Read The Lightning Catcher Online
Authors: Anne Cameron
The Lightning Catcher
To Paul, who always believed this book would happen.
And to Mum, for expert help and advice.
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PROLOGUE
  
I
f you have ever tried to find the Isle of Imbur on a map of the world, then you'll know by now that it simply doesn't exist. You will not find it tacked on to the end of Italy, or nestling under the armpit of the Antipodes, or even skulking off the coast of Mexico, disguising itself as a humpback whale. And even if you spread your map across the entire kitchen table and study it through a magnifying glass, you will find nothing in the empty spaces of the map but a few melted chocolate stains and some dead flies.
Yet it is precisely in one of these empty spaces that the Isle of Imbur lurks, quietly minding its own business, growing its own potatoes, fooling the rest of the world into believing that it is nothing more than an accidental smudge. And that is exactly the way the islanders wish to keep it.
One islander in particular had gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal its existence from the rest of the world. Her name was Principal Delphinia Dark-Angel. She was a practical, businesslike woman at heart, with closely cropped white hair and a stubbly, neatly trimmed mole on her left cheek that resembled one of the Galapagos Islands. She wore a long, yellow weatherproof coat, buttoned all the way up to her chin, and she did not like surprises.
Unfortunately, a rather large one had been delivered to her office at precisely ten past six that morning, along with a pot of hot tea. The principal shot a furtive glance at this surprise, which was sitting in the middle of her desk and took the form of a photograph. The photograph showed showers of newts and frogs raining down on the Houses of Parliament in London. They tumbled from the skies in a blur of webbed feet.
Principal Dark-Angel picked up the photo and turned it over with a sigh. She read the note on the back for the tenth time that morning, hoping that she might have misread it on the previous nine occasions.
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Dear Principal,
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A weather warning has just been issued for Buckingham Palace, Westminster Cathedral, and the Glow Worm Café on Hyde Park Corner
. The risk of heavy amphibious showers falling in all three locations is extremely high and will remain so for the next few hours. Anyone venturing outside is being advised to watch where they're putting their feet and to wear hats, boots, and safety goggles.
Luckily, climatologists are blaming this sudden invasion of flying amphibians on global
warming. They're predicting the problem could become far more serious in the future, eventually leading to heavy showers of bison, followed by prolonged downpours of sheep.
Please advise immediately.
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Yours sincerely,
Trevelyan Tempest
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Principal Dark-Angel put the photograph down and turned away from her desk with a frown. It was not that she was particularly shocked by showers of frogs. On the Isle of Imbur, last Tuesday at lunchtime, a small shower of tadpoles had been rapidly followed by a torrential downpour of newts, and so it had continued, raining newts and frogs, until no one on the isle dared leave home without an umbrella.
What really troubled the principal was the reason the showers had started in the first place, why they appeared to be getting worse, and why, according to Trevelyan Tempestâone of her most trusted colleaguesâthey were now falling in places where they simply shouldn't exist. If her suspicions were correct, it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with strange atmospheric disturbances or global warming, as London's top meteorologists had proclaimed. It did, however, have quite a lot to do with an eleven-year-old boy called Angus McFangus.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a brisk knock at the door.
“Fresh pot of tea, Principal?” A plump woman with soft brown curls entered, carrying a tray. “I've already strained it for tadpoles.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Stobbs.” Principal Dark-Angel sank gratefully into the chair behind her desk. “And could you please tell Felix Gudgeon that I need him to deliver an urgent message as soon as possible?” she added, setting a small sheet of blue writing paper on her desk and scribbling down the words that would change the life of one boy forever.
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1
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I
f you met Angus McFangus in person, you would not find any extraordinary mysteries stuffed up his left nostril, or nestling under his armpits, or even skulking under his eyebrows, disguised as bat-shaped birthmarks. And even if you studied his face closely through a magnifying glass, you would find nothing exceptional upon it, except a few stray smudges of raspberry jam. Nor would you discover the slightest trace of the great secret that had been lurking about his person since the day he was born.
Angus himself had known nothing of this secret until a few weeks before, when he'd suddenly started having nightmares. A huge dragon with claws and a thick armor of fiery scales had begun forcing its way into his dreams, causing him to wake up abruptly in a cold and clammy sweat. He had no idea why this glittering, combustible creature kept bothering him, almost every night. And he couldn't seem to shake it off, no matter how many hot milky drinks he sipped before bedtime.
He knew nothing about the Isle of Imbur, of course, or how that extremely secretive island was about to affect his life. At the moment, he was free of nightmares, fast asleep, snoring gently in one of the bedrooms at his uncle's old windmill in Devon. His pale gray eyes closed fast against the morning sun, his short brown hair flattened across the tops of his small bear-shaped ears. Even the scattering of freckles across his nose had a sleepy sort of look about them as he snored.
This slumber was about to be shattered, however, by a series of loud bangs and explosions, the first of which would wake Angus with a start and cause Mrs. Mavis Fish-Hook, in the nearby village of Budleigh Otterstone, to drop a teapot on top of her husband's head.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM . . .
Angus sat bolt upright in bed, his eyes instantly open. The floorboards in his room shook as if something large and heavy had just collided with the side of the Windmill and then settled again. He held his breath, listening for any nasty cracks, snaps, or thumps that might follow. Then he jumped swiftly out of bed and stumbled around his bedroom, quickly pulling on a T-shirt and jeans beforeâ
“ARRRGGGGHHHHHHH!” A strangled yell suddenly came up from the kitchen below; it was followed by an ominous
smash!
Angus flung his bedroom door open and raced down the spiral staircase. Loud noises first thing in the morning always meant that Uncle Max was in big trouble.
Uncle Max was a brilliant inventor who built highly volatile machines that often went up in smoke, shattering the peace of the countryside. And so far that summer, the peace had been shattered twenty-seven times alreadyâtwenty-eight if you counted this very latest explosion.
“Uncle Max?” Angus called urgently, skidding to a halt outside the kitchen. “Is everything all right?”
There was no answer. Angus opened the door cautiously, sticking his head all the way inside the room andâ
THUD!
He was instantly knocked off his feet by something resembling a large copper-colored washing machine. It scuttled quickly past him, across the hallway, and into the room beyond, trailing several pots and pans behind it, as well as the plug from the kitchen sink.
Angus picked himself up quickly and darted into the steam-filled room. “Uncle Max?”
“Ah, good morning, good morning, dear nephew!” came his uncle's cheerful-sounding voice in reply, and Angus found him under the kitchen table.
Uncle Max had large amounts of bushy white hair sprouting in great tufts from both his eyebrows, the ends of his nostrils, and the insides of his ears. This morning his face was also shining like a boiled lobster; the arms had been ripped violently from his coveralls and were trailing on the floor behind him like a pair of soggy blue pythons.
“Er . . . is everything all right?”Angus repeated, kneeling on the floor beside him. “Do you want me to call out the fire brigade again?”
“Everything is quite under control, my dear Angus.” Uncle Max beamed. “Just a few minor hiccups with my latest invention.”
Angus glanced nervously over his shoulder. What Uncle Max referred to as “a few minor hiccups” often resulted in dangerous explosions, sudden fires, and broken bones. Just last summer, an arctic ice smasher had broken Angus's arm in two places, and he'd spent weeks in a cast. And this summer was already proving to be much more perilous.
“What was that thing that knocked me over, anyway?” he asked warily as the sound of splintering furniture drifted across the hallway.
“That was the automatic steam-powered blizzard catcher,” Uncle Max said, smoothing out his singed eyebrows. “And it's one of my more brilliant inventions, even if I do say so myself.”
Angus frowned. “But . . . why's it gone running off?”
“The blizzard catcher has been programmed to forage for its own fuel,” Uncle Max explained with the air of a proud dog owner talking about his favorite wolfhound. “Unfortunately, it's already consumed a large quantity of hot tea this morning, not to mention my best pair of slippers, and it now appears to be letting off some excess steam. I would appreciate it if you didn't mention this to your mother,” he continued, showing signs of real concern for the first time. “After what happened with the arctic ice smasher last summer . . . well, she may never speak to me again if she hears that another one of my inventions is causing trouble.”
Angus grinned. “I promise I won't tell her anything.”
Luckily for Uncle Max, Angus's mum and dad, Alabone and Evangeline McFangus, both worked in London and only visited him at the Windmill during the school holidays and on the occasional weekend. He had never been entirely sure what his parents did for a living, except that they worked for some big government department, and their jobs involved large amounts of boring paperwork. Although once, in the middle of a very wintry January, his mum had arrived at the Windmill with severely sunburned kneecaps. Her shoes had also left a mysterious trail of golden sand behind her wherever she went, and when Angus had pointed this out she'd tried to convince himârather shiftilyâthat the exotic-looking grains had merely come from the sandbox in the local park.
They'd also given him some extremely odd Christmas presents over the years, including a pair of reindeer antlers from Lapland and some hairy camel's-milk chocolates. All of which had made Angus wonder, more than once, if there was something his mum and dad weren't telling him.
The arrival of his eleventh birthday present, on the fifth of August, had done nothing to dispel his suspicions. Posted in Iceland, and wrapped up tightly in sheep's wool and straw, it had turned out to be a large chunk of black volcanic rock. Angus longed to quiz his mum and dad in person about which volcano this impressive rock had come from. But it had been more than three weeks since their last letter, and Angus had started to worry.
They'd never gone this long before without visiting or phoning to check that Uncle Max was feeding him enough brussels sprouts. They'd never forgotten to ring him on his birthday, either, and he still felt a sting of disappointment whenever he thought about the fact that this year, the phone had remained silent.
An ominous clatter of pots and pans interrupted his thoughts at that precise moment, and he spun around to see the blizzard catcher scuttling back into the kitchen. Large jets of hot steam were now belching out of its pipes, as if dozens of kettles were all coming to a boil at once. Angus backed away from it speedily, before it could poach him like an egg.
“Bother!” Uncle Max exclaimed, grinning and not looking in the least bit bothered. “I think the time may have come to ask the Budleigh Otterstone fire brigade for their assistance after all, if you wouldn't mind telephoning them, my dear nephew.”
“Oh . . . right, yeah,” Angus said, trying to sneak past the blizzard catcher without attracting its attention.
“It might also be a good idea to mention that it's something of an emergency,” his uncle added, his excited face just visible through the thick clouds of steam. “Judging by the smells it's now making, I'd say the blizzard catcher has been guzzling down cold tomato soup, chocolate liqueurs, and wooden matches and is in imminent danger of exploding.”
Angus abandoned all attempts at creeping quietly and flung himself across the kitchen, hoping to reach the telephone in the hallway before his uncle's invention went into total meltdown. He'd barely managed to grasp the doorknob, however, whenâ
BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM . . .
Somewhere in the village of Budleigh Otterstone, Mr. Wilfred Pyke tripped and fell into a wheelbarrow full of manure. Angus was blasted off his feet and thrown clean across the kitchen, where he landed with a thump, feeling like he'd just been flattened by a herd of buffalo. He sat shakily on the floor, with large purple blobs dancing before his eyes, and for a split second, he even caught a brief glimpse of the fire dragon that kept nudging its way into his dreams.
He shook the lingering image from his head and stared around the devastated room. Cold tomato soup dripped from the kitchen walls like an eruption of volcanic lava. The pantry door had been ripped violently off its hinges.
“Now
that
is what I call a highly successful morning,” Uncle Max declared, crawling out from under the wreckage of the smoldering table, his hair now a shocking shade of orange.
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Angus spent the rest of the day knee-deep in tomato soup, helping Uncle Max scoop great bucketloads of the stuff off the kitchen walls. It also took ages to pry the melted blizzard catcher off the floor, to which it had attached itself like a limpet, and he didn't get to bed until well past eleven o'clock that night.
He was awakened by the doorbell ringing downstairs. Angus blinked groggily at the luminous alarm clock on his bedside table and frownedâit was ten past five in the morning.
The sound of muffled voices came drifting up the stairs. Angus heard a door opening directly beneath his bedroom, and then the conversation faded. He hesitated, wondering if Uncle Max was in trouble with the Budleigh Otterstone fire brigade for causing yet another explosion and if he might be in need of some help. There was only one way to find out.
He crept quietly out of bed, crawled across the floor on his hands and knees, and lifted the edge of the rug that covered the bare boards beneath. Several years ago, one of Uncle Max's other inventions (a self-inflating portable bathtub) had exploded in the middle of the living room, creating a small hole in the ceiling directly below Angus's bedroom. So far, Angus had only used this spy hole twiceâonce to discover what his mum and dad had bought him for his birthday, and another time to see the end of a scary film about flesh-eating zombies that Uncle Max had refused to let him watch . . . although afterward, in the long dark hours of the night, Angus wasn't sure this had been such a good idea.
He eased the rug back again now, being careful not to make any noise, and pressed his eye to the hole. Uncle Max was standing directly beneath him dressed in a pair of red flannel pajamas and a purple-spotted bathrobe, both of which clashed horribly with his soup-stained hair. And hovering in the doorway, wearing a long, weatherproof yellow coat and black rubber boots, was the most astonishing person Angus had ever seen in his life.