Fleeced (23 page)

Which was when she spotted Alex, at the back of the stampede, deftly fending off the furious manager of the Luxe using one of Hazel’s cut-outs as a makeshift shield. Beside him, Aries, looking decidedly greener than she remembered, bellowed at the three attendants cowering behind the manager and sent them racing away. Immediately realising that they were behind this wonderful disruption, she punched the air in triumph.

“Alex!” she shouted, stepping into the buffeting sheep to reach him.

He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. “You’re all right!” he yelled, before blocking a thump from the manager with Hazel’s cardboard head.

Lurching backwards, the manager clutched his
throbbing hand, collided with a plump old lady in a silver dress and stole, and vanished in a muffle of fake fur and chubby ankles.

Alex ran up to Rose and threw his arms round her.

“I’m so glad to see you!” she exclaimed, reaching down with the other to rub Aries’ brow. “And you!”

It was a lovely group hug moment, apart from the alarming hissing sound that now whistled in her ear, the sort of alarming hissing sound that snakes make when they are being squashed. Drawing back, Rose jumped to see Hex, his eyes glittering with outrage.

“It’s all right,” said Alex. “He’s a friend.”

Now, Hex’s face broke into a wide grin, touched
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.

Rose looked at Alex and nodded towards the stage, where Hazel was now on her hands and knees shouting instructions to the bodyguards above a flossy sea of sheep. “You caused all this? So, you know what Medea’s up to?”

“’Fraid so,” replied Alex. He grabbed hold of Rose’s hand and pulled her with him after the sheep. “Come on!”

Together, using the cut-out to force their way through, the four of them jostled their way towards the stage, pushing against the bulldozing crowd that was intent on moving in the opposite direction.
Overhead the cinema sound system crackled into life and a polished voice told everyone to stay calm and seated. Not that anyone did, of course, and as Rose looked at the crush of people wedged in uncomfortably in the narrow aisles, she began to feel a glimmer of hope. After all, she reasoned as she sidestepped a cluster of sheep sharing seat stuffing like candy floss, with no audience, no music and nowhere to sit, there couldn’t be a show, could there?

No.

Meaning that in just a few minutes Hazel would be offstage, out of that dress and away from danger.

Well, actually, no, again.

Because as much as I hate to be a spoilsport, I do have to remind you that we still have a deadly sorceress in our midst. The sort, say, whose face might at that precise second be lit up by a spume of silver stars exploding over her head, wholly unnoticed by the people dashing past.

Or Rose and the others.

Shame, really.

Meanwhile, on the patch of carpet below the stage, Mitch had managed to string up a makeshift roped corral and had penned in six sheep. Above him, Hazel shouted sheep-catching instructions to her bodyguards whilst wrestling
another hay bale from the set dressing to throw down. Turning, she stopped to peer out over the auditorium.

“Where are those pretty stars comin’ from?” she said.

“Ssstars?” Hex’s voice was deadly serious.

Shooting up from Alex’s shoulders, like a walking stick tossed by a tap dancer, he scanned the cinema, high over the sea of bobbing heads.

“What’s happening?” demanded Alex.

“Medea!” hissed Hex, twisting into a panicky figure of eight. “She’sss casssting a ssspell.”

Horrified, Rose and Alex strained to catch a glimpse of the sorceress. Craning their necks to peer past the mayhem in the aisles, they saw her turning on the spot in the gap in front of her seat, twirling her arms above her head.

“But she looks like she’s dancing!” said Rose, confused.

“Magic needsss movement!” explained Hex. “It generatesss the energy to make the ssspell work!”

For a moment Rose stared, fascinated.

“But why?” Aries rattled his hooves furiously. “The fleece curse doesn’t need her help!”

“No,” hissed Hex. “But no one’sss ever tried to ssstop it before, have they? Now—”

Hex’s voice was lost beneath the sound of a soft
whump
. Turning, they saw one of the corralled sheep lying on its side, its legs stuck out, its face a mask of shock.

Rose clasped a hand to her mouth. “It’s not—?” She stopped, unable to say the word.

“No.” Alex shook his head quickly. “It’s still breathing. It’s just been stunned.”

“Stunned?” spluttered Aries.

Behind them, a second sheep jerked rigid and keeled over. Then a third star-jumped in the air, froze and landed like a woolly starfish.

“Ssslumber-bound,” replied Hex. “It’sss her sssheep-sssleep ssspell.”

“Her what?” said Rose.

“It’sss how ssshe captured them from the fieldsss in the firssst place!” He grimaced as sheep dropped in the aisles, the orchestra pit and vanished suddenly between rows of seats. “It’sss one of her mossst basssic ssspells”

And Hex was right.

Sorceresses, you see, can’t use their best magic in public. Partly because spells take time, special ingredients, fire and ancient tools, but mostly because you simply can’t turn someone into a wart frog without passers-by badgering you about it.

Around them the thumps grew closer together as more and more sheep fell, turning the theatre into something that was beginning to resemble a storehouse for merry-go-round sheep-shaped rides. Trapped in the corral, Mitch, together with Hazel’s bodyguards, vanished under an avalanche of toppling sheep.

“They’ll all be asleep soon!” muttered Aries.

Rose looked around her and realised that people were no longer panicking. Instead of running they stood in the aisles. They chatted and pointed instead of screaming.

Relief brightened their faces.

Relief that finally the chaos was all over.

Relief that everything would soon go back to normal.

“We’ve got to break the spell!” said Rose desperately.

“Then ssstop her moving!” answered Hex.

Obviously, this was excellent advice if you didn’t happen to be trapped in a cinema whose aisles were jammed by human and sheep sardines at the time.

Unless you were with the strongest ram in history, of course.

“Aries!” said Alex. “You can get through to her!”

There was no reply.

He looked down to see the ram, a deep sigh
flapping his lips, his eyes drooping slowly closed.

“Not him as well!” squealed Rose.

“Aries!” yelled Alex. He bent down and lifted the ram’s ear. “Wake up!”

Aries jumped to attention. “Whatisit?” he spluttered.

“Ssstand ssstill!” commanded Hex, slithering down Alex’s arm onto the ram’s brow where he promptly began wrapping himself tightly around Aries’ ears, twisting from side to side to make a squirmy turban.

“The sspell’s a dark lullaby,” he explained, looking up at Alex and Rose between loops. “Only creaturesss with cloven hoovesss can hear it. We have to block hisss hearing before it takesss effect.”

Drowsily, Aries watched the snake weave from side to side above his eyes. But a few seconds later, after Hex had slithered back under his own loops to whisper down the ram’s ear, Aries was fully alert and knew exactly what he must do. Bustling into an empty row of seats to reach the aisle that led to Medea’s seat, and protected from the sorceress’s dangerous words by his own personal mamba-muffler, he took a deep breath and ran.

Meanwhile, Alex and Rose turned back towards the stage and, bracing themselves behind the cut-out
of Hazel, began forcing their way forwards against the buffeting crowd until they reached a patch of clear seats that would take them to the front of the stage.

Three rows behind them, Aries reached the aisle, stomped out, turned and lowered his head, arranging his horns in front of the vast wall of tightly packed people stumbling towards him and pushed.

Hard.

Force powered up his legs and along his broad back, sending quivers through the straining tendons in his neck and wild shivers down his flanks. Sweat poured off his brow. But in his heart, fury rose like blistering lava in a volcano.

Fury at how Medea was still mistreating the sheep forced him one big step forwards, scooping an elegant old lady off her feet and into his horns.

Fury at what she’d done with his fleece catalysed another three steps that bundled two men and a boy scout into his encompassing horns.

Fury about all the innocent people she’d killed for her miserable sport fired him into a slow clop, gathering two squealing usherettes and a Dorset ewe as he thrust on.

But feeling a seething rage at what she’d tried to do to his friends sent him shooting forwards. Like a monster snowplough plunging through a drift, he
caused people and sheep to spill out of his horns, toppling either side into the empty banks of seats, as he powered up the aisle to draw level with Medea.

Oblivious, the sorceress continued to twirl, her eyes closed in a rapture of spite, her hands spinning wildly in front of her.

Beside her, Pandemic’s deep snores rattled the air. Being half-goat, of course, and owning the most splendid pair of cloven hooves himself, he too had fallen prey to her spell.

Exchanging a look with Aries, Hex released his hold on the ram’s ears and looped round and round on Aries’ back. Then, using the coils like a giant spring, he threw himself into the air, flying, just as his grandfather had taught him to bounce over mangrove swamps of Africa, and whipped around the sorceress’s frantic wrists.

Medea snapped her eyes open and squealed with frustration before meeting Aries’ furious glare.

But only for a moment.

Spinning round, he kicked out his back legs with the force of a small truck and pitched Medea off her feet. Shrieking, she shot up towards the ceiling, her arms bound in front of her, and for a moment she seemed to hang like a furious exclamation mark before arcing over to dive head first into a stockpile
of snoozing sheep. There was a
whump
, several surprised gasps and then nothing. Aries stretched up his head, delighted to see only the sorceress’s feet sticking out of a now muttering, waking heap of sheep, and Hex sliding away into the shadows.

And then the first scream ripped through the auditorium.

Horrified, Rose and Alex looked up from hurdling over seat backs to see Hazel tugging furiously at the skirt of her dress. It was stapled firm to the stage by a vicious-looking shard of mirror. At the same instant two flashes of silver fell from the area above the stage, stabbing the wooden boards with the ferocity of thrown knives.

“Come on!” shouted Alex.

Rose leaped over the next two sets of seats and, drawing level with the stage, looked up.

Suspended from scaffolding, the mirrors that had previously made such pretty twinkles around the stage now swung crazily back and forth like enchanted pendulums, swishing higher and higher each time until they snapped their threads.

And dropped.

Momentarily frozen, Rose realised that this was the way the curse would kill Hazel. Her heart hammered in her ears, thumping against the swish
of mirrors falling faster now in a sudden shimmering shower that tacked Hazel’s skirt to the stage like silver stitches sewn by an invisible hand.

Beside her, Alex dragged the cut-out of Hazel over his head and, as she reached out to help him, she met Hazel’s terrified eyes.

“I’m coming too,” she said, sliding beneath the cardboard beside him.

Together they sprinted up the stage steps and threw themselves into the sparkling storm of mirrors. Each seizing one of Hazel’s arms they yanked her, yelling, off her feet. Behind them the fabric ripped, like a chorus of tiny screams, as all three of them flew backwards towards the cinema screen. In the split second before all the lights went out, Rose glimpsed the remains of the dress billow up from the floor after them, as menacing as a monstrous pink jellyfish. Then everything was in darkness. A darkness spliced by splintering wood as every last mirror fell in a torrent of slashing glass.

XXVIII

S
O
L
ONG
, F
AREWELL
, A
UF
W
IEDERSEHEN
, G
OOD
-B
AAAAH

Blanketed in darkness, their ears still jangling, Alex, Hazel and Rose huddled beneath the cardboard.

“Are you two all right?” whispered Alex.

“I think so,” replied Rose. “Hazel?”

There was a soft moan. “Sure had better days,” she sighed.

“And sssso have I,” hissed Hex from the inky blackness of the orchestra pit. “I think I’ve got. Wssscale-chafehere’sss the ram?”

In reply there was a loud twanging noise coupled with the sound of horns entangled with musical strings.

“I’m here, too,” he muttered. “Although in my haste to return I appear to have got my hoof stuck in some sort of funny-shaped lyre.”

“Guitar,” corrected Rose.

“Ex-guitar,” added Hazel before breaking in a wobbly laugh that sounded close to crying.

At that moment the cinema flooded with light and, blinking, Rose wrapped her arm around Hazel’s shoulder before turning to look at the stage.

She gasped.

Like an alien moonscape of gleaming rocks, mirrors stabbed every few centimetres of stage, splicing the wooden boards. As she watched them spangle in the light, Rose felt her heart begin to thump hard behind her ribs, realising just how vicious the curse had been.

If she and Alex had been only a few seconds later…

Shaking her head, she pushed the thought away.

Beside her, Hazel glanced up and burst into deep gulping sobs before burying her face in her knees, smudged with stage dust.

“C’mon,” said Alex. He looked at Rose from beneath the cardboard cut-out. “Let’s get this thing off us!”

Together Rose and Alex gingerly felt for some shard-free patches with their fingers and slid the cardboard, clattering, to the floor behind them, before helping Hazel to her feet.

Then, quickly glancing over to where the sorceress had crash-landed, and seeing no sign of her, Alex jumped down into the orchestra pit to disentangle Aries from the guitar and tuck Hex back into his jumper.

But Rose simply stood, staring out over the ruined auditorium, feeling rather like one of those marathon
runners who cross the line and promptly burst into tears. Her mind jumbled with astonishment that they’d actually saved Hazel, nerve-trembling shock at just how close it had been and a fizzing dollop of relief.

The sudden clatter of footsteps snapped her out of her thoughts and she looked sideways to see Mitch Praline racing up the steps two at a time.

“Haze, honey!” he cried, striding over the stage, smashing mirrors beneath his boots, to throw his arms around his daughter.

The young singer sank gratefully into her father’s embrace, looking more like a child, her spectacular pink dress no more than a dirt-streaked bodice attached to a miniskirt of frayed rags. Rose sighed, remembering her own father’s bear hugs and how they always put anything right and wished with all her heart that he were there, too. Then, blinking back a sudden prickle of tears, she heard Alex calling her name. Meeting her gaze, he nodded towards the police who were now running into the auditorium.

“We have to go,” he said.

There is no finer police force than HM London Constabulary, and that late afternoon the officers set about sorting the scene of destruction with great relish.

They comforted women with popcorn in their
hair and men whose trousers were covered with hoof-prints. They helped the dishevelled manager of the Luxe to his feet and offered him a cup of hot sweet tea. They called an ambulance for Hazel and saw her off, wrapped in a tartan blanket, gently led away by her father. And they flipped open their notebooks and took down witness statements that would later be filed at the station under ‘mass hysteria’. (This being a fancy term that police officers use when faced with people who insist that they have seen a green ram wearing a venomous snake on his head in a London cinema. Or a man with horns on his head sprinting out of the fire doors the second the lights flicked back on.)

But policemen are just like the rest of us when it comes to a celebrity. And never more so than when that celebrity is young and pretty, and happens to be waving a sore, but attractive, knee about. Consequently, several younger male officers attended upon the sorceress, swarming about her like navy blue bees around a dahlia.

And she wasn’t happy about it.

“A butt from a ram, you say, Madam?” said one officer with a sparkle in his smile. “You’ll need a hospital check-up.”

“I will not!” snapped Medea.

Whereupon a second officer, wearing a concerned
expression on his chubby face that made him look like an anxious goldfish, stepped forwards. “My mum sprained her knee,” he added gravely. “Knocked down by a llama at a petting zoo, she was. Turned nasty. The sprain, I mean, although the llama was pretty bad-tempered too.”

By now, of course, Medea’s temper could easily have topped the most livid of llamas. Shaking with frustration and unspent rage, her white fingers twitched in her lap, itching for magical revenge.

“You’re in shock, Miss,” said the first officer.

Which was precisely the sort of astute observation for which the British police are famed the world over. However, the reason for Medea’s state of mind wasn’t one that any police constable, anywhere, was ever likely to guess.

You see, Medea had not been crossed for hundreds and hundreds of years. Not since Jason ditched her for Glauce had she been so wrong-footed and humiliated.

And mad.

For it to be at the hands of a couple of children,
a ram and a rabble of grubby sheep was almost intolerable. And so, whilst the police officers continued to soothe and coax, she carried on scowling and thinking about snails. Specifically, the little brown garden one she planned to turn Alex into before stamping on him with her good leg, dunking Aries back into super-strength bacteria and giving Rose some much needed crystal clear instruction in how to behave
39
.

If only the police would get out of her way so that she could find them.

“Tango sierra ambulance assistance requested,” said the policeman with the bright smile.

“But I don’t want one!” insisted Medea.

“Calm down, dear!” offered the chubby officer. “Everything will be—”

But whatever solace the officer was predicting was lost in a loud, “Oof!” as Medea punched him squarely in the face. Reeling, he toppled backwards and vanished in a blur of boots and trousers, over the next row of seats.

“Madam!” The smiling officer’s voice was stern. He puffed his chest up in outrage. “There’s no need for that!”

But Medea disagreed and walloped him too.

However, please note: it is never, I repeat
never,
a good idea to punch a policeman and it’s an even more terrible idea to punch two in a row. They simply don’t like it. And, worse, they’ll put you in a police cell to prove it. Which was why ten minutes later Medea was led out in handcuffs, scowling and raging, to a waiting police car.

Whereupon I’d just like to say, “Hooray!”

Thank you.

Meanwhile Alex, Rose and Aries had slipped out of the door leading backstage and hurried down corridors cluttered with theatre props to leave the building by the stage door. This led them into a quiet alleyway and, from there, back into the bustling crowds of Leicester Square where they discovered the flock being ushered by the RSPCA into a corner of the square’s lush gardens, temporarily penned off by the crowd barriers from the premiere. Whilst Alex went to find out where the sheep would be taken to, Aries watched them spill onto the grass, feeling his heart lift as they demolished rose bushes, weed in
the fountain and waggled their bottoms at a snooty-looking statue of a man in funny trousers
40
.

But it was seeing Toby, sniffing the grass beneath his hooves, round-eyed at the novelty of it that brought a tear to Aries’ eye. A tear quickly blinked away as Alex returned to tell them the good news. That, since the police hadn’t received any reports about a missing flock, the sheep would be taken to The Funky Farm Experience, a petting zoo run by a doting family, set in acres of green pastures with cosy straw-filled barns to sleep in at night
41
.

In the time before the trucks arrived, Alex and Aries said goodbye to everyone.

Several times.

“Amazing!” muttered one RSPCA man, as a Greyface Dartmoor knelt down behind the barrier allowing the dark-haired boy to remove the popcorn boxes from its horns.

“Quite astonishing,” added another, watching an Icelandic ram nuzzle the girl with the wild red hair.

“Extraordinary,” added a third, as the green ram tilted its head towards a bumpy-faced ewe, almost as if she were talking to him.

But as the trucks rumbled into the square, Rose led Aries away and quickly hid him behind a large hawthorn bush (where his new green colour blended
in perfectly) to avoid any awkward questions about why he wasn’t boarding the trucks too.

Minutes later, as the sunset streaked the London sky with gold, the trucks were ready to leave.

It was a scene everyone would remember.

After all, it’s not every day that you see Leicester Square overrun by sheep.

Even fewer when you see a world-famous fashion designer being led away in handcuffs to a waiting police car.

And hardly any at all when that same designer is driven past cattle trucks that start to bounce under the stamping hooves of sixty-six sheep in a deafening roar of bleats that sound suspiciously like cheering.

By twenty past ten that evening, Alex and Aries had told the girls about all the terrible things Medea had done with the fleece, Hazel
42
(who was just back from the hospital) had burst into tears several more times, Rose had hugged everyone until they
felt better and the little group had returned to the British Museum. Now, whilst Medea paced up and down the concrete floor of her police cell across town, Rose stroked Aries’ head, watching the others examine the newly repaired caryatid. Flown back from Greece that same afternoon, the statue now stood on her original plinth, in front of the curtain in Room 18. Having only just finished repositioning her, the curators had left their scaffolding up on either side, which was lucky really, since it’d make it much easier for Alex and, especially, Aries to clamber back up to the portal.

Of course, the museum had closed to the public three hours before, but as I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear, Rose’s mother was still working in its basement, so that once again Rose had the run of the exhibition rooms.

Looping out from Alex’s shoulders, Hex twisted round the caryatid’s back, hissing appreciatively.

“She’s done a remarkable job,” said Alex, running his finger over the barely visible join in the caryatid’s neck. “I just hope it’s a seamless mend.”

“It will be,” sighed Rose. “Mum’s besotted by old relics, remember?”

Alex did, and hearing the sadness in her voice, he
felt his heart tighten. Turning, he noticed the same resigned expression on Rose’s face that he’d seen the first time that she’d spoken about her mother. Of course, he knew that she was sad they were leaving, but now he realised something else: that after they’d gone, her life would go back to normal, to being stuck in the museum, alone and waiting around for her mother, day after day.

Unless…

He walked over and picked up Rose’s rucksack, which lay slumped at her feet.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said, handing it to her.

Rose’s eyes widened in excitement. “The Scroll!”

He watched as she quickly unbuckled the straps, rummaged inside and plucked out the Scroll, thinking for a moment before lifting it to her lips.

“Scroll,” she began, her voice little more than a whisper, “if my father is still living, please tell me where he is.”

(Which, when you think about it, was a rather clever way to phrase the question. After all, who wants to be led through the jungle to a heap of jaguar-chewed bones?)

The Scroll fidgeted. It fluttered its ends. It
twitched. It rippled. It made a wet, rattling sound as though it was blowing a papery raspberry. And then it became absolutely silent.

“Scroll?” urged Alex, trying to ignore the little voice in his head warning that it might be delaying bad news.

“Shhh!” The Scroll rustled irritably. “I’m trying to think!”

“Great,” sighed Aries and sank gloomily onto his haunches. “Get comfortable, everybody. It’s going to be a long night!”

And indeed, several minutes dragged past, slow as treacle dribbling off a spoon. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Rose lifted the Scroll with her trembling hand.

“Please?” her voice wavered.

Instantly the Scroll sprang open. “Minus nought point eight three three!” it announced with a flourish.

“What?” Rose’s voice was barely audible.

“Minus fifty-seven point two!” added the Scroll, flapping its edges in excitement.