Fizzlebert Stump (2 page)

‘Well, get in the caravan and go,' his mum said.

‘I'm going to go behind a tree,' Fizz said.

‘Oh, OK,' his mum said. ‘Don't go far.'

‘No, I'll just go over here,' Fizz said, pointing into the darkness by the side of the caravan.

‘Then straight back in,' his mum said.

‘Of course,' he said.

‘OK,' she said.

Fizz nipped into the dark, said ‘Hello' to a tree, had a pee and was about to walk back over to the caravan when a gust of wind rose up from nowhere, ran along the road, caught itself up on the caravan door and slammed it shut.

His mum and dad must have been listening out for such a noise, since as soon as it slammed, the car coughed into life, belched a cloud of exhaust fumes into the glow of the red lights at the back and slowly began to haul the caravan away.

‘Hey, stop!' Fizz shouted, running after them, but they didn't hear, and the last thing he saw was the caravan vanishing round a corner at the bottom of the hill and then the forest was in darkness.

Fizz watched the lights of his parents' car and caravan vanish with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach (it started higher up, but settled there). He wasn't afraid though, because he was sure they'd notice he was missing any minute now and turn the car round.

Any minute now.

He waited.

Any minute now …

After a while he sat down on a hump by the side of the road and waited some more.

He looked at the place on his wrist where a watch would've been had he been wearing a watch, which he wasn't.

Out of the dark between the trees Fizz could hear scritchings and scratchings and cricks and cracks as things moved about.
An owl hooted from far off. Mice scuttled for cover. And as he listened more closely, other noises wandered into his ears. Things he had no picture to go with: noises that could have been the snuffling of wolves or the creaking of a gate or the splash of a frog in a pond. In the dark it was hard to know what was what.

The moon tiptoed out from behind a cloud, making the road look silvery and the darkness slightly less dark.

Fizz looked at his wrist again. In the moonlight he could just make out the time. It was a hair after freckle o'clock, but he didn't feel very sleepy.

Looking up at the strip of sky that ran between the two stands of trees he could make out stars, here and there, speckled
on the blackness. And he noticed how the blackness of the sky wasn't absolute, wasn't as dark as he first thought, because the trees, the edges of the woods, were blacker still. The pitch-black silhouettes of the treetops hid the stars from view, and set the road-shaped strip of the sky into a dusty velvet grey contrast.

Enough of that beautiful descriptive writing, Fizz thought. His parents hadn't come back and he was an idiot to just hang around in the middle of a road through the middle of a forest in the middle of the night. He got up and started walking, heading in the direction the car had gone. It seemed the most sensible thing to do, and Fizz was nothing if not an occasionally most sensible boy. This way when his parents turned around and came
back for him they wouldn't have so far to drive, which, knowing his mum's car, could only be a good thing.

It was harder walking in the dark than he'd thought. He tried walking on the soft verge at the edge of the road, but he kept tripping over hummocks or hillocks or holes. (If you want to get an idea of how it was for Fizz, go out in the garden and try walking in the flowerbeds with your eyes shut.) Why walk, you might ask, on the bumpy grassy forest-edge, when there's a perfectly smooth road to be had? That's easily explained: Fizz's dressing gown was a dark blue and he knew better than to walk in the road in the dark wearing dark clothes. That's a sure recipe for getting knocked over. However, brushing acorns and beetles out of his hair, he gave in and began walking on the tarmac, but
he kept an especially wide ear open for cars coming up from behind (and eyes open for headlights up ahead).

And it was lucky he did, because not five minutes into his midnight hike he heard a distant rumble. It was hard to say if it was behind him or in front of him until he turned and saw the glow of headlights lighting the sky up at the head of the hill he was walking down.

He watched the wavering beams shining on the sparse wisps of cloud high overhead, and then the lights crested the hill: two headlights and, higher up, other lights on the top of a lorry's cab.

Besides the noise of the truck, there was another sound, though he couldn't pick it out, not on its own, not to say what it was. Was it a rattle, perhaps? A scratching?

One of Fizz's hobbies was reading books. In an earlier book I wrote about him, he visited a library and got so overexcited by the sight of so many books that he accidentally had an adventure (see
Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away From the Circus (and joined the library)
(Bloomsbury, 2012)). The sort of books he most liked were adventure stories in outer space or with dinosaurs or robots or ghosts (he had yet to find one about the ghost of a robot dinosaur haunting a space station, but he was hopeful).

Something he
had
once read, in a book of ghost stories, was about hitch-hiking, which is where a person stands at the side of the road and sticks out their thumb. A nice person in a car sees the person's thumb, knows they want a lift, stops the car, asks them where they're
going, says that they're going near there and gives the hitch-hiker a lift.

For a moment Fizzlebert stood on the verge with his thumb up, hoping the truck driver would see him and maybe give him a lift further up the road to where his parents were still trundling onwards, but then the thought jumped up in his mind, waving its arms, letting off flares and shouting in his face that the truck
wasn't slowing down
.

And, what was more, it hogged the whole width of this narrow country road. Trees on both sides were hitting the cab, making that scratching rattling sound, and Fizz realised that even where he stood, on the verge, would be in the lorry's path.

As the dazzling rack of lights hurtled towards him he did the only thing he could,
which was to take another step backwards, into the woods, out of the way.

At the last moment it seemed the driver caught sight of Fizz, because there was a long deep hoot of a horn, and the screeching squeal of brakes. The lorry hurtled forward, hardly slowing down at all, while the smell of burning rubber wafted through the woods.

(When no crunch of a collision came, the driver, supposing that he hadn't seen a boy after all, knowing that he certainly hadn't
hit
one, lifted his foot from the brake pedal, and continued on his way. Night driving, he knew from long experience, was a tiring job and at about two in the morning you sometimes saw things out of the corner of your eye which weren't really there. Maybe he'd caught the
glimpse of a startled deer, or maybe it had just been nothing.)

Soon the red glow of the truck's rear lights and the rumbling noise of its engine had gone and the forest was empty of the music of manmade machinery again. Only nature's night-time noises filled the place: the calls of frogs, the creak of trees in the breeze, those owls calling again and the scurrying of mice and voles in the undergrowth, the footsteps of foxes, etc.

But where was Fizz?

He'd taken a step back and had found his foot treading on empty space, like when you walk downstairs in the middle of the night and miscount the steps and, expecting the floor, you find there's further to go and your heart leaps and your stomach flips and fortunately
you've only misjudged by a few inches and everything's all right and nothing's broken. Fizz, on the other foot, had misjudged a lot further than that.

He had stepped into empty air and then gone (as gravity dictates) downwards. The rest of him followed and he tumbled down a steep slope which rolled away from the road.

Having a circus upbringing is good for some things. For instance, it meant Fizz didn't go to school. Instead he took his lessons with the various members of the circus's ensemble. So, for example, the circus's new escapologist Epistrophe Locke took him for metalwork (Locke wasn't an enthusiastic teacher and, when the idea had first been mooted (which means mentioned) he had
tried to get out of having to give the lessons, but had failed).

More pertinently, the Twitchery Sisters,
Mary and Maureen The Human Trampolines
(the circus's leading acrobats), taught Fizz geography, but neither Fizz nor the Twitchery Sisters much cared for geography, so instead, sometimes, occasionally, not very often really (if anyone asked), they'd show him how to do backflips and somersaults. Fizz wasn't brilliant at them, and often fell over halfway through, which meant that instead of learning how to jump, he actually learnt how to fall.

So, as Fizz fell down the slope, in the dark, he tucked his head in and wrapped his arms round himself and he rolled like a hedgehog through ferns and brambles and over dead
logs and bracken until finally he came to a stop.

He unrolled himself and, having no broken bones, stood up. From what he could piece
together he'd fallen quite a long way through the dark. Now, in the middle of the forest, the darkness was total. It was black, black, black everywhere he looked.

He turned around.

Black, black, black.

He turned around again.

Black, black, etc.

Not a glimpse of light.

He looked up and, perhaps, he really wasn't sure, saw the twinkle of a white pinprick star through the blackness of the trees. But then it wasn't there, so maybe he hadn't seen it at all.

He turned round again, and realised that, with all this turning, he no longer knew which direction he'd fallen from. He didn't know where the road was. And if
he didn't know where the road was, then he didn't know which way home was, because his mum and dad were on that road and they
were
his home.

Fizz, a boy not easily given to worry, was given to worry right then, done up nice with a bow and glossy black wrapping paper.

Well, here we are, the end of Chapter One and Fizz is finally, as promised, properly Lost in The Woods. Maybe Chapter Two will shed a little light on his predicament.

CHAPTER TWO

In which it is very dark and in which a dream is dreamt by a dreamer

I can't stress just how black the night was in the middle of the woods, with the moon lost above the treetops and the nearest town over a mile away, the road missing and the circus unguessably distant. It was really black. Black. You could write the word ‘black' on a sheet of paper in really bold capital letters, fold it up, swallow it, hide in a trunk
in a cupboard in a ship's cabin so cheap it's below the waterline (and thus porthole-less) with all the lights turned out, and only then would you get an idea of how black the darkness was.

In the darkness Fizz stumbled, tripped and flustered his way through ferns and brambles and branches. He tore his pyjamas and muddied his slippers. He got twigs in his hair and was poked in the eye. Eventually he gave up the ‘walking around' as a bad plan.

He had been trying to follow the ground uphill, thinking that that way he'd find the road, but it hadn't worked. It was so uneven and so hard going that he couldn't work out which way the wood sloped.

He sat down with his back to a tree and felt low. He was lost, scratched, dirty and tired.
There was nothing he could do until morning. Once the sun had come up he'd be able to find the slope he'd fallen down, find his way back to the road, and then, maybe, by following it … well,
maybe
, it would lead somewhere
circussy
.

But as he sat there, breathing quietly, listening to the night, he found he could see a little of his surroundings for the first time. His eyes were growing better in the dim light, much better than they had been in the thick dark. There were ferns growing all around and there in front of him, cutting through underneath them, was what looked like a path. It certainly wasn't a path
he'd
made, because he could see that over on his left, broken down and trampled. This path passed under the plants, was only a foot or so high, but was so
clearly made by
something
that curiosity got the better of him.