sleep,” she warbled.
“Here here,” sang Clemmie Answorth, a slightly younger, nervous-looking woman, completely peppered with bruises and still clutching her teddy. “What with all that racket, I fell out of my bed.” She did that a lot.
Mayor Rattsbulge wheezed and clutched his chest. “Ladies, please.” He leant on a lamp-post, but it buckled under his weight. “I’ve only just got here. Now, what’s the alarm?”
Mitch McMassive, the tiny landlord of the village pub The Horse and Horse, stuck his little hand in the air and squeaked, “Look, mayor.” He trotted forward to the heavy wooden door and gave its brass handle an almighty shove. It groaned open groggily on its rusty hinges.
The bolder villagers bundled through the door into the blackness, and tripped straight over an empty wheelchair. Clemmie Answorth screeched and tinkled through a glass cabinet, while all around dull thuds told stories of foreheads meeting walls and coming off the worse.
Audrey Snugglepuss fumbled for a light switch in the dark. Her first attempt found Mitch McMassive’s button nose, which snicked smartly out of joint and failed to make the room any lighter. She finally found the switch and the vault was plunged into dazzling amber light.
“My nose!” honked Mitch McMassive, through a crimson torrent running down his face. “I can smell blood!”
Betty Woons blinked awake and chuckled at all of the bodies rolling around her. “Oh, hello, dears,” she warbled. “What are we all doing on the floor? Sleepover, is it?”
Mayor Rattsbulge was the first to notice. “Oh, my sweet Lord…” he whispered, prodding a trembling finger towards the cabinet. “It’s… gone…”
Clemmie Answorth spluttered. “The sword’s gone?”
“Who used it last?”
“Well, I didn’t take it,” said Audrey Snugglepuss.
“What about my nose?” squeaked Mitch McMassive.
“SHUT UP!” bellowed the mayor. “Shut up and find it. Find my sword!”
The pyjama-clad crowd screamed and ran out into the moonlit square, searching under doormats and tipping over flowerpots. Meanwhile, back in the vault, village gardener Sandy Landscape (who’d watched three whole detective shows on telly so he knew what he was talking about) edged closer to the cabinet. “’Ere… mayor…”
“What is it?” sobbed Mayor Rattsbulge from behind his gravy-stained hanky.
“I found me summink. Look yer eyes on that.” Sandy’s grubby fingers reached into the cabinet and pulled out something black and wiry. He held it to the light, and gasped.
It was a single cat’s whisker.
“What is your name?”
“Casper Candlewacks.”
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“What is your favourite flavour of ice cream?”
Casper gritted his teeth and winced. “Mushroom ripple?”
KABOOM.
Clods of scorched yolk exploded over the garage, covering Casper, Lamp and every exposed garage surface in a stinking slimy film of egg.
“It worked!” cried Lamp.
Casper smeared the eggy grot from his face and grimaced. “Sort of…”
“Too powerful?”
“Too powerful.”
Lamp Flannigan scratched his chimney-brush hair, pulled a spanner from his boiler suit and set to work adjusting a nut deep inside the contraption.
As his friend tinkered away, Casper Candlewacks sat down on the floor and grinned to himself. Out of all the things to do on a baking hot August afternoon, he could think of nothing better than sitting in his best friend’s grimy garage, working on their latest invention and blasting a few dozen eggs to a few dozen smithereens. Casper had spent most of his summer in Lamp’s garage. It’s not that he didn’t like his own house, but things had got a little hectic recently.
Casper was a blonde-haired, keen-eyed scruffbag of an eleven-year-old. He didn’t have any superpowers, he hadn’t been to space and he’d not even slain a single vampire. In fact, until two months ago, Casper’s life was about as exciting as a six-hour guided tour of the Kobb Valley carrier bag factory and shop (where you can buy all the carrier bags you want, but they never have anything to put them in). But then he poisoned a magician, got his village cursed, got attacked by a flock of man-pecking pigeons, survived a high-speed road accident, swam through a sea of bubbles, destroyed a coriander festival and rode home on the back of a Shetland pony just in time to save his dad from certain death. (Apparently there’s a really good book about it too, but I haven’t read it.) You’d think that such heroic actions from such an ordinary boy would be rewarded with a medal, a national holiday or at least a pat on the back and a flapjack, but no, no, and one for luck – no. The idiots of Corne-on-the-Kobb ignored Casper Candlewacks like a bad smell in a lift. He could do brainy things like reading and writing; he could tie his own shoelaces and walk in straight lines. These things were beyond Corne-on-the-Kobb’s villagers, so they resented Casper and pretended he didn’t exist.
“Any more eggs?” asked Lamp.
“Loads.”
The latest additions to Lamp’s garage were Mavis and Bessie, two prize egg-laying hens. They had arrived unannounced at the front door two weeks ago, carrying little suitcases and claiming to be distant relatives. Lamp’s mum let them stay. All day long they strutted around eating grain, pecking visitors and laying dozens upon dozens of eggs. In fact, they laid so many eggs that every one of Lamp’s inventions over the last fortnight had involved the blasted things – be it the remote-controlled bacon detector or the hover-omelette.
If you hadn’t guessed, Lamp Flannigan was an inventor. He was also a short, podgy boy with a scrub of soot-black hair and a dongle of a nose that would be a fantastic door knocker, if it wasn’t made of skin and currently attached to a face. Lamp was an idiot too, but he wasn’t like any other idiot you’ll ever meet. His idiocy went off the scale, went all the way round and came out on the other end. Lamp thought in ways that normal people couldn’t (Casper suspected Lamp’s brain was made out of a substance not unlike fizzy mashed potato), so he spent his time building things: amazing, inexplicable things that you’d probably call impossible. Two months ago he’d driven Casper to Upper Crustenbury on a buggy that ran on washing-up liquid. Today, he was inventing a lie detector that used the power of dishonesty to boil an egg. It turns out, Casper had discovered, that inventing egg-boiling lie detectors is a messy old process.
KABOOM! Another egg-splosion rocked the garage, exuding a cloud of stinking yellow smoke that insulted Casper’s nostrils and sent Mavis and Bessie squawking back into their coop and slamming the door.
“Hello,” a mystery voice said.
Casper shrieked and whisked round, but the egg smog was thick and he couldn’t see a thing. “Who’s that?”
“My name’s Daisy,” the voice said. “Pleased to meet you.”
As the fug settled, Casper began to make out the shape of a girl, about his height, standing at the entrance to the garage. She had brown curly hair, big green eyes and the most beautiful smile Casper had ever seen. She wore a flowery green frock with a ribbon in the middle.
Mavis and Bessie poked their beaks out of the coop and clucked jealously at the intruder.
“What