Milly grabbed Jason by the hand and fled up the stairs with him. Michael and Jess made to follow as Sabik suddenly burst back into being at the bottom of the staircase.
But he was stuck—hunched over and helpless, just as Jason had been! Vega crouched to help her companion.
Jess jumped over them both. “Come on!” Clutching the book tightly beneath his robe, Michael did the same.
“Stop the humans, Vega!” Sabik shouted.
Vega pointed to the top of the stairs. The door swung shut.
But Michael and Jess had already thrown themselves through it, just in time.
“Where’s the real lamp?” Michael gasped.
“Beside my bed!” Jess was already sprinting for the stairs in the hall.
As they took them three at a time, they could hear Milly and Jason trying to open the door to their parents’ bedroom.
“It’s stuck!” Jason cried. “Locked or something.”
“Wake up!” Milly shouted. “We’re all in danger!”
“They can’t hear you,” Michael yelled. “Veil of silence, remember?”
Jason nodded. “I know. I just thought…” He shrugged, close to tears. “I don’t know what I thought!”
Michael’s voice softened. “Hey,” he said. “That trick with the duck flashlight, that was brilliant, Jase. That was inspired!”
Milly nodded. “I can’t believe Sabik went inside it.”
“I wasn’t expecting him to,” Jason admitted. “I just thought he might believe that was the real lamp and leave us alone.”
“I’ve got the real one,” Jess cried, bursting from her bedroom.
“And I’ve still got the book,” said Michael. He pulled it out as he ran along the landing to join her, the others close behind. “Skribble? You okay?”
The bookworm stuck out his trembling head. “We must flee! That trick won’t delay them for long!”
They heard an ominous thump from downstairs as the door to the den was thrown open. “You will never escape!” Sabik was roaring. “Now that we have finally traced the book, we can follow it anywhere—however fast you flee.”
Jason looked dismayed. “Vega must have unstuck him.”
“And now they’re in the hall,” Milly realized. “And we’re trapped up here!”
“No, we’re not,” said Jess. “We just need to use some magic ourselves! Jason, quick—get in the lamp!”
Jason nodded. “Genie me!”
He swooshed away into the cold brass spout. Jess rubbed the lamp and he emerged a moment later in a puff of green smoke and full genie gear, his turban spotlessly white, his slippers extra curly, and his moustache neatly groomed. “What is your wish?” he boomed.
Jess lifted her chin. “I wish that you, me, Milly, and Michael could fly away through the window to the middle of Moreham Wood!”
“As you say!” Jason grinned and clapped his hands grandly. The glass vanished from the windowpanes. And the next moment, all four of them started rising slowly into the air!
“I don’t believe it!” breathed Michael.
Milly squealed. “We’re flying!”
Jess felt a moment’s panic as she found herself moving with the others toward the window. But then suddenly she was soaring through the sky in her satin pajamas, clutching the lamp tightly. Her fear faded away as she gave herself up to the incredible feeling. She was weightless, blown like a feather through the chilly morning, looking down at the garden far below and the pointed tops of the conifer trees. Magic had never seemed more special or intense.
Then, all too soon, Jess found herself slowly dropping down into the heart of Moreham Wood. Her bare feet hit the cold, muddy ground and she almost slipped over. She felt heavy and clumsy, holding the lamp so tightly her fingertips had turned white.
“That was amazing,” said Milly, landing neatly on a pile of leaves in her furry rabbit slippers.
Jason nodded. “Let’s do it again!”
“Wish us farther away, Jess,” Michael urged her, shivering in the thin daylight. “This is too close to the house. They’ll find us again.”
Jess nodded and opened her mouth—but no sound came out. She gasped and wheezed, but couldn’t form a single word.
“Jess?” said Jason, concerned. “What’s up?”
Skribble pushed his way out of the split in the book’s cover, butting Michael in the ribs with his head. “Sabik and Vega must know that she made the wish,” he cried. “They have taken her voice so she can wish no more.”
Milly rushed to Jess and hugged her. “Oh, no! Poor Jess!”
“And Jason can’t be freed unless Jess says so,” Michael realized. “We’re helpless again!”
Jess shook her head, gave Milly the lamp, then dug her finger into the muddy ground and started to write: G…E…N…I…E…
“She’s writing down the release words!” Milly realized.
Jason looked at Skribble. “Will that work?”
“It had better,” said Michael.
Jason shot back up the spout of the lamp and waited.
Jess concentrated hard. As she scrawled in the mud, she wished as hard as she could that Jason would burst back out of the lamp in his blue pajamas, normal again….
“B…E…F…” Michael was reading each letter aloud. “R…E…E!”
Even as he spoke the last letter, Jason was blown back out of the spout and went staggering into a tree.
“Jess, you did it!” Milly cried, embracing her again, and Jason grinned gratefully.
“Nonverbal lamp control,” said Skribble approvingly. “A clear sign of natural magical ability.”
Michael looked around. A noise had started up in the distance. It sounded like someone crashing through the woods. “They know we’re in here,” he said grimly. “Jess, get in the lamp.”
She frowned at him, pointing to her mouth. He pointed back at the ground. With a sigh, Jess bent back over and used her muddy finger to daub, GENIE ME!
With a soundless gasp of surprise she was tugged feet-first into the spout of the lamp. Milly rubbed it and Jess came back out again in a shower of silver glitter. She was wearing her cutoff top, tiara, gold sandals—and a big black puffer jacket. Michael looked surprised. “It’s cold!” she mouthed at him.
“I wish Jess had her voice back!” said Milly.
Jess clicked her fingers—and gasped out loud. “Thank goodness for that!”
Michael shushed her furiously; the crashing sounds were getting closer. “Okay, Milly, wish us away somewhere.”
“Shall we go flying again?” Milly asked.
“They’ll spot us in the air,” said Jason worriedly. “Although, I guess if they’ve got magic vision, they can spot us wandering around anywhere.”
“Maybe not anywhere,” Milly replied with a crafty smile. “I wish we were all tiny and hiding in an underground tunnel beneath the woods!”
“As you command,” said Jess, wriggling her fingers.
Michael felt a weird, spinning sensation, and his stomach lurched like he was caught in an invisible lift, moving from the top floor to the basement at incredible speed. In a sprinkling of silver stardust, everything went dark, and he and the others found themselves all bunched up together. There was a thick, cold, earthy smell in the air, and it was pitch-black. Michael clutched the book close to him. He tried to stand up straight but banged his head on the muddy roof.
“Oh, lovely,” Michael complained. His voice sounded loud and strangely deadened by the thick walls of earth. “How tall are we?”
“I was aiming for the size of a pencil,” said Jess. “But it’s too dark to really tell.”
“I wish there was some light in here!” Milly said.
With a clap of magic hands, Jess conjured a small lightbulb. It stuck out of the mud roof and gave off a strong, steady light.
“I went for a sixty-watt bulb,” Jess explained. “Is that okay, or would you prefer a hundred-watt one?”
“All right, Miss Show-off!” Michael complain
ed.
“Milly,” said Jason, “can’t you wish that they won’t ever be able to find us?”
“That would never work,” said Skribble. “We would need to know the full extent of those two genies’ abilities to be able to limit their powers.”
“And I can’t see them telling us even if we were dumb enough to ask,” said Michael. “But we’re not giving up. We’re not. We’ve come so far. It’s not fair that we can’t finish the genie training!”
“You heard what Skribble said—and Sabik,” said Jess quietly. “We were never meant to start it. And when you look at some of the things that have gone wrong…”
“But we can’t just hand over the lamp, the book, and Skribble,” Milly protested.
Skribble nodded vigorously. “Quite so, Milly!”
“Hang on, Jess,” said Michael. “Maybe some things went wrong, but we’ve managed to put a lot of things right, too. Maybe we can use some of the stuff we’ve learned.” He pointed to Jason. “I mean, that stuff with the flashlight—you gave the genies what they wanted back in the den, but you twisted it so things went wrong for them—just like you did with Foxtrot. And, Jess, you’ve always been good at illusions. You were the best at making food, and look at the way you gave yourself that coat just now….”
Jess frowned. “So?”
Michael picked up two clods of soil. “Could you transform these into an identical lamp and a handbook to go with it?”
“Decoys!” said Jason excitedly. “To fool the genies.”
Michael beamed. “Exactly!”
“Make another book first,” Skribble said hastily. “It is I that they truly seek. They must have been hunting me for centuries….” His voice rose in a wail. “And now they will imprison me forever!”
“We won’t let that happen,” declared Milly.
Jess bit her lip. “Show me the book.”
Michael passed it to her. “Don’t just look at it, Jess. Feel it. Think of the way it tingles and shakes…the way it smells so old…you have to get this right.”
Jess closed her eyes and, running her fingers over the book, remembered the way she had felt when she’d first touched it. Its image seemed to shine in her mind.
Milly passed the lamp to Jason and took one of the clods of earth. “I wish we had an exact copy of The Genie Handbook,” she whispered.
“As you wish!” Jess boomed, sending showers of soil from the roof. When she opened her eyes, she saw Milly gazing down in delight at an identical copy of the book in her hand.
“That’s amazing, Jess,” she said, opening it up. “The paper looks just right, and the ink, too! Even the cracks in the leather…”
Jess gave a relieved smile and passed the real handbook back to Michael.
“Hey,” marveled Milly, “this fake even shakes like the real thing.”
“It’s not the book that’s shaking,” said Michael as vibrations shuddered through the ground. “It’s the whole tunnel!”
The lightbulb began to flicker, and more soil loosened from the low ceiling.
“Something is approaching,” hissed Skribble, ducking hastily back down inside the real book.
Jason gulped. “The genies must have found us again!”
The children huddled together as a huge, grotesque shadow appeared at the far end of the tunnel.
Chapter Thirty
“It’s a monster!” yelled Milly.
“No.” Michael was staring down the tunnel in amazement. “It’s…it’s a mole. Look, it’s a giant mole!”
Jason shook his head. “It’s a normal-size mole. We’re tiny down here, remember?”
Huge pink nose twitching, dark matted fur glinting in the flickering light, the gigantic mole filled the tunnel as it made its way blindly toward them.
Michael frowned. “What a weird thing to attack us with!”
“It’s not actually attacking,” Jess observed. “Maybe it’s just an ordinary mole passing through.”
“It can still squash us flat, though,” cried Jason. “Come on, Milly—wish!”
Milly was seized by sudden inspiration. “I wish my rabbit slippers were real, normal-size rabbits!”
“As you command!” Jess hollered.
Milly squealed as two rabbits shot up from the ground and filled the tunnel completely. They faced the mole, sniffing it as it approached, blocking its way. The mole sniffed them back with a wet snuffling sound.
Michael raised an eyebrow. “Clash of the titans,” he said dryly.
“Maybe the genies wanted the mole to herd us back down the tunnel,” Jason reasoned. “Maybe they’ve set a trap there!”
“I wish one of the rabbits would burrow its way back up to the surface,” said Milly breathlessly. Jess snapped her fingers, and in a flash of light the rabbit duly obeyed, kicking up a huge amount of earth in its wake. The whole tunnel seemed ready to come crashing down on top of them before the giant bunny disappeared from view.
“What did you do that for, Mil?” said Michael angrily, brushing huge crumbs of earth from the real book.
Milly smiled slyly. “Because now, Sabik and Vega will think we’ve followed the rabbit out through that tunnel into the woods and go looking there—when really I’m going to wish us somewhere else!”
“Okay, that is pretty clever,” Michael conceded.
“Michael, why don’t you be genie?” said Jess. “You took us to London that time and you got us back again in a tin can. I think you’re best at going long distances.” She scooted back into the lamp.
“Genie be free,” said Milly, and Jess was catapulted back into the tunnel—without her coat and barefoot again. The remaining mega-bunny jumped in surprise, startling the mole, who scurried away from them back down the tunnel.
Michael gave Jess the real book and said, “Genie me!”
Jason quickly rubbed the side of the lamp. A moment later, Michael reappeared in his traditional cloud of smoke, wearing his huge beard and black ninja-style outfit.
“Ah, that’s better,” he said, looking at his feet. “Fur-lined slippers.”
Jess nudged Jason. “Get on with it!”
“I wish we were…” Jason shrugged. “I wish we were all back to our normal size on a desert island in the South Pacific!”
“Gotcha,” said Michael.
There was a red flash of light, and then the world plunged into dizzying darkness. Jason kept tight hold of the lamp as he felt himself tumbling over and over and over….
But then suddenly his bare feet were half-buried in warm sand. Blazing sunshine prickled his skin. Opening his eyes, he found himself on a spotless stretch of white beach. A clear, deep blue sea lapped at the shore.
“Michael, you did it!” he exclaimed.
“Pretty cool, huh?” said Michael, grinning. “It’s one of the Cook Islands, I think. We did them in geography. Some bloke lived alone here for ten years.”
Jess pointed grimly across the water. “I think our stay is going to be a bit shorter.”
Two specks had appeared on the horizon and were getting steadily closer.
“Oh, no,” breathed Jason, a familiar fear building inside him.
Sabik and Vega were gliding across the ocean toward them, as if standing on invisible surfboards.
“They’ve found us already!” said Milly despairingly. “I didn’t put them off our trail after all!”
“Of course you didn’t!” called Skribble from inside the book. “Every time magic is performed in this world, it leaves a mark, a trace, a trail. That is how this evil genie pair tracked the book down in the first place—with every step of training that you have passed, the magic trails it leaves have grown stronger. Now they shine out like bright beacons for Sabik and Vega to follow.”
Jess watched as the genies drew nearer. “But if they can follow our trail of magic,” she cried, “we’ll never be able to escape them!”
Michael had an idea. “What if we left lots of trails—false trails? Then they wouldn’t know which way to go.”<
br />
“Quick!” Milly urged them. The two genies were so close now that she could see their eyes glinting in the sunlight.
Jason nodded excitedly. “I wish that when we next use magic to travel, we leave a million magical paths leading in all directions to Mars and back!”
“Excellent wish!” thundered Michael.
Jess stuffed the real Genie Handbook up her pajama top, grabbed the decoy she had made for Milly, and hurled it with all her strength into the sea. “Fetch!” she yelled, and was gladdened to see Sabik and Vega veer off in hot pursuit of the book—buying Jason time.
“I wish we were in Mum and Mark’s bookshop,” he whispered.
“Here we go!” Michael shouted. His beard glowed electric blue, and suddenly bright sparks of light seemed to shoot out of him, whip-cracking across the clear sky for miles in all directions.
Jason grabbed hold of Milly for support as Michael’s genie magic sent the world tumbling again, like they were all caught inside a whirlpool. Jason felt himself falling through space, sucked down into nothingness….
Then, with a sickening jerk, he found himself stumbling into a bookcase and collapsing amid a hail of paperbacks.
“We made it,” Jess groaned, flat on her back in the romantic fiction aisle. Milly sat beside her, clutching her head. Jess pulled the handbook from beneath her top and laid it carefully on Milly’s lap.
Michael turned sharply to Jason. “What made you bring us here?”
“There’s a saying,” said Jason, getting cautiously to his feet. “Where better to hide a tree than in a forest?”
Milly looked alarmed. “You’re not going to wish we were all trees, are you?”
“No. But look around,” said Jason. “What do you see?”
“Tons of old books,” said Jess. Then she smiled. “Of course! Who would notice one more old book among this lot!”
“I thought we could hide the real handbook here, then wish ourselves somewhere else,” Jason explained, looking around the shelves for a likely slot. “By the time those genies realize the book in the sea isn’t the real book, untangle all the magical trails we left behind, and work out where we’ve gone, Skribble might just have had time to think of a way to get us all out of this.”
Be a Genie in Six Easy Steps Page 17
