Sally Startup
The Wavyside Beetle
Bees’ Nest Books
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events in this story are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
First Published 2011 by Bridge House Publishing in the anthology Hipp-O-Dee-Doo-Dah
Copyright 2011 Sally Startup
The right of Sally Startup to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Wavyside Beetle
Wavyside School is right next to the edge of Wavyways Wood. Some of the pupils live in Wavyside town. But Mortimer Darkling lives in the wood, and walks to school along winding paths beneath tall, dark trees. Very rarely does anything not human make its way out of the complicated depths of Wavyways Wood and into the town.
One morning, in class, Mortimer noticed a beetle climbing up the leg of the table in front. Ruby Withering, Indigo Wobble and Felix Mumbling were sitting there, doing Maths. The beetle was about 5cm long. Its folded, shiny wings were dark brown with blue stripes. The stalks of its two feathery antennae poked forward from the top of its head.
Mortimer nudged his best friend Cuthbert Strangely. Cuthbert saw the beetle just as it crawled onto Ruby’s Maths book.
“Aaaahhh!” Ruby shrieked, very loudly.
Everyone in the class stood up to try and see what had upset her.
“Miss! Miss! There’s a huge beetle, miss!” cried Felix.
“Sit down everyone!” shouted their teacher, Miss Danger.
Mortimer couldn’t see the beetle any more, but he noticed that Ruby seemed to have two Maths books.
“Miss, I think...” he started to say.
“Not now, Mortimer,” said Miss Danger. “Anyone who is still out of their seat by the time I count to three can spend their lunch break tidying the school rubbish!”
The town’s rubbish collection cart was broken. It hadn’t been able to collect any rubbish from anywhere, for over a month. Some of the families living in Wavyways Wood had offered to help, but the townspeople had refused. They said the cart would be mended just as soon as the spare parts had arrived from the city. Meanwhile, every rubbish bin in the town was full to overflowing. At school, pupils were given the job of emptying the class bins into a big bin outside. But the big bin was now so full of smelly, rotting rubbish that no one wanted to go near it.
“One... two...” began Miss Danger, and everyone hurried to sit down.
Then one of Ruby’s Maths books suddenly lifted up into the air, fluttering its pages, and making Ruby squeal. Miss Danger narrowed her eyes and glared at the flying Maths book, which flapped itself over her head and landed on a computer.
“It’s a Shape-shifting Beetle, Miss,” Mortimer explained. “It must have come here from the wood. I knew Ruby didn’t have two Maths books.”
“Eugh, squash it!” cried Ruby.
“Hit it with the Encyclopaedia, Miss,” suggested Indigo Wobble.
“No!” yelled Cuthbert, who lived in Wavyways Wood, like Mortimer.
“Be quiet, all of you,” warned Miss Danger, “or it’s rubbish-tidying for everyone. Of course we mustn’t squash it, Ruby and Indigo. Especially not at Wavyside School, where we are tolerant of the strange and unusual.”
“Sssstrange,” hissed Indigo, looking round at Cuthbert.
Miss Danger didn’t hear him. She was staring at the computer table, where there were now two computer mice. One of them had begun to move around on its own. The computer screen lit up, and there were small clicking noises, as the mouse began to give instructions to the computer.
“Wow,” breathed Cuthbert, close to Mortimer’s ear.
Everyone in the class watched the computer screen, trying to see what the beetle-mouse was making the computer do. A picture of a rubbish tip appeared on the screen.
“It’s on the Internet!” cried Herbert Weatherbutt.
“That’s just an accident,” said Henrietta Trice. “I was looking at that page earlier. Miss Danger asked me to find out about recycling.”
Miss Danger began to move slowly nearer and nearer to the computer table. When she was close enough, she lunged towards the beetle-mouse and grabbed it. As her fingers closed around it, the mouse changed back into a beetle and flew out between her fingers. Then it went up towards the ceiling lights, its blue striped wings shimmering.
“Oh no! It’s going to hurt itself,” gasped Henrietta.
“Herbert, please go and open a window,” said Miss Danger, “so that it can get outside.”
But the Shape-shifting Beetle didn’t seem to want to go outside. Instead, it landed on top of a tall cupboard, where it crawled away into the dark and dusty shadows.
“Oh,” Henrietta sighed. “I can’t see it any more. Miss, couldn’t we keep it, like a class pet?”
“It’s a wild creature,” answered Miss Danger. “It would be cruel to keep it shut up like a pet. But I wonder why it has come to visit our school this morning.”
There was a nasty squelchy noise. Mortimer stared hard at the top of the cupboard. He thought he saw something moving up there, but he couldn’t be sure.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever cleaned the top of that cupboard,” whispered Cuthbert.
“There could be all sorts of stuff on it. I saw Indigo throw a toffee up there, once.”
As they watched, a sticky, bubbling brown goo began to drip down from the top of the cupboard and run down the front of the door. Before it reached the ground, the squelching goo slipped through the thin gap at the edge of the closed door, disappearing inside the cupboard.
“Eugh!” said Ruby. “Look what it’s doing now. It’ll ruin our spare books and our art paper.”
Cuthbert put his hand up. “Miss, I could...”
“No thank you, Cuthbert,” replied Miss Danger, very quickly.
The last of the brown goo disappeared into the cupboard with a sticky sucking noise. Then Mortimer thought he could hear rustling, bumping, chomping sounds coming from inside.
“Mortimer Darkling and Cuthbert Strangely, can either of you tell me what Shape-shifting Beetles like to eat?” asked Miss Danger.
“Wood,” Cuthbert answered, straight away. “Dead twigs and branches.”
“Oh dear,” said Miss Danger, “that’s what I was afraid of.”
Suddenly, there was a loud noise, like whumph. Dust seemed to fill the classroom, so that everyone started to cough and rub their eyes. By the time the dust had begun to settle, and some of it had drifted out of the open window, Mortimer realised that the cupboard had gone, and so had all the paper and books inside.
“Also,” said Cuthbert, “it eats very fast.”
Mortimer, and everyone else in the class, stood up and peered over the desks. There was nothing left of the cupboard but a pile of multicoloured dust, made up of all the different colours of paper that had been stored inside it. Sitting in the middle of the dust was the beetle, back in its own form. It was exactly the same size as it had been when Mortimer first saw it.
“Why isn’t it bigger?” he gasped. “It’s just eaten a whole cupboard full of paper.”
“That’s how the shape-shifting gift works,” Cuthbert explained.
“We should kill it, Miss,” squealed Amber. “It just ate all our books and paper.”
“Yea, and what will it do next?” added Felix.
Suddenly the whole class was discussing just exactly what the beetle might do next.
“There’s loads of wood in the school, Miss.”
“And paper.”
“There’s wood in the building. What if the beetle eats it and makes the school fall down?”
“Yea! Great.”
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“But what if it eats all the wood in the whole world?”
“And paper...”
Cuthbert nudged Mortimer with his shoulder.
“I know a way to get the beetle back to the wood without hurting it.”
Mortimer frowned.
“We’re not allowed to ...you know... in school.”
“But this is an emergency. And I’d only be in school for a minute. After that, I’d be in the wood.”
Just then, Miss Danger clapped her hands, to get everyone’s attention. It startled the beetle, which took off into the air and landed on the corner of her desk.
“Careful Miss, your desk’s made of wood,” someone said.
“It might eat the register,” suggested someone else.
“Quiet everyone,” said Miss Danger. “Cuthbert, please fetch The Book of Town and Woodland Wildlife. It’s next to the Encyclopaedia. And Henrietta, I’d like you to look up ‘Shape-shifting Beetles of Wavyways Wood’ on the Internet.”
Cuthbert fetched the book, and Miss Danger began to look in the index at the back. The beetle appeared to be watching her closely.
“Hmm,