Fly Frenzy (3 page)

The cake was too good to resist. After a few bites, they started to relax. Petty also sipped from one of their cups of pop to prove these weren't full of S.W.I.T.C.H. juice.

“All quite safe. However,” sighed Petty. She had a wistful look on her face. “A little part of me was
hoping
. . . ”

“Hoping
what
?” asked Josh, his cake frozen halfway to his mouth.

“No—no, it doesn't matter,” said Petty. She picked up crumbs by squashing them together on her finger. “Nothing.”

“
What
?” demanded Danny.

Petty licked the crumbs off her finger. She eyed them both as if she was adding something up. “Well, the fact is, I need help.”

“You're not kidding,” grunted Danny.

“I
meant
I need help with my amazing research,” said Petty. “I've been working alone for far too long. If I had some assistance . . . Well, put it this way, we wouldn't just be talking about spiders or ants or flies.” She paused dramatically. “We'd also be talking about . . . dragons.”

Josh and Danny stared at her.

“Close your mouth, Danny,” said Petty. “I can see your munched-up cake.”

“Dragons?” echoed Josh. “You mean you could make us turn into dragons?”

“Doesn't matter, though, does it?” said Petty, briskly cutting another slice of cake. “Because you don't want anything to do with the S.W.I.T.C.H. Project. It's far too dangerous.”

“H-how? How can you turn us into dragons?” gulped Danny.

“Well, in fact, I can't,” said Petty. “Not yet. Not until I've found something which I lost. Once I've found it, there will be no stopping me! I will work my way up from insects to reptiles. Maybe even mammals and birds. But not until I have found it.”

“Found what?” asked Josh.

Petty peered at them hard. “My memory,” she said. Josh and Danny peered back at their weird neighbor, astonished.

“Well, in fact I didn't
lose
it,” she went on. “It was destroyed. By Victor Crouch.”

“Victor Crouch? Who's he?” asked Danny. This was starting to feel like a very odd guessing game. Petty suddenly drove the cake knife into the table with a vicious crack.

“Victor Crouch and I used to be good friends. We both worked for the government. In the best laboratories in the world, hidden underground somewhere in Berkshire. That's where I first stumbled upon the formula to create the S.W.I.T.C.H. spray. But I kept the secret to myself. Then Victor discovered my diary, read it, and decided to steal my work!”

She pulled the cake knife out of the table. Danny and Josh flinched as she stabbed it back in again, with even more force. “So he stole my notes, claimed the S.W.I.T.C.H. Project was all his own work. And then . . . he burnt my memory out and got me fired!”

Josh and Danny gulped. “How did he burn your memory out?” breathed Danny.

“Oh—there are all kinds of clever ways to do that!” muttered Petty. “I only know it happened because of my nose.”

“Your nose?” queried Josh.

“Yes—it doesn't work properly anymore! And one thing I
do
remember about my old government agency days is that when you burn out part of someone's memory, you mess up their sense of smell too. I can't smell things correctly. This cake smells like cheese. Cheese smells like coal. And so on . . . ”

“So how come you're still working on your project then?” asked Josh.

“Well,” grinned Petty, “what Victor didn't know was that I had
expected
something like this to happen one day! So I transformed all my notes into a secret code. And then I left fake notes in their place! Just in case someone ever tried to do the dirty on me! The
real
secret code for each S.W.I.T.C.H. Spray is chopped into six parts. And each part is hidden inside one of these.” She pulled something from a red velvet box on the table. She held it up to the light. A small cube of glass twinkled in her fingers. Inside it was a hologram of a spider—and some strange symbols in a line beneath it. “It's a S.W.I.T.C.H. formula cube,” she said.

“Inside this one is part of the code for what I call the BUGSWITCH Spray. I have the other five of these. The complete set of BUGSWITCH cubes.”

She turned the red velvet box around. They saw five more cubes. They glinted in the light through the kitchen window, each with slightly different holograms.

“That's why I can make BUGSWITCH Spray.” She pressed the cube into the dent in the box beside the others and snapped the lid shut. “BUT—there are more! I know there are REPTOSWITCH cubes too! Because I have just one cube in this box. And five empty spaces.” She flipped open the green velvet box and held up another cube. This one had a tiny lizard hologram inside it and more strange symbols.

“And there might be mammal cubes! There may even be bird cubes! I can't be sure. I don't know how far I got before Victor Crouch did a smash and grab on my brain. But first of all, I
have
to find the REPTOSWITCH formula hidden in the missing cubes.”

She rolled the rather beautiful, single REPTOSWITCH cube around in her palm. She held it closer to Danny and Josh. “So . . . if you
were
to become my assistants and if we were to find all the REPTOSWITCH cubes, . . . who's to say you couldn't find out what it's like to be a
dragon
?”

Josh and Danny were silent. They gazed at the glass cube with its holographic lizard. “But,” said Josh, after a while, “there's no such thing as a dragon. We know you can do spiders. But they're real. Dragons are just make-believe.” Josh knew a lot about wildlife. For an eight-year-old he was really quite an expert. He was quite certain dragons did not exist.

“Well, what about the Komodo dragon?” said Petty.

“OK—there is a Komodo dragon,” admitted Josh.

“And a water dragon,” added Petty.

“Well, yes—all right! But they're just types of lizards,” said Josh. “They can't fly or breathe fire.”

“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 . . . ”