The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  ‘Stop him!’ I shrieked. ‘Or her,’ I added, because who can tell with bats?

  The score was seven to four. We were still losing!

  ‘Go for the jugular! Go for the jugular! Suck the suckers dry!’ shrieked Mrs Olsen from the sidelines. She was really getting carried away.

  Fat lot of use that was, I thought. Do bats even have jugular veins?

  I caught Phredde’s eye, then Bruce’s and Amelia’s. It was time to get serious!

  Phredde sped up to grab the ball, then zoomed back and down to me.

  I took the ball from her as a bat fluttered up behind her, then passed it to Amelia just as another bat tried to land on my nose. Amelia threw the ball to Bruce. He bounced up and passed to Phredde who passed to me, then I tossed it back to Bruce…

  ‘Keep running!’ Bruce croaked at me, as he stuffed the ball down his frog suit. ‘Pretend you still have the ball!’

  ‘Why…’ But Bruce was hopping down the field before I had time to finish the question.

  I curled my arm up as though the ball was still there, and kept on running.

  Zap! A bat landed on my shoulder. I brushed it off. Zoom! A bat butted me in the back.

  What were they doing? I didn’t have the ball!

  And then I realised. They were bats!

  Bats can’t see—their little squeaks bounce off objects. The bats couldn’t see that Bruce had the ball, because a froggy lump is still a froggy lump, even when there is a football in the lump as well.

  Suddenly the vampires realised something was wrong.

  FLOOP! FLOOP! FLOOP! All over the field bats turned back into boys and girls, so they could see what we were up to.

  But it was too late! Bruce hopped the final few metres over the line—it was a try!

  Could he convert it? Mrs Olsen waved her thermos of bloo…red stuff in triumph! ‘Go to it, Bruce!’ she shrieked.

  Bruce hoicked the ball out of the left front leg of his costume and placed it on the ground. He took aim, then kicked. The ball sailed upwards, over the goalposts…

  Then stopped.

  FLOOP! FLOOP! FLOOP! The sky was full of bats again. Their wings were fanning the ball away.

  ‘No!’ I cried. But even before the word was finished Bruce had soared into the air. Higher, higher. That frog could jump!

  Swot! His tongue zapped out and pushed the ball the final centimetres through the goalposts!

  He’d done it! Bruce’s tongue had done it!

  Except…I suddenly stopped cheering. Bruce wasn’t a REAL frog now, so he didn’t have his superduper tongue. So…

  I glanced over at him. No one else had noticed—they were so used to Bruce’s tongue by now they didn’t even think about it. Bruce met my eyes, then slowly winked.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know that I’d been holding. It was still Bruce inside that suit! The real Bruce!

  And suddenly I realised. Yes, that WAS the real Bruce. Bruce was happy as a frog. He hadn’t given in to Mr Ploppy Bottom! And that meant that…maybe—I gulped—he shouldn’t give in to me!

  ‘Pru!’ shrieked Amelia furiously.

  But there was no time for that now. I grabbed the ball and darted down the field. We had the lead, 11–7! And we were going to keep it!

  A bat dived down my jersey.

  ‘Look, buster!’ I snorted, tossing the ball to Phredde and hauling the bat out by its claws. ‘You’d better be a girl bat or I’m going to be seriously mad!’

  The bat squeaked something rude at me—well, it sounded rude even if I don’t speak bat—and flapped off.

  We had to get the ball to Bruce again! But the bats were awake to that ploy now! At least two fluttered about Bruce’s froggy head, while the others zapped between.

  ‘Ow!’ Amelia rolled on the ground in pain.

  The ref blew his whistle as we ran up to her.

  ‘What’s wrong!’ I cried.

  ‘My ankle, I’ve twisted it! I slipped in a pile of bat dung! They must have all doo-dooed together!’

  ‘Foul!’ cried Mrs Olsen. ‘Really, really foul!’

  The referee blinked. ‘I don’t think there’s anything in the rules about bat doo-doo.’

  The first-aid team helped Amelia off the field.

  Now we really were one team member down!

  We’d had the ball when the whistle blew, so we had it when the game began again. Phredde crouched low—which is really low if you’re a phaery—and sent the ball in, almost at ground level.

  But those bats were no fools! They’d been expecting something like that. One swooped so low it set the grass blades quivering, and zapped the ball before I’d had time to blink.

  We had to get it back! And fast! I glanced at my watch. Only two minutes to go. If we didn’t catch them now they’d win!

  I could hear Phredde panting up above me. Phredde can flap her wings like they’re tornado powered, but there was only one of her in the air and a whole team of bats. If only we had another set of wings on our side!

  There was no way Phredde could get the ball now. The vampires were going to score, which meant they could still win. And there was nothing we could do about it.

  Suddenly the ground shook beneath my boots. Something pounded onto the oval. Something with giant ducky feet, three metres of feathers, and a great curved beak. Something with wings that half flew, half jumped across the field and plucked the ball—vampire bat and all—out of the air.

  ‘Cuddles!’ I screamed. ‘This way!’

  ‘Quack!’ Cuddles galloped towards me, the ball, and the now-protesting bat, still in her beak.

  ‘Come on!’ I raced down the field to the goalpost with Cuddles thundering after me. The bat squeaked madly, trying to get away, but nothing gets away from Cuddles’s beak!

  No one even tried to stop us! The bats flew madly over to the sidelines, and even our team got as far away from those Demon Duck feet and giant beak as they could.

  We had the entire oval to ourselves! I grabbed the ball from Cuddles’s beak (the badly upset bat had managed to wriggle free by now) just as we crossed the line and pressed it to the ground.

  Touchdown!

  ‘Quack!’ Cuddles pecked the ball out of my hands and swallowed it. The referee blew his whistle.

  The game was over!

  Well, we won.

  There was a bit of an argument over it actually. But, as Mrs Olsen said, we were one player down, and if bats and frogs and phaeries are allowed to play football, then Demon Ducks of Doom should be allowed to play as well.

  I think the Batrock coach wanted to take it further, but one look from Cuddles’s beady little eyes accompanied by a sharp ‘Quack’ made him shut his mouth and fly out of reach.

  And then Cuddles ate the spare balls too and started on the goalposts, so everyone decided it was time to have afternoon tea.

  Then we went home to change for the dance.

  Chapter 19

  Off to the Dance

  ‘Is my appearance satisfactory?’ asked Shaun.

  I looked him up and down. He was human again, well, a vampire and not a bat. He’d gone for the traditional vampire look too. Black satin cloak with red lining and a big collar, a brilliant white silk shirt and black pants, finished off with shiny shoes and polished fangs. Even his black hair looked polished too.

  ‘Great,’ I told him. Well, it was Halloween! ‘How about me?’

  ‘Bodacious!’ he assured me. Well, I think it was a compliment.

  Actually, I did look pretty hot. It’s difficult finding a Halloween costume in a school like ours. I mean obviously vampires were out of the question and so were phaeries. And I’d already had too many run-ins with trolls, Ancient Egyptian mummies, ogres, zombies, and bogey men—well, one bogey man, er, girl (her name is Jessica and she’s in the class below us)—to be one of those.

  So I’d dressed up as a pumpkin. No, not a great, fat round-looking pumpkin. It was what a pumpkin would look like if it had the advantages of a whole lot of fashion
magazines and great clothes sense, plus a best friend who could PING! up anything you wanted! My hat was long and green and dangling, like a silky stalk. My dress was pumpkin-coloured and sort of billowed out in pumpkin folds. My shoes looked like pumpkin seeds, except they were foot-shaped not seed-shaped, and my nails were orange too, and so was my hair especially for the occasion.

  The doorbells jangled above our drawbridge. ‘That’ll be Phredde,’ I said. I leant out of the tower window. ‘PING! us down!’ I yelled.

  ‘No worries!’ called Phredde. ‘I’ll come up to you!’

  PING! The carpet hovered outside the window, with Phredde and her vampire billet, Janet, sitting in the middle. Janet had gone for the vampire look like Shaun, except her dress was long, red and silky. Her cloak was red on the outside with a black lining and her hair was big and blonde. And of course, her fangs were all brushed and shiny too.

  ‘Golly gosh!’ said Shaun happily, gazing out the window at the carpet. ‘We will perambulate in style!’

  Floosh! One well-groomed bat darted out the window and perched on the edge of the magic carpet next to Phredde and Janet. I sat on the windowsill and swung my legs out.

  ‘See you later, Mum!’ I shouted.

  ‘What?’ Mum poked her head around the door and stared at the strange sight of her only daughter dressed as a pumpkin, and about to slide through a tower window onto a magic carpet with a vampire, a bat and a phaery. But Mum is slowly getting used to things like that. (It takes grown-ups a while to get up to speed on new things, like programming DVD players and PING!s.) ‘Er…have a nice time, Prudence darling,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your mobile phone?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘And you’ll be home by 10.30?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  It was safe saying Yes, Mum to that one, because if I DID want to stay later, Phredde could always PING! me back to 10.30. Even though it was against school rules now to PING! on school grounds, Phredde could hold off the PING! till we were on our way home.

  I waited in case Mum wanted to ask me if I had my sun block on too, but it turned out that even Mum couldn’t stress about UV rays at a night-time dance because she just said, ‘You will take care, won’t you, Prudence?’

  ‘MUM!’ I protested. ‘I’m just going to a school Halloween dance! What can possibly happen to me?’

  Then I swung my legs out of the tower window, leapt a metre over the moat and the piranhas two-hundred metres below, and settled down on the magic carpet.

  We were off to the dance!

  Chapter 20

  The Deadly Creatures from Beyond the Gates of Reality

  ‘You look great,’ I said to Phredde. She was dressed as a wasp, all orange and black, so we really matched.

  ‘Splendiferous,’ squeaked Shaun. He was still a bat. FLOOSH! Suddenly he was a kid again.

  Phredde grinned. ‘It’s difficult choosing a costume when you have wings,’ she said. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Mum wanted me to be a beautiful butterfly! Yuk!’

  The four of us looked pretty stunning zapping along on Phredde’s mum’s magic carpet through the streets, especially when Phredde forgot to stop at the traffic lights, but it didn’t matter because we just swooped above everyone.

  I don’t know why everyone kept staring though. I mean it WAS Halloween!

  We landed by the school hall and it looked GREAT. We’d hung the pumpkin lanterns out the front. Not real ones, just in case the candles burnt through the pumpkin and burnt the hall down, which would have been a real pity after all the trouble we’d gone to making it look nice.

  These lanterns were made from papier-mâché and had battery-operated torches in them (magic was off-limits). We’d hung black and orange streamers everywhere, and the food was all set out on the tables at the back. Phredde had PING!ed all the garlic out before we left. I mean these kids were okay, even if they did talk funny, and they were quite nice about congratulating us after we’d won the football match.

  A few ghosts wandered past us into the hall—well, kids dressed up in sheets. Edwin was wearing a banana costume, at least I hoped it was a costume and not something Edwin thought was cool to wear. The music was hammering away, and everyone was dancing. Well, everyone except us, anyway.

  ‘Come on, let’s hit the dancefloor!’ I cried, when someone hopped up behind me.

  ‘Hello, Pru,’ he said.

  It was Bruce. Phredde took one look and grabbed Shaun and Janet’s hands and dragged them inside. ‘See you later!’ she called as they disappeared.

  I blinked at Bruce. ‘What are you dressed up as?’ I demanded.

  ‘A Werefrog’ said Bruce matter-of-factly. ‘That’s a frog who changes into a human every full moon.’

  ‘But it isn’t a full moon,’ I said slowly. ‘You look just the same as you always do.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Bruce. ‘That’s the whole idea.’ He hesitated. ‘You look cool,’ he said at last. ‘Very pumpkiny.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  Bruce blinked at me with his googly frog eyes. ‘Pru, I’ve got to tell you something.’

  ‘I’ve got to tell you something too,’ I told him.

  ‘I don’t know how to say this,’ said Bruce hesitantly, ‘but you really need to know that…’

  ‘Come on, inside, everybody!’ It was Mr Ploppy Bottom. ‘You don’t want to miss the fun!’

  I stared at him. He looked…different…somehow. He wasn’t wearing a costume, just his ordinary teacher clothes—pants and shirt—but somehow he looked stranger than ever.

  ‘Into the hall!’ giggled Mr Ploppy Bottom. He surged past us and made his way across the dancefloor, under the twirling orange lights and up onto the hall stage.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Bruce. I really wanted to hear what Bruce had to say, but something told me that we were about to find out just how weird Mr Ploppy Bottom REALLY was.

  Bruce shoved his way to the front of the crowd—frogs have wide shoulders and Bruce is stronger than he looks—and I followed in his wake.

  ‘Attention!’ Mr Ploppy Bottom yelled. ‘And turn that music off!’

  The music pounded even louder as someone turned the switch the wrong way. Then suddenly there was silence.

  Mr Ploppy Bottom stared out at the assembled kids and vampires (as well as one phaery, a giant frog and Jessica the bogey-girl too, except she was hiding behind the door—Jessica’s the shy type).

  ‘You may all wonder why I’ve called you here,’ chortled Mr Ploppy Bottom.

  We all stared at him. ‘No, we don’t, sir,’ said Bruce, puzzled. ‘It’s the school Halloween dance, remember, after the sports day which you organised.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot,’ said Mr Ploppy Bottom vaguely. Then a fiendish grin spread across his face. It made a change from his ‘I am kind to kids’ beam, anyway. ‘But there is another reason! Tonight is Halloween, when the boundaries between the normal world and the world of the ugly and the terrifying grow very thin! One false move on Halloween and the deadly creatures from beyond the Gates of Reality are ready to invade!’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I whispered to Phredde, who’d fluttered up beside me.

  Phredde nodded. ‘It’s true,’ she whispered back. ‘Didn’t they teach you that in kindergarten? Every phaery knows that you have to be really careful on Halloween. Too much magic in any one place can rip open the Gates of Reality and then the deadly creatures…’

  Phredde stopped. ‘Uh-oh,’ she whispered.

  ‘Exactly!’ snickered Mr Ploppy Bottom. ‘That is exactly what I have been working to achieve! Pent-up, unused magic! It’s been a brilliant plan! Phaeries who cannot PING!, combined with a vampire football team unable to vampirise their opponents no matter how much they wanted to!’

  ‘Golly gosh, that is a filthy canard, you pusillanimous zoophyte,’ yelled Shaun. ‘We do not wish to vampirise our new comrades, just because we were not up to snuff in the football match. Well, not much,’ he added honestly.

  Mr Ploppy Bot
tom gave a yell of laughter. It was proper insane laughter too, just like you hear from crazy people on TV. ‘But it is enough! This whole hall is oozing pent-up magic! The Gates of Reality are about to open! And now! Now! Now…’

  ‘Now WHAT?’ I yelled. ‘Come on! Don’t keep us in suspense! What happens next?’

  ‘Just look out the door!’ whispered Mr Ploppy Bottom evilly. ‘And then you’ll see what happens next!’

  That’s when the lights went out.

  Chapter 21

  The Headless Horse-person and the Lhiannan-shee

  ‘Phredde,’ I hissed. ‘PING! up some lights. Quickly!’

  ‘I can’t!’ Phredde whispered back. ‘It’s against school rules!’

  ‘But the school principal who made them is insane! And evil too!’

  ‘I can’t help it!’ whispered Phredde. ‘School rules are school rules.’

  ‘Look, you dingbat phaery,’ I began.

  Suddenly there was a flicker in the darkness, and then another, and another. Red lights shone in the darkness. Weird, glowing, red lights scattered across the room…

  ‘It’s you guys, isn’t it?’ I cried to Shaun. ‘It’s your eyes lighting up!’

  ‘Indubitably!’ said Shaun. ‘That is how we discern our prey in the umbrageous16 gloom!’

  ‘I thought you used those squeaky echo thingies?’

  Shaun sighed. ‘Indubitably. But only when we are bats. When we’re in human form we can illuminate our eyes.’

  A bright-yellow light joined the red ones.

  ‘Who’s eyes are they?’ I demanded. My voice was a bit shaky. I tried to steady it. Really, there was nothing to be scared of. Just a hall full of vampires with glowing red eyes, an insane school principal and deadly creatures from beyond the Gates of Reality and…

  ‘It’s only me,’ said Bruce comfortingly. ‘I brought a torch.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said tremulously.

  ‘Yeah. It attracts moths. Yum,’ said Bruce.

  Just then there was a commotion at the door. ‘Trick or treat!’ someone called sweetly.