The Good, the Bad and the Deadly 7

by Garth Jennings

  ‘If I tell you what’s wrong, you’ll just think I’ve gone nuts.’

  ‘You already are nuts. Everyone in our family is nuts. Nice nuts, though. You know, like chocolate-covered almond nuts.’ Celeste began dishing out rice into their bowls.

  It may have been the jasmine tea or maybe that he just didn’t have the strength to hold on to such a big secret any more, but for the first time since the seven monsters came into his life, Nelson found himself ready to tell his sister the truth. Well, maybe just a little piece of the truth to start with. He bit gently into his bottom lip and began to contemplate where to begin.

  ‘Ooh, look at that,’ said Celeste staring past Nelson’s left shoulder. ‘It’s like they’re all looking at you.’

  Nelson turned to see what Celeste was talking about and discovered seven tropical fish staring at him from the neon-lit aquarium. Nelson quickly turned away and began to dig at his rice with the chopsticks.

  ‘That’s so weird! They’re totally eyeballing you,’ said Celeste with a chuckle before tucking into her food.

  Being stared at by fish wasn’t weird for Nelson though.

  Fish of all kinds noticed him and responded to him as if he were some kind of hero, and while it is nice to be thought of as a hero, it is also very awkward. Especially when you are sitting with your big sister in a Chinese restaurant about to tell her the biggest, most unbelievable secret of all time.

  ‘If you don’t start telling me the truth, I get to eat all the dumplings,’ said Celeste, slurping on some noodles.

  ‘OK. Well . . . uhh . . . I’ve got . . . I’ve got monsters, Cel.’ Nelson looked up at his sister for a reaction, but she remained composed and appeared to be completely open to whatever he was going to say next.

  Maybe Celeste would believe him. Maybe he really didn’t have to bear the weight of this extraordinary secret all by himself. The thought of sharing his secret with his sister was suddenly so appealing that the truth came pouring out of him. ‘Actual, real-life monsters. Seven of them. One for each of the seven deadly sins. Seriously, they’re about as tall as this table. Well, one of them’s a bit smaller. And they’re all different-looking, but . . . but no one can see them or hear them. Except me, obviously. And I suppose they’re like my friends, yeah, they are my friends – my best friends, it’s just that they’ve been getting me into loads of trouble since we got back to school . . .’

  Nelson paused in order to gauge whether his sister believed what he has said so far.

  ‘Well, go on. What kind of trouble?’

  ‘Like that time when the police came to school cos they found Mr Hamilton the geography teacher on the roof.’

  ‘Oh yeah. That was weird. Wasn’t he asleep inside his fishing boat on the roof?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘But you didn’t do that.’

  ‘No, but my monsters stuck him and his boat up there.’

  ‘OK,’ said Celeste slowly. ‘And why did your monsters do that?’

  ‘Cos Mr Hamilton had made me feel bad in class the day before. He was all, like –’ and at this point Nelson put on a nasal man’s voice to mimic his teacher – ‘“None of you have any sense of adventure these days. No gumption. You know when I was your age, my friends and I took the headmaster’s motorbike apart, it was a Triumph, beautiful bike it was, and we reassembled it on the roof of the school.” And then Mr Hamilton turned to me and said, “Judging by his gormless expression, I don’t think Nelson here even knows what the word ‘gumption’ means,” and everyone laughed at me. And that was it. I got this feeling in my stomach like being angry and embarrassed all at once, and my monsters felt it too. They feel everything I do.’

  ‘And they were with you? In class?’

  ‘No! No, they were in the school playground at the time. It’s a nightmare if they come into class with me. Have you seen that big bite taken out of the tire swing? That was Nosh.’

  ‘Uhhh . . .’

  ‘He’s the hungry one – you know, greed. Anyway, what I’m saying is they feel the same things I do. Wherever they are. And Mr Hamilton had made me feel, well . . . ashamed and stupid. So that night, they decided to get back at Mr Hamilton. They carried him out of his house while he was asleep and stuck him in his boat on the roof of the school.’

  Celeste took a deep, steadying breath. She certainly hadn’t been prepared for a story like this.

  ‘Puff, he’s the lazy one, he can fart this kind of sleeping gas, which is how they got Mr Hamilton on the roof without him waking up.’ Nelson chuckled. It had begun to feel exhilarating to talk to his sister about his monsters, and he couldn’t stop now. ‘I didn’t ask them to do it – they just thought it would make me feel better. You see, they get carried away. They can’t stop themselves doing mad stuff.’ Nelson crammed a dumpling into his mouth. The lightness of letting go of his secret had made him extremely hungry.

  Celeste looked up at the fish, who were still staring at Nelson as if they were as surprised by his story as she was.

  ‘And . . . I suppose it was these monsters that dropped you through the canteen roof?’

  ‘Yes! Well, they didn’t mean to. We were all trying to get Nosh out of the air vent – like I said, he’s the greedy one. He’d got stuck while he was sniffing the food smells and . . . Are you OK, Cel?’

  Celeste’s eyes had begun to glisten with tears and she took a sharp, shuddering breath.

  ‘Cel? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s just . . . Listen, me being kidnapped, that was a really, really horrible thing for us all to go through.’ Her voice weakened from trying to keep her tears at bay. ‘And sometimes when people experience something as traumatic as that, it’s natural for them to find ways or, you know, invent ways to cope, and there’s nothing wrong with it.’

  Celeste didn’t believe him.

  He’d finally told her the truth, and she thought he was making it all up.

  ‘But I didn’t invent them, Cel. They’re not imaginary friends; they’re real.’

  People on the tables either side of them looked at Nelson, who lowered his voice and leaned towards Celeste.

  ‘Honestly. They helped me rescue you in Brazil. It was us that found you in that jungle, but I never said anything cos I thought you wouldn’t believe me then.’

  Even Nelson had to admit it sounded ridiculous now. He lay his chopsticks on the table in defeat. Celeste reached out and grabbed his hand.

  ‘All right, all right. Let’s say that’s true. These monsters, these friends of yours, they happened to appear when I went missing, right?’

  ‘Yeah . . . but that’s only because I was helping Uncle Pogo with a leak at St Paul’s and I fell on—’ Nelson had stopped mid-sentence because of a very loud and very familiar honking sound. Not a bicycle horn or a car horn, but the unmistakeable ‘HONK’ of his little monster called Crush.

  Nelson spun around, and sure enough Crush was running towards him at top speed, zigzagging between the legs of the chairs, tables and waiters.

  ‘Nelson? You all right?’ asked Celeste.

  ‘Crush is here! He’s one of my monsters!’ Nelson reached out to grab Crush, but Crush dodged Nelson and ran right past, honking loudly.

  ‘HONK! HOOOONK!’

  ‘Crush? Crush! Come back!’ Nelson jumped up and hurried after his little monster. ‘I’ll bring him right back, Cel.’

  Crush turned a corner leading to the toilets, and Nelson ran after him, leaving Celeste on her own and very confused indeed.

  Nelson burst through the toilet door, nearly knocking out a man on his way out. ‘Sorry!’ he gasped, but he was too busy looking for Crush to hear the man’s curse.

  ‘Honk!’

  It was Crush and he was inside one of the cubicles. Nelson opened the cubicle door and found Crush standing on top of the water tank. With each of his four arms, Crush pointed up towards a window that was wide open with six monsters peering through it.

  MONSTERS IN THE TOILET

 
‘Phwoar!’ said Nosh, his face squished between Stan and Hoot. ‘Dis toilet stinky nice! Me smellin’ soap and fish skins!’

  Nelson was standing inside one of the toilet cubicles looking up at the monsters who peered in at him through the window. Someone else had just entered the toilets, so Nelson flushed the loo to hide the sound of his voice.

  ‘Guys! I only told you to stay away a few hours ago,’ he whispered, and they all answered him at once. What a noise it was. All those strange voices, rasping, growling, hooting, honking and moaning.

  ‘Stop! One at a time,’ whispered Nelson, and Miser took over speaking duties.

  ‘Master Nelson, we have it on good authority that your uncle Pogo and his companion Doody are in grave danger. As are we all.’

  ‘From what? What are you talking about?’

  ‘A very, very evil thing.’

  ‘Oh. OK, I get it. I know what you’re doing,’ said Nelson, and he sighed. ‘Look, making up stories as an excuse to get together isn’t going to work, especially right now.’

  ‘Oh no, no, no!’ exclaimed Hoot. ‘It’s no word of a lie, dear boy! Edna was telling me the truth.’

  ‘Edna? Who’s Edna?’

  ‘She is a seagull!’

  ‘A seagull?’

  ‘He ain’t lyin’!’ Stan was right to butt in. Hoot was useless at explaining things, especially in a crisis.

  ‘The fish community asked for you specifically, Master Nelson,’ said Miser.

  ‘Not more fish. They won’t leave me alone these days.’

  ‘Well these particular fish seem to think your uncle and his friend may be in Greece.’

  ‘They are in Greece; they’re filming a TV show. But come on, everyone knows where they are, so don’t pretend this is some big deal.’

  ‘The fish described your uncle and his friend perfectly – a man with one leg, and another with green hair like a parrot – and they insisted you warn both men not to take the wicked treasure they are searching for from the sea. If they succeed, a terrible, terrible evil will escape and that will be the end of us all . . .’

  But Nelson didn’t hear the last few words Miser said as his sister was calling to him from outside the toilets.

  ‘Nelson? You feeling all right?’

  Having his monsters close by again allowed Nelson to think more clearly. Now he realized it was madness to have thought his sister would believe him, and even if he did find a way to show his invisible monsters to Celeste, what then? As if his life wasn’t already a complete mess, then surely revealing his monsters to her was certain to turn their lives upside down once and for all. It had all been a huge mistake. He had to get out of that toilet, away from his monsters, and set things straight with his sister as quickly as possible.

  ‘Yeah! Be out in a minute, Cel!’ Nelson turned back to his monsters and in an urgent whisper said, ‘Guys, this is a nightmare. We can’t meet up any more, OK? Not until I start proving I’m not a total disaster.’

  As Nelson flushed the toilet and left the cubicle, he could hear his monsters protesting loudly.

  ‘Call da uncle Pogo, Nelly-son!’ cried Nosh.

  ‘Yeah! If this thing is as bad as we think it is, the whole world’s gonna cop it!’ Stan shouted, and it was the last thing Nelson heard before leaving the toilets.

  Back at the table, Nelson finished his food and looked across at his sister, who was still watching the gawping fish.

  ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit weird earlier. You were right. I made up all that stuff about having monster friends. Got carried away, I suppose. Sorry, Cel.’

  ‘You actually had me convinced for a bit there.’ Celeste topped up their cups of jasmine tea and smiled. ‘I was thinking we should probably get some doughnuts on the way home.’

  ‘Yeah, we should,’ said Nelson, smiling back at her.

  He was nervous his monsters would be waiting for him outside the restaurant, but they were nowhere to be seen. They had followed Nelson’s orders and gone back to the zoo, and though it was what he had told them to do, it made him feel like crying again.

  DOODY INVESTIGATES!

  Sometimes bad things happen by surprise. BLAM! You accidentally walked into a glass door you thought was open. Or SPLODGE! You bit into that jam doughnut too eagerly, and now there’s a dark stain on your trousers that not only looks as if you peed yourself, it’s also attracting wasps! But sometimes bad things creep up slowly, and even though you know they are approaching, there is nothing you can do to escape them. This feeling is called dread. It may be an exam you have in a few weeks, your appointment with the dentist to have a filling put into one of your teeth, or, in the case of Nelson’s monsters, believing that an evil creature was about to escape from the ocean and destroy the world. I’m sure they would all have preferred a quick BLAM! or a SPLODGE! or even an OUCH! compared to the dread that swirled around their bellies.

  It certainly didn’t help that Nelson thought they were making it all up.

  Nelson was in his bedroom wearing Stormtrooper pyjamas and trying with all his might to revise for a maths test on Monday when he heard his uncle Pogo’s voice coming from downstairs.

  Pogo wasn’t down there in person. He was on TV; a co-presenter of the six-part TV show Doody Investigates, in which Doody (Professor of History John Doodson) tested the inventions and theories left behind by Sir Christopher Wren. Like a sheepdog reacting to his master’s whistle, the sound of Uncle Pogo saying ‘. . . testing out Sir Christopher Wren’s sin extractor . . .’ made Nelson spring from his chair, dash across the landing and hang the top half of his body over the banister to hear what his uncle was saying.

  ‘. . . the idea being that these needles extract the seven deadly sins from a person’s soul . . .’

  Now Nelson simply had to see the television. Running downstairs into the living room was not an option as his parents had forbidden watching TV until he showed a dramatic and consistent improvement at school, so, moving as quietly as he could, Nelson dashed into his parents’ bedroom to watch the little TV that was perched on top of a set of drawers.

  The screen lit up . . . and there was the sin extractor. It looked exactly as it had the night he had fallen on it. Doody was in the British Museum warehouse, explaining to the viewers what they were seeing.

  ‘. . . But although Sir Christopher Wren never recorded anything about this mysterious device, his daughter Jane made note of it in her diaries, and our research team found mention of an apprentice who worked for Christopher Wren at the time.’

  Pogo took over from Doody and lifted a dust sheet that had been covering an oil painting.

  ‘And here he is! This is a portrait of William Buzzard: son of Lord and Lady Buzzard of Norfolk and Sir Christopher’s assistant. See what’s behind him? That’s right – it’s the sin extractor!

  ‘According to Jane’s diaries, Buzzard was very vain and a bit of a spoilt so-and-so. He only served as Wren’s apprentice for a short time, and her father thought he was an idiot. Apparently the only reason Buzzard wanted to work for Sir Christopher was because he thought it would make him famous.’

  The picture cut to a close-up of a leather diary with the initials J. W. on the cover, clasped shut by a golden lock. Doody opened the diary, revealing the handwritten pages.

  ‘Yeah, so basically Buzzard planned to become famous by being the first bloke on earth to be completely cleansed of sin. And to do that, he had to lay himself out on this table.’

  The camera followed Uncle Pogo as he crouched beneath the table to point at the seven copper vials held in a rack.

  ‘The idea was that Buzzard’s sins were to be somehow drained out of him by the needles and collected into these tubes, each representing one of the seven deadly sins. Now, according to Jane, this test really did happen and something really was extracted from Buzzard. But what we want to know is what exactly came out of him? And is it still out there somewhere?’

  Nelson knew exactly what came out, and for the first time it dawned on him
that maybe someone else had been through what he had. That someone other than him had made their own set of seven monsters. Would they look and behave the same as his? Would he be able to see them too? Could this be what the fish had warned his own monsters about?

  Nelson shook his head. This was no time for thinking; it was time for paying attention!

  Doody joined Pogo in crouching by the copper vials, picking one up and examining it as he spoke.

  ‘Jane describes seeing seven living creatures. One was ’bout the size of a chicken, and it ate the other six. Yuck!’

  Nelson thought of Nosh . . . but Nosh wouldn’t dream of eating his fellow monsters!

  ‘Of course, it’s likely this young lady, Jane Wren, had a wild imagination, and none of this really happened. But what if she was telling the truth? What if there really was a creature? Whatever happened, it was bad enough to scare Buzzard to death. Poor bloke fell trying to escape it, leaving this creature thing. Sir Christopher wasn’t taking any chances either. He didn’t just chuck it in the bin; he trapped it inside a bell and sent it as far away from London as possible. And here’s where it gets spooky, folks. The trading ship that took the bell went down in a storm somewhere off the coast of Greece. Not a soul survived, and whatever it was that came out of Buzzard could still be down there, somewhere in the wreck of that ship . . .’

  Doody paused, before replacing the copper vial and straightening up.

  ‘After the break, we’ll be going beneath the waves, where Pogo and I hope to recover some seriously spooky treasure . . .’

  The picture changed to a torchlit underwater shot of Pogo in full scuba gear pointing towards a barnacle-encrusted bell lying amidst the wreck of the ship.

  Theme music began to play, which meant it was time for a commercial break, and Nelson heard the living-room door open. He quickly switched off the TV, hurled the remote towards his mother’s pillow and dashed back across the landing into his bedroom.