“And what about a person?” asked Elsie, feeling more than a little frightened.
The professor smirked to himself. “It would put a human being to sleep forever.”
“So you’re going to kill us until we’re dead?” asked Dotty.
“That doesn’t really make sense, but, in short, yes,” he replied, now pointing his pistol straight at her.
“You evil, evil man,” said the girl.
“Thank you,” he replied.
“If you have to kill me, so be it,” said Elsie. “Woolly can’t be kept in a cage for the rest of her life.”
“You can’t stop me, child.”
“Maybe I can,” said Dotty.
The lady reached beside her for what was left of the hot-air balloon’s basket. With all her might, she shoved it across the floor of the main hall towards the professor.
W H I Z Z !
He quickly spun his wheelchair out of the way, and the basket smashed against the wall.
DOOF!
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he purred. “Much better.”
Elsie picked up one of the Diplodocus bones that the mammoth had helpfully rearranged across the floor.
“How about this?” she asked, wielding it in his direction.
“Goodbye forever, urchin,” he said, pointing the gun at her chest.
The professor pulled the trigger.
PPPFFFTTT!
Thinking fast, Elsie whisked the bone up to defend herself. The dart stuck into it.
TWANG!
“HA HA!” said the girl.
“Don’t you worry, child. I have plenty more darts. Plenty more.”
Immediately, he began fumbling in his pouch for another. This bought precious time for the pair. Elsie picked up one side of the balloon.
“QUICK!” she shouted to Dotty. The lady followed suit and they ran towards the professor and threw it over him like a huge sheet.
WHOOSH!
“GET THIS THING OFF ME!” he yelled from underneath the one thousand silk handkerchiefs and one pair of ladies’ bloomers.
“NOW BASH HIM OVER THE HEAD WITH THE DINO BONE!” shouted Dotty.
Elsie had never bashed anyone over the head before, and certainly not with a dinosaur bone, but there was a first time for everything. The girl rushed over, and then stood beside the flailing figure, unsure what to do next.
“WHACK HIM!” ordered Dotty.
Elsie did what she was told.
“OW!” yelped the professor.
“Not hard enough!” complained the lady.
“YES, IT WAS!” came a muffled voice from under the balloon.
“HARDER!”
Another whack.
“OWW!”
“Still harder!” said Dotty.
“NOOOO!” pleaded the professor.
“Third time lucky,” muttered Elsie. With all her might, she whacked the man over the head with her bone.
This time the professor did not cry out, but instead slumped in his wheelchair.
“That might have been too hard,” remarked Dotty.
Elsie looked up at the massive hole in the stained-glass window that Dotty had crashed through. The snowstorm had passed, and night was slowly becoming day.
“We need to get Woolly out of here,” said Elsie. “And fast.”
They looked around, but the mammoth had gone.
“Oh no,” said Dotty. “We’ve only gone and lost her!”
You might think a mammoth would be too big to lose, but that was exactly what Elsie and Dotty had done.
“WOOLLY!” called out the girl.
“I’m not sure she’s going to come running like a dog,” said the lady.
“She can’t have gone far.”
Elsie looked at the floor of the museum for any mammoth footprints. There was a trail of them that went all the way up the steps.
“She’s gone upstairs!” said the girl.
“Oh no,” said Dotty. “I cleaned the upper floors last night.”
“Why would she have gone up there?”
The lady thought for a moment.
“Maybe she wanted to see the butterfly collections?”
Elsie shook her head. “Come on, let’s go upstairs and look.”
Apart from the sound of the wind, swirling in from the broken windows, the museum was eerily silent. The pair followed the footprints all the way up to the top floor, where they came to a stop outside the library.
“I didn’t know manmoths could read,” remarked Dotty.
Elsie shook her head in disbelief. “Where to next?”
“Well, this is the top floor of the museum. She can’t have got all the way up to…”
Before Dotty could say “the roof”, there was a deafening sound from above.
CRASH!
The pair looked at each other. No words were needed.
Debris started falling from the ceiling.
“How do we get on to the roof from here?” asked the girl.
“This is the only way. Follow me.”
They scrambled up a flight of steps.
Ahead of them they could see a mammoth-sized hole in the wall.
“More mess!” muttered Dotty.
When they reached the hole, they saw the most startling sight. The mammoth was standing on the roof, looking across London’s skyline as dawn was breaking.
It would have been a magnificent scene to paint, but sadly there just wasn’t time right now.
“WOOLLY!” cried the girl as she stepped out on to the roof. “What are you doing up here?”
The animal chose to do the same selective hearing trick on Elsie that the girl did on grown-ups. She kept staring forward.
“What is she looking at?” asked Dotty.
Elsie followed the creature’s gaze. “The Royal Albert Hall? Hyde Park? Lord’s Cricket Ground?”
“Do manmoths like cricket?” asked Dotty.
“I don’t imagine so.”
“No. Hard to hold the bat with a trunk,” she mused.
“What’s beyond Lord’s?” asked Elsie. She hadn’t ventured too far out of central London.
“Hampstead Heath?” replied Dotty.
“Beyond that?”
“Highgate Hill.”
“Beyond that?”
“I dunno. I never did History at school.”
“Geography!”
“That neither!”
Elsie stood beside Woolly, and patted her side gently. “What are you looking at, my friend?” she whispered to the animal, but the mammoth just kept staring straight ahead.
She lifted her trunk to the sky and let out a mournful cry.
“HOO!”
The girl wrapped her arms round the animal to give her a hug. The mammoth leaned towards Elsie, and wrapped her trunk round her.
“Not too close to the edge, please, Woolly,” she said, guiding the mammoth back.
Dotty took a step forward.
“It’s an awfully long way down!” said the lady.
“There’s the robber!” came a shout from the ground.
Elsie looked down over the edge of the roof.
There was a whole squad of policemen looking up at them.
“GET DOWN FROM THERE!” came a shout.
Elsie knew that voice. It was the head of the police, Commissioner Barker.
“We’ve had reports of a large lady in a hot-air balloon crashing through the window of the museum.”
“It wasn’t me!” called Dotty. “It must have been another large lady flying a hot-air balloon!”
“Pull the other one! It’s got bells on it!” came the shout from below.
Elsie was shaking. “Dotty! If they catch us, they’ll lock us up, and goodness knows what they’ll do to Woolly.”
“Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
“Please stop saying ‘oh dear’ over and over again. We need to find a way out of here or we’re all done for!”
“Oh dear!” The p
oor lady couldn’t help it. “Oh dear, I didn’t mean to say ‘oh dear’. Oh dear.”
“YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO GIVE YOURSELVES UP OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO OPEN FIRE!” barked Barker. Then there was the sound of rifles being cocked.
CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!
“Have you ever ridden a horse?” asked Elsie.
“No.”
“A donkey?”
“No.”
“TEN!”
“Ever sat on a carousel at the fair?”
“Oh no.”
“Me neither. But how hard can it be?”
“NINE!”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Dotty.
“EIGHT!”
“What am I thinking?” replied the girl.
“SEVEN!”
“That you’re going to ride on my back?”
“SIX!”
“I’m not thinking that,” said Elsie.
“FIVE!”
“Oh dear.”
“FOUR!”
“I’m thinking we’re going to have to ride this mammoth out of here.”
“THREE!”
“Oh dear.”
“TWO!”
“Yes, I know. Oh dear. But right now we don’t have much choice.”
“ONE!”
“Yes!” agreed Dotty.
The pair grabbed hold of a tusk each, and with all their might forced the mammoth backwards, away from the edge of the roof.
“FIRE AT WILL!” came the bellow from down below.
Gunshots crackled in the dawn sky.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
“HOO!” The mammoth started wailing. Being a prehistoric creature, she had never heard gunfire before. She began flailing around in fear.
“AH!” cried Dotty.
“HOLD ON!” yelled Elsie.
The pair gripped on to the tusks as tightly as they could.
“DON’T LET GO!” shouted the girl. If they did, they would be hurled from the roof, and become human jam on the ground below.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The mammoth retreated through the hole in the wall she had created. Now she was inside the museum, dragging her two new friends with her.
Safely inside, Elsie let go of the tusk, and fell to the floor.
DOOF!
Meanwhile, Dotty was being thrown around like a rag doll.
“HELP!” she shrieked.
“LET GO!”
“WHAT?”
“I SAID ‘LET GO’!”
Finally, Dotty did so, and fell face down.
BOOF!
“This floor needs a good polish,” she remarked.
“There isn’t time for that!” said the girl. “We need to escape!”
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
“RELOAD!” ordered Barker.
The gunfire had ended for a moment, and the mammoth stopped flailing around. The girl patted the animal, and stroked the fur on her trunk, which helped calm her down.
“Woolly, I will never let anything bad happen to you, I promise,” she whispered. “But you’re going to have to trust me, all right? I know you’re not going to like it at first, but this is the only way out of here. Now, Dotty, give me a leg-up!”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No, but it’s our only idea.”
Elsie put her hand on the lady’s shoulder. Dotty cupped her own hands, and the girl used them as a step to climb on to the animal’s back.
“Good mammoth!” said Elsie. The girl gripped the animal’s flanks with her legs, and used two handfuls of fur as reins. To her surprise, the mammoth didn’t buck, or even let out a sound. In fact, she immediately seemed comfortable with this new arrangement. Elsie reached out her hand to help Dotty up.
“COME ON!” ordered the girl.
The lady was getting on a bit, and struggled to heave herself up. Once she had, Dotty couldn’t swing her leg over the animal like Elsie. Instead, she lay face down on Woolly’s back, her head buried in the animal’s fur. It all looked rather undignified.
“Are you comfortable?” asked Elsie.
“Of course not,” replied Dotty. “But I think we’d best get a move on.”
“If you’re sure.”
The girl had seen the great and the good ride their horses through the parks of London, which had given her some idea of how it might be done. So she dug her heels into the animal’s sides, tugged on her fur and ordered, “GIDDY UP!”
Unfortunately, the mammoth didn’t move an inch.
“Oh dear,” muttered Dotty unhelpfully.
“Dotty?” asked the girl.
“Yes, child?”
“Would you mind giving our prehistoric friend a little pat on the bottom?”
“If you’re sure.”
“As gently as you can, just to see if we can make her move.”
“Understood.”
Then the lady did as she was asked. She raised her hand a touch, and brought it down on the animal’s rear end.
SLAP!
“HOO!”
Instead of a nice gentle trot, the mammoth went straight into a gallop.
“WOO-HOO!” cried Elsie as they charged down the stairs.
Poor Dotty was thrown up and down with each step the mammoth took.
POUND! POUND! POUND!
“OOF! OOF! OOF!”
As they rode down the staircase on Woolly’s back, Elsie and Dotty were met by an unwelcome sight. The professor had come to. Now he was sitting up straight in his wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs, with the dart gun in his hand.
“You should have hit me harder,” he purred.
“I wish I had now,” replied Elsie.
Because of her undignified position, slumped over the back of the animal with her face buried in Woolly’s fur, Dotty was struggling to keep up with what was going on.
“Oh no, not him again!” she remarked.
“Prepare to die. Both of you,” said the professor. He pointed the gun straight at Dotty’s bottom.
A deafening sound came from the huge wooden doors behind him.
“What’s that?” asked Elsie.
“That will be the policemen battering their way in,” replied the professor.
And another.
“There’s just enough time to kill you, and claim this monster as mine!”
Another!
“I’m going to enjoy this!”
Behind the professor, the doors to the museum burst open.
SMASH!
Shards of wood flew into the air.
The battering ram, which was a huge log on wheels, was going at such a speed the policemen couldn’t stop it.
WHIRR!
It sped right towards the professor, whacking the back of his wheelchair.
BOOF!
“ARGH!”
The force of the whack sent the man shooting across the floor.
WHIZZ!
He crashed straight into a glass case of stuffed apes.
BANG!
The professor was thrown up out of his wheelchair…
POW!
…and smashed through the glass.
SHATTER!
Knocked out cold, he landed right between two of the apes. With his mouth wide open, he could have passed for one of them.
All this commotion startled the mammoth, who let out a gigantic…
“HHHHOOOO!”
Elsie patted the animal, and said, “Whoa there, Woolly!”
It was no use; the mammoth began charging towards the line of policemen at the door. The officers all cried out…
“HELP!”
“NOOO!”
“I DON’T BELIEVE IT!”
“IT’S ALIVE!”
“THE ICE THINGUMMY!”
“A REAL-LIFE MONSTER!”
“I AIN’T DONE NO TRAINING FOR MONSTERS!”
“I W
ANT PAID OVERTIME FOR THIS!”
“MY MA SAID I HAD TO BE BACK FOR BREAKFAST!”
…as they leaped out of the way of the rampaging beast.
Elsie and Dotty held on for their lives as the mammoth galloped out of the museum.
“AFTER THEM, YOU FOOLS!” snarled Barker. “THAT MONSTER IS THE PROPERTY OF THE QUEEN! WE MUST BRING IT BACK ALIVE OR DEAD!”
Woolly was way too fast for the policemen. By the time they had scrambled to their feet, the mammoth was long gone. The creature galloped out of the grounds of the Natural History Museum, and charged down the road.
“HOO!”
Try as she might, Elsie could not get the animal to slow down. Poor Dotty was thrown around on the back of the mammoth.
“OOF! OOF! OOF!”
London was waking up, and a handful of market stallholders were wheeling their produce along the snow-covered roads.
“Mind me plums!” shouted one as his barrow of fruit was trampled underfoot.
“Watch me nuts!” yelled another as his roasted chestnuts were sent flying.
“You’ve crushed my chocolate balls!” hollered a familiar voice.
“That must be Raj,” remarked Dotty.
“Who?” asked Elsie.
“Raj! He sells sweets at the market here,” replied Dotty. She called out to him. “HELLO, RAJ!”
The man smiled and waved. “Oh! Hello, Miss Dotty, my favourite customer! I have some half-chewed liquorice on special offer today!”
“I CAN’T STOP, RAJ!”
“And feel free to come back with that huge furry long-nosed donkey of yours for a sugar lump.”
“SHE’S A MANMOTH!”
“She’s very big for a moth!”
Still the mammoth galloped through the snow.
“HOOO!” she cried.
“Where’s she taking us?” asked Dotty.
“I don’t know!” replied Elsie. “But, wherever we’re going, we’re going to get there fast!”
With some difficulty, Dotty lifted her head to see for herself.
“North!” she exclaimed. “We’re heading north!”
“Always north!” replied the girl.
The Ice Monster Page 8
