Daisy Malone and the Blue Glowing Stone

by James O'Loghlin

  ‘Let me explain,’ said Sinclair. ‘The blue glowing stone you have is much more than a stone. About one hundred years ago we Hankaranians explored a planet called Dextra. At the bottom of a deep cave we found many glowing stones. Most were yellow, some were blue and a very few were red. We discovered these stones had certain powers. If you had one and you learnt how to channel its power, you could travel vast distances, and even control the minds of other creatures. The yellow ones had some power, the blue ones were stronger and the red ones were extraordinarily powerful. We immediately made sure that all the stones were heavily guarded so that their great powers could only be used in approved ways. Now we use the yellow and blue stones for many things – for transport, to generate power, even to catch and control criminals. The red ones, however, are so powerful that they are only used rarely and under strict conditions.’

  ‘We used a stone as our spaceship,’ said Dennis cheerfully. ‘A blue one.’

  ‘But how do you fit inside it?’ asked Daisy, trying to stop her overloaded and confused brain from going, Argh! I quit! From now on I’m just going to sit here and make a big, silly whooping sound.

  Dennis laughed uproariously. ‘That’s a good one! How do we fit inside it? Ha!’

  ‘Well, how do you?’ repeated Ben.

  ‘You don’t,’ said Sinclair. ‘You just hold it and concentrate on where you want to go, and it takes you there.’

  ‘And when you want to go home, it takes you home,’ added Dennis. ‘That is, unless you drop it in a river and lose it.’

  Suddenly Daisy had had enough. ‘You really expect me to believe that I should give you the stone back because you’re aliens and it’s your spaceship? I may not be as smart as an ant, but I’m not that dumb. It’s not a spaceship. It’s a stone. Come on, Ben. We’ve wasted enough time. We need to find Mum.’

  She stood up and turned to go.

  ‘Wait!’ exclaimed Sinclair. ‘Remember what happened in your attic? My arm stretched out to grab the stone. You saw, didn’t you?’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘How did I do it?’

  ‘It was … some sort of trick. I don’t know and I don’t care. I need to find my mum.’

  Sinclair turned to Dennis. ‘We’re going to have to show her.’

  ‘Isn’t that against the rules?’ replied Dennis.

  Sinclair shrugged. ‘We have to.’ He looked at Daisy. ‘I think you should sit down.’

  ‘I’m fine like this, thanks,’ Daisy said, crossing her arms. ‘You’ve got fifteen seconds and then I’m going.’

  ‘I really think you should sit,’ said Sinclair.

  Daisy didn’t move. ‘Ten seconds,’ she said (which wasn’t really fair because only three and a half seconds had passed since she had told them that they had fifteen seconds).

  ‘All right,’ said Sinclair. ‘You may find this slightly surprising.’

  Sinclair and Dennis started to lean their heads back. As they did so their necks opened, sort of like their bodies were toothpaste tubes, and their heads were the lids. It was as if their heads had been chopped off from the front of their necks but the cut hadn’t quite gone all the way through to the back. Their heads kept tilting back until their eyes were staring directly up into the sky. Inside their necks, instead of there being veins, arteries, muscles, the top of their spines and lots of spurting blood, Daisy saw something entirely unexpected: their heads were hollow and at the top of each of their bodies was a platform. On the platform was a plain white floor on which sat a miniature bed, a miniature armchair and a miniature table. At the front of each neck-platform was a miniature desk with what looked like a tiny control panel with lots of buttons and little lights on it, and at the back of the platform were tiny cupboards and what looked like a miniature fridge. Nothing was more than a few centimetres high. At the front of each neck-platform a small blue creature sat in a chair behind the desk.

  Daisy was finding it difficult to keep breathing. She felt her knees dissolve and she started to fall.

  The next thing she felt was a tongue licking her face. She really hoped it was Ben’s. She opened her eyes. It was.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  She slowly sat up. Yep, there they were. Two tiny blue creatures sitting in chairs at the top of Sinclair and Dennis’s necks. She reached for her rucksack, extracted her water bottle, took a few sips and then pointed at Sinclair and Dennis and said, ‘The toothbrushes!’

  ‘Oh dear, she’s gone mad,’ said Ben sadly.

  ‘They had tiny little toothbrushes in their hotel room.’

  ‘Indeed. We do have teeth and dental hygiene is very important, especially when you are six billion light years away from the nearest dentist.’ The voice came from the blue creature in Sinclair’s body and sounded exactly like Sinclair’s voice. He was about as tall as Daisy’s index finger, and had three little blue legs, two little blue arms, and a head that was big when compared to the rest of his body and which appeared to have the same number of eyes, ears and mouths as Daisy and Ben. Where noses usually go he had two slits. His ears were huge. Actually they were tiny, but compared to the rest of him they were huge. Dennis looked pretty much the same. Their heads were covered in what looked like a glass or plastic bowl, and a tube ran from the bowl down to the desk. They were both dressed in green robes.

  ‘That’s why you smell funny!’ exclaimed Ben. ‘Because they’re not real bodies!’

  ‘What do you mean, funny?’ said the little blue man inside Dennis, sounding hurt.

  ‘Unusual. Not like other animals.’

  ‘We’ll have to tell the manufacturer about that,’ said Sinclair. ‘Maybe they can improve it in the next model. Anyway, I’m sorry about the shock.’

  ‘But it’s pretty good, isn’t it?’ said Dennis.

  Daisy was more amazed than you would be if you walked into the kitchen one morning and found that your mother had grown an extra head and was playing cards with a giant block of pink cheese carved into the shape of a tiger.

  ‘My real name is Foznip,’ said Sinclair. ‘And Dennis is Dangfar. These human-shaped bodies are just carriers that we use here, so that we don’t attract attention. They are each powered by a yellow stone – we call them heartstones – and they operate just like normal bodies. They breathe, they grow hair, they even feel pain. And they can do a few extra things, as you saw in your attic when my arm stretched out to get the stone.’

  ‘Now do you believe that you really are aliens?’ asked Dennis-who-was-really-Dangfar.

  Daisy tried to keep thinking rationally. It wasn’t easy. ‘So you lost your spaceship. Then what?’

  ‘When we lost our stone, I remembered that our people had visited your planet before and had come to this area,’ said Sinclair-who-was-really-Foznip, ‘and I wondered if they may have left some means of getting in contact with our home planet. We were on our way up here, and as we travelled through your home city, I sensed a stone nearby. I couldn’t understand why, unless there was another expedition here on your planet, but I tracked it to your house. We were on the hill behind your house when that unpleasant boy came along and I persuaded him to find out when you were going to be out.’

  ‘What was in those lollies you were offering him?’ asked Daisy. ‘He seemed so desperate to get more.’

  Sinclair-who-was-really-Foznip smiled. ‘We always carry them with us when we go to another planet. They have a little something in them that makes some creatures want them so badly that they will do almost anything to get another one. But they only work on those who are not too clever or strong willed, so I doubt we could have used them on you. But don’t worry. They won’t have done the boy any harm.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Daisy.

  Sinclair raised his eyebrows, but Daisy couldn’t see it because his face was too small. (By the way, from now on I’m just going to call them ‘Sincla
ir’ and ‘Dennis’ because if I started calling them ‘Foznip’ and ‘Dangfar’ it might get confusing, and if I keep calling them ‘Sinclair-who-was-really-Foznip’ and ‘Dennis-who-was-really-Dangfar’ it would get really irritating and use up too many letters, and then we might run out of letters before we got to the end of the story, and that would be really irritating.)

  ‘And then you broke into our house and stole the stone.’

  ‘Well … yes,’ admitted Sinclair. ‘We had to. Without a stone we can’t get back to our planet.’

  ‘How did you get into our house?’ asked Daisy. ‘The back door wasn’t damaged at all.’

  Sinclair held out his human index finger (as opposed to his tiny little blue alien index finger). ‘This finger can deal with most locks.’

  ‘So,’ said Daisy slowly, ‘if I give you the stone then you can go home?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘But if you were able to sense and then find the stone in our attic,’ asked Ben, ‘why couldn’t you track the one you lost?’

  Sinclair rubbed his chin. ‘I did track it,’ he said unhappily.

  ‘And …?’ prompted Daisy.

  ‘It’s inside a fish. Quite a large fish that swims very quickly.’

  ‘These stones sound very impressive,’ said Ben dryly, ‘but it does occur to me that if you’d had a real proper-sized spaceship, it would have been a lot harder for a fish to swallow it.’

  ‘If the blue stone you had was your only way of getting back home, why weren’t you more careful with it?’ asked Daisy.

  Sinclair looked at Dennis in a less-than-friendly fashion. Dennis looked at the ground again. The ground didn’t look anywhere, because it didn’t have any eyes.

  ‘See, Uncle Foz never let me touch the spaceship ’cos it was so important,’ began Dennis.

  ‘Wait!’ interrupted Daisy. ‘He’s your uncle?’

  Dennis nodded.

  ‘You didn’t think he was another scientist, did you?’ Sinclair snorted. ‘His mother begged me to let him come. It was supposed to be a short trip.’

  ‘But if he’s your nephew … why are you so mean to him?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dennis in a puzzled voice. ‘Why are you so mean to me?’

  ‘Because you lost our spaceship! And, to be perfectly honest, you can be quite irritating. Sorry.’

  ‘Is being irritating a good thing?’ asked Dennis.

  Nobody answered.

  Daisy turned to Sinclair. ‘If he’s your nephew, why does he call you “boss”?’

  ‘In our language it means “uncle”.’

  Dennis continued. ‘Anyway, we were heading through the bush to find a really big ants’ nest, but I wasn’t used to this big body yet, and the track went right next to a river and I slipped and began to fall so I grabbed onto something to stop me, but it didn’t stop me because –’

  ‘Because the thing you grabbed was me,’ growled Sinclair.

  ‘Um, yeah, and I fell in the river, and so did the thing I was holding on to. You know, him.’ Dennis pointed at Sinclair.

  ‘And the river was flowing very fast,’ continued Sinclair none-too-happily. ‘We got washed down it and bashed against rocks and turned upside down and when we finally managed to get to the side and pull ourselves out … the stone was gone.’

  ‘How did you know I was coming up here?’ asked Daisy. ‘How did you find me just then?’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Dennis. ‘I had no idea. I mean, I hardly know anything.’

  ‘Again, I sensed the stone,’ explained Sinclair.

  ‘But if these glowing blue stones are so powerful, why would there have been one hidden underground where my mum found it?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘As I said,’ explained Sinclair, ‘a few hundred years ago others from our planet visited your planet. I don’t know why they came here but they probably left the stone in case anyone else from our planet visited and needed emergency help.’

  ‘But the room where my mum found it was booby-trapped. As soon as she touched the stone a metal door crashed down.’

  ‘Yes, of course. We need to safeguard the stones because they are so powerful. Only a Hankaranian would know how to use the stone to lift the door.’

  ‘What about everyone in the town? They’re walking around like zombies. Did you do that?’

  ‘No!’ said Sinclair. ‘We saw them too. I don’t know what happened to them, but the only thing that is powerful enough to do that to so many people is a blue stone. Or a red one, of course, but there wouldn’t be any red ones on this planet.’

  ‘So who would have done it?’ asked Daisy.

  Sinclair shrugged. ‘I wish I knew.’

  Daisy had another question. ‘How does Professor Blont fit in? Was he helping you?’

  Sinclair gave Daisy a blank look. ‘I don’t know a Professor Blont. No one was helping us.’

  Daisy remembered Blont’s words. It’s too dangerous! He’s too powerful! If Blont hadn’t been referring to Sinclair, who had he been referring to?

  ‘We mustn’t leave that boy with the stone for too long,’ said Sinclair. ‘Will you help us?’

  Are they telling the truth? Daisy wondered. If they were, she should help them. But what if they weren’t? They didn’t seem to be lying, but maybe they were just very good at it. Then again, while she could imagine Sinclair being a good liar, surely Dennis would be terrible at it. And Dennis had sounded like he was telling the truth. Daisy made up her mind.

  ‘I … I think so. Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the little blue man who was Sinclair, looking relieved. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  ‘You should probably put your heads back on first,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Good idea,’ replied Sinclair.

  Their heads gradually came forward and settled back onto their necks, hiding the little blue men from view. They all hurried back to the road where they found Prawn curled up under a tree where they had left him, asleep.

  ‘Ohhh,’ said Dennis, ‘Sweet. Little sleepy bye-byes.’

  ‘Prawn,’ said Daisy gently, shaking him by the shoulder.

  Prawn rolled onto his side. ‘Henry, like, Henry,’ he groaned.

  Daisy shook him a bit harder, the way you might shake a can of lemonade you were about to give to your sister so that when she opened it, the lemonade would spray all over her nice new shirt. ‘Prawn! Wake up!’

  ‘Oh, man,’ groaned Prawn. ‘Is he gone?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘Like, the dude.’

  ‘What dude?’ demanded Sinclair urgently. Daisy started to get a funny feeling in her stomach.

  ‘Like, this dude came up the track. I hid but it was like he could see through the trees. He’s coming towards me and I’m, like, “Oh no, this is bad. Why did I forget Henry?”’

  ‘What could your phone have done?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘He could have, like, provided me with companionship and emotional support. Or I could have thrown him at the dude.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ prompted Daisy.

  ‘Then the dude came around the tree and just, like, stared at me. I tried to shout out, but I couldn’t.’

  There was silence for several seconds as everyone waited for Prawn to tell them what had happened next, and Prawn didn’t.

  ‘Then what?!’ demanded everyone except Prawn at the same time.

  ‘Then you guys woke me up. That’s all I remember.’

  ‘The stone!’ exclaimed Sinclair. ‘Check your pocket.’

  They all held their breath as Prawn patted his jeans pockets, then dug around inside them, then turned them inside out twice and then looked around on the ground near where he had been lying.

  But, of course, the stone was gone.

  Chapter 13

  INTO THE UNDERGROUND />
  ‘Boss,’ said Dennis, ‘I know that you sometimes think I’m not all that clever, but this is a bad thing, isn’t it?’

  Sinclair put his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. ‘It’s very bad.’ He focused on Prawn. ‘What did the man look like?’

  ‘He was kind of, like, normal looking. Like, brown hair I think, sort of normal length, and, I don’t know, like a normal face and stuff.’

  ‘Very helpful,’ said Sinclair. Clearly, thought Daisy, the Hankaranians were also familiar with sarcasm.

  ‘What was he wearing?’ pressed Sinclair.

  ‘Like, pants, um … obviously. Um … and a shirt. Maybe brown … or blue. Could have been green.’

  Sinclair clenched his fists and turned away.

  ‘Come on,’ said Daisy to Sinclair. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? If you don’t get the stone back, so what? You’re just stuck here for a while. There’re lots of ants to study. It can just be like a holiday until they send someone to rescue you.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Sinclair, frowning. ‘These bodies that we are in protect us. They filter and treat the air so we can breathe it. But we have already been here longer than we expected and they’re running out of power. When they stop working, your air will kill us.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Daisy. That did rather change things. ‘How long have you got before they run out of power?’

  ‘I would guess about one more day,’ said Sinclair slowly.

  Dennis gulped.

  ‘Oh,’ repeated Daisy, which she thought sounded a bit inadequate, given that Sinclair had just told her that he and Dennis might only have a day to live. But what else do you say?

  ‘We need to get that stone back. It can recharge our bodies and take us home,’ added Sinclair.

  ‘Well, we’d better find the person who took it,’ said Daisy. ‘Ben, can you pick up his scent?’

  ‘I can try,’ replied Ben, starting to sniff about.

  ‘Whoa!!’ exclaimed Prawn. ‘Did that dog really, like, talk?’

  ‘I did,’ said Ben.