‘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.
Delta Theta
Until that moment, Ralph had always imagined that towering genius would be matched by height. But even with regard to his miniaturised state, the professor would have stood little taller than the average post box. Fidgety and nervous, he eyed Ralph suspiciously, a task not made particularly easy by a serious tic below one eye. The skin there was twitching like a rabbit’s nose. Ralph stuck it for a second then had to look away, fearful of some kind of strobe effect.
From a shirt pocket stained by yellow chalk dust, Ambrose Collonges pulled out a pair of unruly spectacles and wired them around his cup-handle ears. He leant forward, pupils splashing wide open, eyes the colour of wetted slates. ‘A boy. What joy. Another toy for Jack.’
Now it was Ralph’s turn to back away in fear. ‘Please. Don’t hurt me. I k-know who you are. I’m not your enemy. My name’s R-Ralph.’
‘R-Ralph!’ Collonges barked. ‘Ralph! Ralph! Rrr-alph!’ Scratching his ear like a flea-bitten squirrel, he approached with a half-maniacal leer, not so much a scientist as a mad scientist’s assistant (the one who was always called ‘Igor’ in the movies).
Thump. Ralph found himself up against a heavy wooden door, similar in size and thickness and shape to the one they’d stopped by on the landing of the house. He rocked the handle. It was firmly locked. No key. No escape from the mad professor. Collonges stretched out his hairy hands, raising his chains to the level of Ralph’s neck. Calamity. The Frankenstein monster had been unleashed and the innocent victim had nowhere to run.
But just then, the air between them shimmered and Miriam, the dainty Miriam, appeared. The professor immediately shrank into a corner, the shackles rattling against his bones.
Miriam put her hands on her hips and frowned. ‘You see, Rafe? You see what a dreadful tangle he makes?’ She pointed to an overturned writing desk, a broken chair, a full-sized matchbox (presumably a bed), an upset bucket of human waste and a couple of half-eaten hundreds and thousands.
‘The ghost! The ghost!’ Collonges wailed.
‘Oh, boo!’ went Miriam, to shut him up.
The professor jumped like a wounded gazelle, worrying his hands underneath his chin in the way that a hamster might bunch its paws.
‘Miriam, you’ve got to get me out of here,’ said Ralph. Two minutes of his hour were already up. And his mum would be going frantic with worry. He thought about shouting out to her or Tom (Tom: was he alive or not
?), but even if they’d heard him, could they get him out?
Miriam, meanwhile, swished towards a wall. ‘Look here, Rafe. What did I tell you? Wiggly, squiggly scribbles, all over.’
Ralph had noticed the writing on the walls and was faintly curious to know what it meant. Steering well clear of the terrified prisoner, he crunched through some pieces of shattered window pane to investigate the doodles a little more closely. They were chalked up in every available space, like hieroglyphics on a mummy’s tomb. Complex scientific equations. Ralph recognised some letters from the Greek alphabet and one or two familiar mathematical symbols, but a monkey might just as well have written the maths for all the sense it made to him.
‘All day,’ Miriam chuntered. ‘Rattle, scribble; scribble, rattle. It’s enough to drive a girl to bubbly, Rafe.’ And from some everlasting cupboard of ghostly props she produced a long-stemmed, fluted glass and sipped what appeared to be champagne from it.
Ralph looked at the equations again and this time noticed something unusual. There was a pattern to them. They weren’t the random squiggles that Miriam seemed to think: a whole block was repeated over and over. He circled one example with a piece of chalk. ‘What does this mean, Professor?’
Collonges lifted the flap of his shirt and scratched at his sore-skinned, bag o’bones ribs. ‘Particle redistribution,’ he babbled, ‘reversible functions. Converging parameters. Counter iterations. Delta theta.’
In the car-boot sale of dumb brain cells, Ralph suddenly had a major clearout. Delta theta. That’s what the old man had been wailing all this time. Not ‘Belt the Keeper’ or ‘Melt the heater’. Delta theta. But what could it mean?
He stepped nearer. Collonges twitched his chains. ‘It’s OK, I just want to talk,’ Ralph said. ‘I know about transgeneration. I read in the paper how you proved your theories by moving a potato from one plate to another.’
Collonges nodded, his eyes almost bouncing off the inside of his specs. In a voice full of fearful memories he said, ‘A spud. A spud. He was up to no good.’
‘You mean Jack?’
‘Jack! Jack! Stabbed me in the back!’
‘He saw you, didn’t he? That’s what happened. He sneaked into your laboratory and watched the tests. Then he stole the watch. Didn’t he?’
The professor beat his fists against his knees. ‘Into the dog bowl, whole,’ he wailed.
‘And then threatened to feed you alive to Knocker? If you didn’t teach him how to use it?’
Collonges let out a high-pitched moan. In the rafters above him, something stirred. Ralph shuddered and raised his gaze. The sloping beams were alive with bats. Bats. Oh, good. This house got better all the time.
‘Why is he keeping you in chains?’ he pressed. And how had Jack managed that, anyway? he wondered. The chains were bolted firmly to the wall. It would have been impossible for Jack’s big hands to shackle the professor after he’d been miniaturised. So was he chained to the wall before he was zapped? Had Jack taken him to the house in Yorkshire? Had they gone there together as business partners, where Jack had done the dirty on him?
The tic began to drive Collonges’ eye again. Something wasn’t right here, Ralph decided. But for now he let it pass. In fifty-five minutes’ time, it wouldn’t matter who was misleading who: piranhas weren’t fussy who they ate.
‘Professor, I’ve something to show you,’ he said and closed his hand around the stone in his pocket.
‘Rafe, the ogre’s watching,’ said Miriam.
Ralph glanced through the broken window. The great round eye of the magnifying glass was trained on the tower room. If Jack saw the stone, that would be that. ‘Miriam, have you got curtains?’
‘Why, yes,’ she said and turning into vapour, she whooshed into the rafters, displacing all the bats. They took flight in one gigantic flock.
‘Miriam!’ Ralph complained, flapping and ducking and falling to his knees. Next time Mr Gifford, his Drama teacher, asked him to imagine how a teaspoon felt in a mug of swirling tea leaves, he would be able to draw upon the perfect life experience. He covered his ears to block out the squeals the bats were emitting and prayed they wouldn’t land on him and suck his veins dry (or worse, turn into a vampire army).
The first thunk-thunk erased that fear. Glancing up, he saw the bats clustering in the bay, settling flat against the window panes, shutting out the light and even covering up the holes. They were forming a living quilt. Curtains.
Ducking as the last bat strafed his collar, Ralph turned quickly to Ambrose Collonges. ‘What does this do?’ He pulled out the stone.
‘Oh, Rafe,’ cried Miriam, as the stone sent out a pulse of light and she had to disappear to dodge being zapped.
A sticky trail of frothy saliva trickled off Professor Collonges’ lips. The tic below his eye slowed down, then stopped, and he was at Ralph’s shoulder in a bow-legged stride. He snatched up the stone and held it to his eye.
‘I found it in Jack’s fridge,’ Ralph said, slightly concerned that the old man had mugged him. He tried (politely) to take the stone back, but Collonges buried it inside his shirt as if he were protecting a week-old kitten. Its hard rays splintered the loose-knit cotton, lending him a kind of electrified look.
‘Can we use it?’ Ralph asked. ‘It did something to Miriam—’
‘Rafe, you’re such a cad,’ came her disembodied voice.
‘If I don’t give it back to Jack in an hour, he’s going to drown us. Do you understand?’
Collonges ground his teeth. His eyes slewed sideways towards the wall. He touched a finger to the boxed equation, pressing so hard that his knuckle cracked. ‘Coat hanger,’ he hissed.
‘Pardon?’ said Ralph.
‘Coat hanger,’ Collonges snapped, making a spiralling upward movement.
Ralph thought about this. ‘Like an aerial, you mean?’
The professor squeaked and did a little shuffle.
Ralph responded with a long, slow nod. ‘Anything else?’
‘Mirrors!’ said Collonges, glaring at him wildly.
Ralph chewed his lip. ‘My mum’s got a mirror – in her bag.’
Collonges batted his fists in excitement. ‘Wire,’ he snorted.
‘Easy,’ said Ralph. He’d seen a large reel of it somewhere in the house.
‘Lenses,’ Collonges challenged him loudly.
‘You’re wearing them,’ said Ralph. He pointed to the specs.
The old man jumped as if a nettle had stung him. ‘A box! A box! For ten bundles of socks!’
Ralph bracketed his hands about a foot apart. ‘About this big?’
The professor’s eyes bulged with triumph and delight.
Ralph turned a half-circle and shouted to the rafters. ‘Miriam, where are you?’
‘I’m not coming out till you put that thing away!’
‘Miriam, I need you.’
‘Here, dahling,’ she said, manifesting at his side in a flash.
Ralph pointed to the door. ‘You’ve got to get me out of here.’
‘But Rafe, this is the best room in the house. It captures the sunlight in the afternoons.’
‘Miriam, please, this is important. Walk through the door and go and find my mum. Tell her I’m here. Tell Neville he’s got to break the doors down.’
‘Oh Rafe, don’t be such a ruffian,’ she said. ‘Use the key, like everyone else.’
‘There’s a key?’
Miriam raised the mat. There on the floor was a large, old-fashioned key. Ralph gritted his teeth. What was that line that actors always used: ‘Never work with children or animals’? Someone ought to add ‘ghosts’ to the list.
He snatched the key up and opened the door. Within seconds, he was pounding down a spiralling flight of steps to unlock the second door out to the landing. He shouldered it open, bursting through, covered in cobwebs and spiders. The sound brought several miniones running. Among them were Penny and Neville Gibbons.
‘Oh Ralph,’ Penny cried. ‘We thought h
e’d killed you.’ She swept him madly into her arms. She was shaking and Ralph could taste blood on her neck. He didn’t like to think about what she’d been through. Even so, he squeezed himself clear.
‘Mum, let me go. We don’t have much time.’ He touched her face to comfort her. With her jeans badly ripped and her hair exploding out of her clip, she looked like a wild-eyed cavewoman. ‘Jack’s given us an hour to find the stone. If we don’t give it back to him, he’ll flood the tank.’
‘Have you lost it?’ she asked, looking frightened.
Ralph shook his head. ‘The professor’s got it.’
Neville squinted up the stairs. In the mayhem, he’d lost his glasses. Without them, he looked rather child-like and vulnerable. ‘Is that him, in t’chains? Chap who made t’transgenerator?’
Ralph nodded. ‘Jack’s been holding him prisoner. He’ll save us. I know he will. All he needs is some wire and a mirror and a coat hanger and—’
‘What for?’ asked Penny, cutting him off.
Ralph stared at his mum with a physicist’s eye. ‘We’re going to build a new device,’ he said.
Betrayal
‘To do what?’ said a voice.
Ralph whipped around. Kyle Salter was standing at the back of the group. He banged a spear against the landing and the miniones parted to let him through. Stripped to the waist like a Navajo brave, the bully had never looked quite so scary. On his head and chest were lines of warpaint, drawn from a mixture of blood and charcoal. In his eyes was a hungry desire for combat.
‘You gave the stone away?’
Ralph felt his knees buckle. ‘Where’s Tom?’ he begged his mum.
‘Dead,’ said Kyle.
Penny wheeled on him. ‘He is not. Don’t say that.’
‘Good as,’ sneered Salter. ‘He’s broken. Useless. He’s in the next room, laid out like a stiff. Wally’s done his back in, Spud’s as bad, and Nev needs a guide dog without his specs. I’m in charge now, Rafe.’