The Eddie Dickens Trilogy

by Philip Ardagh

  Eddie sat up. ‘What’s happening, Mad Uncle Jack?’ he asked, for that was the name he called the thinnest of thin gentleman – with the beakiest of beaky noses – who was leaning over his bed.

  ‘Come quickly, boy!’ his great-uncle instructed, his top hat brushing against the gas tap of the lamp on the wall. The eel might have had electricity, but this house – Awful End – didn’t.

  Eddie didn’t need to be asked twice. The quickest way to escape the eel was to leap from his bed, so leap from his bed he did.

  Eddie and his parents lived at Awful End with his great-uncle and great-aunt (Mad Aunt Maud). If you want to find out how they all came to live together, following a series of awfully exciting adventures – though I say so myself – you’ll have to read the first book in this trilogy, called (surprise, surprise) Awful End.

  Now where were we? Oh yes: an electric eel in the bed, Eddie Dickens out of the bed, and Mad Uncle Jack’s top hat brushing against the gas tap … What’s that hissing noise? Do you think it’s important? Do you think it’s part of the plot?

  Hsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

  Mad Uncle Jack snatched up the escaped eel, seemingly unconcerned as the current of electricity passed through his hand and up his arm as he popped it back in his pocket. This rather strange gentleman used dried fish (and eels) to pay his bills but, for some reason we’re bound to discover later, this eel was still alive and slipping. (I can’t really say ‘alive and kicking’ now, can I? Eels – electric or otherwise – don’t have legs.)

  Eddie glanced at the clock on the wall. It said six o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Six o’clock in the morning,’ said the clock – an old joke, but not bad for a clock.

  Why was Mad Uncle Jack getting him up so early, Eddie wondered? It must be important. Then again, perhaps not. After all, his great-uncle was completely mad. Stifling a yawn, Eddie pulled on his clothes.

  ‘Hurry!’ said Mad Uncle Jack through gritted teeth. He didn’t have a gritted pair of his own, so he always carried a pre-gritted pair about his person for just such an occasion. He kept these in a side pocket of his coat rather than in a top pocket. This was why the electric eel, rather than the pair of pre-gritted teeth, had fallen onto his great nephew.

  Out on the landing, the early light of dawn filtered through the large picture window. A picture window is a big window, usually with a large enough area of glass to permit one to see a view as pretty as a picture. (Not to be confused with a picture of a window, which is – er – a picture of a window.)

  The view from this window was of Mad Uncle Jack’s tree house, built entirely of dried fish, and covered in creosote. The creosote not only protected the tree house from bad weather, but also from the neighbourhood cats (who loved the smell and taste of dried fish but who hated the smell and taste of creosote). Some might think the tree house pretty in the pinky early-morning light. There was something quite salmony about it. That’s the word: salmony.

  Still half asleep – which, if my maths serves me correctly, means that he must also have been half awake – Eddie Dickens followed Mad Uncle Jack down the front stairs. He lost his footing a couple of times but managed to remain upright and stumble on.

  The heavy velvet curtains were closed in the hallway and it was pitch-black. Pitch is a kind of gooey tar which is very, very black, so pitch-black is a way of saying ‘very, very black’ using fewer letters … so long as you don’t then have to explain what ‘pitch’ is, as I’ve just done.

  Mad Uncle Jack found the front door by walking into it. The advantage of having the beakiest of beaky noses was that it reached the door way in front of the rest of him, so he managed to limit his injuries.

  ‘Oooof!’ he said, which is the universal noise a person makes when walking into a door, unless he or she stubs a toe, that is. The universal noise for stubbing a toe is ‘Arrrgh!!!’ (but you can choose the number of exclamation marks that best suits).

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Eddie, blinded moments later as his great-uncle threw the door open wide, letting in the morning sunshine.

  ‘There’s no time to lose, boy,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, a trickle of blood running from his beak – nose, I mean nose.

  The picture window on the landing looked out onto his tree house at the back of the building. The front door opened onto the front – the clue is in the name – and there, right in the middle of the huge sweep of gravel driveway, was a hearse.

  A hearse served the same purpose then as a hearse serves today. It was for transporting dead bodies in coffins from A to B (assuming that you wanted the coffin taken from A to B – it might be taken from A to Z if you asked very nicely). The difference is that hearses today are sleek black motor cars, whereas motor cars hadn’t been invented in Eddie Dickens’s day. For that reason, hearses were often glass-sided carriages pulled – or ‘drawn’, as horsy folk would say – by a pair of black horses with plumes of black feathers. The driver of a hearse would be dressed in black too … only this hearse didn’t appear to have a driver and the coffin was half in and half out of the back.

  The horses appeared nervous, skittish even (whatever that may mean), and they were shuffling their hooves around uneasily. Their flesh looked sweaty and their eyes were wide.

  Mad Uncle Jack was already scrunching across the gravel. Eddie ran to keep up. ‘W-What’s happening?’ he gasped. ‘Who … who’s died?’

  ‘Your parents are asleep upstairs and Mad Aunt Maud is safely tucked up in Marjorie,’ Mad Uncle Jack reassured him. Marjorie was a cow-shaped carnival float that Eddie’s great-aunt lived inside in the gardens of Awful End. If you don’t know why, I wouldn’t let it bother you. It won’t really lessen your reading enjoyment. ‘I was awoken by the sound of frightened horses and this is what I found … a riderless hearse.’

  ‘And this is what you got me up to see?’ asked Eddie, nervously. If these pitch-black – yes, that word ‘pitch’ again – horses bolted, the coffin was bound to fall to the driveway and smash open … and who knew what or who might spill out onto the ground.

  ‘Indeed. I do not want your great-aunt troubled by such a sight. She is a sensitive creature. And your parents need their sleep with the busy day that lies ahead. I feel confident that, with your experience of training horses, we’ll soon have this carriage off the premises.’

  ‘But I’ve never trained horses,’ Eddie Dickens explained, patiently. Living with Mad Uncle Jack and Mad Aunt Maud, you had to be patient.

  ‘So you’ve lied to me all these years then, have you, Edmund?’ said his great-uncle sternly. ‘Next you’ll be telling me that you never fought alongside Colonel Marley at the Fall of St Geobad.’

  ‘I think you’re confusing me with someone else,’ Eddie protested. ‘I’m only thirteen. Well, almost.’

  Mad Uncle Jack frowned. ‘You’ve never trained horses?’

  Eddie shook his head.

  ‘And you never fought alongside Colonel Marley at the Fall of St Geobad?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Eddie. ‘I don’t even know what the Fall of St Geobad is.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, ‘and there’d be no point in asking you now.’

  ‘Do you think it might have been a waterfall?’ Eddie suggested, helpfully.

  ‘St Geobad seems a ridiculous name for a waterfall to me, boy. Preposterous! I’ve often wondered whether St Geobad was a church.’

  ‘A church that fell down?’ Eddie mused. ‘But why would Colonel Marley be fighting by a falling-down church?’

  ‘A point well made! Well made, sir!’ said his great-uncle. ‘Perhaps it means “fall” as in “autumn”.’

  One of the horses at the front of the hearse snorted, causing steam to rise from its nostrils and the reader to remember the hearse, which was in serious danger of being forgotten because Uncle Jack – Mad Uncle Jack, that is – and Eddie Dickens were getting sidetracked.

  ‘Well, you’re here now, boy,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, ‘so what
I want you to do is to calm the horses whilst I go to the back of the hearse and push the coffin back inside.’

  Eddie would have preferred it if his great-uncle had done the calming-of-the-horses and he’d gone round to the back of the hearse. He knew from books he’d read – such as Life After Being Kicked and Horsy Horrors, for starters – that nervous horses were inclined to kick out at people who turned up uninvited to try to calm them down … but, then again, Mad Uncle Jack was a lot stronger than he was. He’d be able to slide the coffin back inside much more easily.

  ‘G-G-Good horses … nice horses …’ said Eddie in the kind of voice some people use when they’re cooing over a baby in a pram, saying ‘Doesn’t he have his mother’s eyes?’ (If a baby really had his mother’s eyes, she’d be screaming her head off and calling for child psychologist, police and ambulance and trying to get the eyes back off him.)

  He took a step forward. Scrunch.

  Both horses fixed their wide eyes on his. They reminded Eddie of the glass eyes on Mad Aunt Maud’s stuffed stoat, Malcolm.

  He took another step forward. Scrunch.

  The horses’ eyes looked even more wild … even more crazy, if that was possible. Forget Malcolm. They reminded Eddie of Even Madder Aunt Maud herself, now.

  Scrunch.

  One of the horses whinnied.

  Eddie dug his hand inside the pockets of his trousers. In one was a carrot and in the other a fistful of sugar lumps. What a lucky break! What were the chances of having a carrot and a fistful of sugar lumps in your pocket when you wanted to try and make friends with a couple of frightened horses attached to a hearse, eh? In Eddie’s case, quite high, actually.

  Sugar lumps were still considered an exciting innovation by Eddie’s mother, Mrs Dickens (or ‘that nice Mrs Dickens’ to her friends), even though they’d been around since 1790. To her, they were one of the many marvels of the age, like gas lighting. No more candles! Simply turn the gas tap, light the gas and – hey presto! – instant light. (Knock the gas tap on with your top hat, don’t light the gas and hsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss, big explosion sooner or later.) Sugar lumps … sugar in a perfect cube. How’s it done? Who knows? Why’s it done? Because we can! Eddie’s mother loved gimmicks, and sugar lumps certainly fell into that category. She had recently insisted that Eddie carry a fistful with him everywhere.

  The carrot was for a more practical purpose. Mr Dickens (Eddie’s father) thought that a boy of Eddie’s age should carry a knife with him for protection and for whittling. Mrs Dickens thought that Eddie might cut himself, so a compromise was reached. Eddie would carry a carrot for protection and for whittling instead. Eddie knew better than to argue. Anyway, he didn’t feel he needed protection (having once organised a mass escape from an orphanage, single-handedly) and had no idea what ‘whittling’ was anyhow.

  The horses smelled the sugar lumps and the carrot and suddenly looked a whole lot happier. Eddie scrunch-scrunch-scrunched over to them with increasing confidence, and started to feed them the treats, patting their muzzles and muttering what he hoped were encouraging words.

  Much to Eddie’s amazement, Mad Uncle Jack had stuck to his side of the plan and was successfully pushing the coffin back into the glass-sided hearse without a hitch.

  ‘There,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘All done.’

  At that precise moment, there was an enormous explosion, the sound of shattering glass and a plume of smoke appeared above the proud rooftops of Awful End.

  Waking early to the sound of scrunching gravel, Eddie’s father, Mr Dickens, had struck a match to light his first cigar of the day – he had recently taken to smoking boxes of the things to improve his cough – but had ignited some escaped gas. The hsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss had turned to BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

  Episode 2

  BOOOOM!

  In which someone or something flips his lid

  Even the calmest of horses, with a mouthful of carrot or sugar lumps, isn’t going to take kindly to a massive explosion. This black-plumed pair had been on the unnerved side of uneasy before the BOOOOM … now they were tearing off halfway down the drive, with the hearse in tow.

  Mad Uncle Jack hadn’t actually had time to twist the catch on the back of the carriage, and the coffin shot out of the hearse like a half-hearted cannonball from a cannon packed with not quite enough gunpowder.

  It hit the gravel with a thud but, much to Eddie’s relief, didn’t split open to reveal its occupant. All of this seemed to have happened in an instant but, now that he had his wits about him, Eddie turned and ran inside the house to see if anyone had been hurt.

  His mother was coming down the stairs with a stunned look on her face and the tattered remains of his father’s nightcap in her hand.

  ‘What happened, mother?’ asked Eddie, running over to her and helping her to a chair. ‘Are you all right? Where’s father?’

  Mrs Dickens pointed to her ears. Mad Uncle Jack would have taken that to mean that she was telling him that Mr Dickens was in her ears, but Eddie knew better. His mother was trying to tell him that she couldn’t hear. The BOOOM must have affected her hearing.

  ‘W-A-I-T H-E-R-E,’ Eddie said very loudly and very slowly, then dashed up the stairs two at a time to see if he could find his father. When he reached his parents’ bedroom, next to his own – or, more accurately, when he reached where his parents’ bedroom should have been, next to where his own bedroom should have been – Eddie found … found … Well, it’s rather difficult to describe, really.

  He found a smouldering mess. Everything seemed to have been blown apart. Nothing was whole. There were bits of chairs, bits of wardrobes, bits of chamber pots, bits of bits and bits of bits of bits. And a slipper. His father’s slipper, with a wisp of smoke coiling out of it, as if on cue. Where the outside wall had been was now just outside … a huge gaping hole opening onto the back garden and morning sky.

  There was a thud. Not a heavy thud, like the one when the coffin had hit the gravel on the driveway. This was more of a mini-thud. The thud of an unsmoked cigar falling from the rafters.

  Eddie looked up. There, where the ceiling had once been, were exposed roof beams and, straddled across one, like an outsized kid on a rocking horse, was Mr Dickens, in nothing but a nightshirt.

  Eddie’s heart leapt for joy. Suddenly nothing else mattered. His father was alive.

  ‘It’s a miracle!’ shouted Eddie at the top of his voice. ‘It’s a miracle.’

  Though even more deafened by the explosion than his good lady wife had been, Mr Dickens could hear his son’s cries of joy. ‘A miracle? Not really,’ said Mr Dickens philosophically. ‘It’d be a bit sad to kill one of us off in Episode Two … maybe in a tragic climax, but not in Episode Two.’

  Not realising that he was in any Episode Two, Eddie had no idea what his father was on about, but he didn’t care. Running into one of the rooms that hadn’t been destroyed when the hsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss became a BOOOOOOOOOOM, Eddie returned with a pair of library steps. They were designed for wheeling in front of bookshelves, but his mother often took them into the bathroom to use for diving practice – she’d climb up them and jump off into the tub.

  Eddie dashed up them and helped his father down off the beam. He was covered in a fine powdering of dust which made him and his nightgown look grey. ‘Powdered ceiling plaster,’ he explained. ‘Someone must have left the gas on.’ Apart from his (hopefully) temporary loss of hearing, Mr Dickens seemed little the worse for wear.

  Mad Aunt Maud appeared in what would have been the doorway from the landing if the inner wall had still been standing. ‘See!’ she said, with a steely look of rage in her eyes. ‘I told you no good would come of these rowdy parties.’ Neither of the Dickenses knew what she was on about – Mr Dickens because he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, and Eddie because Mad Aunt Maud never made much sense anyway. She marched off the way she’d come.

  It was only later that Eddie realised that was o
ne of the few occasions since he’d met his great-aunt when she hadn’t been carrying Malcolm, her stuffed stoat.

  Back in the hallway, Eddie’s parents were reunited. Unable to see her husband up in the rafters and unable to hear his cries, Mrs Dickens had assumed that he’d been blown to bits … To find him alive was the best thing that could happen before breakfast. There was plenty of hugging and kissing. This is always embarrassing to watch if it’s your own parents doing it, and even more so in those days for some reason, so Eddie hurried back outside, leaving them to it.

  He found Mad Uncle Jack in the driveway issuing instructions to the servants – ex-footsoldiers once under his command in some faraway place in some long-forgotten war – whose job it would be to clear up the mess. Eddie suggested that they also be given strict instructions not to light any fires or make any sparks until the gas pipes damaged in the explosion were repaired.

  Mad Uncle Jack looked at him admiringly. ‘I can see why Colonel Marley was glad to have you at his side at the Fall of St Geobad, my boy,’ he beamed proudly.

  Eddie was about to say something, but decided against it.

  Mad Aunt Maud appeared, pushing between them. ‘I said such rowdiness would end in tears,’ she muttered, stomping off around the east side of Awful End, back to Marjorie, her hollow cow.

  ‘Where’s Malcolm, Mad Uncle Jack?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Malcolm?’

  ‘Her stoat.’

  ‘I believe her stoat’s name is Sally,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, which was a common error on his part, unless, of course, it was Mad Aunt Maud who consistently got the name wrong. ‘Is that her?’ He pointed at a stone birdbath on a pedestal. In it was Malcolm, floating on his back. It was a strange morning all round.