The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  ‘Take the left one!’ I screamed. We panted on…

  Thud, thud, thud went my feet; plop, plop, plop went Bruce’s footpads; huff, huff, huff went our breath.

  ‘I’m beat,’ I confessed. ‘Surely we’ve left it behind now!’

  ‘Shhh,’ said Bruce.

  I shushed.

  Silence, apart from the thump of my heartbeat. The pyramid walls disappeared into the darkness around us. Slime dripped slowly from the ceiling. Plop! Plop! Plop! A drop hit my nose, then dribbled down my chin.

  ‘Turn off the torch!’ Bruce whispered urgently.

  ‘But—’ I began.

  ‘Quickly! It might see the light!’ hissed Bruce.

  I clicked the switch on the torch to off. Darkness swallowed us, thick and evil-smelling.

  I stood there panting, frozen with terror.

  ‘Do you think it knows where we are?’ I asked, very quietly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ whispered Bruce. ‘I think we outran it. Now all we have to do is—’

  And then I heard it…

  Clomp. Clomp. Clomp…

  ‘It knows where we are!’ I hissed.

  ‘Shhh,’ breathed Bruce. ‘Maybe it’ll turn down another passage!’

  Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

  It was coming closer, closer, closer…

  ‘It’s nearly here!’ I squeaked.

  ‘Maybe, if we keep really still in the darkness, it’ll miss us,’ whispered Bruce hopefully.

  Clomp, clomp, clomp. It was nearer now. Much nearer.

  ‘I think we should keep running!’ I hissed.

  ‘But if we run it’ll hear us…’

  Clomp, clomp, clomp.

  Too late! Suddenly, a light flared. The mummy’s face leapt out of the shadows towards us, all dirty bandages and staring eyes.

  ‘Found you!’ it shrieked triumphantly.

  It lifted up one heavily bandaged arm and said, ‘Excuse me for bothering you, but I don’t suppose either one of you has a Band-aid?’

  ‘Erp,’ I said. Bruce just sat there with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out, and there weren’t even any flies around for him to catch.

  ‘A Band-aid,’ repeated the mummy politely. ‘You know, one of those sticky things. They’re such a marvellous invention. If only we’d had them five thousand years ago, life would have been so much easier. Death too,’ it added, after a bit of thought.

  ‘Erp. Wait a second,’ I said, as my brain came back together again. ‘I’ll have a look.’ I rummaged in my pocket for a minute. Handkerchief (Mum always checks I have one), bus pass, ticket stub from the movie I saw last Saturday, something I think used to be a plastic-wrapped lollie…and a Band-aid.

  I held it up triumphantly. ‘I knew I had one in there somewhere. I had a blister on my heel last weekend,’ I explained to Bruce. ‘Mum made me take a Band-aid—just in case.’

  The bandaged arm descended and plucked the Band-aid out of my hand. ‘Wonderful!’ (I think it must have been at least 5000 years since that mummy cleaned its teeth. I mean, pong!) ‘Just what I need.’

  The bandaged hands fumbled for a moment and then the mummy said politely, ‘Excuse me, I don’t suppose one of you could lend me a hand would you? Preferably two hands. These things are so hard to manage…’

  I glanced at Bruce but he’d be no use. Frogs have pads not hands, and small round discs rather than nimble fingers.

  ‘I’d be glad to help,’ I said insincerely. (Mum would have been proud of my good manners. Not that she’s ever actually said ‘Always help a mummy in distress,’ mind you. But you get the general idea.)

  The mummy handed the Band-aid back. ‘It’s this bit here,’ it said, pointing to a loose bandage. ‘You know how these things are. One bit comes loose, and the next thing you know, the whole lot’s around your ankles.’

  ‘Well, not really,’ I admitted. ‘I’m not really into bandages.’ I peeled the wrapping off the Band-aid and forced myself closer. I took a suspicious sniff, but there wasn’t any dead-person smell. It was more like spices and lavender and old dust, plus a bit of tooth decay…

  The mummy considered. ‘I suppose not,’ it said at last. ‘You’re much too young to be interested in bandages yet.’

  ‘Actually, bandages are sort of old hat these days, even if you happen to be dead,’ I informed it as I pressed the Band-aid into place.

  ‘Really?’ The mummy sat down on the slimy ground next to us. It looked fascinated. Well, as fascinated as a face full of off-white bandages can look. ‘Thank you so much for helping, that feels infinitely better. What do your pharaohs use instead of bandages when they die?’

  ‘Are you a pharaoh?’ I asked. I wondered if I should curtsey or something.

  ‘No,’ said the mummy.

  ‘Oh, good,’ I said. I hadn’t curtsied since I met the Phaery Queen in Phaeryland, and even then I was a bit afraid I’d fall over onto my nose.

  ‘I’m a queen,’ said the mummy. ‘The Pharaoh’s grandmother, actually.’

  ‘Hey, a grandmummy!’ giggled Bruce. I nudged him in the ribs with my toe.

  ‘But please, don’t stand on ceremony,’ said the grandmummy graciously. ‘So, do tell me—what are the funeral practices of pharaohs and queens these days?’

  I hadn’t got the heart to tell the poor thing that pharaohs had gone out of fashion along with the bandages. ‘Oh, this and that,’ I said airily. ‘Look, I’d, er, love to stay here chatting with you. I mean, it’s a really lovely pyramid you’ve got here and all that. But Mum will go bananas if I’m not home in time to get my homework done before lunch. Could you possibly tell us the way out? We’re sort of lost.’

  ‘No,’ said the grandmummy.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Er…you don’t plan to keep us here and eat our souls or anything like that do you?’ I asked a bit nervously.

  ‘Of course not.’ The grandmummy looked affronted.

  ‘Then why won’t you show us the way out?’

  ‘Because I don’t know how to get out,’ said the grandmummy simply.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘In fact, I don’t think there is a way out. As far as I know, the entrance to my pyramid was plugged with a block of granite when I was buried.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ I croaked. Suddenly, my voice was as froggy as Bruce’s.

  ‘Well, I was dead when they did it,’ the grandmummy pointed out.

  ‘But then how do you know about Band-aids if you haven’t been outside?’ I asked.

  The grandmummy sighed. ‘I have visions,’ she said dreamily. ‘When I’m asleep in my sarcophagus, I can see people all around my pyramid. They’re wearing strange clothes and eating wonderful, chilled blocks of fruit…’

  ‘Iceblocks!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘And they have wondrous delights like Band-aids, and little boxes that sing, and camels with wheels instead of legs—’

  ‘So you don’t get out at all?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Well, there’s not much point, really,’ explained the grandmummy. ‘Not with being dead and everything. I mean, there’s not much of a future for me outside. Besides, there’s no place like home.’ She patted the walls affectionately.

  ‘But I want to get out!’ I wailed.

  ‘Um, Pru,’ said Bruce.

  ‘I want to get home to our castle before Mum grounds me!’

  ‘Um, Pru,’ said Bruce again.

  ‘I want to do my homework and have lunch, and borrow a video for tonight, and—’

  ‘I can get us home,’ said Bruce.

  ‘And…and…What did you say?’ I demanded.

  ‘I know how to get us home,’ said Bruce.

  ‘How?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘Well, magic of course.’

  ‘But, but, but why didn’t you tell me you could do magic?’ I shrieked.

  Bruce shrugged—as much as a frog can shrug anyway. ‘I thought you knew. I am a phaery prince, after all.’

  ‘
But why didn’t you say something before!’ I yelled.

  ‘I dunno. You seemed to be having fun.’

  ‘Having fun! You call being lost in an ancient pyramid fun?’

  ‘Well you didn’t say you weren’t,’ said Bruce reasonably. ‘I thought you might have wanted to experience being chased by a mummy. Girls like creepy things, don’t they?’

  Boys! I mean frogs…or phaery princes!

  ‘How come you never do magic stuff at school?’ I demanded.

  Bruce shrugged again. ‘I dunno. Spells and things—they’re kind of chick stuff…’

  The grandmummy coughed politely. ‘Well, if you really must be going…’ she said. (You could tell she used to be a queen—her manners were really cool.)

  She extended a bandaged arm and shook my hand, then bent down and shook Bruce’s froggy paw. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you,’ she said. ‘If you’re ever this way again, do drop in. If I happen to be asleep, just cough next to my sarcophagus and I’ll wake up.’

  ‘Oh, oh sure.’ I said. ‘Er, thanks for the invitation. Next time, I’ll bring you a whole packet of Band-aids.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ said the grandmummy graciously.

  Or better still, I thought, I’d get Phredde or Bruce to PING! a packet of Band-aids over to her, plus a few iceblocks and maybe a Discman and a few CDs, because, to be really honest, I’d sort of lost my taste for pyramids.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Bruce. Then PING! and we were back in our castle gardens and the pyramid was just a little shape under the rose bushes.

  Another PING! and it was gone.

  I breathed in a lovely breath of air scented with everyday things like castle rose garden and unicorn manure, and with no whiff of slime or pyramid in it at all.

  ‘Hey, Prune Face!’ yelled Mark from the castle battlements.

  ‘What?’ I yelled back.

  ‘Mum said lunch’s ready! Where have you been all morning?’

  ‘I’ve just been doing my homework project with Bruce!’ I shouted. ‘Tell her I’ll be right in!’ I turned to Bruce. ‘Hey, you want to join us?’

  Bruce shook his head. ‘I’d better be getting back. Mum makes mosquito pizza on Saturdays.’

  ‘Yuk! Does your whole family eat stuff like that?’

  ‘Of course not,’ croaked Bruce indignantly. ‘They eat normal stuff, just like everyone else.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ I said.

  ‘I think they’re having sparrow’s tongues with lotus sauce,’ said Bruce. ‘See you Monday!’

  ‘See you,’ I said. ‘And thanks for rescuing us,’ I added, but it was too late. There was one last croak and a PING!, then Bruce was gone.

  I went inside to have lunch and write up the plan of the pyramid, while it was still fresh in my mind. To be honest I wasn’t quite sure about exactly which corridor we’d gone down and when, but I didn’t think it would matter. It wasn’t like Mrs Olsen was going to be zapping back to Ancient Egypt to check.

  As a matter of fact, it was a good thing the project was out of the way, because with the invasion of the giant slugs on Monday, not to mention the curse of the zombie librarian, things got a bit busy at school that week.

  But that’s another story.

  The Curse of the Zombie Librarian

  We heard the scream during maths class, just after we’d come in from morning tea.

  It came over the loudspeaker in the corner of the classroom: ‘Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhkkkkk!’

  Well, that stopped the arithmetic lesson. Mrs Olsen turned round from the blackboard and said, ‘What the *&%@ was that?’

  Then she said, ‘Children, pretend you didn’t hear what I just said.’

  ‘Said what?’ asked Bruce innocently but sort of muffled, because he had a whole cheekful of flies that he’d been zapping while her back was turned.

  Mrs Olsen just glared at him. ‘If you really want an extra three pages of homework, Bruce—’ she began, when suddenly the scream came again.

  It was even louder this time.

  ‘AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGHHH!’

  Mrs Olsen stopped what she was saying and stared up at the loudspeaker in the corner of the room. Normally Mrs Allen, our Principal, just uses the loudspeaker for boring announcements like, ‘Would Jason Chickenburger bring his water bombs and come to the office at once!’ ‘Would the person who put the plastic cockroaches in the staff water cooler please refrain from doing it again. Three staff members have already gone home in a state of shock.’

  I mean, you don’t expect anything interesting to come over the school’s loudspeaker system. And certainly not a scream.

  ‘Maybe Mrs Allen stubbed her toe or something,’ said Amelia helpfully from the front row. Amelia is always being helpful. It really gets up my nose.

  ‘It didn’t really sound like—’ began Mrs Olsen uncertainly.

  ‘No! No! Noooooooooo!’ sobbed Mrs Allen’s voice through the loudspeaker.

  ‘That was no stubbed toe,’ I informed Amelia.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she argued. (Amelia will argue about anything.) ‘When I stubbed my toe last Christmas—’

  ‘Don’t come any closer! I’m warning you—I have a bazooka in my filing cabinet,’ wailed the voice from the loudspeaker.

  ‘Well, that settles that,’ I said to Amelia. ‘You don’t attack a stubbed toe with a bazooka.’

  Booooooom! went the loudspeaker.

  ‘I didn’t know Mrs Allen had a bazooka in her filing cabinet,’ whispered Phredde.

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe the Education Department’s issuing them to all Principals. You know, to help keep discipline.’

  There was a sort of choked panting sound coming from the speaker now, then Mrs Allen screamed: ‘Attention! Attention!’

  Well, we were certainly paying attention.

  ‘Would all classes please assemble at once on the oval! This is an emergency. I repeat this is an—’ Booooom!, the bazooka went off again. ‘This is an emergency! The school is under attack from giant slugs! I repeat, would all classes please—aaaaaagggggghhhhhhhhh!’

  ‘Hey, cool!’ said Phredde, her wings fluttering like a fan in overdrive. ‘I’ve never seen a giant slug!’

  Well, it was okay for Phredde. She could probably PING! away any giant slug that decided to go into attack mode. But what about me? Come to think of it, Phredde could PING! away any giant slug that tried to attack me, too. Or Mrs Allen or Mrs Olsen—even Amelia, I thought charitably, though maybe Phredde could wait just a little bit longer before saving Amelia.

  Mrs Olsen cleared her throat. She looked a bit white, but then, vampires always look a bit white, so she was probably okay. After all, she might be able to vampirise a giant slug, though it mightn’t taste very good.

  ‘Alright, everyone. I want you all in a single file,’ ordered Mrs Olsen. ‘No panicking. Bruce, would you go to the end of the line, please, so that no one steps on you. That’s right, everyone—’

  ‘But Mrs Olsen,’ said Bruce.

  ‘Bruce, this is no time to—’

  ‘But I was just going to say: why do we have to worry about giant slugs?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Mrs Olsen.

  ‘Well, what can they do to us?’ asked Bruce reasonably.

  ‘Maybe they’re going to eat us!’ said Amelia.

  ‘No way. Slugs are vegetarians.’ Bruce always knows useful stuff about insects, slugs, spiders and stuff like that. He knows all sorts of stuff that’s not useful, too.

  ‘They could run over us,’ protested Amelia.

  ‘Slugs don’t run either, dummy,’ said Bruce scornfully.

  ‘Well…well…slug over us then!’

  Bruce shrugged. ‘If you can’t run faster than a slug, you deserve to be slimed,’ he said.

  Mrs Olsen coughed. ‘This is all very well,’ she said. ‘But Mrs Allen will be waiting for us on the oval.’

  ‘If the slugs haven’t eaten her,’ muttered Amelia.

  ‘I told you…’ began Bruce.

&nb
sp; So, we all trooped down to the oval.

  School always seems so deserted when everyone is in class. Or when everyone is marching down to the oval in single file too. There were just the pigeons, strutting around the rubbish bins, and the volcano, smoking gently in the corner of the playground.4 There were no kids racing around and no parents waiting for school to get out.

  And no giant slugs, either.

  ‘Maybe Mrs Allen got them all with her bazooka,’ whispered Phredde.

  ‘Maybe they got Mrs Allen,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe they’re eating the petunias out the front,’ offered Bruce. ‘Slugs love petunias.’

  ‘Maybe Mrs Allen was wearing a floral perfume and they thought she was a flower and swallowed her whole,’ whispered Amelia.

  We walked around the corner of the library to the oval. Everyone was lined up in their class groups (except for us, of course). It didn’t look like too many kids had been eaten. We seemed to be the last class to arrive, which, because of all the discussing that had been going on, really wasn’t surprising. Even Mrs Allen was there, with all her arms and legs—or, at least, all the bits that we could see were intact. She had her microphone with her, too.

  There were still no signs of any giant slugs.

  Mrs Allen glanced at her watch. ‘You took six minutes and forty seconds to get here,’ she said sternly. ‘That really isn’t good enough, you know.’

  ‘But where are the giant slugs?’ asked Mrs Olsen.

  ‘There are no slugs. It was just a drill,’ said Mrs Allen.

  ‘But schools have fire drills,’ protested Mrs Olsen. ‘Not giant-slug drills!’

  Mrs Allen looked a bit wild around the eyes. ‘Some schools have fire drills. We have giant-slug drills! With the dragon and the ogre5 and other…recent events, one can’t be too careful! And let me tell you,’ she went on, ‘if the school is attacked by giant slugs, I expect all of you to be here in less time than six minutes and forty seconds!’

  No one said anything.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ demanded Mrs Allen.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Allen,’ we muttered.

  Mrs Allen looked a bit mollified. ‘Well then,’ she said in a happier tone of voice. ‘While you are all here, I’d like to introduce our new temporary librarian. As you all know, Miss Richards is taking some long-service leave this term to study ancient Tongan self-defence techniques. So, as of today, Miss Snagglethorpe will be taking over.’