weekly newspaper, the Daily Kobb, which floated on a puddle. On the front page Casper could still read the headline, the story that everyone had been talking about (until Mayor Rattsbulge announced the opening of his bus shelter):
Below the headline was a picture of Blight Manor, a once-great mansion, now old and crumbling, with missing windows, half a roof, and walls that had buckled and bent more than a bent buckle.
The Blight dynasty existed long before Corne-on-the-Kobb had even been thought of. A baron of Blight ruled the Kobb Valley after the Norman Conquest, and the family have held the seat with their cold-knuckled fists ever since. But in the years that passed, the Blights’ hold on the Kobb Valley slipped, their lands shrank and their finances dwindled. The last Lord Blight died under mysterious circumstances – after his daughter poisoned him. It’s not that mysterious, really. Now Lady Lobelia Blight and her daughter, Anemonie Blight, resided in Blight Manor, desperately clutching at the embers of their once-great empire. With the sale of Blight Manor, the lordship would slip away and the estate disappear, leaving nothing in its place but a nesting-place for the pigeons.
A steel-capped black leather boot slammed down on the soggy paper, splashing a muddy puddle all over Casper’s trousers.
“Oy!” Casper jumped back to avoid more wetting. Then he looked up to see the owner of the boot… and shivered. “Anemonie Blight. What d’you want?”
“It’s all lies, Candlewacks!” shrieked Anemonie, her oh-so-noble pointy nose red with shame. “How many times do I have to punch you before you understand that?”
Casper shuffled back further as Anemonie advanced, fists clenched. “Look, I don’t care how much money you have.”
“Lots of money!” she shouted. She had long dark hair and a threatening squint. “Rooms full of it, in fact. An’ if you say we don’t, I’ll bite you.”
“OK!” Casper held up his hands. “I believe you! You’re still rich.”
Anemonie stopped and smirked, but her eyes stayed steely cold. “Good. Make sure you tell everyone.” As she turned to leave, she spotted a two-pence piece on the ground and bent down to snatch it like a pigeon to a breadcrumb. She straightened up and looked around to check nobody had seen.
Casper pretended to watch a tree.
Once Anemonie had stomped round the corner, Casper gave a sigh. However much he despised the little bully and her pointy nose, watching Anemonie’s downfall was a pitiful sight. A few generations back, a Blight’s packed lunch would contain caviar sandwiches and cartons of alcohol-free champagne. But now Anemonie was eating free school lunches and getting caught stealing cabbages from Mrs Trimble’s shop.
The crowd from the ceremony was filtering away gradually, although many villagers had formed a long line stretching from the bus shelter and away down the road. As old Betty Woons trundled by, she gave Casper a knowing wink. She always did. It was unnerving.
“Casper! Casper!” A sooty-haired, lumpy chap in a blue boiler suit and sponge shoes came galumphing out of a garage at the end of the street. He spotted Casper, gasped, and galumphed in his direction. He only fell over twice on the way, which was a new record. “Casper, I did it! I really did it!”
“What did you do, Lamp?”
Lamp Flannigan, Casper’s best and only friend, was red-faced and puffing from his run. He was eleven, the same age as Casper, with a dongle of a nose, wide, round eyes and a funny way of standing that always made him look as if he was about to sit down. He also had toes that glowed in the dark ever since he let a small family of fireflies live in his shoes, and the world’s first elephant-repellent boiler suit. Lamp was an inventor by trade… but we’ll get to that.
“I did my Time Toaster! Look…”
Lamp crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue with concentration as he fumbled around in the pocket of his boiler suit. Finally his eyes lit up and he pulled out a blackened, crumbling piece of toast.
Casper waited for the toast to do something amazing.
It didn’t.
“So…” Casper shrugged. “It’s just toast.”
“Not just toast, Casper,” Lamp grinned, relishing the words on the tip of his tongue. “This is toast from the future.”
Casper was a good fifteen centimetres taller than Lamp – and a good fifteen centimetres better at spelling, for what it’s worth. Casper was a dab hand at sums, a keen reader and he could list the kings and queens from 1066 to the present. Lamp could just about list the numbers from one to two, but he struggled to open books the right way up and he didn’t even know when history was. Casper’s clothes were scruffy hand-me-downs from his dad’s rock-band phase, while Lamp only wore his boiler suit. When it got dirty, he wore it backwards to save on washing. The two made an unlikely pair, but because they’d saved the village three times since June, and it was only a quarter past eleven on the sixth of October, nobody was complaining.
Lamp’s one and only strong point was inventing, but, boy, was he good at it. He’d invented just-add-water moustaches, hind wheels for donkeys and a torch that glowed dark in the day. The thing is, when Lamp Flannigan says a piece of toast is from the future, you’d do well to believe him. He’s not normally wrong about that sort of thing.
Lamp’s house sat at number 1 Corne Approach, a charming two-bedroom property, just a stone’s throw from the new bus stop, complete with a garage, good access to the town centre and stunning views into the window of the house across the road.
But who’d want to look outside when the interior held such wonders? Lamp’s garage was dark, gloomy and absolutely wicked. Here, amongst piles of scrap metal and buckets of leftover doorknobs, Lamp let his inventions take form. Today, at centre stage on the workbench, sat a brushed-steel, four-slot toaster with a dozen metal springs boinging outwards at jaunty angles, each with a watch face glued to the end. Most of the watches were cracked, bent or missing vital numbers, like three etc. The hands weren’t turning, either, so Casper guessed they were just for decoration. Multicoloured wires sprouted from inside the toaster and wound about in scruffy coils, meeting again as they stuffed inside a digital alarm clock strapped on to the toaster’s front face. A series of buttons ripped from Lamp’s mum’s cardigans had been installed in a long line below, each labelled with things like SEKUND, MINIT, and MUMF.“It’s my Time Toaster.” Lamp proudly patted it, making the little watch faces wobble. “It steals a piece of toast from any toaster through time and space.”
“Oh…” Casper let that flow over him. “But why would you want toast from anywhere through time and space?”
“If you’re hungry, of course.”
“Couldn’t you just make some real toast?”
Lamp blinked. “Didn’t think of that. But listen, this is way better.” He pulled out the crumbling slice he’d shown Casper earlier. “Sniff this.”
He did. It smelt of toast.
“See?” grinned Lamp. He took a bite. “Mm, futurey.”
Casper waited patiently while Lamp invented a jam magnet.
When the toast was finished and the jam wiped off the walls, Lamp licked his lips and said, “So. Fancy a slice?”
“I... er…”
“Me too!” Lamp bounced across the garage to his Time Toaster and twizzled some buttons. “Ready?”
Casper