The Phredde Collection (41 page)

I dreamt of home that night. Were Mum and Dad frantic? Were they calling the police every ten minutes to see if I’d been found? I mean Mum and Dad just don’t handle stress well, like that time the ogre chased me home.
¹⁹

Were the police combing the Big Koala Wildlife Park looking for clues? Were Phredde’s mum and dad and Bruce’s mum and dad PINGing all over the world
and
Phaeryland looking for us?

And what about poor Mark? This was a crisis in my brother’s life and I should be there for him. I
wanted
to be there for him. I wanted to be HOME!!!!

I stifled a sniffle under my ’roo-skin blanket. There was no point being a wimp about it. Tears wouldn’t get me 100,000 years into the future. I just needed to get a good night’s sleep so I’d be bright and fit the next morning to cope with milking giant echidnas and
digging out an ants’ nest oven and making prehistoric paint out of ochre and echidna milk and roasted limestone if we could find some and all the other yuk stuff Miss Richards said went into it. But it wouldn’t be yuk at all, I told myself firmly. It would be fun. You hear me, Prudence. FUN. And besides, my two best friends would be there too.

The moon made a bright yellow splodge under the ’roo-skin door, so I could almost pretend it was an electric light on in the hall back home in our castle. And if I shut my eyes tight I could imagine I really
was
home and the gentle shuddery feeling wasn’t a herd of grazing giant kangaroos thudding past our hut or an earthquake from all that volcanic activity Miss Richards said not to worry about, but Mark practising on his drums and the bracken bed was really…was really…

Finally I did fall asleep.

So I woke up to my second morning 100,000 years ago. It hadn’t been such a bad night, once I’d got to sleep. The ’roo-skin blankets kept me warm, even if they were a bit clammy still, and hard around the edges, and Miss Richards had suggested we put down sheets of paperbark to cover the bracken mattress, so it was hardly scratchy at all.

I was even getting used to sleeping in the same room, er, hut, as the others. But I was still homesick. It was like a great big heavy lump of bullrush-pollen cake in my inside, but the bullrush cake was digested and gone by now and the homesickness remained.

I really wanted muesli for breakfast, or maybe banana muffins and passionfruit juice. But all there was was fish—again—and more bullrush cakes with wild-bee honey (they don’t sting like ordinary bees according to Miss Richards). After we’d finished eating, Miss Richards steered the flying carpet to these droopy old native cherry trees and we picked some native
cherries for dessert. (Native cherries aren’t as good as
real
cherries, because they’re tiny, but they’re sweet and red and okay when there isn’t any iced watermelon around or bowls of fruit salad with lots of chopped rockmelon and banana.)

We didn’t bring Mrs Olsen, because she was asleep again. She still looked pretty vampire-like—I mean
real
vampire, not nice-teacher-who-has-an-arrangement-with-the-abattoir-type vampire—but I reckoned she’d come to herself a bit when Cuddles bit her.

Cuddles enjoyed breakfast too.

‘That duck is getting fat,’ said Phredde darkly, as Cuddles finished off his fourteenth fish.

‘He’s just a baby,’ I said defensively. ‘He needs lots of food to grow.’

‘Burp,’ said Cuddles, grabbing another fish from my fingers and giving Phredde a nasty look.

‘Maybe if you don’t feed him much he won’t grow so big,’ suggested Bruce.

‘Quack,’ said Cuddles, giving Bruce his best ‘maybe I’ll have a giant frog for dessert’ look.

‘On second thoughts,’ added Bruce hurriedly, ‘maybe you should feed him as much as he likes.’

‘Quack,’ agreed Cuddles, satisfied.

‘You know, he is going to be a little bit of a problem when he gets bigger, Prudence,’ Miss Richards pointed out.

‘A great big bit of a problem,’ spluttered Phredde. ‘Like two metres of Demon Duck of Doom problem.’

‘But he’ll be really tame by then,’ I argued. ‘Won’t you, little Cuddles?’

‘Burp,’ agreed Cuddles, as he peered down to see if there were any more fish in the basket. There wasn’t,
so he waddled over and shoved Phredde off her seat and lay down on her stringybark cushion. Two seconds later he was asleep.

Phredde glared down at Cuddles. ‘That duck is a pest,’ she said.

‘He’ll learn manners when he gets older,’ I said. ‘It’s just like a puppy. They wee on the carpet for the first couple of weeks and then they learn to behave themselves. I’m sure Cuddles will learn not to shove you off your seat.’

‘Or steal my fish,’ muttered Phredde.

‘Look, I told him he was naughty and he shouldn’t eat your breakfast!’ I said. ‘He won’t do it again.’

‘He’d better not,’ said Phredde. ‘Or he’ll…’

‘I know,’ said Miss Richards brightly. ‘Why don’t you three take the flying carpet off and hunt for more fruit for lunch? I want to experiment with banksia candles so we have some light at night, and then maybe I’ll plait some more stringybark to make hammocks and then…’

‘You couldn’t knit a TV out of stringybark too, could you?’ asked Bruce brightly.

‘Um, no,’ said Miss Richards.

‘Pity,’ said Bruce.

‘What sort of fruit should we look for?’ I asked. I mean, apart from native cherries and kurrajongs and kangaroo berries, the only fruit I could recognise was in big piles in the supermarket.

Miss Richards opened her laptop. She was being pretty careful with it now, as there wasn’t much battery capacity left. ‘See?’ she said. ‘Look for those trees there. Those are sandpaper and Port Jackson figs—you’ll find them in the wet gullies—and those
bushes with little purple fruit are boobialla, and you know what kangaroo berries look like and native cherries.’

‘Sure thing,’ I said.

We left Cuddles sleeping because he looked so cute I didn’t want to wake him up, and also because Phredde and Bruce didn’t want to share a flying carpet with a Demon Duck of Doom who might wake up feeling hungry.

So after Miss Richards had warned us a few times about not trying to tackle any giant goannas and keeping well clear of leopards and stuff like that, and had given me some bracken tea so I didn’t get flying-carpet sick (she’d looked up bush remedies too on her laptop), the flying carpet finally rose over the campsite.

Actually our new home looked pretty good, with the hut and its new verandah and the stone fireplace and seats and turtle-shell bath. It was hard to think it had all just been tussocky grass and trees a couple of days ago.

We flew down the river but there wasn’t much to see except big shaggy things like bears but with long tails and noses, and something like a wallaby except it was tearing the head off a rat and gulping it down. And what looked like a wolf but there weren’t any wolves in Australia, were there? Anyway, I was glad we were up in the air and it was down there.

After a while the river got bigger and bigger and then we came to a wide bay with big sandbanks across it. And then a beach, which looked pretty much like any beach with big curling waves, except there were no high-rise resorts or hamburger shops, or bright umbrellas, dead thongs and bits of styrofoam boxes
among the seaweed. Then we flew up the coast just because it was pretty scenic, and I’d never flown along a beach on a flying carpet before, and I reckon Miss Richards’s bracken tea must have worked because I didn’t bring my breakfast up once.

Finally we remembered that we were supposed to be looking for fruit for lunch so Phredde swung the carpet inland.

‘How about we land there?’ she asked, pointing to the big round mountain we’d been able to see from our campsite. It was pretty bald-looking on top, and all covered in red dirt and rocks with funny yellow crystals around them, and it had a funny hole in the top too, like a big shallow dish with some water in it, but lower down there were more trees than you’d think could possibly be crammed onto a mountain slope. They were big bushy-looking trees too, and even if they weren’t in one of the wet gullies Miss Richards had talked about they still looked like a few sackfuls of fruit might be dripping off their branches.

‘Okay by me,’ said Bruce.

We landed on the grassy slope just above the treeline. I stepped off the carpet and stretched. ‘Hey, this is nice,’ I said. ‘Look, you can see the hut and everything! It’s warmer up here too.’

‘Mmm,’ said Phredde. ‘Maybe we could have a nap before we head down and pick some fruit.’

I looked at her more closely. She looked great, of course, because Miss Richards had finished her snakeskin skirt and top too (actually mine itched like heck, but I wasn’t going to say so because it looked so cool), but she did look tired, with black smudges under her eyes. I glanced at Bruce. It’s hard to tell if frogs are
tired or not, but I thought he might be. I suddenly wondered if they were both as homesick as I was. Maybe they hadn’t been able to sleep last night either, and they probably felt even more lost than me because they’d lost their PING. All at once I felt guilty that I’d even half wished that they were just like me. They were my two best friends and now I wished like anything they had their PINGs back, and it wasn’t just because then they could PING us home.

‘I wouldn’t mind a nap either,’ I confessed.

‘Me too,’ said Bruce. He grinned. ‘At least up here we don’t have to worry about giant goannas or leopards leaping down on us.’

‘Nope,’ I said, gazing around at the bare red dirt and yellow crusted rocks. ‘This is probably about the safest spot in the world.’

It had a pretty good view too. From here you could see way down the coast and all the trees and blue hills and mountains inland, with here and there the glint of white of snow and glaciers. It was really cool, except like I said it was actually pretty warm.

I knelt down and felt the soil. ‘Hey, the ground’s hot!’ I said.

‘Must have heated up in the sunlight,’ said Phredde sleepily. ‘G’night.’ She rolled up the flying carpet for a pillow and ten seconds later she was asleep.

I lay down with my head on the carpet next to her. I suppose I must have fallen asleep pretty quickly, because the next thing I knew someone was shaking me awake.

‘Go away,’ I muttered. ‘It’s not time for school yet.’ The shaking continued. I opened my eyes crossly, then opened them wider.

No, I wasn’t in my bed at home, and, no, Gark our butler wasn’t trying to wake me up to get into my school uniform (not that he wanted to get in my uniform—just to make sure that I was ready for school in time. You know what I mean). No-one was shaking me either.

Weird. I sat up.
Someone
had been shaking me, I was sure, but there was no-one around. I glanced down at Phredde and Bruce. They were both asleep, Bruce with his froggy mouth open and Phredde all curled up like a butterfly in a leather skirt and top and purple joggers with silver laces.

But there was no sign of anyone else.

I yawned and gazed out at the view. It still looked great, but there was a funny haze in the air, almost like it was thick and shimmering. It smelt peculiar too, like the water in the river and the way the breeze had smelt sometimes, but even more so…

I sniffed again. Rotten eggs, that was it, like the time Phredde and I left a dozen eggs out in the sun for three weeks then threw them at the castle walls just to see what rotten eggs
did
smell like, because books are always telling you they smell pretty bad. Well, books are right (and Mum was furious), and the air round here stank of rotten eggs too.

Maybe some dumb bird had left its nest for too long and the eggs had gone bad and then fallen out of the nest and crashed on the ground, I thought. Or a Demon Duck of Doom’s compost heap hadn’t worked and…

The ground rumbled slightly below me. That was what had woken me up, I realised! Maybe there was a herd of giant kangaroos down among the trees and their bounding around had made the earth shake.

I peered down, but couldn’t see anything. The ground shook again. The rotten egg smell grew stronger.

Things were getting weirder and weirder…

Bruce blinked and sat up beside me. ‘Can you smell something?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘It’s pretty yuk. I’m scared!’ I admitted.

‘Oh, Pru!’ said Bruce, ‘I just want to say…’ He edged closer and I
think
he was going to put his arm around me…

…And then the ground REALLY shook and down, deep in the earth, a rumble grew louder, louder, louder…

‘Help!’ I screamed. ‘It’s an earthquake!’

Phredde sat up with a start. ‘Pru!’ she shrieked.

The shaking grew even stronger, battering us about like we were on board a ship on a really rough sea. For a second my tummy wondered whether it should be seasick in spite of Miss Richards’s bracken tea, then realised that
no
! This was not the time to be sick!

Bruce stared around, his froggy nostrils dilating. ‘It’s not an earthquake,’ he yelled, ‘it’s an erupting volcano!’

‘But…but…’ I stuttered. Then suddenly it all fell into place—the bare mountain with its hole in the top, the yellow crystals around the rocks,
²⁰
the too-warm ground underneath us…

A wisp of steam threaded its way through the soil just by my hand. It was HOT!

‘Let’s get out of here!’ I yelled, scrambling to my feet. ‘Everyone onto the carpet! Now!’

The steamy ground heaved below us as we struggled to roll out the flying carpet. We’d just got it spread out when the ground ripped apart next to us. Rocks and grass and soil crumbled into a gaping wound.

‘Up!’ I yelled as I grabbed hold of Phredde and Bruce. ‘Get this thing flying.’

Then suddenly we
were
up, but it wasn’t the carpet that had got us there, because the whole mountain exploded in a great burst of gas and the carpet was screaming up into the air with us grasping at its edges. Rocks and dirt were flying past us and the air was so thick with smoke my eyes were streaming and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe at all.

‘Phredde!’ I gasped, clinging onto the carpet with all my might.

‘I can’t get the carpet going!’ sobbed Phredde. ‘It’s out of control!’

‘Then PING us out of here!’

‘But I can’t!’

‘Try! Please! It’s our only hope! You and Bruce together…maybe you have a tiny bit of PING left!’

‘But…’ began Phredde. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll try…’ Suddenly her hand grabbed mine. At least, I thought, if
I’m going to die I’ll be with my best friend. My best friends. I clasped Bruce’s froggy foot in my other hand.

‘PING, PING,’ I shrieked, but it wasn’t a real shriek because there was no air in my lungs to shriek with. It was just a croak, even worse than Bruce’s.

I shut my eyes. The carpet heaved and bucked below me. Phredde’s hand was warm and Bruce’s was cold and the air was sizzling at my skin and dirt singed my face and…

You can hear a phaery’s PING, but I felt this one. It came from Phredde and it came from Bruce but it was such a little PING, it wouldn’t take us anywhere at all, and we had to get away, away from the volcano, we had to get home—and not just me and Phredde and Bruce but little Cuddles and Mrs Olsen because she was a pretty nice teacher even if she was a vampire and Miss Richards because I kind of liked her again now and…

‘PING, please, please PING,’ I breathed desperately. I tried to help them. Okay, I was just a human and they were phaeries but maybe if I concentrated, maybe some of my energy could seep through my hands, they were my best, best friends and I didn’t want them to die. I had to help them, help them, help them…

The PING seeped through my bones and round my head. All the world was PING. And suddenly it burst out all around me and everything went…

PING!