The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket

by John Boyne

  Chapter 17

  The Postcard That Smelled Like Chicken

  “Wanted to tell us what?” asked Henry, flipping the postcard over, looking for more.

  “Well, I don’t know what,” said Melanie. “That’s all it says. He must have stopped writing at that point.”

  Henry frowned. “But if he stopped writing, then why would he post it?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t he finish it first? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” repeated Melanie. “Maybe something happened that meant he couldn’t go on.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, Henry! It’s a mystery. Anyway, we obviously weren’t even supposed to find this postcard. It was crumpled up in the trash can.”

  “Is that why it smells of chicken?” he asked, giving it a little sniff before turning away in disdain.

  “I assume so. I was throwing out some empty cartons, and that’s when I saw it. It must have arrived this morning, and either Mum or Dad threw it away.”

  “Which is very strange. I mean, it’s a postcard from our only brother—”

  “He’s not my only brother,” pointed out Melanie.

  “Oh yes. Well, my only brother. And your second-favorite brother.”

  “Hmm,” said Melanie, frowning a little as she considered this.

  “So why wouldn’t they want us to see it? They know how much we miss him.”

  Henry stood up and walked over to the bedroom window, staring down into the garden below. Captain W. E. Johns was out there, sniffing around the washing line where Barnaby had once been hung out to get some sun on his face. The dog had been very disconsolate these last few weeks. It didn’t seem to matter what anyone did, it was obvious that he was missing his master. He wouldn’t even let Alistair or Eleanor take him for walks anymore, staying in his basket until Henry or Melanie came home from school and then charging toward the front door, anxious for a run.

  “The whole thing is distinctly odd,” said Henry, turning back and glancing at his brother’s empty bunk. “After all, if what they told us is true, then why wouldn’t they want us to see his postcard? They know how worried we are about him.”

  “Of course what they told us is true,” said Melanie, going over to examine her hair in the mirror. “It’s not as if they sent Barnaby away themselves. He took his rucksack off, you know that. He was always complaining about it. Still, I suppose what matters is that he’s trying to get home.”

  “It’s a long way from Canada to Australia, though. We studied it in geography class. It’s practically the other side of the world.”

  “Nowhere’s difficult to get to these days,” said Melanie. “Not with all the planes that go to and fro. Why, he could make it back to Sydney by tonight if he put his mind to it. He says he has a seat booked, after all.”

  “And yet I have a feeling that he won’t.”

  “So do I.”

  The two siblings sat down on Barnaby’s bunk, thinking through all the possibilities in their minds but unable to come up with a satisfying conclusion.

  “I miss him,” said Melanie eventually, sighing deeply.

  “I do too,” agreed Henry. “He wasn’t a bad brother, all things considered.”

  “Personally, I always liked the fact that he floated. I never thought it made him different; I thought it made him special.”

  “Everyone I know admired him for it.”

  “Everyone except Mum and Dad.”

  “Yes, they hated it,” agreed Henry. “Do you think if he comes back he’ll still float?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “They won’t be happy with that.”

  “But maybe they won’t mind so much since they’ll have him back safely. They must miss him as much as we do.”

  “If they do, they make a good job of hiding it.”

  “Oh, don’t say that, Henry.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? After all, they don’t seem very concerned, do they? If you ask me, they’re happy that Barnaby is gone.”

  And with that, Henry leaned back on the bed, only to feel a curious bump under the duvet. He reached underneath and pulled out the bulky item that someone had left there for safekeeping.

  David Copperfield.

  “Oh,” said Henry and Melanie, looking at each other in surprise and wondering what that could possibly mean.

  Chapter 18

  Freakitude

  When Barnaby woke, he felt a great throbbing pain running from ear to ear. He lay quite still, hoping that he might fall straight back to sleep, but the floor beneath him was moving up and down in a rolling motion. As he stretched out, his hands and feet pressed against a set of bars and he realized to his horror that he was being held in some sort of cage.

  “He’s awake,” said a voice to his left, and he looked round anxiously.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. “Where am I?”

  “Don’t worry, you’re safe,” said a second voice, and as Barnaby’s eyes began to adjust to his gloomy surroundings, he saw that he was in a long, dark, windowless chamber, with just a couple of low-hanging lightbulbs to illuminate the space. Pressed against the walls was a row of empty cages similar to his own, and a small group of people were sitting on the floor, watching him.

  “Don’t be frightened,” said a middle-aged man.

  “You were captured,” added a little girl standing next to him.

  “Who are you?” asked Barnaby, and as he looked closer, he noticed the most extraordinary thing: the man had no ears and no nose but a wonderful bushy mustache, red in the center and auburn toward the ends, like all the colors of autumn gathered together in one place.

  “Francis Delaware,” replied the man. “At your service. And who might you be?”

  “I’m Barnaby Brocket,” said Barnaby.

  “Well, Barnaby Brocket, you’ve got yourself into quite a pickle, haven’t you? From what my friends and I can gather, you seem to have some difficulty staying on the ground. Problems with gravity—am I right?”

  “Yes,” said Barnaby, shrugging his shoulders apologetically.

  “Well, you floated past the wrong man,” said a boy of about sixteen, waddling over. Barnaby stared at him in amazement, for he had a set of flippers where his feet should have been. He was like a cross between a boy and a penguin. “Please don’t stare,” he added in a sad voice.

  “I’m sorry,” said Barnaby. “It’s just that I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. And how can you hear me, Mr. Delaware, if you have no ears?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he replied. “I might as well ask you how you can float. You don’t know, do you?”

  “No, it’s a mystery.”

  “Would you like to come out of your cage?” asked the boy with the flippers, whose name was Jeremy, and Barnaby nodded. The door was opened for him; he stepped outside and immediately floated up to the ceiling.

  “That must be terribly frustrating,” said a young girl. Attached to her shoulder was her identical twin, of the Siamese variety.

  “Terribly frustrating,” repeated the twin.

  “I’ve grown used to it,” said Barnaby. “But you don’t have anything around here that can keep me on the ground, do you?”

  Francis Delaware scurried off for a moment and returned with what looked like a ball and chain. “Will this do?” he asked. “We could tie it to your leg.”

  “Perfect,” said Barnaby as the others reached up to pull him down and then attached the chain to his ankle so that he was standing among them. “This is all very confusing,” he went on. “The last thing I remember, I was floating up to the top of a tower, then a man saved me and gave me some water to drink.”

  “That wasn’t water,” said the little girl, Delilah, who didn’t at first seem to have any unusual characteristics. “That’s how he captured each one of us. We’ve all drunk that so-called water.”

  “Us?” asked Barnaby. “Who are you all anyway?”

  �
��We are known,” declared Francis Delaware, standing tall and sounding highly insulted, “as Freakitude.”

  “Freakitude?” asked Barnaby.

  “It’s offensive,” said the second Siamese twin furiously.

  “It’s not even a proper collective noun,” added the first.

  A chorus of voices chimed in, each one stating how much more offended they were by the term than the last, and they were silenced only by the commanding tone of a rather pretty woman in a floral dress.

  “Anyway, us calls he what that’s,” she declared. “It over control no have we, but course of demeaning it’s.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Barnaby, blinking two or three times, unsure whether he’d just gone quite mad, as he hadn’t understood a single word of what she’d said.

  “Yes, I’m afraid Felicia takes a little getting used to,” said Jeremy, the boy with the flippers. “Everything she says comes out backward. You have to listen back to front, if you can manage it. Or read her back to front if she writes something down. We barely notice, to be honest, we’re so accustomed to her way of talking. Strangely enough, when she sings, the words come out in the normal order.”

  “So why doesn’t she sing rather than talk?” asked Barnaby.

  “Oh, because she’s a terrible singer. She’d bring tears to your eyes. And not in a good way either. Think nails on a blackboard.”

  “Sentences short in speak to try I’ll,” said Felicia, shrugging her shoulders. “Way that you for easier be might it.”

  “All right, then,” said Barnaby, trying not to laugh even though it was rather funny, and then almost falling over. “Why does the room keep rocking back and forth like that?” he asked.

  “It’s not a room,” said Jeremy. “It’s a cabin.”

  “We’re on a ship,” said Francis Delaware.

  “A ship?” asked Barnaby in surprise.

  “Ship a,” confirmed Felicia.

  “Well, what are we doing on a ship?”

  “Trying to escape from it,” said a familiar voice, and a boy of around Barnaby’s age appeared from out of the shadows. A perfectly normal boy—nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that he had two sets of neat steel hooks instead of hands.

  “Liam McGonagall!” cried Barnaby, amazed and delighted to see his old friend from the Graveling Academy for Unwanted Children. He rushed forward to embrace him, but the ball and chain was too heavy and he fell face-first instead, landing on his nose on Jeremy’s flippers, which smelled of sardines.

  “Pick him up, someone, please,” said Jeremy in a quiet voice, blushing furiously in the half-light. “This is terribly humiliating for both of us.”

  Several hands and hooks reached down to pull Barnaby to his feet.

  “Hello, Barnaby,” said Liam.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Barnaby. “And how did I end up on a ship anyway?”

  “Liam, you might as well tell him everything,” said Francis. “From the top—there’s a good boy.”

  The boy cleared his throat a little before he began. “The man who you met in Toronto is only one of the most despicable human beings ever to walk the face of the planet.”

  “No argument,” said Jeremy.

  “Terrible he’s, oh.”

  “His name is Captain Elias Hoseason,” continued Jeremy, “and at one point in his life he was a ringmaster in a circus.”

  At that moment, Delilah gave an enormous sneeze, and as she did so, she completely disappeared.

  “Oh dear,” said a voice coming from where she had been standing. Her own voice, in fact. “It’s happened again, hasn’t it? Does anyone have the smelling salts?”

  Francis stepped forward, took a rather ornate silver box out of his inside pocket, opened it, and tipped a small quantity of something gray and powdery into his hand. He held it out before him and it immediately vanished, accompanied by a sniffing sound; then there was another tremendous sneeze and Delilah reappeared before them.

  “Anyway,” said Liam, raising his voice a little now, “if you’re quite finished over there … As I was saying, Captain Hoseason was a ringmaster, but he grew bored with the animals and was looking for a little more excitement. And that was when he met Francis Delaware here.”

  “I was the first one,” admitted Francis.

  “Now, as you can see, Barnaby, Francis has no nose or ears and yet has perfect smell and hearing. To us, it’s simply a fascinating trait in his character, but to Captain Hoseason he’s a freak.”

  “He thought people would pay to see me,” said Francis. “And he was right, they did. It was just the two of us for a while—not much income from that, of course—but then he met Delilah.”

  “I was the second,” said Delilah. “He saw what happened when I sneeze, and he captured me too.”

  “Does it happen every time?” asked Barnaby.

  “Every time. That’s why I keep the smelling salts to hand. Or one of my friends here does anyway. I only need to sneeze again to immediately reappear.”

  “How peculiar,” said Barnaby.

  “It’s her reality,” insisted Jeremy, sounding wounded. “Please don’t call her names.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I only—”

  “Would you like to hold my smelling salts, Barnaby?”

  “Very much,” he said, taking them and placing them in his inside pocket.

  “It’s her reality,” repeated Jeremy, his face growing red again. “I won’t stand for name-calling.”

  “He didn’t mean anything by it,” said Liam. “Now where was I? Oh yes. Then Captain Hoseason ran into Jeremy at an aquarium near Bristol. And as you can see …”

  Jeremy looked down at his flippers and shook his head sadly.

  “We were due to have an operation to separate us,” said one of the Siamese twins.

  “Only he kidnapped us from the hospital.”

  “Show radio my to listener regular a was he,” said Felicia. “Night one home me followed he and. Head my over bag a threw. Too up locked was I knew I thing next.”

  “And what about you?” asked Barnaby, looking at Liam. “How did he capture you?”

  “Well, after the fire at the Graveling Academy, my family and I moved to India. Freakitude played three nights at Habitat World, and he caught up with me on the street outside. He said I looked thirsty, offered me a drink of water, and the next thing I knew …” He looked at his surroundings and shrugged his shoulders.

  “The point is, one way or another, he thinks we’re all freaks,” said Francis. “And as he captured more and more of us, he decided to go back into the circus game, only not with animals but with people instead. He must have thanked his lucky stars when he saw you floating up like that. Freaks like you—his word, not mine—don’t appear every day.”

  “But it’s not right!” cried Barnaby. “I’m not a freak! I’m Barnaby Brocket!”

  “A boy who refuses to obey the law of gravity,” said Delilah. “To Captain Hoseason, that’s freakitude.”

  Barnaby stared around in dismay. “Well, what happens to us?” he asked. “And why are we on a ship?”

  “We’ve been crossing the Atlantic Ocean since you arrived,” said Francis. “We’re on our way to Europe. Europeans love a good freak.”

  “Europe!” cried Barnaby, trying to picture a map of the world in his head. “Well, where in Europe exactly are we going?”

  “I imagine we’ll start in Ireland,” said one of the twins.

  “It is the first country you reach when you get to the far side,” said the other.

  “And is Ireland anywhere near Sydney?” asked Barnaby.

  “Well, not really,” replied Jeremy. “Although it’s closer than Toronto was.”

  “And if you live in Sydney,” said Francis, “then what were you doing in Toronto all on your own?”

  Barnaby hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell them about the terrible thing that happened at Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair—but then, he thought, they had all
been so honest with him about their unfortunate lives, it seemed only fair to be equally candid in return. And so he told them the full story.

  “But that’s terrible,” said Francis.

  “Shocking,” agreed Felicia.

  “Why would you want to go back to such despicable people?” asked Jeremy.

  “Because it’s home,” said Barnaby, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” said Liam, coming over and placing a hook around Barnaby’s shoulder, “but you won’t be going back to Kirribilli anytime soon. Once Captain Hoseason captures us, he never lets us go. We’ll be locked in our cages before we’re allowed to disembark and then dragged in front of the next audience.”

  “But there’s so many of you,” said Barnaby. “And only one of him. Why do you let him do this?”

  “The whip!” said Delilah, her eyes opening wide in horror.

  “It’s terribly painful,” said Francis.

  “Well, I won’t do it,” insisted Barnaby. “I won’t be a freak.”

  “We’re all freaks,” said Jeremy.

  “There’s no escape.”

  “It of best the make to have just you.”

  “On the plus side,” said Francis, tapping a finger against his chin thoughtfully, “we do get to see a lot of the world.”

  “I’ve seen quite enough of the world as it is,” insisted Barnaby. “I’ve been to Brazil for a week, took a train all the way to New York, then another to Toronto, and now I’m on an ocean liner heading toward Ireland and—”

  Barnaby didn’t get to finish this sentence because just as he said the word Ireland, the ship came to a juddering halt and the engines were switched off. The small group gathered in a circle, holding their collective breath in anticipation, and a moment later they heard the sound of a hatch being opened directly above them. Daylight streamed in, and they turned their eyes away against the shock of the sudden brightness. When Barnaby managed to look up again, the only thing he saw was the face of Captain Hoseason grinning down at him.

  “I see Sleeping Beauty has awoken,” came the voice from above. “Now, are you all going to get into your cages and lock the doors like good little freaks, or do I have to come down there and sort you out myself?”