Magicalamity (12 page)

“Wasn’t there? What about that crab pastry? Oh, we’ve been blind—blind! Milly Falconer was murdered, all right—but not by Jonas!” To everyone’s surprise, Dahlia turned a somersault in midair and let out a wild laugh. “I can’t WAIT to see the looks on their faces!” She was suddenly businesslike. “Now listen, everyone. This is going to be a very tricky heist to pull off. Snatching the coffin is going to be a heavy job, and we can’t use magic to carry it out of the chapel or we’ll set off the alarms—so we need every pair of hands. Somehow, we have to sneak Tom and Pindar into the Realm.”

“Can Tom get into the Realm?” Lorna asked. “He’s a demi.”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Dahlia said brashly. “There are more important things to worry about. Once we’ve all got ourselves into the Realm without arousing suspicion, we have to carry out a large glass case that contains quite a hefty corpse.” She gazed round at all of them. “Make no mistake, we’ll be taking an enormous risk. If we’re caught, it’ll mean death for us old fairies and exile to somewhere ghastly for the boys.”

There was a silence. Death or exile. Tom tried to look brave, but he was cold with fear. The mortal world had never seemed so far away.

“Count me in,” Lorna said. “My magic’s a bit patchy,
but I can fight—I didn’t win those Golden Boxing Gloves in college for nothing!”

“What must be done must be done,” Iris said, cold and brisk. “Dolores holds her grand nude ball today, and I have an invitation. That’ll be a perfect excuse for me to be in the Realm.”

“Good thinking,” said Dahlia. “I’ll say I’m visiting the Realm to see Justinian. He has a big concert today—as long as he manages not to blow up the stadium.”

“I haven’t been back for donkey’s years,” Lorna said. “It’s going to look dodgy if I suddenly show up now. The boys and I need to get in without being seen.”

Dahlia waved her hands airily. “I have a brilliant idea to cover that. Here’s what we do.…”

They gathered for takeoff in Dahlia’s back garden. It was another sunny day, and Tom listened to the normal noises of children playing and cars in the square beyond. He was frightened, excited and so incredibly curious that he almost didn’t care about the danger. The Realm was where his dad had grown up. It was part of his history, and he couldn’t imagine what it would be like. When people talked about “Fairyland” they normally meant a pink, sugary kind of place, full of ponies and unicorns, like the covers of comics for little girls. Yet the land his godmothers spoke of was full of guns and explosions.

Dahlia threw out a cloud of pale-green invisibility powder.

Pindar burst out sneezing. “Sorry—achoo!”

“You seem to be allergic to magic,” Lorna said. “Jolly awkward for a fairy—where on earth did you get it from?”

“It runs in his family,” said Iris. “Clover Falconer was just the same.”

“Who? Oh, that poor-relation cousin—yes, of course! Poor old Clover—how could I forget her? She came to visit Milly during college Nude Week. And she couldn’t do the simplest spells without sneezing her head off.”

“You seem to do a lot of nude stuff in the Realm,” Tom said. “We won’t have to take our clothes off, will we?”

“Certainly not. Only the grandest fairy occasions are nude,” Iris said. She was wearing a raincoat, rubber boots and a diamond necklace. “I’m stark naked under this coat.”

“Oh.” Tom heard a snort of stifled laughter from Pindar and tried hard not to smile. He totally did not want to think about what Iris looked like naked.

Iris proudly took a stiff white card from her pocket and showed it to Tom.

The letters were of thick gold. In the bottom right-hand corner it said:
Dress: none
.

“Love the necklace, darling,” Dahlia said, busily unfolding a pair of shiny black-and-gold wings. “Isn’t that one of the Cartier pieces that went missing?”

“Yes, one of my girls brought it back from a school outing to Bond Street.” Iris was looking beadily at Dahlia’s Chanel wings. “Very chic, I’m sure. Personally I prefer efficiency.”

Tom put on Uncle Clarence’s wings. They were comfortable and familiar, and he felt braver when he was wearing them. Maybe I’m imagining it, he thought; but that doesn’t matter if it makes me stronger.

Pindar pulled something out of his back pocket, muttered a spell—sneezed—and shook out the folds of a pair of leather wings a lot like Tom’s.

Lorna’s wings looked tattier than ever.

Dahlia wrinkled her nose. “It’s a shame you can’t use this trip to buy yourself some new fliers, darling. Lightfoot’s sale started yesterday.” She opened a polished wooden case that one of the husbands had carried out into the garden.

“Wow,” breathed Tom.

The case was lined with scarlet velvet. Against the cloth gleamed five beautiful silver pistols.

“Standard lightning-guns,” Iris said stiffly. “Very nice, I must say.” (She didn’t enjoy paying compliments.)

“They don’t fire bullets,” Dahlia said to Tom. “Watch.”

She pointed one of the guns at a small bush in the corner of the garden. There was a white flash, like lightning, and the leaves and branches of the bush turned fiery orange, then fell to the ground in a heap of black ash.

Tom’s mouth was dry. “Does it do the same to people?”

“Of course!” said Iris. “And no corpses to dispose of afterwards—such a TIDY weapon!”

Dahlia handed the pistol to Tom. “The trigger automatically sparks the magic. If anyone attacks, fire this right at them. You’d better take a practice shot.”

“OK.” Tom handled the gun very carefully. It was much lighter than the old revolver Lorna had lent him. “What shall I shoot?”

“That cat on the wall.”

“No!” The cat slinking along the garden wall was white, like Elvis. “I don’t want to kill anything!”

“He isn’t a nice cat,” Dahlia assured him. “He has a very bad attitude to fairies, and he shouts insults through my letter box. Aim for his head.”

“NO!”

“Oh, all right! Shoot at that.” She pointed across the lawn at a wooden bench.

Tom took aim and pulled the trigger. The bench turned to flame for a moment, as if made of hot embers, before falling on the grass in a heap of ash. It felt very
satisfying, and he would have loved to shoot something else, but instead he put the lightning-gun into the holster on his wings, where it fitted exactly.

Dahlia handed the guns around to the other godmothers and Pindar. It was time for takeoff. Tom concentrated on the spell, trying to ignore poor Pindar’s sneezes, and shot into the air. This time there was no flying over countryside. They flew up and up, through the clouds, through what seemed like miles of pale-blue sky. The white summer sun was hot and Tom had to screw up his eyes to see Lorna’s stout form ahead of him. Dahlia had put on a pair of sunglasses that matched her wings.

The air cooled on his cheeks as they flew towards a bank of thick white cloud. Tom was confused—hadn’t they already left the clouds far below them?

It wasn’t a cloud. As they came nearer, Tom realized that they were approaching what looked like a border, or a customs point. He saw low buildings and a row of little booths where people were queuing with pieces of paper. He noticed—with a jolt of shock—that there were other fairies flying alongside them. They looked like ordinary mortals, carrying suitcases, briefcases and shopping bags and dressed in ordinary mortal clothes. One was a policeman.

Somehow (Tom wasn’t quite sure how he had come to be standing on solid ground) they had landed. He took a
deep breath and gazed around. This was the uttermost edge of the fairy Realm. He had left the mortal world and was actually in another dimension. It felt different, in a way he couldn’t pinpoint—the feel of the air on his skin, the strange, soft, bright glow of the light.

They were in the entrance of a gigantic hall with a vaulted roof of cloud, like a cross between a cathedral and a busy airport. All around them, fairies were briskly landing, shrugging off their wings and heading for the queues. Tom noticed them clutching pieces of card that had a faint glow, like weak lightbulbs. He guessed these were fairy passports—did his dad have one?

“Synchronize watches,” said Dahlia. She had taken charge, and the other two fairies accepted her authority. “Tom, your mortal watch won’t be any use. We’re on fairy time up here. I make it two thousand past moon—got that?”

Lorna, Iris and Pindar fiddled with their watches. Tom added “fairy time” to the long list of things to ask his dad about—if he ever saw him again.

“Our invisibility runs out in five minutes,” Dahlia said. “Iris—you go on ahead. We’ll meet you at the Chapel of Milly at moon two-eighty—got that?”

“Moon two-eighty. Got it.”

To Tom’s total horror, Iris took off her raincoat and stood in front of them wearing nothing but wellies and a diamond necklace. It was amazingly embarrassing; he
couldn’t look up until Iris had walked away into the crowd.

“Make for the collection shed over there.” Dahlia pointed to a very large wooden shed. A notice said: MORTAL GOODS COLLECTION POINT.

Outside the entrance was a little hut like an observation post. At first Tom thought there was a small child inside it—until he saw, with a slight shock, that it was a tiny man. He knew there were tiny people in the mortal world, but this man did not look human. His light brown skin was like leather. His nose and ears were pointed. He was a magical creature from a story—a pixie, or a goblin. How incredible that the stories were real. And how even more incredible to see a pixie or whatever working as a security guard.

There was no time to stare. The four of them dashed past the observation post into the gloomy shed just before their invisibility ran out. All around them stretched long lanes of metal shelves, piled with boxes and parcels.

“So far so good!” Dahlia took a piece of paper from her handbag. “This is where all the stuff fairies have ordered from the mortal world comes to be scanned on entry into the Realm. You’d be surprised how many useful things are mortal made. My boxes contain mortal drums, ordered by my son because fairy drums aren’t loud enough. They’re in Aisle P, number eight hunded and
thirty-four.” She bustled off through the tunnels of boxes and the others hurried after her. “Stop! Found them!”

She pointed at two large wooden boxes labeled
TREBONKERS
. Tom, Lorna and Pindar helped her drag them off the shelf. Tom’s heart was beating hard, but so far, it was all going to plan.

Lorna curled up inside a kettledrum. “Blimey, this is a tight fit! Can’t I shrink myself?”

“No,” Dahlia said. “You’ve forgotten the rules, darling—all enchantments must be removed before going through customs. You’d only give us away.”

Tom and Pindar were each sealed up inside a large drum, which was then shut inside the wooden box (Dahlia was amazingly strong).

“Tom, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Tom said—though it was hard to speak when he was curled up like a prawn.

“Can you breathe?”

“Just about!”

“I should just mention,” Dahlia said, “that as you’re a demisprite, there’s a teeny-weeny chance that when you go through the scanner you’ll disintegrate.”

“WHAT?”

“Well, it’s too late to do anything about it now. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

W
hen you’ve just been told you might be about to disintegrate, it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Tom curled up in his cramped, dark hiding place, listening to the confused noises he heard outside and praying Dahlia was wrong.

They were moving—Dahlia had found some helpers to put the boxes on a trolley. They didn’t know there were people inside the drums, and Tom felt himself being hurled and heaved and slammed down, until he literally didn’t know whether he was on his head or his heels.

“They’re drums for my son, Jay Trebonkers,” he heard
Dahlia explaining. “He’s waiting for them at the Tiberius Stadium—do let us through quickly, please!”

“Right you are, Lady Trebonkers,” a man’s voice said. “Never mind the paperwork. My two girls are going to that concert, and if I do anything to hold it up I’ll never hear the last of it!”

Tom’s box rocked violently. Searing white light poured into the darkness, and he could suddenly see the knees of his jeans a few centimeters in front of his nose. He nearly gasped aloud—it felt as if a cool breeze had shot through his entire body and somebody had filled the core of his bones with toothpaste. And though it wasn’t exactly painful, it felt extremely peculiar. It was a relief to be plunged back into warm darkness.

“Tom,” Dahlia’s voice said, close to the box, “have you disintegrated?”

“I … I don’t think so.”

“Good. We’re safely through customs now.”

“Can we get out?”

“Not yet, but it won’t be long.”

He was being moved again—loaded into the back of a truck, as far as Tom could guess from the confusion of shouts and jolts. The engine juddered into life and they were off.

I’m inside the Realm, he thought; I’m in a place where fairy tales are real.

There was a thunderstorm raging—no, those explosions were not thunder—was that gunfire? One sound started to drown out all the others. At first Tom thought he could hear a huge flock of starlings. It got louder and louder, until he realized they were driving through the middle of a screaming crowd. The truck had slowed down, and Tom heard a girl’s voice shrieking, “I love you, Jay!”

They had reached the stadium where Jay Trebonkers was performing. The noise of the crowd was deafening, and Tom wished he could move enough to put his hands over his ears. Suddenly, the screams were muffled, and he guessed they were now inside the stadium. Finally he felt his box being dropped on a floor.

The drum seemed to burst open and Tom fell out of it, dazzled by the light.

Lorna grabbed his hand, heaving him to his feet. “Are you all right, boy? My heart was in my mouth when we went through customs. I was terrified you’d disintegrate and I’d never be able to fit all your molecules together in the right order!”