Time and Again (7 page)

‘Got you at last!' Chris cried out, making Luke jump to his feet in alarm.

‘What you doing here?' he grunted, in a vain effort to act cool.

‘More like what were
you
doing back there on the railway line?' said Becky. ‘You almost caused a train crash.'

Luke shrugged. ‘Who cares?'

‘We do.'

‘Yeah, saw you play the big hero. What do you want?'

‘The watch,' she stated simply.

Luke shrugged again. ‘It's bust.'

‘Yes, we know,' said Chris. ‘Butch told us. But we still want it back.'

Luke took the watch from his coat pocket and glared at it. ‘Thanks to Butch, I'm stuck in a kind of time warp – y'know, like in that story old Sammy was reading to us,' he said, struggling now to hold back his tears in front of the twins. ‘There's no way out. I'm just going round in circles.'

In a fit of temper, Luke chucked the watch at a duck on the bank, but his aim was wild and the watch flew into the river. ‘You want it – you fetch it!' he cried.

At the word
fetch
Tan darted away, as if after a stick, and plunged into the shallow water.

‘Good girl!' Becky encouraged her when the dog seemed to be on the point of giving up the search. ‘Fetch. Where is it?'

A few moments later, Tan's head bobbed beneath the surface and reappeared with the watch dangling from her mouth by the chain.

‘Good girl!' Becky praised her again. ‘Come!'

Tan doggie paddled to the bank, climbed out and shook herself vigorously – spraying Luke with water – before dropping the watch at Chris's feet.

Chris picked it up and peered at the tiny, glowing arrow. ‘Must be waterproof. It still
seems to be working,' he said, then pressed the red button, which refused to budge. ‘Even if this isn't.'

‘What time do you reach before you slip back?' Becky asked Luke.

‘Five o'clock,' he muttered.

Becky glanced at her wristwatch. ‘It's nearly that now,' she told Chris. ‘What can we do?'

‘Dunno exactly – but we've got to do something.'

He seemed to come to a decision and went to the water's edge, knelt down and scooped up a large stone from the river bed.

Luke suddenly realised what Chris had in mind. ‘No! Don't, Jacko!' he yelled. ‘You don't know what…'

Too late. Chris's hand came down hard, slamming the stone onto the Timewatch and breaking its glass front. The gold arrow buckled and the red button snapped back up into place.

‘You nutter, Jacko!' Luke cried. ‘Look what you've gone and done!'

‘Just shut up and wait!' Chris told him. ‘Then we'll see what I've done.'

The three of them seemed to be holding their breath and Tan wandered away to start rolling in the grass to dry her fur. After what seemed an age, the church clock began to strike the hour. They almost counted the bongs out loud.

‘Right, that's five,' Chris said. ‘So I reckon if anything was going to happen, Luke, you'd have been back in the market square again by now. You're free at last.'

Luke let out a sigh of relief. ‘Thought about smashing the watch myself, but I didn't dare,' he admitted.

‘I don't think I'd have dared either, if it'd been me,' Chris replied honestly. ‘It just seemed the only thing to do.'

They stared at the broken watch on the ground.

‘So what do we do with it now?' Luke asked. ‘Chuck it back in the water?'

‘No, we'd better destroy the Timewatch once and for all,' said Becky, taking the stone from her brother's hand. ‘Make sure nobody can ever use it again.'

‘Or misuse it,' added Chris, glancing at Luke.

‘I'm really going to enjoy this,' Becky grinned, kneeling down. ‘Been wanting to do it for ages.'

Time and again she hammered the stone onto the watch, shattering it into smithereens.

‘There!' she said with satisfaction, standing up. ‘Now Luke can pick up all the pieces and we can go home.'

Surprisingly, he did so without any argument, but then tossed them into the river before they could stop him.

Chris whistled for Tan and winked at his sister. ‘Of course, there's still one more thing you have to do, Luke,' he said with a smirk.

‘Oh, yeah – and what's that?'

‘Start thinking what you might say to people about what you got up to in the last hour,' Chris told him. ‘That hasn't been wiped out, remember…'

Time travel! What a mind-bending concept it is. Just imagine having your own time machine and being able to travel back into the past – or even forwards into the future! Impossible? Well, not in the world of science fiction, one of the main areas of interest in my writing. I may be better known for all my sports stories for children, but I've written many time-travelling tales too.

Time and Again
began as an idea in one of my notebooks before I let the characters loose on the page – or at least on the computer screen – and then they helped me to write the story during the drafting process.

By pressing a red button on an old watch, the children experience a time slip of one hour. Not long, maybe, but many things can happen in that extra time, especially when
they are able to change what originally took place – for better or worse.

I have always enjoyed writing and had my sights set on a career in journalism after graduating from Leicester University in the early 1970s. Instead, I somehow found myself teaching in primary schools for about 20 years. The best part of the job, as far as I was concerned, was being able to run various sports clubs and coach the youngsters in a wide range of activities like football, gymnastics, cricket and athletics. It turned out to be very good experience for writing for children and I left teaching to concentrate on doing just that. I must have had about 80 books published since the first one appeared in 1980.

My wife, Joy, and I love rough collie dogs, like Lassie in the stories, and we now share our home in a Leicestershire village with one called Rocky. He always gives us a good excuse to leave our desks and enjoy walks in the local countryside and along nearby canal towpaths.

“
The bony hand zoomed right out of the screen and grabbed him
.”

When James is kidnapped by aliens, he
can't believe his luck. They want to
transform his feeble human body and
James can have whatever superpowers he
likes. He chooses super-speed, super-brains
and super-strength. But James soon starts
to realise he might have got slightly
more than he asked for…

“
It's just as well Yours Truly has a breathtakingly
brilliant, scintillatingly surefire gem of an idea
up her sleeve
.”

There's never a dull moment in the Bell
household. Fresh from success on Broadway, they
now star in their very own reality TV show. Plus
there's the mystery of Ken Undrum's long lost
love to solve, the Nativity play to rehearse, and
Bryony has special plans to make sure the
coming Christmas will be full of surprises…

“Those who enter Inverscreech should be wary.
Those walls contain some deep, dark secrets.”

Young ghosts Spooker, Goof and Holly are
off to a remote Scottish castle to make a
video about how to haunt. But the castle
turns out to be less lonely than expected. The
arrival of a bunch of Americans and a series
of spooky goings on give the ghosts rather
more to deal with than they bargained for…