The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  ‘Hey, Dad, no worries,’ I said again. Sometimes parents need a lot of reassuring. ‘Hey, is that it?’

  A giant gate blocked the road in front of us. On either side a big stone wall stretched into the distance.

  ‘It must be,’ cried Phredde eagerly. ‘Hey, do you think the gate will open automatically? Or maybe there’ll be a gatekeeper!’

  There wasn’t. Dad honked the horn a few times, but nothing happened.

  ‘I’ll open it,’ said Bruce. We watched him hop happily through the mud and wrestle with the latch. The big gates creaked open.

  Bruce hopped back to the car. ‘It looks great in there!’ he announced enthusiastically.

  ‘Beautiful gardens?’ asked Dad.

  ‘A giant spooky graveyard,’ I suggested.

  ‘Nah,’ said Bruce. ‘Just wet!’

  Dad started the car again and we drove through the gates. Bruce was right, it did look wet. And not just rain wet. On one side of the road an enormous lake stretched almost to the fence. On the other, trees dripped onto sodden ground. Slowly the woodland changed to grassed lawns. The car topped a rise…and there it was.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  It wasn’t what I’d expected at all. It didn’t even have any bats flying around! It was big all right—three storeys high, like a giant white wooden box someone had plonked down among the hills. But there were bright curtains hanging at the windows and flowers in all the garden beds, even if they did look like they needed raincoats.

  ‘I wonder where the graveyard is,’ said Phredde. She sounded a bit disappointed. Well, I was too. It all looked too, well, pretty to be a deserted mansion.

  Dad breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It all looks…normal,’ he said. ‘Now, are you sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘No dead bodies on the path,’ I said, doing up my raincoat buttons. (Phredde and Bruce didn’t need raincoats—no rain falls on a phaery if they don’t want it to, and Bruce likes anything wet.) ‘No headless zombies under the roses. We’ll be fine, Dad.’

  ‘Not even a strange tunnel leading to Ancient Egypt,’ said Bruce cheerfully. I nudged him in the ribs, or at least where I thought a frog’s ribs might be. Dad doesn’t know about our trip to Ancient Egypt.4 He doesn’t need to know either!

  Dad squinted at the garden through the rain, and then at the house, just in case a few zombies were peering out from under the doormat. But there weren’t any. Just puddles and the patter of the rain and the far-off toot of a train in the distance.

  ‘Well, all right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Now you promise you’ll phone every night and morning?’

  I patted Mum’s mobile in the pocket of my shorts. ‘No worries, Dad.’

  Dad turned to Phredde and Bruce. ‘And you’ll PING! her to safety at the slightest hint of trouble?’

  ‘Of course,’ Phredde assured him. ‘As soon as any hungry crocodiles or skull-juggling trolls appear I’ll PING! straightaway. Not that we’re expecting any,’ she added quickly. ‘I mean, you hardly ever meet a skull-juggling troll these days, only that time we—’

  ‘You’d better be off, Dad,’ I broke in hurriedly. ‘You’ll be late!’

  ‘Late for what?’ asked Dad in confusion.

  ‘Well, late for something!’ I opened the garden gate—it was a pretty white one, made of wood with flowers painted on it—and waved him off. ‘Bye, Dad!’

  ‘Bye!’ chorused Phredde and Bruce.

  We watched the car drive slowly down the empty road.

  I turned back to the house. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  …

  The three of us stared at the house. The thunder boomed again, but further away now.

  ‘Why on earth would anyone be afraid to stay in a nice house like this for two nights?’ demanded Phredde. ‘Those other rellies of yours must be nuts.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a disgusting smell,’ suggested Bruce. ‘Hey, maybe an insane murderer left a body under the floorboards and it stank out the house and—’

  ‘Maybe they were just scaredy cats,’ I said quickly, trying not to think of a body under the floorboards. A Prudence-shaped body…

  I was a bit nervous, to tell the truth. Two or three little butterflies were zooming around my tummy. Well, a small horde of butterflies really, pterodactyl-sized. But I wasn’t going to show Phredde and Bruce I was scared. This was my house, after all. It was up to me to take charge.

  I picked up my pack and the esky of food Mum had given us in case we starved. (Phredde and Bruce can PING! up any food we want, but you try telling that to Mum.) ‘Come on!’ I said.

  I marched up the path, trying to avoid the puddles, then pulled the keys Mr Nahsti had given me out of my pocket. A cold wind blew around the corner, making me shiver. It was the coldest wind I’d ever felt, like ice had blown into my bones. I stopped, with the keys in my hand.

  ‘Tooooot-toot!’

  ‘There must be a train line nearby,’ I said, to cover up the sound of my heart thumping.

  ‘Why?’ asked Phredde.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the train whistle?’

  Phredde shook her head.

  ‘But I’m sure I heard…’ I began. Then I stopped. The cold breeze buffeted me again and there was another sound, almost like the wind was muttering in my ear.

  ‘Well, did either of you hear THAT?’ I asked.

  Phredde shook her head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Bruce.

  ‘What was it?’ asked Phredde.

  ‘A…a sort of whispering,’ I said.

  ‘What was it saying?’

  ‘Knock, knock. I think. I don’t know. It was too soft to hear.’

  The three of us concentrated. ‘I heard something!’ said Phredde at last.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Bruce’s tummy rumbling.’

  ‘I’m a growing frog,’ said Bruce defensively.

  ‘Yeah, growing fatter,’ said Phredde. ‘Hey, wait a sec, I DID hear something!’

  ‘I heard it too. Just a dog barking,’ I said, disappointed. I shrugged. ‘I must have imagined the whispering.’

  ‘Probably just the wind,’ agreed Phredde. ‘Knock, knock—it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Maybe it was a warning,’ said Bruce enthusiastically. ‘Maybe the murderer knocks his victims out, you know, knock knock, and he’s hiding behind the—’

  ‘Shut up Frog-face!’ yelled Phredde. ‘You’ll REALLY scare her soon!’

  ‘I’m not scared.’ I lied, hoping my hands weren’t shaking. I grabbed the doorknocker—it was shaped like a little girl with a watering can, I mean, yuck!—and rapped down.

  No ghastly booming noise. No peal of hidden bells. It just went clink-clonk in a normal sort of way.

  We waited, while the rain pelted down around us and the thunder growled in a normal muttering storm sort of way. Nothing happened, except I grew wetter. Raincoats never work all that well.’

  ‘Um, Pru,’ said Phredde after a while.

  ‘Yeah?’ I asked, hoping my voice wasn’t shivering.

  ‘Why are you knocking? There’s no one in there.’

  ‘We hope,’ said Bruce hollowly.

  ‘Shut up, Bruce!’ Phredde and I chorused.

  ‘I don’t know why I knocked,’ I said, putting the key back into the door and turning it. But I did. It was because someone…something…had whispered ‘Knock, knock.’ What sort of a warning whisper goes ‘Knock, knock’?

  I pushed the door open. It didn’t even creak.

  GRRANNNGGGG! A sudden peal of thunder boomed all around us, just as jagged lightning lit the garden behind us.

  ‘Wow!’ croaked Bruce. ‘Now THAT was a warning!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said feebly. ‘Just a perfectly ordinary storm.’ I stepped into the house.

  Nothing happened.

  Well, the rain stopped beating on my head, but that was all. Phredde fluttered in beside me and Bruce hopped up the steps. I took my raincoat off, hung it on the coat rack by the door and looked a
round.

  We were in a hall. It had tiny tiles on the floor, all blue and white, with a great big puddle, but that was just where Bruce was standing and had dripped. A big staircase rose on one side of us, and on the other a corridor stretched into darkness.

  I reached for the light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ offered Phredde.

  PING!

  Lights flared in the hall, down the corridor and up the stairs. Phredde grinned. ‘I just PING!ed the electricity back on,’ she said. ‘Easier than doing all the lights myself. Doesn’t use so much magic either.’

  Phredde and Bruce get their magic allowance every Saturday.

  ‘You’ve got enough magic for tonight, haven’t you?’ I asked, a bit concerned.

  ‘Yeah, plenty,’ Phredde assured me. ‘I’ve hardly used any all week.’

  ‘Me too,’ agreed Bruce, his tongue zotting out to catch a spider lurking in a corner. ‘Mmm, delicious. Hey, what’s that?’ he added.

  I looked down to where he was pointing. ‘It looks like a pair of underpants,’ I said, prodding them with my toe. I mean no way was I going to pick up someone else’s underpants, even if they were pink and frilly, which these were.

  ‘I bet some girl got so scared by a headless vampire that her underpants fell down,’ suggested Bruce, chuckling.

  ‘Shut up, Frog face! Well, what now?’ Phredde asked. ‘Do we choose our bedrooms or explore the house?’

  ‘Bedrooms,’ I said, kicking the underpants under the hall table. ‘Then explore.’ I glanced up the stairs. ‘I suppose they’re up there.’

  I hoisted my pack over my shoulder more comfortably. Mum had insisted I bring my sleeping bag, even though I’d reminded her that Phredde could PING! me up a four-poster or a waterbed or even a free-fall-type hammock if I wanted one.

  We started to climb the stairs. Well, I climbed, Bruce hopped and Phredde fluttered up, inspecting the light fittings on the way. I was sort of thinking we might all sleep in the same room, or at least Phredde and I in together and Bruce right next door. I wasn’t SCARED exactly. Just…cautious. That’s the word. Something had scared off the other 56 girls, and they couldn’t ALL have been wusses—even if one of them did wear pink frilly underpants.

  The thunder boomed again outside. Phredde peered down the upstairs corridor. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That’s a lot of bedrooms.’

  ‘If they are all bedrooms,’ said Bruce cheerfully. ‘And not torture chambers.’

  ‘Thanks, Bruce,’ I muttered. ‘You’re a great help.’

  ‘Hey, you’re not worried, are you?’ he asked, surprised. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. I mean, if they’re torture chambers Phredde and I can PING! you to safety and—’

  ‘I don’t need anyone PING!ing me,’ I said crossly. ‘And I’m not scared. I’d just rather sleep in a bedroom than a torture chamber.’

  I opened the first door as I spoke.

  ‘Wow,’ said Phredde. I stared at the room, then nodded slowly.

  I’m not sure what I’d expected—a bare room with maybe a bed and mattress, maybe a rat’s nest (yuck), and a broken window pane. I should have remembered the bright curtains at the windows we’d seen from outside.

  This room looked like the pictures you see in magazines at the hairdresser’s. Thick white carpet, so shaggy you’d need to use a lawn mower instead of a vacuum cleaner. Big wooden bed—I mean room-enough-for-half-the-class big—with a lacy pink bedspread. (I’d almost have rather had the rats’ nest. I DESPISE pink. Lacy pale pink like that, anyhow.) About six million pillows, all pink and lacy too. Pink armchairs with lace cushions, a dressing table (pink) with a big bowl of that stinky pot-something you get your mum for Mother’s Day if you can’t think what else to get her—like a blue-ringed octopus to put in the toilet. (It’s so everyone saves water, see? You save up going to the toilet till you REALLY need it and then you go FAST before the octopus can bite your bum.) You should have seen Mum’s face when I gave her that! Except the octopus sort of got lost and ended up in the moat, but that’s okay, because piranhas don’t like blue-ringed octopi and Dad says as soon as he gets round to it he’ll fish it out, and where was I?

  Oh right, the bedroom.

  ‘The bed’s made up and everything,’ said Phredde, gazing down on it from where she hovered in the doorway. I walked cautiously into the room, just in case it was booby-trapped, and pulled the bedspread down. The sheets were pink (surprise, surprise). They felt freshly washed, and crisp too, as though they had even been ironed.

  ‘Mr Nahsti must have got someone to get the house ready for us,’ I said slowly. Maybe I’d been wrong about Mr Nahsti. Maybe he was really a nice bloke who just wanted us to have a good weekend.

  ‘There’s an en suite and everything,’ Phredde called out to me, peering into the room beyond the bedroom.

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Pink.’

  ‘Figures.’

  I stepped back into the corridor while Bruce checked the corners to see if there were any more spiders. Phredde fluttered into the next room. It was just the same as the first, but with ruffles instead of lace and mostly yellow. ‘I’ll take this room,’ she decided. ‘And you can have the first one.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said reluctantly. It didn’t REALLY matter if Phredde wasn’t in the same room, I told myself. She’d hear if I yelled. And anyway, there was nothing I’d need to yell about. This place wasn’t a deserted mansion at all. Nothing spooky. Nothing weird. Just an ordinary house in the bush…

  Bruce found a frog-green room down the corridor from ours and claimed it for himself, then we went exploring.

  I was glad Phredde had PING!ed all the lights on so there were no dark rooms or gloomy shadows. But there WERE a lot of rooms. Empty rooms, that echoed. Actually they didn’t echo, but you felt as though they might.

  ‘Thirteen bedrooms,’ chanted Phredde as we went downstairs again. ‘Thirteen bathrooms, eight spas, six walk-in wardrobes…’

  ‘Wuff.’

  ‘The view would be really pretty too if it wasn’t raining.’

  Suddenly a draught blew down the staircase, with a touch of ice at its edges.

  ‘Wuff, wuff, wuff!’

  I stopped, halfway down the stairs. ‘Did you hear anything?’

  Phredde shook her head.

  ‘What? Oh sorry,’ said Bruce. ‘I was checking the ceiling for spiders’ webs. Why?’

  ‘I thought I heard a dog this time,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Maybe there’s a stray outside somewhere. Poor thing,’ said Phredde, ‘it’ll be all wet.’ She zoomed down the stairs, flew up to the front door and PING!ed it open. ‘Here, boy!’ she yelled.

  ‘What if it’s a girl?’ asked Bruce.

  Phredde ignored him, shouted. ‘Here, boy!’ again, then gave a whistle about ten times bigger than she was, which was a useful talent to have when you’re only 30 centimetres tall.

  Nothing happened, except another flash of lightning, followed by thunder a few seconds later.

  ‘That means the storm is three kilometres away,’ said Bruce. ‘One kilometre for every second between the flash of the lightning and the sound of the thunder.’

  ‘I thought it was ten seconds a kilometre,’ argued Phredde.

  They bickered about it as we wandered around the downstairs rooms. I thought about the poor dog out there in the storm. Or maybe it was sheltering under a bush or in a shed. But then I forgot about it, because this place was AMAZING.

  There was a billiard room, a room all set up as a small theatre with a stage and everything, another room with lots of mirrors and combs and scissors and about a hundred wigs on a table—black ones, red ones, long hair, short hair, curls and every hairstyle I’d ever seen and lots of others too.

  ‘Maybe they scalped the other girls,’ joked Bruce, staring at the wigs.

  I glared at him. ‘Ha, ha. Not funny.’

  ‘Yeah, cool it, Frog-face,’ said Phredde.

  There
was a sewing room, with bits of clothes cut out on benches, which was WEIRD, like someone had been sewing and then just left it all.

  ‘They look like underpants!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Huh,’ said Phredde. ‘You’ve got underpants on the brain.’

  ‘No, on the bum,’ sniggered Bruce.

  ‘Shut up, Frog-face!’ cried Phredde.

  ‘Yeah, don’t be crude,’ I added. I took one last look at the piles of material—they really did look like half-made underpants—then followed Phredde and Bruce along the corridor to the next room.

  This one was a giant living room with one whole wall of DVDs and a player the size of a movie screen. A kitchen like the ones you see in restaurants on TV, except without a dopey TV chef in it saying,’Now just a drizzle of walnut oil’ on something that looks like puke on a plate. (Why don’t TV chefs ever do sausage and pineapple pizza?)

  And then we found the dining room.

  It was almost as big as our school hall, with a giant polished-wood table, lots of chairs with that embroidery stuff on them and a huge window overlooking the lake.

  ‘Hey, look out there.’ Bruce pointed out the window. ‘A tennis court! The rain’s stopping too.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I shivered. The house was really draughty sometimes. I looked out the window where Bruce was pointing, then turned back to the room. And then I stared.

  ‘Er, Bruce, Phredde…?’

  ‘Yes?’ Phredde was still gazing out the window.

  ‘Have a look at the table!’

  Phredde turned. ‘Oh goody,’ she said. ‘Afternoon tea!’

  ‘Um…you didn’t PING! it, did you?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Phredde. ‘Hey, I’m hungry.’

  ‘How about you?’ I asked Bruce.

  He shook his froggy head. ‘Look, earwig slices! And I bet those are slug sandwiches.’

  ‘Nah, they’re spaghetti,’ said Phredde, fluttering above the table.

  ‘Bet you they’re slugs.’

  ‘Hold it!’ I yelled. ‘Look, did either of you see any food on the table when we came in?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Bruce. ‘I was looking out the window.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Phredde. ‘But it MUST have been there. You didn’t hear a PING!, did you?’