by Paul Gamble
“Clearly these meerkats know nothing about being liable for causing trips and falls,” Jack complained. “Frankly, their health and safety procedures are shockingly lax.”
“These little vermin really do like digging,” Trudy agreed. “But there’s nothing unusual in that.”
Jack was just about to agree with Trudy when he tumbled into a massive hole eight feet across. “I think I may have found an unusual burrow,” Jack said. “Either that or we need to start running now. If there’s a meerkat big enough to dig this by himself, I worry that we might look too much like a tasty bug to him.”
Trudy carefully made her way into the mouth of the enormous tunnel, pulling a flashlight out of her schoolbag.
“Did you steal that from the chamber where Excalibur is hidden?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t have a chance to return it,” sneered Trudy. “I was too busy almost being killed by empty suits of armor.”
“Just make sure you put it back later. We don’t want people going around saying we’re thieves.”
“Well, I could just leave the flashlight here,” said Trudy, switching it off.
Jack looked into the darkness. “No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary. After all, the only thing worse than having people talk about us would be having people talk about us in the dark when we wouldn’t even be able to see who they were.”
Trudy clicked the flashlight back on and walked into the tunnel. Jack scurried behind her trying to keep up while pretending to be braver than he really was.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
HEALTH AND SAFETY
HORNED VIKING HELMETS
As you will already know, Vikings did not originally wear horns on their helmets. However, after the rumor started that they did, King Hendrick the Caring suggested that it might not be a bad idea.
King Hendrick was a thoughtful and caring king who had noticed that when Vikings poured off their longboats for a raid, frequently there was something of a stampede and many of his warriors were crushed underfoot.
Hendrick decided that it would be a good idea to have a way to warn the warrior in front of you that he needed to get a move on. He therefore got the Viking Health and Safety Executive to fit a set of horns onto all helmets. This meant that when Vikings charged head-down into battle, you knew if you needed to speed up because the Viking behind you would poke you with his horned helmet.
Although people no longer remember that this is how the practice started, it continues to this day—as motorists “sound their horns” in order to tell someone in front of them that they need to get a move on.
* * *
27
FAMILY REUNION
Jack talked as they headed down the tunnel. Jack found talking extremely helpful, because if he chattered enough it helped him to forget how scared he actually was. “There’s something very odd about this tunnel. We know that the meerkats haven’t escaped, so they must be using the tunnel for something else. Also, did you notice the way the meerkats were standing up on their hind legs?”
“Isn’t that the way they always look?”
“Maybe, but they were standing bolt upright. It’s almost as if something’s holding them in place. Maybe they’ve been affected by the animal feed the way humans are by the health-food bars.”
Trudy stopped and turned. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?” said Jack, quite pleased. “Because when I was saying it out loud I was slightly worried that I was losing my marbles.”
“And it makes sense that Merlin would base himself at the zoo. Health food mostly looks like animal food anyway—so he can store that kind of stuff here. And there’s plenty of space for him to experiment with plants. But then what would be the reason for…” Trudy said as she turned the corner.
“Reason for what?” Jack asked. Trudy had stopped dead still. Jack bumped into her back.76 As usual he was amazed that her back seemed to be very solid despite the fact that his front was quite soft and hurt a lot.
“Trudy, why are you…?”
Jack stopped and saw why Trudy had suddenly frozen. The tunnel had opened up into a large chamber, and lying at the back of it was a woman chained to the wall. Jack didn’t need to ask who she was. Trudy dropped her flashlight and ran for her right away. The woman stood up stiffly and opened her arms. Despite the fact that her clothes were dirty and torn, she was still stunningly elegant, with long auburn hair cascading down her back and eyes that sparkled emerald green. Her arms enfolded Trudy as she leapt into them, making her mother fall backward against the wall. Trudy’s mother buried her face in the top of her daughter’s head. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said in a muffled voice. Trudy said nothing, but Jack knew from the way her body trembled that she was crying. Jack felt a tear running down his own cheek, but he wiped it away, because no matter how emotional Trudy became he was pretty sure that she’d still be together enough to make fun of him for crying.
Jack felt as if he was intruding on something incredibly private, and so he pretended that he needed an impossibly long time to pick up and clean the flashlight while Trudy and her mother held each other almost silently, except for tiny sobs.
Eventually Trudy’s mother pushed her daughter away softly. “Let me look at you.”
Trudy’s eyes were red but she still grinned. “Dad’s missed you too.”
Trudy’s mother smiled for a second, but then her face snapped into a more serious shape. “I’m sure he has, but we can discuss that later. We need to get out of here first!”
Jack spoke. “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard. I mean, this feels like a bit of an anticlimax as a rescue. We were able to just walk in here.”
Suddenly Trudy’s mother seemed to notice Jack for the first time. “Who is your friend, Trudy?”
“This is Jack. I met him at the Ministry. He’s very good at figuring things out.”
“So you’re both working for the Ministry?”
Jack nodded. “We’re practically old hands at this stage.”
Trudy’s mother snorted. “Then you should realize that we’re in a very bad situation.”
“But there weren’t any traps or anything on the way in.”
Trudy’s mother sighed. “This is a prison. And prisons aren’t about stopping people from getting in. They’re about stopping people from getting back out.”
“You mean … there are traps?”
Trudy’s mother nodded. She pointed up to the corners of the cavern. There were two small black boxes in the far corners aimed directly at them.
“What are they?” Trudy asked.
“Motion detectors.”
“What do they do?” Jack asked.
“Detect motion,” Trudy’s mother said. “You actually work for the Ministry? Obviously the Misery hasn’t been training people quite as hard as he used to.”
“I meant, what do they do when they detect motion?”
“That I don’t know. They were set up here when Merlin brought me in. But I suspect we’ll find out precisely what they’re for if we manage to get this chain off my wrist.” Mrs. Emerson rattled the long, rusty chain that fastened her arm to the wall.
Jack picked up a length of the chain and rattled it. “Seems fairly solid. Maybe we could use The Speed.”
Mrs. Emerson shook her head. “I’ve already tried using The Speed to pull it and vibrate it, but it’s embedded far too deeply into the wall for that to have any effect.”
“Maybe we can find a bolt cutter?” Trudy suggested.
“Whatever we do we’d better do it quickly. Merlin occasionally checks in on me to ensure that I’m here.”
Jack thought as hard as he could but there was no easy solution. He looked at the manacle that secured the chain to Mrs. Emerson’s wrist. “I don’t suppose Merlin keeps the key nearby? If we could get the key, we’d be able to get you out.”
Mrs. Emerson’s shoulders sagged. “If that’s what we’re relying on, we’re really in trouble. Me
rlin thought that someone might come and try to rescue me, so he said that he had mixed the key in with some animal feed. One of the animals will have eaten it and then pooped it out in a random location. There’s no way anyone will ever find it. It’s just impossible—the key is lost.”
A thought struck Jack and he smiled. “What does the key look like?”
“Why?”
“Humor me.”
“It was maybe an inch long, made out of a dark gray metal. The top of it was shaped like a crown. But it doesn’t matter. You’ll never find it. It’s lost forever.”
Jack laughed. “Maybe Merlin isn’t the genius we took him for. He’s made a very big mistake.” Jack took off his schoolbag and started looking through it to find one of the poetry books from his English class. He handed it to Trudy. “Read some of this to me.”
“Is this really the appropriate time for poetry?”
“I don’t think there’s ever an appropriate time for poetry,” said Jack. “Now read!”
Trudy shrugged. She was getting used to Jack behaving like this.
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,77
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:”
“Clay and wattles,” Jack muttered to himself. “What are clay and wattles?”
Trudy carried on reading:
“Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”
As Trudy read, Jack carried on with his muttering. “Why would you need a hive for a single bee? Shouldn’t that be ‘honey-bees’? And if you only had a single bee how loud could it possibly be?”
Trudy read on.
“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”
Jack shook his head in consternation. “Is the poet saying the sky at noon was purple? I’ve never seen a purple sun before. And what on earth is a linnet?”
Trudy stopped reading. “Jack, why do you want me to read this if you don’t understand it?”
“Don’t you get it? Anytime I try and understand poetry I always get completely lost.…” And after saying that sentence Jack disappeared.
Mrs. Emerson blinked twice as she looked at the empty space where Jack had until recently been. “Maybe there’s more promise in that boy than I thought.”
Trudy smiled at her mother. “That’s how I feel about him as well.”
Jack suddenly reappeared where he had been, but he was clutching a key.
“The Lost and Found room?” guessed Trudy.
“Exactly,” said Jack. “Merlin had deliberately lost the key, so it had to be in the Lost and Found room. Once I found the key it wasn’t lost anymore and so I just popped back into existence with it.” Jack held up the key proudly. Then he noticed that it was covered in elephant dung.
Trudy handed him a tissue and Jack thanked her profusely. When the key was moderately cleaner they freed Mrs. Emerson from her chains.
“Now we can get out of here.” Trudy smiled.
Mrs. Emerson was looking less cheerful than her daughter. “I suspect that now that the chain is removed we’ll find out what the motion sensors are for.”
On cue, the motion sensors clicked and turned toward the heroes.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
MIND CONTROL
MIND READING
To date, Ministry scientists have discovered that mind control is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. However, this does not mean that all psychic arts are beyond our capabilities.
Indeed, one particularly distinguished psychic within the Ministry, called Sarah the Grand, discovered that with a judicious application of psychology, concentration, and sheer force of will she could hear what people were thinking.
In order to do this she had to stand on one leg, wave her hands in the air, and stare with one eyebrow raised. Using this technique she was able to perfectly understand what someone was thinking.
Unfortunately, using this method, she invariably discovered that what they were thinking was “I wonder why on earth that idiot is staring at me like that.”
Therefore, the skill was of somewhat limited use.
* * *
28
GETTING THE POINT
Jack, Trudy, and Mrs. Emerson all froze on the spot. The motion detectors stopped moving and the room was silent. Jack tried to speak without moving his lips. “If we move, is that going to set off an alarm?”
“Ha ha,” Mrs. Emerson said, clearly worried that really laughing might have set off the motion detectors. “If that was the problem, I’d be walking out of here already. I rather suspect that they’re the trigger to some kind of deadly trap.”
“Why do so many traps have to be deadly?” Jack grumbled. “Can’t we have some mildly inconveniencing traps for once?”
“We can’t just stand still forever,” Trudy said. “I’m going to try something.”
“You will not,” Mrs. Emerson said firmly. “I’m the adult, and if anyone is going to…”
As Mrs. Emerson spoke Jack saw a frown fall across Trudy’s face. It was a sure sign she was going to use The Speed. Trudy’s body suddenly jerked and she sped across the cavern. The motion sensors twisted and followed her progress. As they did there were several small eruptions of soil from the walls of the cavern. Three long, metal poles burst from inside of the walls and shot toward Trudy. She turned her head and caught sight of them.
“TRUDY!” Jack and Mrs. Emerson shouted at once—both frozen, not daring to move.
Although she was already moving at an impossible pace, Trudy pushed harder with her legs and dived forward. The three poles missed her by a fraction of an inch and crashed into the wall behind her, sticking with a series of thonks.
Trudy rolled and came to a halt, sitting on the ground. She froze instantly.
“Okay,” Jack said, “at least we know what the motion detectors do. And I’ve also just realized what must have happened to the other metal bars that were replaced by the Plexiglas around the meerkat enclosure.”
Trudy swiveled her eyes toward where the poles had stuck into the wall. “They seem to have sharpened ends. I think if we get hit by one it’ll be fatal.”
“Don’t you ever do anything as foolhardy as that again, young lady,” Mrs. Emerson lectured her daughter.
“Do you think there were only three sharpened poles in the wall?” Jack asked.
Trudy and Mrs. Emerson barely moved their heads and yet managed to give him withering stares. Jack was sure that if they had been able to move he would have been suffering from two badly bruised shoulders.
“Look, I’ve already shown that the poles can be outrun. We can all move at once—if we dodge and zigzag we can get out of here.”
Jack felt very worried indeed. Trudy had barely managed to avoid being turned into a shish kebab. He knew that he was nowhere near as fast as she was. He was going to say something but Trudy’s mother beat him to it. “You two go on. I’ll try to follow.”
Trudy frowned. “We’re all going together.”
Mrs. Emerson risked a sigh and a slight sag of her shoulders. “We can’t, Trudy; there’s no way I’d be fast enough even using The Speed. I’ve been chained to a wall for almost a year now. I’m not strong enough and my legs are so stiff they’re practically boards.”
“There’s no way we’re leaving without you.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed, secretly glad that he wasn’t going to be skewered.
“Jack, we need an idea how we can get out of here.”
“Right. Ummm.”
“And hurry up—Merlin could be back at any minute.”
Jack concentrated as hard as he could and came up with … nothing. The silence in the cavern was deafening until it was br
oken by Mrs. Emerson speaking. “Trudy, whatever happens I need you to know that I’m proud of you. You tried your best and that’s the main thing.”
Trudy’s face turned red. Jack suspected that she was emotional at her mother’s touching words. “No,” Trudy said calmly but firmly. Her voice sounded fierce rather than emotional.
“No?”
Trudy let out a long breath. “Trying your best isn’t the main thing. That’s what people say to losers. And I am not a loser. I’m going to get us out of here.”
“But I can’t think of anything,” Jack said apologetically. “I don’t know how those metal bars are being fired out of the wall—I don’t know how to stop them. And the motion sensors are far too high on the cavern roof for us to reach them.”
A sparkle appeared in Trudy’s eyes. “That’s it—you’re thinking about this wrong, Jack. We don’t need to stop the iron bars. They’re the solution—not the problem.”
If Jack had had more time he would have been confused by Trudy’s statement. However, he didn’t get the chance as his confusion was replaced by worry when Trudy bolted across the room, using The Speed. As she moved, small clouds of dirt burst out of the walls of the cavern. And behind each spray of dust a sharpened iron bar followed, zipping toward Trudy at an incredible rate.
The first missed her by more than two feet, the second by a foot and a half. Trudy was running toward where the two motion sensors were mounted high on the wall. Jack wondered how she could climb the wall quickly enough to avoid being pierced by a deadly bar.
As Trudy reached the wall she leapt in the air and then tucked and tumbled back to the ground. A metal bar zoomed over her head and stuck into the wall, vibrating for a second.
“Now the difficult part,” Trudy muttered to herself as she leapt back up again. With both hands she grabbed onto the bar above her head and spun herself around like an athlete on the horizontal bars.
