‘Is it an alien?’ I asked Jackson, my heart immediately thumpety-thumping again (remember to breathe, remember to breathe, I ordered myself).
‘What is a Nalien?’ the thing asked Jackson, nervously folding its little paws together in front of its fluffy chest.
‘Something from another planet,’ Jackson explained, looking remarkably calm for someone speaking to a possible Nalien.
‘What is a Nuther Planet?’ the thing asked Jackson.
‘Like Earth, only in outer space!’ Jackson said all enthusiastically, as if he was talking to some human buddy.
‘What is Nouter—’
‘Look, where do you come from?’ I interrupted the thing, with a more simple question.
This useless conversation with the mystery creature was already starting to go round in so many circles it could tie us all up in knots.
‘Over there,’ it purred, pointing in the direction of the horrible, dull houses beyond the trees.
‘Willow Avenue?!’ I muttered, reading the road sign that was just visible through the foliage and shrubs.
Huh?
Was the thing some kind of deluxe, remote-controlled robotic toy, belonging to a kid who lived there?
‘No, thank you,’ said the thing, wobbling from side to side and moving towards me. ‘I come from long, long, long way inside woods. Long, long, long, long, long way inside.’
I looked at the small thing with its huge, scaredy eyes and felt instantly sorry for it.
It was no robot.
It was a living, breathing, er, thing, and whatever it was, it had lost its habitat, same as the deer and the rabbits and the teeny-tiny voles and stuff.
‘Had you lived there for a long time?’ I asked gently.
I was slightly unnerved at how close it was standing to me and how hard its bushbaby eyes were staring at the side of my head.
‘A long, long, long time. A long, long, long, long, long time,’ it muttered, reaching a paw out towards me.
‘You had to leave your home behind when the men came with the chainsaws, didn’t you?’ I said, picturing the little creature scampering away in fear as the noise of men and machinery and crashing trees filled its ears.
‘Yes, please,’ said the thing, suddenly flicking my earlobe back and forth with its finger. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s part of my ear!’ I told it, moving back out of flicking distance.
‘It’s floppy. Nice,’ the thing said with a crooked smile of wonderment.
‘Hey!’ Jackson suddenly blurted out. ‘This bag I unwrapped you from – was this a sort of tent?’
‘What is a Sortoftent?’
‘I mean, were you living in it, or under it?’ I said quickly, before we got in a confusing looped conversation again.
‘Yes, please,’ nodded the thing, wobbling side-to-side. ‘But it is not a good house. I like my old house. Wish I still in old house. I build it nice. All branches and twigs. Crunchy.’
I had no idea what that meant. Neither did Jackson, from the frown he just gave me.
But there were other, more important questions that needed to be asked. I was sure we could wait to find out what a crunchy house looked like.
‘What are you?’ I asked bluntly.
‘Not know,’ it answered, giving up on my earlobe and now turning to twiddle the metal button on the waistband of my jeans as if it was a mini steering wheel. ‘What are you?’
‘We’re humans,’ I explained. ‘My name is Ruby—’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jackson automatically raise his right hand towards his left armpit and gave him a don’t-you-dare glare.
‘—and this is Jackson. We live in those two buildings behind us. Do you have a name?’
‘No, thank you,’ purred the thing, hooking a finger in my belt loop and tugging quite hard for something so small.
(I felt like I was being explored. It was kind of cool to be so interesting, but I wished it would go and explore Jackson instead …)
‘Are there any more of you? Did you have a family before the builders came?’ I asked, rocking back and forward a little as the thing tugged.
‘No, thank you. Always me only.’
‘How can you speak? Our language, I mean?’ said Jackson, asking a sensible and important question for once.
‘I hear people walk and talk in the woods,’ explained the thing. ‘I hide but I listen and learn.’
‘You’ve learned very well,’ I praised it, wondering if it had ever heard me and my parents or friends yakking over the years. (How weird would that be?)
‘Your language hard,’ it continued. ‘Starling is harder. Very big complicated. Snail is easy.’
‘What? You can speak snail!’ Jackson said incredulously. ‘Go on then, say something in snail!’
The thing blinked a bit, then opened its mouth.
‘ .’
‘I couldn’t hear anything!’ I told it.
‘That how loud snails speak,’ the thing said simply.
‘So can you try again at human volume?’ I suggested.
The thing hesitated, then made a slurping sound.
‘Cool! What did that mean?’ Jackson asked.
‘Eat,’ answered the thing.
‘Can you say something else in snail?’
The thing shrugged at Jackson. ‘There is twenty-seven more words in snail language, but they will all sound same way to you.’
‘Really? So what do the other twenty-seven words translate as?’ I asked.
‘Eat. All just mean Eat,’ explained the thing.
‘TEA’S READY!’ I suddenly heard Mum call out. ‘WHERE ARE YOU, RUBY?’
I looked in a panic at Jackson; the idea of the small whatever-it-was being all alone and homeless was awful, however useless its home was.
Jackson seemed to understand.
‘It’s fine – you go,’ he told me, as he fumbled with the tent. ‘I’ll stay here and fix this!’
‘COMING, MUM!’ I called out, then turned back to Jackson. ‘Maybe see you here later, if I can get back out?’
‘Yeah, I’ll try too,’ Jackson said with a nod and a grin.
As I got to my feet and leapt back over the wall, he lifted a hand and waved.
‘But listen, Ruby,’ he called out before I vanished, ‘don’t tell anyone about … this, OK?! Let’s talk more about it first, yeah?’
‘All right.’ I nodded uncertainly, as I walked backwards.
And as I walked, I saw the thing studying Jackson – then it began to copy him and wave at me too.
With a pair of still-damp, daisy-print pants clutched in its paw.
Tea got in the way.
Then homework.
Then Gran phoned for ages.
So I never did make it back out to the garden and the thing last night.
Same went for this morning.
After tossing and turning and dreaming of small things all night, I woke up at ten-to-eek!-I’m-late!, and had three-quarters-of-a-nano-second to have breakfast and get ready for school.
And now it was twenty-past nine and I was sitting in our ICT lesson – with a big, grinning baboon leering at me from the computer screen!
OK, so it was the reflection of Jackson, suddenly hovering over my shoulder.
‘Jackson Miller! Nice of you to join us!’ said Miss Wilson, looking up from someone else’s monitor as she spotted him standing behind me, breathless from running. ‘The bell went ages ago … that’s not a great start on your second day, is it?’
‘No, Miss Wilson,’ muttered Jackson, sliding into the empty seat next to me. ‘I got lost.’
PLING! went the on-button of his computer.
FROWN went my forehead, which translated as ‘What’s up?’, ’cause I was pretty sure Jackson couldn’t have got lost. School was the first building you came to when you followed the windy road into town.
Jackson glanced round to check Miss Wilson wasn’t watching and replied to my frown with a mime, which went like th
is …
He’d been out looking for the thing?
So that’s why he’d been late!
I raised my eyebrows in reply (translation: ‘Did you find it?’).
Jackson understood, which was pretty amazing for a boy with a head full of jelly babies.
He nodded, then pointed to his stomach, his open mouth, then made the paws and big, sad eyes mime again.
I tried to think of a mime back, but couldn’t, so mouthed, ‘It’s hungry?’ at Jackson.
Poor little thing … I didn’t know whether it preferred to snack on berries or bugs, but as the houses got built and the woods started shrinking, its breakfast, lunch and tea options must have started shrinking too, I realised.
Jackson nodded, then pulled out an empty bag of jelly babies from his pocket, rustled it and gave me a thumbs-up.
Big mistake.
(WARNING: If you ever want to show someone an empty packet of sweets to let them know you’ve fed a starving mysterious talking creature who’s living at the bottom of your garden, DON’T do it in class in front of your teacher …)
‘Thank you, Jackson!’ said Miss Wilson, swooping out of nowhere and snatching the bag from his hand. ‘Enough with the litter. Now can you please get on with the project?’
‘Sorry, Miss Wilson,’ muttered Jackson, swiftly turning to the instruction sheet that was lying by his keyboard.
As Miss Wilson pit-pattered away, I quickly faced the screen and carried on with my own work.
But I was pretty much immediately distracted.
The scritchy-scratchy sound of a frantic pencil made me sneak a peek sideways. What was Jackson Miller writing on the back of his instruction sheet?
Shoomf!
I was about to find out – he’d just shoved it across to me.
Flipping the paper over, I read:
Wow.
Two thoughts zapped into my head as I read Jackson’s note:
SWOOP!
Now it was my turn to have Miss Wilson snatch something out of my hands.
EEK!!!
‘What have we here, Ruby?’ she asked, wrinkling her nose up at the sight of major scrawling.
Help, help, help … I’d managed to keep the top-secret secret safe for about half a nano-second!
Now Miss Wilson would tell the Headteacher, who’d tell the police, who’d tell some scientists or someone, who’d come and scoop up a frightened thing and take it to who knows where and—
‘It’s mine!’ Jackson bellowed. ‘It was a film I watched on DVD last night – I was just describing it to Ruby!’
‘Well,’ sighed Miss Wilson, flipping the instruction sheet the right way up and tapping it with her finger. ‘Save the chit-chat till breaktime, please, Jackson!’
As she turned to go, me and Jackson looked at each other and – in a psychic, spooky,* I-can-read-your-mind kind of way – knew exactly what each other was thinking.
And that was a great big,
‘Phew …’
* Speaking of spooky, I promised you magic, didn’t I? Well, it might be just about to happen. (Turn the page – quick!)
OK, so there have been a few jelly babies in this story so far, but not enough.
Still, after school that day there was a whole trail of them, leading from the huddle of trees, over my garden wall, under Jackson’s fence (he dug a thing-sized tunnel specially) and all the way across the garden to his back door.
It had been the only way to tempt the thing inside.
‘Not like buildingings …’ it purred worriedly, as it ate its way along the multicoloured line of jelly babies. ‘Buildingings make trees go!’
‘Yes, but you need to come in the kitchen and figure out what you like to eat,’ Jackson insisted, stepping backwards into his house. ‘We don’t want you to starve!’
Jackson’s mum was still at work, and his dad was lovingly washing and waxing his fancy car in the drive, giving us time to sneak inside and raid the fridge.
Earlier – when we’d got home from school – me and Jackson had both smuggled a bunch of nibbles out to the thing’s den. Between us, our haul included a piece of peanut-butter-on-toast, a banana, a chipolata, a slice of honey-roast ham, a Dairylea cheese triangle and a slug.
(By the way, the slug came from Jackson’s garden, not his kitchen, in case you thought his parents made strange shopping lists.)
Creeping out from under its plastic-bag-and-stick tent, the thing spotted the slug, gave it a stroke, then smiled warmly as it oozed off – so we decided there and then that it must be vegetarian.
Next, it spied the food we’d brought and had a dainty gnaw of it all. But it shuddered and made ‘peh!’-ing noises at everything except the green jelly baby that Jackson finally held out.
Sadly, a whole load of jelly babies does not add up to a balanced diet – for humans or things – so we needed to work out what to feed our thing and fast.
Which was why we’d made the tunnel and laid the trail that led here to the back door of Jackson’s house.
‘Come on! Just a few more steps …’ he urged it, patting the cool, grey slate of the kitchen floor.
‘No, thank you!’ the thing replied, staying where it was on the back doorstep, wringing its paws together and wobbling anxiously from side to side.
Its bushbaby eyes blinked in alarm at the dazzling array of shiny white units.
‘I’ll sit here with it – you get some food, Jackson,’ I suggested, settling myself down beside the trembly little thing.
It scuttled closer to me, scrambling on to my lap.
‘By the way,’ said Jackson, grabbing a tray and beginning to dollop random bits of food on it. ‘I meant to ask – are you a boy or a girl?’
Jackson was looking in the fridge at the time, but I guessed the question was aimed at the thing, and not me.
‘He means you,’ I told it.
‘Oh! Ah … not know,’ replied the thing, picking up my thumb and examining the nail. It gave it a questioning nibble, then mumbled a small ‘peh’ of disgust.
‘So you don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl, OR what you are?!’ laughed Jackson.
At the same time, he gave up on the inside of the fridge and grabbed a box of Rice Krispies from the top of it, shaking the contents on to the tray alongside an olive, a tomato, a strawberry yoghurt and a potato.
‘Well,’ Jackson continued, about to say the first thing that would annoy our thing. ‘Maybe you’re some sort of a troll crossed with a fairy crossed with a squirrel?’
The thing stomped its tiny feet on my lap.
‘I is not a squirrel! And not a fairy or a trolly. Whatever they is. Peh!’
‘Well, your ears are quite squirrelly …’ Jackson carried on, coming over and setting the tray down on the tiled floor.
With a twitch of its squirrelly ears, the thing huffily turned its back on both Jackson and the tray of food.
‘What?’ asked Jackson, not sure how he’d managed to be so annoying. ‘What’s wrong with squirrels?’
I shrugged a just-leave-it! shrug in Jackson’s direction. Like crunchy houses, we could wait to find out what the problem was.
‘Please can you try some of this food,’ I implored the thing, holding out a Rice Krispie.
The thing shook its head, stubborn as a tiddly toddler.
‘Not want to, girly,’ it said, as it leant sideways and listened instead to my watch. (One of its back legs started thudding in time to the ticking, like a dog scratching mid-air when you tickle its tummy.)
‘All right. But listen, my name’s Ruby, remember. And we should call you something.’
‘Why?’ the thing asked, like I suspected it might.
‘Because everyone has a name,’ said Jackson, ignoring the fact that he was being ignored. ‘Even animals must have names for each other, right?’
He pulled a ‘Don’t they?’ face at me and I pulled a ‘I dunno!’ one back.
‘Well, what about your friends from the forest? What did they call yo
u?’ I asked the thing, hoping I didn’t make it sad, talking about long-lost creatures from Muir Wood.
The thing wobbled its forehead up and down, thinking hard.
‘I liked some woodlice once. They nice. But not talk, just scurry,’ it said finally. ‘And a bat. I like one bat, a long, long, long time ago. A long, long, long, long, long time ago. It have name for me. It call me …’
The thing opened its mouth and from somewhere at the back of its throat made a thin, scratchy, creaking noise.
Me and Jackson glanced warily at each other, knowing that it was going to be pretty tricky for us to pronounce that.
‘Hey,’ I began, ‘would you mind if we called you something that’s a bit easier for humans to say?’
The thing blinked at me. ‘You can call me any name, Rubby.’
‘Ruby,’ I corrected it gently, nudging Jackson in the shin to stop him from sniggering.
‘Hey, I know!’ Jackson suddenly burst out. ‘How about we run through a bunch of names, and see which one you like best?’
Knowing the mood Jackson was in, I suspected that the names were going to be pretty dumb. And knowing the mood the thing was in, I was worried Jackson might annoy it again.
‘How about Vince?’
The thing kept on ignoring Jackson and began instead to undo my watchstrap.
‘Don’t be stupid, Jackson,’ I told him.
‘Nah, you’re right. It has to be something that’d work for a boy or a girl,’ Jackson mused, as he opened a nearby cupboard and helped himself to a new bag of jelly babies. ‘How about Spot?’
The thing did a small ‘peh!’ under its breath.
‘Or Fang?’
I rolled my eyes as Jackson rustled the bag open. (The thing was tapping its tiny claw-nails on the glass of my watchface.)
‘Or Fluffy?’
As Jackson sniggered out another useless name, he casually selected an orange jelly baby and got ready to toss it in the air.
‘Or—’
AARRGHH!’ When would Jackson ever shut up? (I could feel the thing trembling with rage in my lap.)
The Curse of the Jelly Babies Page 2
