by Steve Cole
FOR TOBEY:
BEST TESTER OF LOOPY FICTION IN THE WORLD
A MAGIC INK PRODUCTION
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY.
Text copyright © Steve Cole 2013
Illustrations copyright © Jim Field 2013
Design by Jane Buckley
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Steve Cole and Jim Field to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN: 978-0-85707-870-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85707-871-1
Printed in the UK by CPI Cox and Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire RG1 8EX
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
www.magicinkproductions.com
CONTENTS
CHAPETR ONE
CHAPETR TWO
CAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOR
CHAPETR the FIFTH
CHAP SIX
CHAPETR SEVEN
CHAPTE’IGHT
CHAPTER NIN-E
CHAPTA TEN
CHAPT’ELEVEN
CHAPETR TWELVE
CHAP-TO-CHAP-TER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOR TEEN
CHAPTER FFFIFTEEEN
THE SIXTEENTH CHAPTRE
CHAPTER SEVENTOON
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINNIETEEN
CHAPTER TWONTY
CHAPETR TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-FREE
SPECIAL SUPER-SIZED CHAPETR TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPETR 2-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-ATE
CHA-CHA-CHA TWENTY-NINE
CHAPETR THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-WON
A MYSTERIOUS PIG IN FANCY DRESS RUNS WILD!
If you noticed I spelled ‘chapter’ wrong at the top of the page, CONGRATULATIONS! I’m just making sure you’re awake.
You may think it’s a bit crazy to start a book with a wrongly-spelled word. Well, with the story I’m telling, you’d better get used to crazy. And I should warn you, we’re talking bonkers, fruit-loops, round-the-bend, round-the-twist, round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush-then-round-an-extra-twisty-bendy-fruit-loop crazy. Not throwing the book away in disgust? Good. Then I’ll continue. . .
The whole thing started when we saw a pig in a top hat running wild through the house. By “we”, I mean my whole family: Mum, Dad and Lib.
Lib – or Liberty – is my little sister. My stupid, whiny, annoying little sister.
She was the first one to see the mysterious pig. . . and to hear it, for that matter.
I was asleep at that point.
Who am I?
Glad you asked.
I’m Stew Penders, and this is my book.
Confession: it’s my first go at writing a book and I’m feeling my way a bit. So, please. . . bear with me.
There – a picture! I feel happier when there are drawings involved, you see; I’m more of a comic book kind of guy. I’ve been writing and illustrating my own comics since forever.
Well, OK, I may have exaggerated slightly there. But from now on, I won’t. I don’t need to. This true-life story is crazy enough already.
I’ll prove it. Let’s get back to the night it all began. . .
There was Libs lying in her strange, unfamiliar bed – unfamiliar because we’d only moved into my granddad’s old house that very day, and he’d left lots of old furniture behind, and Libs had whined and whined until Mum and Dad shut her up by saying she could have Granddad’s big, wooden, sleigh-shaped bed in her room.
Anyway, there she was, surrounded by stuffed animals and princesses and all that rubbish, when suddenly. . .
Snuffle – snuffle —
There’s a sinister snuffling outside her bedroom door.
“PIIIIIIIIG!!!” Lib shrieked from across the landing, with way more exclamation marks than I can be bothered to write right now. “PIIIIIG! In my BEDROOOOOOM!!! It’s got a hat on! Big, fat, hairy PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG!”
Luckily for the accuracy of this eyewitness account, that was when I woke up. Nine times out of ten, my automatic response would be to shout something brotherly like, “LIB, SHUT UP AND STOP BEING SO DUMB!”
But, on this one-tenth of times, I didn’t.
Partly that was because I was in a strange bedroom too, and got confused ’cos I didn’t know where I was for a few seconds. But mainly it was because I heard a throaty squeal carry above Lib’s cries. And, fair play to her, it did sound exactly like the sort of noise a big fat hairy ‘PIIIIIIG’ might make.
Nah, that’s crazy, I told myself. Isn’t it?
I checked my watch and saw it was after two in the morning. A split-second later I heard Dad throw open the door to his and Mum’s room, which was next door to mine, and shamble outside.
“Something must’ve got in through the old cat-flap. . .” he said, sounding sleepy and confused. “I don’t get it – I boarded the hole up with a piece of two-by-four, a good match for the door, it should’ve held, no problem. . .”
Dad is a bit of a Do-It-Yourself whizz – or so he likes to think. Eight times out of ten his DIY does it back to him.
But this was no ordinary night.
I was wide awake by now, and waiting for Dad to give Lib a roasting for being stupid, annoying, whiny etc and for making stuff up. But the next moment, he was shouting too!
“Bryony!” (That’s my mum’s name, sorry, should’ve mentioned that.) “Bryony, there really is a pig!”
I almost jumped out of my unfamiliar bed in shock. I heard more squeals and snuffling (by now it was hard to tell whether they were coming from Lib or the pig), quickly followed by a loud thump as Dad fell over.
“AAAGH!” he shouted. And then my mum joined in with the caterwauling. Or pigerwauling, I guess. Her conversation with Dad went like this:
Mum— “A pig?”
Dad— “Yes, a pig! It got past me, don’t come out!”
“But, a PIG?”
“Yes! A pig. Must’ve got in through the—”
“You mean there’s a PIG IN THE HOUSE?”
“YES, there’s a massive pig up here, it’s dressed up in—”
“Did you say A PIG?”
“YESSS!”
Their bellowed duet seemed to go on for ages; I can’t be sure, because around then I zoned out. Why? Possibly because my unfamiliar bedroom door had suddenly burst open. . . Yellow brightness had flooded in like a strike of lightning. . .
And there was Liberty’s pig, poised dramatically in the doorway. Weirdly, I saw that it was wearing a hat – a big, black top hat, like some posh type would wear maybe a hundred years ago. The pig even seemed to have a curly moustache under its snout (a trick of the light, right?!) and its pink, pudgy body was squeezed into a funny kind of coat.
Luckily, I’m not one to panic in the face of strange goings-on and weird events. I’m calm in a crisis, yeah? Stew Penders – the comic book king of cool heads. I stayed smo
oth and in control and I. . .
Oh, who am I kidding?
I yelled my bum off.
Yep, that was what my scream was like – right down to the bold capital letters and seven exclamation marks.
Well, you try meeting a pig in fancy dress in the middle of the night on your first day in a new home! See how you like it!
Besides, I wasn’t really scared for myself. All I could think was—Don’t touch my superhero comics! Please! It took me my whole life to collect them and some of them are worth a bit, and bite-marks and trotter-prints are going to seriously reduce their value. . .
In case you hadn’t figured it out, action comics are kind of important to me. What could be more important than super-powered characters in long underwear having fights?
My mum’s always despaired of me for being such a comics nut. If I’m not reading about superheroes, I’m drawing my own strips. But, right now, with all of us yelling and shrieking and swearing and falling over, that’s exactly what me and my family needed: a superhero. Someone to answer our cries and come bounding to the rescue.
But at that moment, it all boiled down to just two things – a boy in bed, and a pig in top hat and tails with a dodgy ’tache. Each staring at the other.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the pig WINKED. . .
THE PENDERS CONTENDERS
I might just spell a chapter correctly, one day! But don’t hold your breath.
There’s an old saying that goes something like, ‘When heroes don’t exist, it is necessary to invent them’. Pretty deep, huh? So, how might my family measure up as superheroes?
Let’s weigh up the odds in the big battle – Pig versus Penders – fact-file-style!
So, you see, even if they were superheroes, three-quarters of my household would be no real use against a killer pig in the middle of the night.
But what about me?
As that bacon-sandwich-in-training stared at me – his top hat cocked at a rakish angle and a glint in his eye – it was almost as if he could see through the outward form of a startled boy to spy the superhero within. The star of a thousand homemade comics, the hero I’d always longed to become. Stew Penders, also known as. . .
Never mind the pig, I hear you shout. Let us read and enjoy Stupendous Man’s adventures right away!
Well, I understand where you’re coming from. I’ve been writing and drawing his comic-strip exploits my whole life and right now I’m redrawing and rewriting them (since the earliest ones were a bit basic).
They will be available to read some day. But for now, I’m afraid you HAVE to mind the pig.
In my household, we minded him very much.
After a few seconds’ staring at me, the improbable pig suddenly decided to make like the Hulk’s trousers – and split. He turned and ran squealing down the stairs, pursued by Dad, with Mum’s wails and Lib’s screams still ringing in his pink pointy ears.
Within a few minutes, all went quiet. Dad came back and reported that the pig had escaped through what was left of the catflap. The board Dad had used to block it was lying outside on the path to the back door, like it had been prised off. For now, he’d wedged a couple of heavy boxes in front of the hole to keep out any other loopy wildlife.
“A pig in fancy-dress!” Dad attempted a chuckle. “Most likely a neighbour’s idea of a practical joke. You know, we’re newbies to the area so they’ve set us a kind of crazy entrance exam. I’ll ask round in the morning – right now we should just forget all about it and go back to sleep.”
And so, an uneasy clam settled on the house. Oh, all right then, an uneasy calm. But frankly, if there was a mad clothed pig running around there could easily have been an uneasy clam about too.
We wanted to believe there was a normal explanation; and at gone two in the morning, you’re ready to believe almost anything.
Libby crashed out eventually after some hugs from Mum and a couple of way-past-bedtime stories from Dad.
It took me longer to drift off, though I was super-tired. I was still awake when the quiet snorts and snufflings started up again. This time from the ceiling.
Or rather, through the ceiling.
The noises were coming from the room above mine. The attic. The attic that my granddad had locked up twenty years ago, and banned anyone from going near. . .
I buried my head under the pillow and told myself the noise was in my imagination. I also told myself my carpet was made of marshmallows and that I would one day marry a satsuma.
The three statements were about as believable as each other. But at least the thought of my fruity wedding distracted me long enough to smother my pig-radar and push out some zzzs in the end.
THE MORNING AFTER
(But you can read it now if you like)
I was woken from a confused dream about marshmallows and small oranges around 8.30 by the sound of banging. It was Dad getting busy with his hammer, nailing a board over the catflap again. He was taking no chances on the pig returning.
I thought about the way the pig had seemed to wink at me. Imagination, I told myself. Got to be. Probably had something in his eye. And the moustache had to be a falsie.
But what about the noises I’d heard in the night? Could there be another animal trapped up there (apart from the uneasy clam, obviously)? Perhaps there was another way in? I couldn’t really see a pig climbing a ladder to get in through a hole in the roof. There again, I wouldn’t have imagined a pig in a top hat before last night either.
I trudged down the stairs in my dressing gown. I’d been up and down those seventeen steps no end of times before, since I was old enough to crawl, in fact – but to think they were our stairs now and not Granddad’s seemed really very odd.
I’d always loved my granddad and couldn’t believe he wasn’t with us any more. . . that he’d gone to that great comics convention in the sky.
I also couldn’t quite believe he had left his savings, his house and everything he owned to his only son – my dad.
On top of that, I also couldn’t believe how quickly Dad had stuck our old house up for rent – fully-furnished – so my family could make a new start here on the outskirts of a big town, fifty miles away from our old life in the country (which, by the way, I REALLY LIKED).
But what was completely unbelievable was this: instead of using Granddad’s money to take us all on a mega-cool vacation, or to buy himself a sports car, or to buy me a sports car for when I’m old enough to drive, Dad had chosen to do the most boring, cruel and selfish thing possible:
“Granddad’s money will support us while your Mum and I take time out to decide what we want to do with our lives. . .”
You see? Granddad’s cash would go on totally boring stuff like supermarket shopping and electricity bills and new shoes, while Dad and Mum skived off from being proper grown-ups.
And it was me and Lib who were paying for their decision: goodbye to our friends, goodbye to our old schools (not exactly heartbreaking, obviously, but still), goodbye to everything we knew. . .
And hello to Granddad’s house, to big new scary schools where we knew no one at all – and, apparently, to late-night pig rampages. (And possibly uneasy clam-pages.) [SHUT UP! THERE WAS NO CLAM!]
It was all right for Lib. She was too small to be that bothered – especially since she got a sleigh bed out of the deal. But for me, it stank.
It stank even worse than the smell coming from the kitchen that morning.
Burning bacon.
Warily, I opened the door. Through a haze of smoke and cardboard boxes I saw Mum snatch a smoking frying pan from the hob with one hand and wrestle a window catch with the other.
Squeezing past the boxes, I helped her to open the window. “Wow.” I eyed the burnt-black rashers. “Guess you taught that pig a lesson it’ll never forget, huh?”
“I’d certainly like to.” The pan hissed angrily on Mum’s behalf as she dropped it into the big porcelain sink. “So much for celebrating our first day here with a cooked breakf
ast. I’m not used to cooking with gas. In any case, I’m a bag of nerves this morning.” She jumped as Dad started hammering again in the utility room next door. “See what I mean? There’s so much to sort out, and all that banging’s giving me the worst headache. . .”
“What a good job it’s Easter!” Lib was peeping over the breakfast bar, her saintly smile shining through the smoke. “Me and Stew will be around the whole week to help you.”
“Bless you, angel.” Mum smiled at Lib fondly.
I smiled at Lib less fondly. “Crawler.”
“Nerd.” She stuck out her tongue at me. (Six-year-olds – so immature!)
“Don’t start,” Mum warned us.
Just then, Dad strode out from the utility room and started to choke on all the smoke. “Don’t start what?” he gasped.
“Coughing,” I said helpfully.
Dad pretended to swing his hammer in my direction, then studied the charred mess in the sink. “Ah. I’m guessing our celebratory cooked breakfast is off the menu?”
“You can have cereal and like it.” Mum kicked a cardboard box. “That is, if you can find the stupid cereal anywhere in this mess.”
Dad put a caring hand on her shoulder. “There is some good news this morning,” he said quietly, opening another window to let out the smoke. “That catflap’s closed for good.” He waved his hammer cheerily. “I’ve gone nuclear on it.”
“I think I heard something in the attic,” I blurted out. “Last night, after you chased the pig away.”
“You did not,” Lib retorted automatically.
“What sort of something?” asked Dad.
“A sort of. . . snuffling, scratching sound.” I shrugged. “Like an animal.”
“Oh, Stew.” Mum managed to make the words sound like perfect despair; it was one of her super-abilities. “You and your imagination. There’s only the attic above your room, and you know that’s been locked up for twenty years.”
“Your granddad said we were never to open it, ever,” Dad reflected. “But it could be that something’s got inside and built a nest or a den up there.”
