Shrinking Ralph Perfect (12 page)

Despite his mother’s protests about toxic fallout from garden puffers, Ralph snatched up a loose piece of firewood and was at the tank wall in a matter of seconds. With an arm across his mouth to protect his lungs from the choking sulphur air, he found a space among the row of miniones and walloped the aquarium with everything he’d got.

To the giants in the room it must have sounded no louder than a fairy sneezing, for neither of them cast their eye towards the tank, and to Ralph’s dismay, Bone turned his attention first to
The Frisker,
circling the thing like a member of the public invited to inspect a magician’s cabinet.

Jack was straight into pantomime mode, dancing, half-bent, wringing his hands. He reminded Ralph of the creature, Gollum, from
The Lord of the Rings,
always sucking up, never to be trusted. He touched a button. The trestle table buzzed to the hum of
The Frisker’s
motor, its bright lights raced each other round the frame.

Bone seemed unimpressed. Pursing his lips like a
small pair of bellows, he turned a half-circle and rumbled out a question (it was easy to guess from the tone of his voice). And now his watery, policeman’s eyes did begin to pan every corner of the room.

‘Louder,’ Tom shouted to the cast of miniones. ‘We’ve got to make ourselves heard.’ And he banged the sheer wall of glass so hard that the body of his saucepan flew off the handle.

Ralph hammered away with all his might, till sweat beads were trickling into his eyes and his biceps were angry, complaining and sore. But it was working. Bone had raised a hand to his ear and was fiddling with something just inside the shell. Ralph realised at once it was a hearing aid.
Please,
he begged all the powers of creation,
make him turn it up really loud.
He whacked the glass with extra force.

The policeman listened attentively for a moment, then, with a puzzled frown, he turned towards the tank.

Triumph.

Surely?

He must see.

No.

Quicker than a ferret down a rabbit hole, Jack had nipped in front of the detective, blocking Bone’s view of that side of the room. He minced a little more and
waggled a mug. ‘Tea, Inspector?’

Bone appeared to say a sharp, ‘No, thank you.’ He dipped a hand inside his jacket and retrieved what looked to be a piece of newsprint.

As he unfolded it, Jack stepped sideways towards the sofa and picked up the plastic covering sheet. Snarling at Knocker to ‘git out of the way’, he casually turned from Bone and threw the sheet loosely over the tank, plunging the miniones into darkness.

‘Blast,’ said Tom, his anger illumined by the flare of the torches.

‘What now?’ said Sam.

The plumber looked up at the plastic sky. ‘There’s a hole in it,’ he muttered.

‘Great,’ said Kyle. ‘Our very own ozone hole.’

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Wally, wiping sweat off his brow.

Tom looked at the dripping branches of the tree. ‘Torch it,’ he said. ‘Set it alight. The wet wood will smoke and the air hole will draw the fumes up and out. Let’s send our policeman a signal, shall we?’ He looked at the rest of the dumbfounded miniones.

Neville tightened his fist. ‘Aye, do it,’ he said.

So Kyle played his torch among the dried, dead wood of the lowest branches, turning them from grey to a
dancing gold. The flames swept inwards towards the trunk. The wood split and crackled and the flame trails merged.
Whumph.
With a flash and a surge of heat, the tree began to burn. A coil of smoke rose out of the flames and headed towards the hole above.

By now, Ralph had run further down the tank towards a thin sliver of natural light. If he shut one eye and squinted hard, Jack and the Inspector were still just visible through a slit in the sheet.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Tom.

‘They’re just talking,’ said Ralph. But in his heart he knew it was more than that. Bone’s facial expression was dark and distrustful. He had thrust the piece of newsprint under Jack’s nose and was clearly interrogating the builder about it. Ralph’s heart began to pound. This had to be to do with Professor Collonges. But what could Bone be saying to Jack? Carefully observing their body movements, Ralph imagined it went like this:

Bone: ‘Do you know this man, Mr Bilt?’ He taps his finger on the last known picture of Ambrose Collonges, genius of physics, first reported missing six weeks ago.

Jack grimaces. He shakes his head.

‘You sure about that?’

Jack pushes back his sleeve. On his arm, the
strange-looking wristwatch blinks.

Bone sees it, but presses on with his inquiry. ‘Take a good look at the name below the picture. Ambrose Collonges. Unusual, isn’t it? Difficult to say. Even harder to forget. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr Bilt?’

Jack wrinkles his nose. He has the look of a man whose collar has been felt. He smirks. He’s clearly had enough of these questions.

Not so Inspector Bone. ‘He’s gone missing, you see, and I intend to find him, which is why I’m here, with you and your contraptions…’ He bounces on his toes and starts to prod and poke, examining the ramshackle bits of invention that will one day, Jack hopes, find themselves displayed on the end of a pier.

Jack says nothing. He lets Bone wander. The policeman starts towards the Miniville project, then pauses in the very centre of the room. His nose twitches. So does Knocker’s. Jack Bilt wipes some snot from his. He twists the green pyramid on his wrist, tuning in to Bone’s body heat. One quick press of the red counterpart and the troublesome copper will be arresting nothing much bigger than an ant.

Bone puts his fists to his hips. He sniffs and sniffs and sniffs again. Something, somewhere is burning, he’s sure of it. But he can’t decide what or where. He stares at the
tank and presses Jack again. ‘During the course of my investigations, I’ve discovered that before he disappeared, Professor Collonges had an extension built at the back of his house. Sloppy job. Done on the cheap. I found an invoice for the work tucked away in his desk. Your name appears at the top of that invoice. How do you explain that, Mr Bilt?’

‘Like this,’ says the builder, and he presses the red button.

‘No,’ cried Ralph, jumping back.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Tom.

‘Jack’s zapped the Inspector.’

Tom muscled him aside, then shook his head, puzzled. ‘No. The copper’s still there.’

‘What?’
Ralph squinted again.

The plumber wasn’t wrong. Inspector Bone hadn’t joined the Lilliput brigade. He could still be measured in metres, not millis. ‘It’s not worked,’ Ralph said. ‘Something’s gone wrong. Jack looks scared. He’s going to the kitchen.’

‘I wonder what
that
could be for,’ Tom muttered, knowing full well that Jack would probably be searching in his fridge for the stone.

‘Bang the glass! Bang the glass! Inspector Bone’s coming!’

But there was no need for anyone to make another sound. A second later, the skirt of plastic was lifted and the moustachioed face of Bone peered in.

For one dreadful moment, Ralph feared the policeman might faint with shock. His watercolour eyes froze dead in their sockets when he saw the house and the smoking tree and the dozen or so human beans jumping and waving. Confusion passed over him, then stunned disbelief, then the cold, hard light of understanding. He pushed back the sheet, pushed up his sleeve and craned a hand over the wall of the tank.

Tom grabbed Ralph’s shoulders and twisted the boy to face him. ‘I’m going back for your mum and Jemima. Climb onto his fingers. Get out while you can.’

But despite these heroic words, the fingers never came. As the hand descended, a resounding
bong
rippled through the air. The hand snaked upwards and out again. Inspector Bone crumpled in a heap on the floor.

And there stood Jack, proudly swinging a far less subtle kind of particle displacer: a wide-bottomed, long-handled frying pan.

Ralph watched with a kind of helpless fascination as Jack dragged the detective’s unconscious body into the space behind
The Frisker,
where he tied him up with a length of washing line and gagged him with a pair of rolled-up socks. And when this ghastly deed was done, Jack slid his bony hands together, stared down briefly at the object of his crime, then turned on his heels and marched towards the tank.

‘Everyone, to the house now,’ yelled Tom. He grabbed Ralph’s arm and yanked him up the steps. ‘Hide yourself away. This looks like trouble.’

‘What do you think he’s going to do?’ Wally said as they streamed into the parlour, looking back towards Jack.

They didn’t have long to wait for an answer. With a deep-lying structural groan, the whole house was suddenly tilted backwards, then tipped as far the other way, then backwards again. Ralph fell to the floor and collided with a chair as it tumbled over and bowled towards the fireplace. There were frightened cries from all around the room. Neville was hit by a flying painting
and Kyle Salter was spilt out through a window. From her ghost-world, Miriam wailed in anger and Ralph thought he heard calls from the tower room as well. What must it be like to be fastened in chains and thrown around like this? he wondered.

With a bump, the house came upright once more and Jack’s whispering voice floated through the rooms.

‘What’s he saying?’ Tom shouted, getting back to his feet, clutching his arm just below the elbow. It was bleeding. There was broken glass at his feet.

Ralph strained his ears. The howling wind of Jack Bilt’s words had a cruel but definite rhythmic twist. ‘I think he’s saying…I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.’

Miniville creaked and rattled its bones. And then from the wolf’s mouth came a short word, an easy, one syllable, soft-sounding word, that no one, especially not Ralph, could miss. ‘Boy…’

‘That’s you,’ said Kyle, lurching in through the door with cinder burns on his face and hands. Behind him, the dying tree still crackled. ‘He wants you, Rafe. He wants the little worm who stole his stone. I say we give you up.’

But once again, Kyle’s threats could not be played out. After one more stride, he was thrown off his feet as
the house rocked again, and this time, ended up flat on its back. Kyle crashed into what had been the ceiling once, breaking a hole in the lath and plaster. Ralph was more fortunate. He’d nearly plunged into the deep fireplace, but had rolled aside and clung to an old wall light. While he lay there, catching his breath, he stared through skylights that used to be windows. Something was coming down through one.

A pair of tweezers.

Agh!

He screamed and rolled away just in time. The points of the tweezers crashed through the window, showering glass like frost being brushed off a privet hedge. The points nipped and clicked, crushing one wall light between their jaws. Tom Jenks, who’d been trapped behind a sliding sideboard, pushed it away and hobbled over, shielding Ralph to the hallway door, now a long hole in the new ‘first floor’.

‘I’ve got to go to Mum. She might be hurt,’ Ralph panted.

Tom nodded and looked down into the hole. The tiled hall floor was now a vertical drop. The broken stairs curved away to their right. At the far end, at the bottom, was the miniones’ room, where they had left Jemima and Penny. ‘We’ll have to jump for the stairs
and grab the newel post,’ he said. ‘I’ll go first, then I’ll call you down and catch you.’

Without hesitation, he sat on the wall, dangling his legs through the doorway a second. When he dropped, he hit the post with a thumping clout that would have knocked any lesser man sideways. Not him. Not Tom Jenks.

‘OK,’ he shouted. ‘Come on, you’ll be safe.’ He stretched an arm, beckoning Ralph down.

It was an image that would haunt Ralph for many days to come. As he steadied himself to make the jump, a thud on the ‘ceiling’ turned his head. A large bulge had appeared in the area of wall between the two windows. Another thump followed. A shower of plaster fell.

‘Ralph, jump!’ Tom shouted. But by then it was too late.

With a clatter of bricks and dust and mortar, the point of the tweezers crashed through the wall. Most of the masonry flew through the doorway, showering Tom in an avalanche of rubble, taking him down the stairway with it.

He never had a chance.

Ralph screamed and screamed, and though Neville Gibbons was able to reach him and did his best to hold the boy down, the tweezers, when they came, were far
too strong for a mini-man’s muscles. They picked Ralph up by the seat of his pants and hauled him out of the broken house. His sweatshirt tore in Neville’s hands. His comb fell back through the gaping hole.

Upwards he sailed. Miniville, punctured, wrecked and on its back, was suddenly very tiny below him, then rapidly growing larger again as Jack dropped him onto a castellation above the tower room. Ralph scrabbled to his feet. The castellation was only a few feet wide. It was slippery with moss and pigeon droppings, and felt eager to break at any moment. Ralph knew if he stepped too far to either side he faced a suicidal drop. Forwards, he could walk down the front of the house and jump in through any open window. But forwards was Jack, with a pea-shooter at the ready.

The builder’s voice echoed down the barrel. ‘Where is it, tyke?’

‘Where’s what?’ yelled Ralph, standing on tiptoes to shout down the barrel.

‘The stone you thieved.’

Ralph shook his head.

Jack frowned darkly and drew back the shooter. He loaded a pea and billowed his cheeks.

‘No!’ Ralph cried out, and covered himself with orang-utan arms.

Zing!
The pea shot out and hit the next castellation along. A zig-zagged crack appeared on its surface. With a groan, the larger part broke away, shattering against the aquarium floor with a distant, ugly snap.

Jack trained the shooter back on his victim.

‘I hid it,’ Ralph shouted. ‘It’s under the floorboards.’ A lie, of course, but he was stalling for time.

Jack clicked the tweezers hard. ‘Find it or I’ll squish you up.’

Ralph gulped and spread his hands. ‘You knocked the house over. The stone will have moved.’

Jack drew back, twitching his lip.

Got you, Ralph thought, and lied again: ‘It might take ages to find.’

The builder loaded another pea.

‘If you shoot me, Tom will crush it,’ Ralph wailed. ‘Then what will you do?’ He ducked as the pea whistled past his ear. It pinged against the far wall of the aquarium.

‘I’ll recharge this one,’ Jack said quietly. He turned his arm. From a cradle on the underside of his wrist, he unclipped a stone the same size and shape as the one from the fridge. It was grey and lifeless. Dead.

‘So, is the stone I took fully charged?’ Ralph asked.

The question seemed to annoy Jack immensely. ‘Just
get it,’ he boomed. ‘You’ve got one hour. Or I’ll turn you into water babies.’

‘Water?’ Ralph shouted, not sure he’d heard right.

Jack laughed out loud and stabbed the tweezers through the house wall again, making a hole even bigger than the first. The shockwave brought Ralph down to his knees. Somehow, he managed to hold his pitch.

‘Change of plan,’ the builder snarled. ‘Going to turn the house into a sunken castle.’

‘Castle?’ Ralph said, straining to hear. It was difficult to understand the longer sentences.

‘New attraction,’ Jack said. ‘Welcome to
The
Shredder.
’ From his pocket he pulled out a polythene bag. It was bulbous with water. Two long, finned creatures were swimming around inside it.

Piranha fish.

‘You’re crazy,’ said Ralph, watching the piranhas jazzing back and forth, prodding their irate noses to the polythene.

‘Home time,’ Jack said snidely. He punched out the nearest window, then clamped the tweezers to the seat of Ralph’s pants and unceremoniously dropped him through it.

Immediately, Miniville was righted again. Ralph rolled like a piece of tumbleweed and was only halted
when his body collided with a moving snake of metal. Chains. He must be in the tower room. He blinked and looked up. A wild-haired, bearded man stared back.

‘You!’ gasped Ralph.

‘Twenty-first letter of the alphabet,’ said the man. ‘Comes between ‘t’ and ‘v’, fiddle dee!’

Ralph slapped a hand across his forehead. Of course, how could he have been so thick? He should have guessed all along who was in the tower room. The man who had probably been the very first minione: the missing genius, Ambrose Collonges.