?” said the Emperor.

  “Indeed, master.”

  “Well, not bad. Quite good. Nice waterfall. Love the stained glass. So,” he turned to Eddy, “ready to show me your palace?”

  “Could you give us a couple of minutes to get in place?” said Eddy.

  “Happy to,” said the Emperor. “It’s a pleasure to spend more time in such delightful company.”

  “You flatter me, master,” said the Genie.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” said the Emperor. “And you know it, you old tease.”

  He took Mitzee’s arm in his.

  “That palace was magnificent,” Dylan Plimpsoll said miserably. The rest of the Tidemark Bay team couldn’t help laughing out loud, even though they were all feeling extremely gloomy about their chances of winning.

  “This is hopeless,” Jeremy Grubb said, fiddling nervously with his wheelbarrow full of hair. “How can we go on after that?”

  “The show must go on,” said Maurice Burbage. “That’s what we say in the theatre. Teeth and smiles, everybody.”

  “He’s right. This is no time to give up,” said Eddy. “We’re going to go out there and give it our best shot.” He dipped his hand absent-mindedly into a huge bag of potato crisps that was standing open next to him, and popped one into his mouth.

  “Hey, hands off,” said Hen. “Those are for the snack fountain.”

  “Sorry,” said Eddy. “Mmmm. Those are really good.

  What’s the flavour? It tastes a bit like beef and mint and cheese and ketchup and sausage and pineapple – it really shouldn’t all work together. But it does.”

  “They’re Chris P’s,” said Hen. “The ones that the Wizard made when he wished.”

  “You pinched them?” said Eddy.

  “I pinched them,” said Six. “He’d carelessly left them lying round in a padlocked box underneath the floorboards in his bedroom. Piece of cake to get them out. Nice to do a proper bit of thieving again – makes this whole trip worthwhile.”

  “Chris P’s not going to help us, so I thought we should help ourselves,” said Hen. “We needed some crisps for the fountain, and my dad never leaves any around the house. Never give anything away if you want to get rich, he always says. I’d better go and load them. And then I think we’re ready to go.”

  As ready as we’ll ever be, Eddy thought. But he didn’t say that. What he said was, “Right, everybody. We need bags of energy. Total concentration. Heaps of fun. And then we can still pull this off.”

  He made it sound so convincing that he almost believed it himself.

  It all started well enough.

  Sharon Dibble’s really nice shoes chatted away as she led the Emperor towards the Tidemark Bay Palace.

  “It’s an honour to have you here today.”

  “And you’re looking so well.”

  Distracted by talkative footwear on one side, and Mitzee on the other, the Emperor barely glanced at the badly painted front wall as he walked into the first room.

  Eddy and Hen remembered how much the Emperor enjoyed his food, so they had filled the room with the smell of hot pies. To make the smell, they had cleverly used nothing more than a table full of hot pies.

  With four hands to do the work, Sophie Milldew had quickly turned out a huge batch of baking. The Emperor immediately tucked in, and made appreciative noises through a mouthful of steak and mushroom.

  Then Dylan Plimpsoll entered.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  The Emperor laughed so hard that a chunk of the pastry he was chewing shot out of his nose.

  Dylan Plimpsoll had given up trying to make jokes. He realized that it really didn’t matter what he said. Anything would get a laugh. He picked up the Tidemark Bay telephone directory and started to read aloud.

  “Abercrombie, Arnold, 26 Seaview Terrace – 71346…”

  The Emperor held it together through the 7134. But that 6 was a killer punchline. He lost it completely, and rolled around on the floor shrieking with laughter.

  As Dylan continued, the Emperor was reduced to a giggling wreck. Each name and number seemed like the funniest thing he had ever heard in his life – until the next came along and was even funnier.

  By the time Dylan got to “Banerjee, Anish, 9 Tiverton Crescent – 88357,” he was clutching his sides and kicking his legs in the air and howling hysterically.

&nbs
p; “I’m going…to burst…if he…doesn’t…stop!” he panted.

  Dylan closed the phone directory.

  “If Your Majesty would care to follow me into the next room,” said Eddy.

  The Emperor was gasping too much to stand up, but he managed to roll over onto his hands and knees and crawl through the doorway into the second room. Mitzee followed him, and Eddy closed the door behind them.

  As soon as the door shut, Hen’s team began to take the first room apart. The Emperor had no idea that was happening, as he clambered onto a sofa with Mitzee beside him.

  “Please. No more jokes,” he said.

  “Not in here,” said Eddy. “This will give you a chance to get your breath back.”

  Across the room stood a thin, sharp-eyed woman wearing a blouse and a long tartan skirt, surrounded by a dozen children in matching tartan smocks.

  “Celia Chillworth,” the woman introduced herself. Celia could be found every Saturday morning at the Community Centre running classes in Country Dancing at ten o’clock and Karate at eleven o’clock – and only occasionally getting the two mixed up.

  “And now,” she went on, “the Celia Chillworth Country Dancing Troupe present our Scottish Spectacular.”

  She pressed the play button on a portable music centre. A harp strummed, a guitar twanged, bagpipes skirled, and the troupe of tartan tinies began to twirl.

  Eddy pressed his ear to the door. He could just hear Hen’s team at work, getting ready to move the pieces of the first room to their new location and set them up as room three.

  The Emperor was getting restless. Country dancing clearly wasn’t his thing.

  “I fancy more of those excellent pies,” he said. “I’ll just go back to the first room to grab a couple.”

  “NO!” Eddie yelled. “DON’T!” It would be a disaster if he went through the door and found there was no first room to go back to any more. Their whole plan would be blown wide open when it had barely started.

  “Since when do you tell me what to do?” said the Emperor.

  “I mean, please don’t trouble yourself, Majesty,” Eddy said. “I’ll get them for you.”

  He opened the door a crack and squeezed through, careful not to give the Emperor a chance to see what was on the other side. Hen and her team were carrying the walls away.

  “How much time is it going to take?” Eddy asked. “I don’t know how long I can keep him in there. He’s getting a bit bored.”

  “It’s country dancing,” said Hen. “Of course he’s bored. But we need a few more minutes.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Eddy. He picked up the pies, and squeezed back through the door.

  “Very good,” said the Emperor, grabbing his snack and starting to haul himself out of his chair. “I’ll have these on the way to the next room.”

  “It’s extremely bad for the digestion, Majesty,” said Eddy. “Walking and swallowing at the same time. Much better to sit here and eat. Besides, you wouldn’t want to miss the big finish to the routine.” He doubted that a big finish was coming, but at least he had got the Emperor to stay where he was.

  The Emperor gulped the first pie down in two bites. The twelve twirling tartan tinies held hands and formed a ring, and began to skip round in a circle – until one of them snagged a twirly toe in a crease in the carpet. Down the tiny tumbled, dragging its tiny neighbours down with it, and so on round the ring. One after the other, twelve tiny tartan bottoms hit the floor, and twenty-four tiny legs in tartan socks thrashed in the air.

  “You were right,” said the Emperor. “That ending was the best bit by far.” He swallowed the last of his second pie and headed for the third room. Eddy stepped ahead of him to open the door, hoping that Hen and her team had managed to finish putting the room together.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. Everything was in place. And with a different carpet and some new decorations, it looked quite unlike the first room.

  The new room housed a strange contraption. It had a broad metal belly studded with pipes and valves, and a tall shining funnel rising from its top. It looked like someone had cobbled together an old-fashioned stove, a vacuum cleaner and a trombone. Which was not altogether surprising, because that was exactly what someone had done. And the someone was standing next to it in her best boiler suit.

  “Your Majesty,” said Hen. “May I present a world first – the potato snack fountain!”

  She clicked a switch with her foot. The machine let out a long wheezing sigh that rose in pitch and volume until suddenly:

  A slim slice of deep fried potato shot out of the top of the funnel and fluttered through the air.

  The middle of the room was filled with a cloud of cascading crisps.

  Chris P’s crisps. They looked like a fall of autumn leaves in a stiff breeze, but no leaf ever tasted like these.

  One flittered down right in front of the Emperor’s face. With a snap of his head and a smack of his lips, he crunched and swallowed.

  “Absolutely delicious,” he said. “I’m not leaving here until I’ve eaten every last one.”

  Eddy had never seen the Emperor move so fast. Come to think of it, he had never seen the Emperor move much at all. But here he was, trundling around the room, snaffling up every crisp he could find and stuffing them into his mouth.

  “Well done,” Eddy said to Hen as she slipped away to check on the building of the next room. “He loves it. If we carry on like this, we might even manage to pull off a win.”

  But as if the world had just been teasing the Tidemark Bay team all along, at that very moment things started to go wrong.

  Dreadfully wrong.

  The Emperor licked the very last crumb of the very last crisp from the corner of his mouth.

  “Yum!” he said. “Very interesting flavour. I must get the recipe. What’s next?”

  Eddy led him and Mitzee into the fourth room. In the middle of the floor stood a low couch, a large wicker basket filled with theatrical props, and Maurice Burbage.

  Maurice had agreed to entertain the Emperor with extracts from his epic one-man performance, Great Moments From Shakespeare. He had decided to start as Hamlet, with the most famous speech of all – “To be, or not to be.”

  As soon as the Emperor settled his bottom in an armchair, Maurice took a deep breath, raised his right hand, furrowed his brow, and began.

  Shakespeare had not written that at the start of the speech, but as far as Maurice was concerned, there was no dramatic moment that could not be improved by a good “OHHHHH!” And sometimes, two.

  he said again. “To be or…”

  Hen and her team had hung several mirrors around the room, to make it look different from the others. Maurice caught sight of the Emperor’s reflection in one of them. And then in another. And then a reflection of a reflection that made it look as if a long line of Emperors were all staring at him.

  “To be or…” he repeated.

  And suddenly the memory of the other night flooded through him. He was there again, standing in front of the huge audience in the National Theatre, with no idea what he was supposed to say, or do. His legs wobbled. A drop of sweat ran from his forehead, down the length of his nose, and dripped onto the floor.

  “To be…or…” he stammered, “be…or,” a look of horror on his face as he relived his nightmare.

  “Does it go on like this for long?” said the Emperor.

  “Be…or…be…be…”

  “Because I’ve had enough already.” The Emperor rose to leave.

  “The next room won’t be ready yet,” Eddy whispered to Mitzee. “You’ve got to keep him here.”

  “Be…be…do…be…”

  “Me?” said Mitzee. “How?”

  “Think of something,” said Eddy. “I’ve got to tell Hen they have to hurry up.”

  “Be…do…be…do…” Maurice burbled.

  “Hang on, Babes,” Mitzee said to the Emperor, in a moment of inspiration. “I love this song.” And she began to hum “Do-be-
do, do-be-dooby-doooo,” in what was almost a tune.

  Eddy rushed out into the fifth room. At least, he rushed into where the fifth room was going to be. It was still a wall and a half short, and had no carpet on the floor.

  “Quick,” said Eddy. “You’ve got to be ready to go in one minute.”

  “No chance,” said Hen. “We might get the walls up, but the carpet’s still round the other side. We can’t get it rolled out in time.”

  “We need to do something,” said Eddy.

  “Use me,” said Jeremy Grubb, lying down on the floor. “You can spread my hair out. There’s more than enough to cover it. It’s good to find a use for it at last.”

  “Great idea,” said Eddy. “Let’s get the walls up. Everyone else, start hairdressing.”

  They began to haul out long strands of hair and spread them to cover the ground.

  “It’s still no good,” said Hen. “What about the ceiling? The cloth’s over with the carpet. We’ve got nothing.”

  Eddy looked up at a cloudy sky.

  “We can tell him it’s a glass roof.”

  A few drops of rain fell on his face.

  “He’ll never fall for it,” said Hen.

  “I’ve got a better idea.” It was Celia Chillworth. “I can keep the Emperor entertained while you sort this room out properly.”

  “Are you sure?” said Eddy.

  “I did twenty-eight years in cabaret on the cruise ships before I settled in Tidemark Bay. Of course I’m sure.” She grabbed her music player and headed into the fourth room.

  Maurice Burbage was huddled under the low couch, making occasional mewing noises.

  “Time to go,” the Emperor said to Mitzee. “This is all much too modern for me.”

  But before he could move a muscle, Celia Chillworth pinned him to his chair.

  “Welcome to this celebration,” she said, thrusting her face into his, “of the joyous spirit of fiesta and the traditional dances of Spain. After which I shall break a house brick in two with one chop of my bare hand.”