The Phredde Collection (55 page)

Bruce found a frog-green room down the corridor from ours and claimed it for himself, then we went exploring.

I was glad Phredde had PING!ed all the lights on so there were no dark rooms or gloomy shadows. But there WERE a lot of rooms. Empty rooms, that echoed. Actually they didn’t echo, but you felt as though they might.

‘Thirteen bedrooms,’ chanted Phredde as we went downstairs again. ‘Thirteen bathrooms, eight spas, six walk-in wardrobes…’

‘Wuff.’

‘The view would be really pretty too if it wasn’t raining.’

Suddenly a draught blew down the staircase, with a touch of ice at its edges.

‘Wuff, wuff, wuff!’

I stopped, halfway down the stairs. ‘Did you hear anything?’

Phredde shook her head.

‘What? Oh sorry,’ said Bruce. ‘I was checking the ceiling for spiders’ webs. Why?’

‘I thought I heard a dog this time,’ I said slowly.

‘Maybe there’s a stray outside somewhere. Poor thing,’ said Phredde, ‘it’ll be all wet.’ She zoomed down the stairs, flew up to the front door and PING!ed it open. ‘Here, boy!’ she yelled.

‘What if it’s a girl?’ asked Bruce.

Phredde ignored him, shouted. ‘Here, boy!’ again, then gave a whistle about ten times bigger than she was, which was a useful talent to have when you’re only 30 centimetres tall.

Nothing happened, except another flash of lightning, followed by thunder a few seconds later.

‘That means the storm is three kilometres away,’ said Bruce. ‘One kilometre for every second between the flash of the lightning and the sound of the thunder.’

‘I thought it was ten seconds a kilometre,’ argued Phredde.

They bickered about it as we wandered around the downstairs rooms. I thought about the poor dog out there in the storm. Or maybe it was sheltering under a bush or in a shed. But then I forgot about it, because this place was AMAZING.

There was a billiard room, a room all set up as a small theatre with a stage and everything, another room with lots of mirrors and combs and scissors and about a hundred wigs on a table—black ones, red ones, long hair, short hair, curls and every hairstyle I’d ever seen and lots of others too.

‘Maybe they scalped the other girls,’ joked Bruce, staring at the wigs.

I glared at him. ‘Ha, ha. Not funny.’

‘Yeah, cool it, Frog-face,’ said Phredde.

There was a sewing room, with bits of clothes cut out on benches, which was WEIRD, like someone had been sewing and then just left it all.

‘They look like underpants!’ I exclaimed.

‘Huh,’ said Phredde. ‘You’ve got underpants on the brain.’

‘No, on the bum,’ sniggered Bruce.

‘Shut up, Frog-face!’ cried Phredde.

‘Yeah, don’t be crude,’ I added. I took one last look at the piles of material—they really
did
look like half-made underpants—then followed Phredde and Bruce along the corridor to the next room.

This one was a giant living room with one whole
wall of DVDs and a player the size of a movie screen. A kitchen like the ones you see in restaurants on TV, except without a dopey TV chef in it saying,’Now just a drizzle of walnut oil’ on something that looks like puke on a plate. (Why don’t TV chefs ever do sausage and pineapple pizza?)

And then we found the dining room.

It was almost as big as our school hall, with a giant polished-wood table, lots of chairs with that embroidery stuff on them and a huge window overlooking the lake.

‘Hey, look out there.’ Bruce pointed out the window. ‘A tennis court! The rain’s stopping too.’

‘Yeah?’ I shivered. The house was really draughty sometimes. I looked out the window where Bruce was pointing, then turned back to the room. And then I stared.

‘Er, Bruce, Phredde…?’

‘Yes?’ Phredde was still gazing out the window.

‘Have a look at the table!’

Phredde turned. ‘Oh goody,’ she said. ‘Afternoon tea!’

‘Um…you didn’t PING! it, did you?’

‘Nope,’ said Phredde. ‘Hey, I’m hungry.’

‘How about you?’ I asked Bruce.

He shook his froggy head. ‘Look, earwig slices! And I bet those are slug sandwiches.’

‘Nah, they’re spaghetti,’ said Phredde, fluttering above the table.

‘Bet you they’re slugs.’

‘Hold it!’ I yelled. ‘Look, did either of you see any food on the table when we came in?’

‘Nope,’ said Bruce. ‘I was looking out the window.’

‘Me too,’ said Phredde. ‘But it MUST have been there. You didn’t hear a PING!, did you?’

I shook my head.

‘The solicitor must have got someone to bring in some food for us,’ said Phredde. She gazed at the table, then zoomed down and grabbed a plate. ‘I’m starved. This looks a lot better than anything I can PING! up.’

Phaeries can PING! up food, but it has to be stuff they KNOW, not just something vague like ‘a delicious meal’. Phredde is okay with things like watermelon, but she’s a pretty boring cook. And Bruce’s favourite snack food is fried flies.

Bruce peered at the laden table. ‘Date scones, blueberry muffins, sliced mangoes, stuffed eggs…not a single fly!’ he protested.

‘Yes, there are!’ Phredde pointed.

‘Wow! I must have missed them. Chocolate-coated mosquitoes too!’ Bruce began to load up his plate.

I blinked. I was SURE the table had been bare when we first came in. I was sure there hadn’t been that bowl of fried flies a few seconds ago either.

‘Chocolate cake, peach pie, cherry slices,’ chanted Phredde. ‘Hey, this is a
desserted
house. Get it? Desserted, not deserted.’

‘Yeah, I get it.’ I tried to grin. Something was wrong—all wrong. But I couldn’t tell what it was. I mean, everything was fine, wasn’t it? Nice house, great food. Even the rain was clearing up.

We stuffed ourselves with all the cakes and things. (You needn’t worry about getting fat with a friend who’s a phaery—she just PING!s the fat away.) Then I dashed up to my bedroom (to go to the toilet, in case you were wondering). The toilet was all purple marble—I love purple—and the spa bath was purple too. Even the soap was purple. I was just drying my hands
on the purple towel when I remembered something. Phredde had said the bathroom was pink—like the bedroom.

I went back out into the bedroom. The bedspread was purple. The chairs were purple and white.

I made my way downstairs thoughtfully. Phredde and Bruce were whispering together at the other end of the dining room. I heard Phredde say, ‘She doesn’t suspect ANYthing!’ Then she saw me and shut up.

‘Who doesn’t suspect what?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Phredde airily.

‘Just as I came in you said, “She doesn’t suspect anything.”’

‘What me? No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did,’ I said.

‘Um…I think she said, “She doesn’t RESPECT anything,”’ said Bruce quickly. ‘We were talking about Amelia, how when I had my Phaeryland Day party Amelia said there wasn’t any such day because it wasn’t in the list of holidays in her diary. Remember?’

‘Yeah, I remember,’ I said slowly. ‘But I was sure…’ I shook my head. ‘Hey, do either of you remember what colour my bedspread was?’

Phredde stared at me. ‘Your bedspread? Why on earth are you interested in bedspreads? It was pink, wasn’t it?’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t purple?’

Phredde shrugged. ‘Pink and purple look a bit the same.’

‘Yeah. Maybe.’ But that bedspread had been a really PINK sort of pink and now it was the purplest purple I’d ever seen…

‘Just wait a sec,’ I said. I raced up the stairs again and peered into my room. The bedspread was still purple.

So I trudged downstairs again, and we went outside to look around.

⁴
See
Phredde and the Purple Pyramid.

The gardens were okay. They were pretty and everything and there were flowers EVERYWHERE and I could see the lake would be fun. But it wasn’t what we were used to—no dragons or charging dinosaurs or marsupial tigers or evil hippopotamus-cooking princes. Even the graveyard was just a graveyard, with mown grass and neat marble tombstones saying things like ‘Annie Smith, 1841 - 1899, Rest in Peace’, or ‘Willie, February 1994-April 1994’, which made me sad to think a baby had died so young.

‘Hey, look!’ yelled Bruce. He hopped over to something almost hidden in the grass.

‘Train tracks!’ I said. ‘I TOLD you I’d heard a train!’

Bruce shook his head. ‘These tracks are all overgrown. There hasn’t been a train on them for years.’

‘But I HEARD one,’ I said stubbornly.

‘Maybe there’s another train line somewhere else,’
said Phredde, trying to keep the peace. She waved a hand towards the damp tree-covered hills.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ I agreed.

We followed the train tracks for a while, but they didn’t go anywhere, just around the lake. There wasn’t even an old train to go with them. It was all just wet grass and puddles, some dripping bushes and rain-faded flowers.

If we’d been anywhere else I’d have asked Phredde or Bruce to PING! us somewhere more interesting for a few hours, like to the moon.
⁵
But the rules of my sort-of Uncle Carbuncle’s will said I had to stay for two nights. And night wasn’t far off. So we just wandered round and looked at the flowers and yakked about school and whether Edwin was keen on that girl in the year below us and if dinosaurs could ride a bicycle which one would be fastest, stuff like that. And then we went back in for dinner.

‘I vote we just have leftover chocolate cake,’ said Phredde.

‘There are still lots of ants left from afternoon tea,’ agreed Bruce.

I was about to agree too—chocolate cake sounded a lot better than the spinach quiche Mum had packed in the esky, and that chocolate cake had been the best I’d ever eaten. But then I stepped inside the dining room, and stopped.

On the table there was an enormous pie and a roast turkey with stuffing oozing out of its bum (I know stuffing doesn’t LOOK like bird poo but I wish there
was somewhere else to put it) and potato salad and green salad and beetroot salad, which I LOVE, and cheesecake and a whole uncut chocolate cake (but this one had whipped cream and cherries instead of chocolate icing) and sliced watermelon and a big bowl of ferment flies, which are those tiny flies that hover round a fruit bowl (you get to know all sorts of insects when your boyfriend is a frog), and another plate of gnats.

‘Wow!’ said Bruce. ‘Gnats with mushrooms—my favourite!’ He bounded over to the table.

‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘Look, who made all this stuff?’

‘Who cares?’ said Bruce.

‘Think about it!’ I said patiently. ‘Someone’s been in and done all this while we were out. But no one drove up—we’d have seen them. So who? Snow White and the Seven TV Chefs? I don’t think so.’

‘I’ll go and check,’ offered Phredde. She zoomed out like a butterfly on steroids. Thirty seconds later she was back. ‘No one around,’ she announced.

‘It’s weird,’ I said slowly. ‘But it’s not FRIGHTENING weird,’ I added. ‘I mean, it’s really great food.’

‘Unless it’s poisoned,’ said Bruce cheerfully.

‘Bruce!’ I yelled. ‘If you make one more remark like that I’m going to kick you!’

‘Make that two kicks,’ added Phredde.

‘What did I say?’ Bruce asked, looking aggrieved. (Great word that, isn’t it? I used it in an essay last term and Mrs Olsen gave me an extra mark for it.) ‘If it
is
poisoned, Phredde or I can PING! an antidote.’

‘Look, shut up about poison and antidotes,’ I said. ‘Let’s just eat.’

So we did.

⁵
If a phaery ever PING!s you to the moon make sure they PING! you a space suit and air first—that was a REALLY bad few seconds I had last week!

We decided to watch a DVD after dinner. Phredde PING!ed the curtains shut against the dark outside and I settled myself on one of the enormous white sofas. Bruce sat next to me, which sounds romantic but wasn’t, because frogs sort of spread out and when you cuddle up to them they feel clammy, though Bruce can PING! the clamminess off when he remembers. Phredde perched on the back of the sofa.

‘What’ll we watch?’ asked Bruce, looking at the pile he’d selected from the wall of DVDs. (Have you noticed it’s always boys who do the selecting when you’re going to watch a movie? AND they hog the remote control, except phaeries can PING! DVDs too so for once I got to hold the remote.) ‘How about
The Monster from the Deep, The Revenge of the Alien Ghouls
—’

‘How about a comedy?’ I said quickly. Now it was dark I was beginning to get nervous again. The house was as
far from being a ghost house as you could possibly get, but that hadn’t stopped the pterodactyls in my tummy.

We watched two movies. And it turned out that dinner hadn’t been poisoned, because none of us collapsed in agony or vomited green yuck or got the runs, which worried me just a bit, because if the other girls hadn’t been poisoned what HAD happened to them?

I’d have been happy to keep watching DVDs all night, but I didn’t want Phredde and Bruce to see that I was scared. It was bad enough that I needed them to PING! me out of danger, without them thinking I was a wuss as well.

But I still didn’t want to go up to bed in the purple-not-pink bedroom all by myself. So when the second movie finished I said, ‘Hey, I feel like a hot chocolate,’ even though I was still full from dinner.

‘Sure,’ said Phredde. ‘I’ll PING! some up. Do you want marshmallows or whipped cream or plain?’

‘No marshmallows,’ I said. ‘Marshmallows always make me think of snot pillows. Hey, don’t PING! yet. I want to check something.’

I stood up and raced into the dining room next door. The cold draught hit me again as I stepped in, but I was too preoccupied to bother about it. I stopped and bit my lip.

Yep, just as I thought. Three cups of hot chocolate sat steaming on the table, one with marshmallows, one with whipped cream and grated chocolate on top, and one with a scattering of dried mosquitoes. There was a plate of banana muffins too, and another plate of what looked like currant muffins, but I bet those currants had once had long proboscises (a word Bruce taught me) and had sucked blood.

And there was a pair of underpants—purple this time—right in the middle of the carpet. Bruce hopped into the room with Phredde fluttering behind. She surveyed the hot chocolate. ‘This is crazy,’ she said. ‘There CAN’T be anyone here!’

‘There has to be,’ I said slowly. ‘Those underpants weren’t there before, either.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t drop them?’ asked Bruce.

‘Shut up, Frog-face!’ ordered Phredde, while I glared at him.

‘My underpants are
not
purple,’ I informed him. ‘Look, I know we didn’t see anyone before. But maybe they were hiding.’

‘Well, let’s make sure,’ said Phredde. ‘Bruce, you and Pru check the ground floor. I’ll zap up and check the bedrooms. That chocolate is still hot—they can’t have had time to go far!’

I shook my head. ‘You’re not thinking!’ I said. ‘What if there’s a hidden trap door under a bed or…or they’re disguised as a suit of armour?’

‘There aren’t any suits of armour,’ objected Bruce.

‘You know what I mean! Look, can’t you just PING! so any living thing in the house ends up here?’

‘No worries,’ said Phredde. She loves that phrase.

PING!

‘Hey, cool!’ said Bruce, gazing at the small pile of spiders, ants, flies, beetles and a large bewildered cockroach all cartwheeling over each other on the carpet. ‘Anyone for a beetle?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said absently. Sometimes I DID eat beetles, but only when I let Bruce turn me into a frog, which is okay but not something you want to do very often. (Beetles taste like chicken, in case you’re
interested—a chicken that’s lived on lemons and eucalyptus washing powder and is crunchy.) ‘None of this lot could have made hot chocolate. And beetles don’t wear purple underpants.’

‘I think I know what it is,’ said Phredde, as Bruce started zotting the beetles with his long froggy tongue.

‘What?’

‘Your Uncle Carbuncle was an inventor. He’s programmed the house to do exactly what you want. A sort of robot house. So it made up the beds and cooked the dinner.’

‘Who left the underpants then? And how did it know when we wanted dinner? A mind-reading robot house?’

‘Well, maybe not,’ said Phredde. ‘Okay, maybe the solicitor, Mr Thingummie—’

‘Nahsti,’ I put in.

‘Maybe
he
programmed the house to cook dinner for us and put it on the table. And he just guessed we’d like hot chocolate about now.’

‘Maybe,’ I said doubtfully.

‘Look, don’t worry,’ said Phredde. ‘There can’t be anyone in the house or they would have been PING!ed here with Bruce’s beetles.’

‘And spiders,’ put in Bruce. ‘They’re delicious spiders.’

I sighed, picked up my hot chocolate and sipped it. It tasted okay. Phredde flew back to the DVD room with hers, and Bruce gathered up a handful of spiders, and we all sat on the sofa again and talked.

One of the best things about best friends is the talking. Phredde and Bruce and I could talk for 50 years, I bet, and never run out of things to talk about.
Like, does Amelia’s mum REALLY let her wear a G-string or does she pin her knickers into shape every morning with safety pins? ‘Like a nappy,’ said Phredde, giggling. And what would happen if one of the pins opened in class, and what would happen if you dropped an emu from an aeroplane?

‘I bet it’d start using its wings FAST,’ said Phredde.

‘Nah,’ said Bruce. ‘It’d just go SPLOT. There’s no way emus can fly.’

‘I wonder how loud the splot would be?’ I sipped my hot chocolate. ‘Not very loud maybe because of all the feathers.’

‘That’s the sort of stuff we should be learning at school,’ said Bruce. ‘useful things, not all that square of the hypotenuse stuff.’

Phredde PING!ed her empty mug away. (For one small phaery she can put away a lot of hot chocolate.) ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Only another year and we’ll be in Hero School and you’ll never have to bother with geometry again.’

‘What’s Hero School?’ I asked, licking the last of the whipped cream with grated chocolate off my finger.

‘You know,’ said Phredde, ‘where phaeries go to learn about how to really use magic. Like uni for humans, except we go to Hero School for part of high school too.’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘I’m sure I mentioned it,’ said Phredde.

I felt a hollow open up in my tummy, even though it was full of hot chocolate. ‘No,’ I said.

Bruce shrugged, which did funny things to his froggy shoulders. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s a whole year away.’

‘And then you’ll leave high school?’

‘Yes,’ said Phredde.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Bruce, as though it was the least important thing in the world.

I felt the bottom drop out of my tummy and then the universe as well. My two best friends in the world would be leaving school in a year…

…and they’d be leaving me behind…

…and they didn’t even seem to think it mattered!

‘I think I’ll get some mosquitoes,’ said Bruce. He hopped out of the room. I turned to Phredde.

‘Um,’ I said, as casually as I could, ‘tell me more about this Hero School.’

‘Well, EVERYONE goes there,’ said Phredde. Everyone but me, I thought. ‘You know, Superman’s kids and phaeries, anyone with superpowers or magic. Because you’ve got to learn to use them properly. They train you for what you’re going to do when you leave school as well.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Then,’What do you think you’ll do when you leave school?’

‘Haven’t decided,’ said Phredde. ‘But it’s going to be SOMETHING. It’s so last millennium just being a phaery-in-waiting to the Phaery Queen or marrying a prince, no matter what Mum says.’

‘I’m going to work with frogs,’ said Bruce, hopping back in.

‘Big surprise,’ said Phredde.

‘Frogs need protecting,’ said Bruce hotly. ‘Or one day there won’t be any more frogs in the world and just think how many mosquitoes there’ll be then. Do you know how many diseases mosquitoes spread?’

‘Not as many as there were since you started stuffing mosquitoes in your belly,’ said Phredde. ‘I bet real frogs don’t eat as much as you.’

I was hardly listening.

I knew Phredde’s dad worked for some politician as his magical advisor. But for some reason I’d never thought about what Bruce’s parents did, apart from trying to make Bruce stop being a frog. Or what Phredde and Bruce might do when we all left school. Except that we’d still be friends.

Which we would be, I thought firmly. OF COURSE we would be.

Probably. Almost certainly.

Except…what would a couple of phaeries at a school for heroes have in common with a boring human girl who has no magic powers whatsoever? Who was just stuck at an everyday high school learning maths and history and—

‘Time for bed,’ Phredde said yawning.

‘Okay,’ I said miserably.