The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  And then the volcano in the playground exploded2 and it was time to go home.

  So me, Phredde and Bruce stayed after school, trying to work out how to do our project.

  ‘We’ll have to spend tomorrow in the library,’ I said gloomily. Normally I love the library—I’m even a library monitor (so is Phredde). But the thought of spending a whole, perfectly good Saturday stuck indoors with books on Ancient Egypt didn’t exactly make me want to say, ‘Goody goody gumdrops.’

  Phredde shook her head. ‘Can’t,’ she said, even more gloomily. ‘I’ve got to go spend the weekend in Phaeryland (eerk) with Dad and Mum. My older sister Gladiolus is being made a lady-in-waiting to the Phaery Queen.’

  ‘Hey, cool,’ I said.

  ‘I think it’s totally yuk,’ muttered Phredde. ‘Double yuk! You know what Phaeryland’s like. Tiaras, lace dresses, glass slippers. Glass slippers! But I can’t get out of going.’

  Bruce stared at her with his big, round, googly eyes. ‘But that means Pru and I’ll have to do all the work,’ he protested.

  Phredde’s eyes gleamed. ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea!’

  ‘What?’ I asked suspiciously. The last time Phredde had an idea I ended up being kidnapped by a butterfly.3

  ‘How about I magic you and Bruce into a real pyramid tomorrow morning before I leave for Phaeryland? That way you can make a map of it without having to be stuck in the library all day!’

  ‘You mean go back five thousand years to Ancient Egypt?’ I asked.

  Phredde nodded.

  ‘No way. Mum grounded me from time travelling after that episode with the eruption of Vesuvius, remember?’

  ‘That wasn’t my fault,’ argued Phredde. ‘I just mistimed it a bit.’

  ‘Mum said it took weeks to get the lava stains out of my bedroom carpet,’ I said. ‘And anyway, don’t you have to have a passport and vaccinations and stuff to go to Egypt?’

  Phredde shrugged. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll put the pyramid in your garden and you can explore it there.’

  ‘In our garden! Mum will have pink kittens…’

  ‘I’ll make it a small pyramid,’ Phredde assured me. ‘Alright? And I’ll magic it so that when you’re in there, you’re small enough to fit. It’ll be fine!’

  ‘Well…’ I began. I mean, it sounded okay. ‘Do you really think—’

  Phredde glanced at her watch ‘Hell’s bells and bat’s blood!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m late! I promised Mum I’d practise my curtsey before dinner!’

  And before I could say, ‘Look, Phredde, I think I need more time to think about all this small Ancient Egyptian pyramid stuff,’ there was a loud PING! and Phredde was gone.

  I looked at Bruce. He looked at me and shrugged, which made his clammy skin ripple all the way down his back. (I’d always thought frogs were green till I met Bruce. But he’s brown with just a bit of gold and some grey too. He’s a Crinia…Crinea…Oh, what the heck. Ask Bruce if you really want to know what sort of frog he is. But you’d better have a few hours spare because he’ll tell you. And tell you. And tell you.)

  ‘I suppose it’ll be okay,’ croaked Bruce doubtfully. ‘Better than being stuck in an old library, anyway.’

  ‘I like libraries,’ I protested.

  ‘Okay,’ said Bruce happily. ‘You go and look up pyramids.’

  ‘Well, actually…’

  Bruce grinned. (Frogs have just about the widest grin in the world.) ‘See you tomorrow then,’ he said, and hopped off to catch his bus.

  I like Saturday mornings.

  Well, actually, I don’t see much of the ‘morning’ part of Saturdays, because I sleep in, which is really cool because my bed’s made of rose petals, and the longer you sleep, the more they waft rose-scent all around you.

  Gark, our butler (who used to be a magpie before Phredde’s mum PING!ed him to be our butler), somehow knows when I’m just about ready to wake up. He comes in with a raspberry milkshake and a plate of pineapple muffins on a silver tray and draws my curtains for me so I can see the sunrise. (When you live in a magic castle, the sun’s always rising through the window, no matter what time you wake up.)

  This morning was different.

  For a start, I didn’t yawn and stretch and wriggle around in my rose petals. (You know, the way you usually stretch and wriggle around when your body is trying to decide whether it’s worthwhile waking up yet or not.) One moment I was lying in my rose petals, and the next there was this great loud PING! and I was wide-awake.

  No Gark carrying a milkshake and muffins on a silver tray. No pink and gold sunrise. In fact, the only thing I could see was darkness. There were no rose petals, either. All I could feel beneath me was a cold and damp floor. And the only thing I could hear was the sound of drip, drip, drriiiiiipppp all around me.

  I sat up suddenly. ‘Help!’ I squeaked. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ whispered someone.

  ‘Me!’

  ‘Who’s me?’

  ‘Me…I mean Pru…Hey, is that you, Bruce?’

  I almost heard a nod in the darkness. ‘Where are we?’ said Bruce.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I stretched my arms out to feel around me cautiously, then stopped when my fingers found something cold and squishy that had just dripped from the ceiling. ‘Phredde!’ I half-yelled, half-squeaked.

  ‘What about Phredde?’ asked Bruce. His voice sounded as shocked as mine.

  ‘This is all Phredde’s doing! Remember how she said she’d PING! us into a pyramid before she went to Phaeryland! Well, she must have done it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bruce. He thought for a moment. ‘You don’t happen to have a torch do you?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘How would I carry a torch?’ he demanded a bit crossly. ‘You don’t get pockets in frogskin. How on earth does Phredde expect us to explore a pyramid without a torch?’

  I was more concerned about how we were going to get out of the pyramid without a torch than finding our way around inside. I was also a bit worried that all this sitting in a dark corridor with stuff going plop! all over the place was going to give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. (In front of Bruce too, which was even worse!)

  Then suddenly, there was a soft PING! right beside me.

  ‘Phredde?’ I whispered hopefully.

  No one answered. I stretched out my hand. There was something cold and square and plastic. A torch! I pressed the handle and a beam of light zapped through the darkness.

  I shone it around carefully. First at Bruce, who was pulsating gently beside me, then at the tall, slimy walls and up to the high ceiling…

  ‘We’re in a corridor or something,’ I whispered.

  ‘So I see,’ Bruce said. ‘Why are we whispering?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to get my voice back to its normal loudness, except it didn’t seem to want to for some reason.

  Bruce looked at me with interest. ‘Is that what you wear to bed?’

  I looked down at myself and blushed. ‘What’s wrong with Winnie the Pooh pyjamas?’ I demanded hotly, thinking that I’d boil Phredde in oil on Monday morning. I mean, how embarrassing.

  ‘Hey!’ I squeaked in surprise. Suddenly, there was another PING! All at once, I was wearing a T-shirt, and the jeans I’d worn last weekend when Phredde and I went hunting for buried treasure (we found some too, but the ogre made us put it back).

  Maybe I’d only boil Phredde in raspberry cordial…

  PING! PING! PING! I looked down again. There was a notebook and a pen on the ground, and a plate with two banana and cream-cheese muffins. I decided not to boil Phredde at all.

  ‘Hey, how about me?’ complained Bruce.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I mumbled, my teeth already around one of the muffins.

  ‘You don’t expect me to eat those do you?’ Bruce nodded at my muffins.

  ‘Dey’r goob.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Bruce. He sighed. ‘Maybe I’ll find some
flies somewhere along the way. Or maybe a cockroach or a few caterpillars or some moths, you know, the crunchy brown sort.’

  Well, all this talk of eating insects was putting me off my muffins, so I said, ‘Shut up, Bruce,’ and squished the second muffin into my pocket (a squashed muffin tastes just as good as an unsquashed one). I picked up the notebook and pen and shone the torch around again. ‘Which way should we go?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Bruce.

  ‘Well, the sooner we get this place mapped, the sooner we can get out of here,’ I pointed out. ‘So which way? Left or right?’

  ‘Left,’ decided Bruce.

  So off I went, torch in hand, with Bruce hopping just behind me.

  You know something? Pyramids are boring. Well, most bits of them are anyway.

  We walked along the corridor (well, I walked and Bruce hopped). It wasn’t what you’d call interesting.

  The corridor went straight for a while, then it started to slope down…and then the slope got steeper and steeper, and slimier and slipperier. It was alright for Bruce with his sticky feet, but I was afraid my feet were going to fly out from under me and I’d end up bum-down in 5000-year-old slime.

  Down, down, down.

  ‘Hey, are you making notes?’ demanded Bruce.

  ‘What am I supposed to be writing?’ I retorted. ‘One corridor. Straight. Slopes down. I mean, who needs to make a note of…’

  Suddenly the corridor shrank. One minute the ceiling was stretched way above our heads. The next, we were faced with a small, waist-high hole in a dirty black wall. (Well, waist-high for me—Bruce had to crane his neck to see in it.)

  ‘Hey, look, you can see ancient chisel marks in the stone!’ announced Bruce.

  ‘Well, whooppee,’ I said. ‘What do we do now? Go back the other way?’

  Bruce shook his head. ‘I bet this hole is the mouth of a tunnel, and that the tunnel leads somewhere. I bet the builders were just trying to make it difficult for thieves. They used to put lots of treasure and stuff in pyramids. And mummies, of course.’

  ‘Mummies?’ I asked.

  Bruce sighed. ‘Weren’t you listening to Mrs Olsen?’

  ‘Of course I was,’ I said. Then my conscience got the better of me. ‘Well, actually I wasn’t,’ I admitted. ‘But you weren’t listening either! You were catching flies!’

  ‘I can catch flies and listen,’ said Bruce loftily. ‘It’s a talent we frogs have. Anyway, as Mrs Olsen said, if you were listening, the mummies were the dead bodies of the pharaohs and queens of Egypt.’

  ‘Yuk,’ I said.

  ‘They took out the heart and liver and stuff like that and pulled the brain out through the nose with hooks—’

  ‘Hey, double yuk!’ Now, I was really glad I hadn’t listened.

  ‘And then they filled the bodies up with herbs and stuff to preserve them so that the bodies’d last forever, and then they wrapped them in bandages, and put them in great big coffin-type things with lots of treasure around them.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ I said. ‘I suppose they put booby traps in, too, like in that movie we saw, and any minute now, we’re going to fall into a pit of poisonous spiders or a skeleton holding a great long knife is going to fall from the ceiling onto us or…’ I tried to think what else had been in that movie.

  ‘I don’t think they used booby traps,’ said Bruce cautiously. ‘Anyway, Mrs Olsen didn’t say they did.’

  ‘Teachers always leave out the interesting bits,’ I said gloomily. ‘If we fall into a pit filled with poisonous spiders, it’ll be all her fault.’

  ‘I think it’ll be all Phredde’s fault,’ said Bruce.

  ‘You leave Phredde out of this,’ I said. ‘She’s my best friend.’ Actually, I sort of felt that it was Phredde’s fault too, but a whole pit filled with venomous spiders and girl-eating snakes couldn’t have made me say so to Bruce. ‘And anyway, you could have done your project with Amelia and Shirlee and be in the boring old library right now!’

  Bruce ignored me. ‘Well, I’m going in,’ he said, and disappeared.

  I hesitated. It was okay for him. It was a good-sized tunnel for a frog. But if you happened to be girl-size, like me…

  I squatted down. The tunnel didn’t look so bad from that angle. I began to inch my way inside, still squatting. The ceiling loomed wet—and close—above me in the torchlight.

  ‘Hey, Pru!’ said Bruce. ‘Come and look at this!’

  I duck-footed my way forward and suddenly the ceiling rose again. I stood up. ‘Hey, wow!’

  We were in a room as big as our assembly hall at school, or even bigger. It was hard to see the walls in the torchlight, firstly because they were so far away, and secondly because they were all crammed with…

  ‘Treasure!’ breathed Bruce.

  ‘Oh, wow!’ I said. There were sheets of gold; gold chairs with legs made out of golden lions; couches with legs made to look like golden palm trees; tables with legs of golden leaves and, well, you get the general idea. And it was all heaped higgledy-piggledy, like someone had just shoved it all in and then fled.

  ‘Look!’ said Bruce softly, pointing with one moist foot-pad.

  I followed his gaze. There was another passage, about as tall as I am, or maybe a bit taller, and not much wider then me either.

  ‘Let’s go!’ breathed Bruce.

  ‘Er…’ I said. But Bruce was already hopping across the room, so I followed him, picking my way through the golden furniture.

  Bruce was waiting for me at the entrance. ‘Better shine the torch up first,’ he instructed.

  ‘In case there’s a poisonous spider pit?’

  ‘No, dummy. In case the ceiling gets lower and you hit your head.’

  ‘Oh right,’ I said. I shone the torch up the passageway. ‘It looks okay. All I can really see are stairs going upwards.’

  ‘Off we go then,’ declared Bruce, and he hopped inside.

  I followed more slowly, trying to keep the torchlight steady. My hand was shaking a bit, to be honest. I mean, you try sneaking around a dark, slimy pyramid with just a frog for company—even with a frog like Bruce. It wasn’t all that easy.

  Up the stairs: one…two…three…four…They were steeper and broader than the stairs in our castle at home—I could almost take two steps before I got to the next one.

  Twenty-six…twenty-seven…twenty-eight—my legs began to ache—fifty-three…fifty-four…fifty-five…

  ‘Hurry up!’ yelled Bruce.

  It was alright for him, I thought. Frogs can hop. Seventy-two…seventy-three…

  I rested my back against the slimy wall and tried to catch my breath…eighty-one…eighty-two…‘Made it!’ I puffed. Then I held my breath.

  We were in a small room, no bigger than my room at home. The walls were white and smooth, as though the room had been carved out of the centre of some pure-white jewel.

  The floor was white as well, and bare, except for a tangle of tall, gold rods that looked like they’d once held up a canopy or tent, but now the fabric was rotted and hanging in threads from some of the rods. A gold plate and cup, a small gold basin and jug, and little golden boxes filled with who knows what sat on a small, gold table.

  Whoever built that room had obviously never thought of nice, convenient plastic or fibreglass. I bet gold isn’t even microwave-proof or dishwasher-safe.

  There was one other thing in that room too. It was taller than me, and much wider. It seemed to be made of gold as well, but when I shone the torch on it, I could see that the gold was just the trimming. It was really made of dark, rich wood, just like Mrs Olsen’s…

  ‘Coffin!’ I breathed.

  ‘I think it’s called a sarcophagus,’ whispered Bruce.

  ‘I don’t care what it’s called!’ I whispered back. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  ‘Why?’ argued Bruce. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s five thousand years old! Nothing’s going to…’

  The sarcophagus began to move. Slowly, th
e lid began to open…

  Creak…

  We stood there, frozen to the hard white floor.

  Creak, creak…

  You need to run, I told my feet. Come on! Run!

  My feet refused to budge.

  Creak, creak, creak…

  There was something inside the sarcophagus. Something that was about the size of a grown-up, but it was all wrapped up, so it looked even bigger. It was white, just like the walls, but the walls were made of hard white stone. This looked softer, like…like…like…bandages.

  The mummy took a shuffling step towards us and then another…

  ‘Run!’ I shrieked, and this time my feet did what they were told. In fact, they did even better than they were told. In three great bounds, I was out of the room, with Bruce leaping close behind me.

  Zooooommmm went my feet down the stairs; thud, thud, crash, bang, whoooosh, across the great big room below.

  ‘Bruce, are you still there?’ I yelled.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ croaked Bruce. ‘I’m right behind you!’

  This time, I didn’t bother squatting to go through the low passage—I went down on my stomach, wriggling like one of the poisonous snakes in the snake pit we hadn’t fallen into (yet, I told myself).

  Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. I flopped out the end of the passage and fled down the corridor, with Bruce plip plopping at my heels…

  The light wavered and bobbed in front of us as the torch shook in my hand. Faster, faster, faster…Suddenly, I stopped.

  ‘Bruce!’ I panted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t remember the corridor having a fork in it!’

  ‘Neither do I!’ croaked Bruce. ‘We must have missed it in the dark. Which way should we go?’

  ‘Left…er, right…er, maybe we should go back and retrace our steps.’

  ‘Do you really want to go back again?’

  ‘No!’I gasped. ‘Come on! Left!’

  We went down the corridor, around a corner, and suddenly there was a fork—with another two passages.