The Phredde Collection (35 page)

Luckily it didn’t jump very far, because basically its legs looked like a baby’s—that still made it a baby with a long flat head and a zillion tiny fangs. It just sort of
glumped
at us, then began crawling up our knoll, looking as though we were the best thing a paracyclotosaurus had seen for breakfast in the past million years.

‘Hai!’ yelled Miss Richards, crouching into her best martial-arts attack position. She stopped. ‘Um…does anyone know the best place to kick a paracyclotosaurus?’ she asked.

‘Nope,’ said Bruce, eyeing the paracyclotosaurus warily. ‘Why don’t I just give it a PING and---’

‘Never fear!’ cried Mrs Olsen suddenly. ‘I’ll defend you!’

‘But…but how?’ asked Phredde. ‘Well, I
am
a vampire,’ Mrs Olsen pointed out. ‘I’ll vampirise it.’

‘But…but I thought you didn’t go sucking at people’s necks any more?’ I said. That paracyclotosaurus, was getting awfully close.

‘To defend my students—and the school’s librarian—I’ll even stick my fangs in a paracyclotosaurus,’ said Mrs Olsen bravely.

She leapt, just as the paracyclotosaurus leapt. They met halfway, but Mrs Olsen got her fangs in first.

‘Ggrrupphh!’ bleated the paracyclotosaurus.

‘Yuk!’ Mrs Olsen made a face. ‘Fish-flavoured blood! Revolting!’ she added, taking another bite.

‘Gggrrrummpphht,’ said the paracyclotosaurus again. It crawled backwards
fast,
taking Mrs Olsen with it. She pulled her fangs out just as it disappeared under the water.

Mrs Olsen squelched back to us. ‘Well,’ she said proudly, wiping a smudge of paracyclotosaurus bl…, er, red stuff off her lips, ‘that took care of that!’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘what we really need to do is get back to the twenty-first century! Not to mention the Big Koala Wildlife Park. And the kiosk and picnic tables,’ I added, because it had been a really small banana yoghurt and I was getting hungry.

Phredde nodded. ‘Exactly,’ she said, with a dirty look at Bruce. ‘No more messing about PINGing up librarians and laptop computers and GPS stuff. We just need to get home.’ She took a deep breath.

PING
!

Nothing happened.

Phredde screwed up her face and really concentrated.

PINGGGGGG
!

I looked around. Same cycads and club moss. Same gluggy swamp. Same piggy paracyclotosaurus eyes peering at us out of the water.

‘Phredde!’ I warned. ‘Hurry!’

‘I’m hurrying!’ wailed Phredde. ‘Nothing’s happening!’

‘I know what you’ve done,’ said Bruce smugly. ‘You’ve used up all your magic allowance bringing us all the way back here.’

‘Oh,’ said Phredde.

‘Er, when do you get your next allowance?’ I inquired. ‘Next Saturday.’

I glanced at the paracyclotosaurus. It didn’t look like it intended waiting till next Saturday.

‘Will I vampirise it again?’ offered Mrs Olsen helpfully.

Bruce shook his head. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said, with a glance towards me to see if I appreciated it. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

I suppose I should have said, Oh, Bruce, you’re so brave! But I didn’t because all he had to do was go PING! which isn’t much effort at all if you happen to be a phaery—and haven’t used up your week’s magic allowance; and also because I didn’t want to make everyone sick. I mean, being magic-carpet sick is bad enough.

PING!

It was a proper PING this time, a deep and hearty PING, though it still wasn’t as big as the PING when Phredde accidentally took us back in time. I suddenly had the feeling that I’d been picked up and moved a few million years (all except my tummy—which sort of lagged a bit), which was exactly what happened, because when I opened my eyes I saw…

‘Er, Bruce,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Bruce. He sounded a bit worried. ‘You know how you were going to move us in time?’

‘Well, I did,’ said Bruce defensively.

‘How
far
in time did you move us?’

‘As far as I could,’ said Bruce. He looked around. ‘I wonder where the kiosk is, and the souvenir shop?’

‘And the rest of the class,’ said Mrs Olsen worriedly. ‘You know, this still doesn’t really look like the twenty-first century.’

Miss Richards gazed around then looked down at her laptop again and began to tap out commands. ‘I’d say we’re in the late Jurassic,’ she said, ‘judging by the seed ferns and the beetles.’ She brushed a giant beetle off the keyboard. ‘And by that rhoetosaurus…’

‘Er, what rhoetosaurus?’ I asked nervously.

‘The rhoetosaurus that’s heading towards us,’ said Miss Richards, holding her laptop steady, because by now the ground was vibrating under us.

‘Is a rhoetosaurus a zillion-metre-high dinosaur with a long neck and big tail and…’

‘Only about fifteen metres high, actually,’ said Miss Richards as she read the text on her laptop, ‘and weighing about twenty tonnes. And I think they were vegetarians…’

‘You
think
?’ I asked.

‘Well, no-one has actually studied a live one,’ admitted Miss Richards.

‘Bruce!’ I screamed, ‘get us out of here!’

PING
!

PING
!

PING
!

Nothing happened. Well, except for a rhoetosaurus galloping towards us.

‘It won’t work!’ yelped Bruce. ‘I must have used up most of
my
allowance getting Miss Richards and her laptop here.’

‘Boys!’ snorted Phredde.

‘Well, you did too!’ yelled Bruce.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘that rhoetosaurus is getting awfully close.’

‘I could vampirise it,’ offered Mrs Olsen.

I looked at Mrs Olsen and then at the rhoetosaurus. Somehow I didn’t think a 1.6-metre-tall vampire was really going to scare a fifteen-metre-tall rhoetosaurus. It would probably think Mrs Olsen was just a mosquito in a hat and sunglasses.

‘How about we run!’ I suggested.

So we did.

Well, I ran and so did Mrs Olsen and Miss Richards, while Bruce hopped—fast—and Phredde flapped her wings like a butterfly after twenty cans of cola.

You don’t get to see the scenery much when your legs are pumping under you as you try to escape from a fifteen-metre-high rhoetosaurus, but I did look about a bit, mostly to make sure my feet weren’t going to trip over anything that would make me a nice snack for a rhoetosaurus.

The late Jurassic looked pretty much like the Triassic, except the tree things were in different places and it was colder and there were more beetles.
Lots
of beetles and gnat-like things which choked us as we ran.

It was still squelchy, but at least now we could see a hill with a cliff a little way off, and in the cliff there was…

‘A cave!’ yelled Phredde, fluttering by my ear.

It was pretty dark-looking, and small too, but that was a good thing because it was far too small for the
rhoetosaurus to fit in. We raced towards it, over the soggy ground, all mud and water, and round a few spots that were mostly water with hardly any mud at all—well, raced and flew and hopped. I think Phredde made it first.

‘Phew!’ I said, ducking under the stone lip of the cave while the rhoetosaurus thundered up behind me. I stuck my head out to see what it was doing, then stuck it back in again quickly to avoid two giant rhoetosaurus nostrils. I looked around the cave instead.

Caves in movies and stories have big rounded openings and nice flat floors and you have to traipse a long way round twisty passages to find the dragon or the treasure, or the dragon
and
the treasure, or at least a great chamber of stalagmites and stalactites and stuff.

This cave wasn’t like that at all.

This cave was more like a deep wrinkle in the cliff. Its mouth was jagged, like a crooked grin, and its inside was only half as tall as I am, which was fine for Phredde and Bruce who fitted just nicely, but Mrs Olsen and Miss Richards and I had to sit, or bend right over, to fit in.

I peered back into the gloom. Of course there weren’t any dragons back in the Jurassic or whatever it was we were in, but it just occurred to me that there might be other things that lived in caves. Prehistoric vampire bats (maybe they’d make friends with Mrs Olsen) or cave-a-sauruses or…

‘Is anyone here?’ I called. My voice was a bit wavery, to tell the truth.

‘Look, Pru,’ said Phredde patiently, ‘there aren’t any humans yet, and even if there were they wouldn’t speak English.’

‘I know that,’ I said crossly. ‘I just wanted to let anything that lives in the cave know we’re here so they can…’

‘Leap out on us?’ suggested Bruce.

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘But I’d just like to
know
if there was anything there to leap out on us.’ I gestured back into the gloom. ‘So it doesn’t take us by surprise.’

‘If I’m going to be eaten by a cave dinosaur I
want
it to be a surprise,’ said Bruce. ‘I want to be happy right up till it closes its jaws around my---’

‘Ahem,’ said Miss Richards. She’d been studying the floor. ‘I don’t think the cave is inhabited. See? There are no footprints in the dust.’

‘What if they fly?’ asked Phredde, perching on a jagged rock.

‘They’d probably leave droppings,’ said Miss Richards.

I could see Phredde was about to inform her that phaeries fly but they use toilets like everyone else and certainly
don’t
leave droppings all over the place. So I said hurriedly, ‘I wonder what everyone else is doing.’

‘Probably watching cute little koalas,’ said Phredde gloomily.

I’d never seen Phredde look so gloomy before, I suppose because we’d never been trapped in the past before with a rhoetosaurus after us. Actually, in spite of everything, I felt fine. Maybe it was just that now my two best friends weren’t able to PING, so they were just like me. Well, apart from having wings or looking like a frog, anyway. But on the other hand I felt guilty too, because I’d sometimes wished that they might sort of lose their PINGs…

‘Cheer up. It could be worse,’ I said encouragingly.

‘How?’ Phredde demanded.

‘Well, we could be attacked by venomous spiders.’

A spider dropped from the ceiling of the cave onto my hair. Bruce zapped it with his tongue. ‘Not bad,’ he said, crunching it.

Which reminded me. ‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘Phredde, how about you PING us up some hamburgers…oops, I forgot. Bruce, could you? Oh bother…’

I suddenly realised what having two PINGless friends meant. This was even worse than being lost in the late Jurassic! ‘Er, has anyone any food?’ I asked.

Phredde inspected her invisible bag. ‘Nope,’ she said.

I hunted through my school bag just in case there was a pizza or two I’d missed. Nothing, except for the plastic spoon that went with my banana yoghurt—which was now just a faint and distant memory, having been eaten so long ago in the Triassic.

‘I’ve got a packet of cheese and lettuce sandwiches back in the library,’ offered Miss Richards. As the library was as distant as the twenty-first century that didn’t help my tummy much.

Mrs Olsen peered into her Thermos. ‘There are still a few drops left,’ she offered generously. ‘You children are welcome to them. I’m still full of paracyclotosaurus.’

Zap! ‘These beetles are delicious,’ said Bruce, snapping his tongue back into his mouth with a particularly fat beetle on the end of it. ‘Would anyone else like one?’

‘NO!’ said Phredde and I together.

I glanced at Phredde. She shrugged.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The first priority is food—for those of us who don’t eat beetles and don’t have vampire fangs.’ I gazed out of the cave. ‘Does anyone know how to cook a rhoetosaurus?’

You know, it’s not easy getting lunch back in the Jurassic. A few pizza bars would really have brightened the place up.

We decided not to eat the rhoetosaurus. First of all, anything that weighed twenty tonnes and was fifteen metres high would probably have been too tough to eat. And secondly…well,
you
try catching something that weighs twenty tonnes and is fifteen metres high.

‘Maybe we can find some fruit trees,’ I said hopefully, 7ls;like apple trees or…’

Miss Richards shook her head. ‘No apples in the Jurassic,’ she said.

‘Not even dinosaur apples?’

‘No.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Fish!’ exclaimed Miss Richards. She’d booted up the laptop again. We peered over her shoulder at pictures of
a rock with a fish traced on it. ‘That’s a freshwater fish called
cleithrolepis
,’ she informed us. ‘Of course that was in the Triassic but there may still be some around.’

‘It looks more like a rock to me,’ I said, looking at the picture on the laptop screen.

‘No, Prudence,’ said Miss Richards patiently. ‘That picture is of a fossilised fish. The original fish died and was covered with mud or lava and when it rotted it left a hollow that filled with other rock and left an imprint.’

Well, to be honest, it didn’t really look like it’d be all that delicious even before it was fossilised and if someone had cooked it with batter and lots of chips and tomato sauce. But on the other hand, it looked better than beetles or a banana-yoghurt-coated plastic spoon or the bl…, er, red stuff in Mrs Olsen’s Thermos.

The first thing to do was get past the rhoetosaurus so we could go fishing.

‘Maybe if we all shouted we could scare it away,’ suggested Mrs Olsen.

So we did. The rhoetosaurus didn’t even blink.

‘What we need is a set of drums,’ said Phredde. ‘That might frighten it. Or the school recorder group would be even better!’

What we needed was about ten tonnes of dynamite, enough to blow that rhoetosaurus into tiny rhoetosaurus fragments, but I didn’t bother saying so, ’cause no-one had enough magic left to PING up any dynamite.

‘I could try karate-kicking its toes,’ suggested Miss Richards. ‘Maybe it’s got sensitive feet.’

I gazed at the toes. They were grey and horny and tough-looking. You could probably have run a tank over them and it wouldn’t have noticed.

Miss Richards looked determined. ‘
All
animals have a vulnerable spot,’ she said. ‘That’s one of the first things you learn in martial arts. You poke crocodiles in the eyes and biff sharks on the nose and knock raging buffaloes right between the eyes…’

I looked at Miss Richards with admiration. I knew she got pretty stroppy about overdue library loans and she was pretty great about keeping the books in line, especially when they wanted their bones.
¹²
But this was supercool.

Miss Richards stuck her head out of the cave then pulled it in pretty quickly when the rhoetosaurus stuck its down too. ‘When in doubt,’ she said slowly, ‘the best thing to aim for is the back of the mouth.’

‘Oh, great!’ I said. ‘All we have to do is leap twenty metres high and punch that monster in the tonsils.’

‘I can fly twenty metres high,’ offered Phredde.

‘No you don’t,’ I said. ‘Firstly because you’re not a martial-arts expert so you don’t know how to kick a rhoetosaurus in the tonsils, and secondly because you’re my best friend and I don’t want you swallowed up in a rhoetosaurus’s tummy.’

‘Oh,’ said Phredde. She considered. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she added.

‘I know I’m right,’ I said gloomily.

Miss Richards was thinking. ‘No, Phredde was right the first time,’ she said slowly. ‘She
can
fly up there.’

‘But…’ I began. Miss Richards held up her hand. ‘No, she doesn’t have to kick its tonsils. When the rhoetosaurus sees her it’ll open its mouth to eat her…’

‘Great…’ muttered Phredde.

‘Then all she has to do is throw in something disgusting and it’ll decide we’re no good to eat and go away!’

I looked round the cave. ‘But we don’t have anything disgusting!’

‘We’ve got Bruce,’ suggested Phredde.

‘Ha, ha,’ said Bruce. He thought hard. ‘I could catch a few beetles.’ He zapped out his tongue and hauled one in. ‘See?’ he said.

‘The rhoetosaurus wouldn’t even
notice
a few beetles shoved down its throat!’ protested Phredde.

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘How about we make a big disgusting mixture? Bruce can add beetles and I’ve got…’ I thought for a second, ‘I’ve got my socks! They’re all sweaty and I can wipe them on the bottom of my joggers for extra yuk.’ One thing about living with a werewolf brother and tramping around Triassic swamps—you can be pretty sure there’s always some yuk on your shoes.

‘I don’t have anything disgusting…’ began Phredde, then she stopped. ‘Yes, I do!’ she said. She held up a snotty hanky.

‘There’s still a little blood in my Thermos,’ said Mrs Olsen helpfully.

We looked at Miss Richards. ‘I used to be a really great spitter when I was your age,’ she said nostalgically. ‘How about you mix everything together and I’ll spit on it and---’

‘Oh, yuk!’ we all said together, then looked at each other.

‘You know,’ said Mrs Olsen slowly, ‘I think this is going to work!’