The Wizard In My Shed

by Simon Farnaby

  the thoughtless warlock

  didn’t even say goodbye.

  Oh dear, reader. I don’t know whether you have ever had the misfortune to become famous, but there are three major pitfalls to avoid if you ever do. And here they are.

  1. People do EVERYTHING for you. When you’re famous, activities like making yourself a sandwich become a thing of the past. That sort of thing is done for you. And once things are done for you, then having to do those things yourself again can feel like a catastrophic failure. So if, for example, you had someone make your sandwiches for you for ten years, and then suddenly you had to make a sandwich for yourself – you’d HATE making that sandwich. All that effort. The butter. The fillings. Cutting it into triangles. What a pain! Whereas before you were famous, you had no problem at all with making a sandwich.

  2. You lose a sense of the value of money. When you have lots of money, you lose the joy in saving up for something special. Say you like fish and chips, and once a week you treat yourself to a nice big portion from your favourite fish and chip shop. It’s a moment to be treasured and enjoyed, and you savour every delicious mouthful. But say you could afford to have fish and chips every night of the week? It wouldn’t seem so special, would it? And soon you would end up HATING fish and chips.

  3. You don’t know who your true friends are. Being famous tends to increase the number of people that are around you at any one time. You might have an agent, a manager, a lawyer, a press person, a hair stylist, a wardrobe advisor, a financial advisor, a diet advisor, a fitness trainer, a tenpin-bowling instructor, a driver, a biographer etc. You end up spending so much time with these people that you think they’re your friends. So much so, that you forget who your real friends are.

  Merdyn fell headlong into all three pits in a matter of days. It was oh so easy.

  For a start, Freddie did EVERYTHING for him. Whereas before, Merdyn had insisted on collecting the herbs and plants for his spells from nature, now Freddie ordered them from Waitrose and the garden centre and had them delivered to the apartment. Rosemary, foxglove, mint, parsley and clover all came in little neat packets, ready to be crushed and powdered by Merdyn’s personal assistants.

  Merdyn started doing sell-out gigs in football stadiums, bringing in untold riches. Never mind going to a fish and chip shop; he BOUGHT the fish and chip shop and had it installed in his spare room.

  As for Rose, she waited for Merdyn to bring her the singing spell he’d promised, but the days passed and he never came. She even tried to visit him at Clifton Towers but, once she’d got past all the screaming fans, she found herself blocked by Freddie the smarmy agent.

  “Merds is just so busyrooney, freckle-face!”

  Her brother was even worse. “No time, sis. It’s tough at the top, you know.”

  If it hadn’t been for his constant TV appearances on adverts, chat shows and variety events, she’d have forgotten what Merdyn looked like.

  Rose was sad about how things had ended between them. But it all made sense. What had Merdyn said to her when first they met in the woods? “I am the greatest warlock who ever liveth!” How jealous was he of Harry Potter’s fame? And Merlin? He hated them both for being more famous than him. Maybe fame was all Merdyn really cared about.

  It must be, thought Rose. Because now he was getting fame in spades, she was nothing to him.

  When she had met Merdyn, she’d felt that everything was going to get better. But instead, everything was worse.

  For a start, school was terrible. She had thought that Tamsin would be her friend now, after all the fun they’d had. But on that first Monday back at school, she passed Tamsin in a corridor and Tamsin couldn’t even look at her. Catrina had glared at Rose through her too-much-eyeliner eyes and Andie had crushed an apple with her fist in a weird show of strength (a waste of a good apple, in my mind) – but there was nothing from Tamsin. Rose hadn’t expected a high five, but at least Tamsin might have said hello.

  Rose was more of an island than ever.

  She couldn’t even talk to Bubbles any more. The pinecone spell had worn off again, and without Merdyn she couldn’t renew it. Night after night she sat in her room with her notebook, trying to enchant the pinecone herself. She’d tried every combination of herb, plant and Latin word she’d captured in her notebook, but maybe she’d written everything down wrong. Primula vernum speakoutsideinside? Vibernum opuli? Aaaaaaargh!

  Rose wasn’t surprised she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t a W-blood. But she wasn’t going to give up without trying.

  As if all that wasn’t bad enough, Suzy was even more depressed than before, especially now Kris had moved into Merdyn’s apartment full-time. She didn’t even get off the couch to go to bed now. She just fell asleep there, midway through a box of chocolates, woke up in the morning, switched the TV back on to documentaries about tragic singers and carried on. She didn’t see Sergeant Murray any more either. The love potion had worn off, and he only had eyes for the police force again. Dion next door came around most days and offered to help out, but Mum just stared through him and popped another piece of confectionery into her mouth.

  So in a nutshell, everyone was sadder than Sad Sadie McSadface on a wet Sadderday morning, but let’s get back to the story, shall we? One night, Rose was cleaning out Bubbles’s cage as usual. She was emptying her dad’s Poover tray and marvelling once again at its brilliant engineering. Would she ever make him proud of her? She swallowed the giant lump in her throat and glanced up, catching sight of the calendar on her wall. It was the last week of the summer term, which meant … the last Mountford’s Got Talented People heat was this Thursday, the day before the class trip to Stonehenge.

  Rose had been so preoccupied with everything else, she had almost missed it. Suddenly her regret at how she had left things with Merdyn turned to anger. The least he could do was give her the singing spell he’d promised her! It was the only way left she could see to make everything all right again. She would go to Clifton Towers tomorrow before school and demand to see Merdyn. And this time, she wouldn’t give up.

  She would barge past Kris,

  and Freddie, that chancer!

  This time she wouldn’t take no

  for an answer!

  “Finally we have it!” cried De Selby, the genius scientist. “The exact year, month, hour, minute that Merdyn is in the future. What a triumph of science! What an achievement!”

  “Well done indeed,” agreed Jeremiah Jerabo. “Now I will goeth through the Rivers of Time, killeth Merdyn the Wild, returneth, marrieth Evanhart and becometh heir apparent, killeth the King and imprisoneth my wife for ever. Then I shall ruleth over all of Albion!”

  Jerabo finished his little speech only to find De Selby staring at him in horror once again. “Oopseth,” he said. “Did I say ‘imprisoneth my wife for ever’ at the end of the list of bad things I’m going to do?”

  The scientist continued to stare.

  “Sorry, De Selby.” There was now a large trace of menace in Jerabo’s eyes. “I’m afraid I have told thee too much.”

  “N … not necessarily,” De Selby stammered quickly. “I don’t remember hearing anything after ‘killeth the King’ which I did already knoweth about, so …”

  “Really?” said the awful wizard, evidently toying with De Selby. “Thou did not hear me say imprisoneth Evanhart?”

  “Nope,” said De Selby firmly.

  “But thou did heareth that when I said it just then?”

  “Heareth what?”

  “That I would imprisoneth Evanhart!”

  “Oh that!” said De Selby. “I could forget I heard that. I am a very forgetful person, sometimes I forgetteth my own …”

  *SHWANG!**

  De Selby hadn’t even finished his sentence before Jerabo turned him into a tiny bird and locked him in a little cage.

  “Me and my big mouth,” said the wizard-villain to no one. He hadn’t let his plan to imprison Evanhart slip at all, of course. He had always meant to get rid
of De Selby as soon as he had Merdyn’s exact location. But you knew that already, didn’t you? Shame De Selby didn’t. Jerabo opened his spellbook and smiled.

  He flipped the pages

  with his thumbs.

  Watch out, future,

  here the wicked wizard comes!

  Rose went to Clifton Towers the morning of the final Mountford’s Got Talented People heat and refused to move until she saw Merdyn.

  “You listen to me, greasylocks,” she started as soon as Freddie answered the intercom buzzer. (Between you and me it was true, Freddie did put too much grease in his hair.) “Tell Merdyn I want my singing spell and I’m not leaving until I have it. It’s the competition today!”

  “Fine, I’ll ask him,” Freddie conceded, hugely offended. “If only to stop you bugging me.”

  Upstairs in the penthouse suite Freddie released the intercom buzzer and went to find Merdyn. This was no easy feat, such was the size of the place. It looked more like a busy office or factory than a home. The kitchen was full of people in white jumpsuits grinding herbs and flowers into powders and decanting them into labelled bottles, which they then put into a giant refrigerator.

  Merdyn was in the sitting-room area. His appearance had changed a lot since we last saw him. His beard was clean and silky, his eyes weren’t caked in mud and his robes smelled less like drains and more like lavender. On the sofa next to him was Rose’s brother, and they were talking about the new range of Merdyn the Wild merchandise. There were bathrobes, hats, mugs, T-shirts and a magic set. There was even a Merdyn the Wild doll which, when you pulled its string, said: “I am the greatest warlock who ever liveth! Bow down before me!” Kris was particularly proud of this one.

  “I think we should get the doll out for Christmas, Merds,” he was enthusing as Freddie came into the lounge area looking flustered.

  “Ah, Freddie,” Merdyn said. “Who was at the door – bleurgh!” He spat out the tea he’d just been given. “Too sugary. Take it away, fool!” he bellowed to one of his assistants. “Before I turneth thee into a toad!”

  “It’s that girl again,” moaned Freddie as the trembling minion scurried off to fetch a new cup of tea for Merdyn. “Rose.”

  Merdyn waved Thundarian over a batch of bracelets that Kris was thrusting in his face, imbuing them with good fortune. “Who?”

  “Do you mean my sister Rose?” Kris piped up, slapping a hundred-pound price sticker on the nearest ‘lucky bracelet’ and tossing it into a crate.

  “That’s the one,” said Freddie. “She wants a singing spell or something?”

  “She won’t give up, Merds,” warned Kris. “Take it from me. She’s like a dog with a bone when she gets a bee in her bonnet.”

  Merdyn didn’t have a clue what Kris was on about, but he felt a twinge of guilt. He hadn’t given Rose a moment’s thought in the past week.

  “We’ve got no time for her, Merds!” insisted Freddie. “We’ve got a whirly-bird waiting on the roof to take us to the Lazy Ladies studio.”

  “All right. Let me getteth the spell for her at least,” said Merdyn. “Kris, thou can take it down.”

  “Me?” protested Kris. “You need me to dress you.”

  “He’s dressed already, you muppet!” barked Freddie.

  Merdyn crossed to the kitchen. One of the jumpsuited underlings saw him coming, and passed him a small brown bottle.

  “What be this, girl?” the celebrity warlock snapped impatiently.

  “Your howling wolf spell, sir. For Lazy Ladies.”

  “Ah yes.” Merdyn opened the fridge and peered inside. “And where are the singing spells? Why don’t these bottles have labels? Thou fopdoodle!”

  “Sorry, sir.” The girl trembled. “Haven’t had time today. Top right.”

  “Merds, let’s go!” Freddie said.

  Merdyn grabbed the singing spell bottle from the fridge. He paused as his conscience twinged once more. But then he shook himself firmly, tossed the singing spell to Kris, popped the howling wolf spell in his pocket and ran to join Freddie on the steps to the roof, where the whirly-bird was waiting.

  Minutes later, Kris opened the ground-floor apartment block door and handed Rose the bottle.

  “One singing spell,” he said. “Merdyn sends his apols but, you know. He’s busy busy busy.” He pointed at the helicopter rising into the clouds from the roof twenty-three storeys up.

  Rose sighed at the sight of the fleeing Merdyn, but she had other concerns just then. Like why Kris was wearing such oversized sunglasses. His baseball cap was the wrong way round as well. She looked him in the eye. Or tried to. “Are you OK?”

  Kris shrugged nonchalantly. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Because I can’t see your face, for a start. Why are you wearing those ridiculous sunglasses?”

  “Because if I don’t, they’ll go craaazeee.” Kris pointed to the crowd of Merdyn fans and paparazzi behind Rose.

  “Why?” Rose was perplexed. “You’re not the famous one.”

  “No. But I am the good-looking one.”

  It was clear to Rose that Kris had finally got so vain that his brain had exploded. “What on earth are you talking about?” she said.

  “Check this out.” Kris whipped off his glasses and hat and directed a kilowatt smile at the crowd outside. Suddenly they all went crazy. Grown girls and boys screamed and wailed like he was a pop star. The paparazzi snapped like crocodiles in a feeding frenzy. One teenage boy even started crying.

  Rose looked closely at Kris’s face. It WAS different. His cheekbones seemed higher, his eyes bigger, his nose smaller. His eyebrows looked like they’d been plucked by the gods and he glowed like he had a lightbulb where his brain should have been.

  “See?” Kris said, beaming from ear to ear as he put his glasses and hat back on.

  “Merdyn gave you a handsome spell, didn’t he?” Rose guessed, horrified.

  “For all my hard work. Great, isn’t it?”

  Rose didn’t know what to say. So, as always, she plumped for honesty. “No, Kris. It isn’t great. You look like a human Barbie doll! What does Shakia think?”

  “She … doesn’t like it, actually,” Kris admitted. “She preferred it when I was just really good looking, as opposed to really, really, really good looking.”

  For a moment, Rose could see the old Kris in his saddened eyes behind the glasses, but then he turned to go. “One last thing, Kris,” she said. “Would you give Merdyn this?”

  She dug into her school bag and handed over a pinecone. Her brother looked at it quizzically.

  “I need him to enchant it,” said Rose. “To make Bubbles speak again. There’s a note inside. Make sure he gets it, will you? Don’t just put it in the bin.”

  “As if I would!” Kris said. Then he disappeared back inside the doors.

  Rose walked away. Slowly at first, but then she started striding, faster and faster. Fine. If Merdyn didn’t want to see her again, that was just fine. At least she’d got the singing spell. Now it was up to her.

  Kris’s handsome spell

  was something tragic,

  but if it gets her what she wants

  why shouldn’t Rose use magic!

  It had been a tough few weeks for Jim and Alan. First there was the mayhem caused by Merdyn the Wild as he conjured Thundarian from deep within the old well. Then there was the subsequent dematerialisation act of the warlock and three kids. What a business that had been.

  The Oldwell Shopping Centre management had given them both some time off for therapy, which they’d found very valuable. Now they were back guarding the ornamental garden and all was well. It was a quiet morning. There was no trouble in sight, and the traumatic events of Merdyn the Wild were firmly behind them. They could even laugh about it now.

  “Do you remember that song he sang?” Jim reminisced in a jolly tone.

  Alan laughed. “The one about herbs and plants and things?”

  “That’s the one. You know he’s released it as a record now?” said J
im.

  “I did not know that,” said Alan. “So, he wasn’t just trying to pull the wool over our eyes?”

  “Well he was then,” said Jim. “But now he’s a famous magician and stuff, so he’s cashing in with a novelty record. My therapist said I shouldn’t let it bother me, but let it be a lesson instead.”

  “What lesson’s that?”

  “To expect the unexpected,” Jim said triumphantly.

  Right on cue, a shining green light appeared behind them. A familiar feeling of dread pulsed through Jim and Alan’s beating hearts. They turned their heads slowly.

  The light was coming from the fake grass in the ornamental garden. Suddenly the ground opened up as if someone was pulling an enormous zip. The sides parted to reveal a huge dark mouth, which spat out …

  A man.

  As soon as it had deposited the man *WHUMP!** the mouth slammed shut and zipped back up again.

  The morning shoppers barely noticed. They were all busy shopping or texting on their phones. But Jim and Alan’s eyes were like wagon wheels, and their mouths like Pez dispensers.

  Oddly, the new arrival looked exactly like the fellow who’d won Britain’s Most Talented People recently: all quiffy blond hair, narrow eyes and thin lips. Except THIS version wore an ornate black and gold tunic, tights and a cape. His eyes adjusted to the light and he looked around in wonder. Finally, his gaze settled on the stunned security guards.

  “Thou there!” he ordered. “What century be this?”

  “Er, twentieth?” said Jim, in a shaky voice.

  “Twenty-first,” Alan corrected. It’s an easy mistake for those much older than you to make.

  “Goooooood!” said Jeremiah Jerabo – because that’s who it was, of course, though I’m sure YOU already realised that. He turned his attention properly to Jim and Alan. What strange clothes these future people wore. Uniforms of sorts?

  “And who might thou be?” Jerabo demanded. “Important keepers of the Rivers of Time, perhaps?”