‘Alfie, it’s not going to work,’ said Janey, laughing. ‘Even the child catcher in Chitty Bang is not going to terrify me.’
‘But he’s hideous,’ hissed Alfie. ‘I had nightmares about it for years! And anyway, your family doesn’t have –’
There was a thud, and his words cut off abruptly.
‘Doesn’t have what? A DVD horror collection?’
Silence wafted around the sofa like a chill wind. Even the child catcher had ceased his monstrous mewling search for hidden kids, so the film must have gone off too.
Okay, so maybe that was a little bit more effective.
‘Alfie, dearest cousin of mine, you are not going to scare me by being quiet because that would, of course, be the answer to my prayers.’
Still nothing.
Absolute and total nothing.
In fact, it was the kind of nothing she’d experienced before – when she’d plummeted through space or down time-twisting helter-skelters; when it felt like the world had collapsed in on itself and nothing existed beyond her own skin.
How had he done that?
Suddenly a voice sliced through the darkness in a way that froze her to the core. It was hollow – a dark, hacking noise that sounded like someone speaking from the deepest pit of their own body, amplifying the horrible rasp through their stomach. It was vile. Cold.
Frightening.
‘Are you afraid now, Jane Blonde?’
She tried to laugh into the darkness, but the dank, soul-less air around her swallowed the sound. ‘Don’t be silly, Alf.’
‘You are afraid,’ said the voice. ‘Very afraid. That is good.’
‘Why … why is it good?’ said Janey, rather than admitting that she was actually getting a smidge freaked out. Very freaked out. ‘Alfie,’ she added for good measure.
‘I am not your cousin,’ croaked the voice.
‘Course you’re not,’ said Janey, trying not to let nervousness creep into her voice. ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’
There was a long pause during which she tried to remember where the light switch was, pulling her school cardigan around her against the ever-decreasing temperature. This was getting a little weird.
Then suddenly the voice growled, ‘This is your cousin,’ and the frozen white face of Alfie was thrust into her vision, illuminated by a sickly green glow. His head was turned away as if in horror, his eyes screwed tightly shut in fear.
Then the voice continued, and it definitely wasn’t coming from Alfie because his dead-looking white lips didn’t even twitch.
‘So do you believe me now, Jane Blonde? Are you afraid?’
Her chest was so constricted with terror that she could hardly speak. Why was she still in her uniform? At least in her spysuit she’d have had some chance of finding out who was talking. And saving Alfie. What had happened to him? Was it really as bad as it looked?
As anger at this … this thing that had hurt Alfie vibrated through her, Janey recalled the power that used to pour into her from the Wower. There was strength in anger, she remembered - a force in turning fear outward against the enemy.
‘Yes, I believe you,’ she said, stalling for time and wishing beyond all else that she could still see Alfie’s face. It had floated back into the black vacuum surrounding her. If she reached out to attack the voice, she might damage Alfie in the process.
Then she remembered the first rule of spying that she had ever been taught by G-Mamma: surprise, surprise, surprise.
‘And yes,’ she said, dropping her voice to a whisper.
As silently as she could, she hunched down towards the sofa and groped for the one thing she knew was in arm’s reach and might possibly save her and Alfie.
‘Yes,’ she repeated, even more quietly. ‘I’m very, very afraid.’
A small sob escaped from her lips, and another and another, until soon she was gently crying.
The voice started to laugh. The icy air around Janey pulsated with the dreadful sound as the voice’s owner drew breath to speak. ‘I knew it–’
‘Kidding!’ shouted Janey, and in that same moment she grabbed the DVD remote control and pressed all the buttons at once. Even with the TV off, the DVD player might do something helpful – and it did, opening up the DVD drawer to spit out the film, flashing a vibrant blue beam across the lounge …
There was just enough time and sufficient light for Jane Blonde to grab Alfie by the collar and whirl the dead weight of his body round onto the sofa, then leap on top of who or whatever was crouched behind him like some diabolical puppet master. She flung herself onto the creature, not sure if it was human or some spy-created abomination such as she’d witnessed in the past. She felt fur beneath her palms and a soft, yielding presence like a … like a trampoline. Or a sprung mattress.
Had she misjudged and fallen onto the sofa? Hoping she hadn’t, as that would mean Alfie getting even more injured, Janey bent her leg and skewered her sharp knee into the side of the body.
The grating, hacking voice erupted into shouting. In the same moment, the air got distinctly warmer, and the lights all came on at once.
‘Get your bony bits off me, Blonde!’ screamed the voice – only now it was a voice that Janey recognised all too well, with nothing sinister and chilling about it (although it was certainly someone of whom she could, from time to time, be very afraid).
‘G-Mamma! What are you doing? You’ve killed Alfie!’
With Janey still straddling her SPI:KE’s well-upholstered ankles, Rosie Biggenham heaved herself over onto her back on Janey’s living room rug. ‘I have not killed Alfie, tempting though it is. He’s neither use nor ornament these days, since you de-spied everyone.’ She flipped her hands at Janey. ‘Get off me, and I’ll show you.’
Janey obliged, and then helped lever G-Mamma to her feet.
The spy pointed to the gadget in her left hand. It resembled a small torch, and looked completely unremarkable. ‘It’s just a stun gun. Sort of a Taser, only gentler. He’ll be up in about seven minutes when the effects wear off.’
‘Good. I’m glad he’s okay.’ Feeling suddenly weak-kneed, Janey sank onto the sofa. ‘But what was all that about? And how did you do that voice? It was … scary.’
There it was again. ‘Are you afraid, Jane Blonde?’
‘That was me.’ G-Mamma sniggered as she waved the instrument in her right hand in Janey’s face. It was a megaphone – the same megaphone she had employed to shout at office workers in London during Janey’s first ever mission, several years ago.
‘We-- I put a voice refrigeration module onto it,’ G-Mamma explained, pointing to the large white cube bolted onto one side. ‘I call it a vox-pop. Freezes my words and the atmosphere around it.’ Behind fluttery fake eyelashes in virulent yellow, G-Mamma’s large blue eyes sparkled merrily.
It looked like she was really enjoying herself - which led Janey to her next question.
‘So did you seriously just want to try out a new spy-buy? Because knocking Alfie out and invading my living room with both our parents due back any minute is a bit mental. Even for you.’
G-Mamma stared at her, and Janey experienced that same chill-and-thrill she got whenever something exciting was afoot.
It was as she thought.
Hoped.
Dreamed …
‘I was just making sure you’re really as ready as you’ve been saying. Luckily, you passed the test. On your feet, Blonde,’ snapped G-Mamma.
She got up warily, half-expecting to find her socks secretly transformed into Fleet-Feet without her knowledge. G-Mamma grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her big moon face up to Janey’s.
‘It’s what we’ve been training for, all this time,’ she said breathlessly.
‘Not a … It can’t be …’
She could hardly believe it, and yet her gut instincts were fizzing madly. Janey knew for sure that something huge was about to happen.
G-Mamma nodded. ‘We have a mission, Blonde. We meet tomorrow.’
‘Oh!’ squeaked Janey, delighted. ‘That’s brilliant!’
‘You bet your Blonde booty it is.’ G-Mamma’s eyes snapped left as Alfie began to stir on the sofa, and she tapped her watch. ‘Spylab, this time tomorrow. Be there or be no longer a spy.’
‘Try stopping me. I’ll be there!’ said Janey.
A key turned in the front door. In her usual fluid and surprisingly agile manner, G-Mamma scooped up her gadgets, hastened Alfie’s recovery by giving him a tiny zap in the neck with the stun gun in reverse mode, and disappeared out through the back door to flit across the garden and back to her own house.
‘What happened?’ moaned Alfie plaintively.
‘You passed out, I think. Afraid of the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.’
‘Was not,’ he replied, although he didn’t sound entirely sure.
It was only later that Janey realised she hadn’t had time to ask what the mission was going to be.
Or how it was that, an hour or two after she’d gone to bed, her bedroom suddenly grew very cold and still, and a voice as brittle as perma-frost whispered to her.
‘Are you afraid, Jane Blonde?’
But G-Mamma had taken the Vox-pop with her as she left.
Oh yes. She was terrified.
And it felt fantastic.
After a long period of flat-lining, Janey Brown – and Jane Blonde - finally felt alive again.
Chapter 2 – Lips with Tips
By nine o’clock the next night, Janey could barely contain herself. Two hours earlier, she’d made her excuses to her parents and disappeared upstairs. They’d never known her to be so fond of chemistry homework. For the entirety of those two hours she had perched on the edge of her bed staring at the fireplace, hardly breathing, hoping the weird chilly voice would whisper in her ear and wondering if – no, wishing that – the back of the hearth would slide up. Up and up, to reveal G-Mamma’s roller-booted feet and the shiny floor of the Spylab.
Not that the Spylab was much of a Spylab any longer. Most of their gadgets still languished behind dusty panes of glass in the cabinets that lined the lab walls, but for years they had either hung in tatters or lain broken into pieces for experiments, like a kid’s old, unwanted Christmas presents. Without the backing of the SPI organisation, there had been no money to keep the spy-buys active or replace anything that was no longer working. It just wasn’t like the old days at all, no matter how hard G-Mamma tried to keep it exciting and ready-for-action. Even the special entry hatch between their fireplaces had rusted shut.
Or at least, that was how it had been last time Janey had seen the Spylab. From the way G-Mamma had delivered her news the previous night with a sparkle in her eye, Janey sensed that there might have been a few changes.
‘Come on, Blonde,’ she muttered. ‘Get on with it.’
Now she really was afraid – scared that it might all be a hoax.
It took all the self-possession she could garner to wait for the clock to tick past nine thirty, and then a wee bit more to dare to drop to her knees and shuffle over to the hearth. What if it didn’t work? What if this wasn’t all going to be as exciting as she hoped?
There was only one way to find out. Janey located the tiny button that used to release the sliding door, closed her eyes tight, and pressed.
Immediately, smoke billowed into the room, accompanied by a horrendous grinding sound like a car engine that wasn’t in gear. Janey backed away quickly, coughing. It wasn’t working. There must be a fire in the hearth next door, and now she’d created a hole for flames to waft through into her own bedroom. She could set the whole house alight!
Then suddenly, as she grappled through the fog to close the shutter, she spotted a familiar and much-loved sight through the murky cloud of fumes. A pair of luminescent green eyes were observing her carefully from the bottom of the fireplace.
‘Trouble!’ she called. She reached out a hand to the cat as the panel jerked upwards to reveal a pair of wobbly, dimpled knees in jeggings.
‘Don’t worry about the mess, Blonde.’ G-Mamma’s face appearing next to Trouble’s. ‘Just need to oil the machinery.’
Janey slithered under the creaking panel as G-Mamma applied the contents of a shiny oil can to its edges.
‘Okey smokey, you’re done,’ carolled the SPI:KE, hauling Janey to her feet in one easy movement. The metal sheet between their homes slid noiselessly back into position.
Janey wanted to pinch herself. She was here again!
And so, she was astonished to see, was the Spylab. The entire room gleamed like a polished grand piano. It looked better than it ever had, even when Sol was heading up the organisation.
‘Did you get a cleaner in?’
Both her mother and Rosie Biggenham had been professional cleaners for a while. Maybe she’d pulled in some favours – otherwise how could she have organised this so quickly?
G-Mamma rolled her eyes. ‘Well, yes, but could a cleaner do THIS?’
She flung open a double-fronted, shiny white wardrobe that Janey had never seen before, and dragged its contents out onto one of the benches. ‘Spysuit. Fleet-Feet. Aspic. Ultra-Gogs – new design with clever laser lighting and some other things I haven’t had time to investigate yet. Girl Gauntlet for you, now in Invisibubble too so your whole arm can disappear. Bigger versions of all of them for me.’
Using the sparkling green acrylic nail encrusted with diamonds on her index finger, G-Mamma swirled the clothing into a tottering pile, then waltzed around the room yanking open the non-dusty cabinets. ‘There’s all sorts in here, Janey-Jane-Janey. Everything we ever tried and more. We’re back! And we’re better than ever.’
Janey followed G-Mamma around in a daze. G-Mamma was right. It was all here - everything she’d ever used in her fights against evil, along with heaps of articles she’d never seen before.
Hardly daring to breathe, she stepped in front of one of the massive fridges pulsing gently along the back wall and turned to G-Mamma. ‘Is this what I really, really hope it is?’
‘Open it and see,’ said G-Mamma.
Moonlight-silver rays spilled out across Janey’s face as she took a deep breath and levered the doors open. ‘It is! It’s a Wower!’ she said, so filled with delight that it was all she could do not to race in there and let the magical robotic hands Spy her up right there and then.
But how? How was this all possible?
She closed the Wower doors firmly and leaned on them. ‘What’s going on, G-Mamma?’
‘We seem to have a new investor, that’s all. They started with developing the Vox-Pop, and then moved onto all of this.’
G-Mamma pointed furtively over Janey’s shoulder at the Wower, and she turned slowly. Was the investor inside the shower cubicle?
Then her gaze dropped to the strangely shimmering surface of the Wower’s door. Just about where the ice-dispenser would be if this was a normal fridge, something was forming.
Nostril. Lips. Teeth.
‘G-Mamma, there’s a mouth appearing on the Wower,’ she hissed.
‘I see it!’ squeaked her SPI:KE. ‘I knew someone was in there!’
‘But there’s nobody in the Wower; I just looked.’
Janey stepped back a little as the mouth swam out of focus for a second and then pinged back to life onto the silvery doors, stretching into a yawn as if someone was trying it for size.
And then, as the same deep chill that Janey had experienced the previous evening trickled down her spine, a tongue protruded slightly from between the teeth. It licked the thin lips back and forth, and suddenly the voice spoke.
‘Thank you,’ it said, ‘for helping.’
Trouble spat venomously, leaping at the peculiar image before them, so Janey moved him carefully out of the way and looked round for a gadget that might record what was going on. Where was her LipSPIck when she needed it? Unable to find anything more technical, she reached into her pocket and took out her phone.
‘Helping with what?�
� she said carefully, holding the phone close to her body so it couldn’t be seen.
The mouth quivered momentarily, and then re-formed. In the same icy rasp as before, it continued:
‘A story once told.
As an ancient boy turns gold,
The truth emerges.’
Janey stared at G-Mamma. ‘Well, what kind of rhyme is that?’ said G-Mamma rudely. ‘That wouldn’t make a decent rap at all.’
The lips pursed thoughtfully. ‘Well, how about this?
‘They took something precious.
And now I want it back.
The lodestone’s there before us,
And you are right on track.’
‘Better,’ said G-Mamma. ‘Could bust some moves to that one.’
Pins-and-needles flushed the length of Janey’s body. That was quick-thinking on the voice’s behalf, and G-Mamma was nodding approvingly. But the words seemed to indicate that the future involved them, and they hadn’t agreed to anything yet.
The mouth elongated into a rather cynical smile that lasted only a moment. ‘Then meet at the playground copse. Ten minutes.’
As quickly as it had appeared, the lips formed two thin parallel lines, merged immediately into one and then, like a zip folding in on itself, the mouth vanished completely.
Pressing replay on her phone, Janey scribbled down the words onto a pad.
‘The truth emerges. Hmm. It’s not a rhyme, exactly,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a haiku. We just did them in poetry this afternoon.’ Then something occurred to her. ‘Have you seen that mouth before? You must have got news of our mission from somewhere.’
G-Mamma shook her head, her fluffy earmuffs sliding madly to one side. ‘No, I just got a message via my Bigg Squid website. Look.’
S*W*A*G*G 1, Spook Page 2
