Carnival in a Fix

by Philip Reeve

  “My name’s See-Through George,” it said.

  “Are you really a ghost?” asked Emily. “You’re not very scary….”

  “I’m only little,” said See-Through George. “I haven’t really got the hang of it yet. You should see my mom and dad, and my big brother, and Uncle Reggie, and Headless Maude. They’d scare the pants off you!”

  “Where are they, then?” asked Emily (although she didn’t really want her pants scared off).

  “They’re hiding,” said See-Through George. “I was hiding, too. But then I realized I’d left Penguin out here, so I came to get him.”

  “What, hiding so you can jump out at people with bloodcurdling screams?” asked Emily.

  “No,” said the ghost. “Hiding because we’re scared!”

  “What are ghosts scared of?”

  “Rustlers!” said See-Through George. “They’re black and spiky! They come up through the floor, and they rustle in the shadows….”

  That reminded Emily of something, but before she could remember what, there was a sudden rustling sound from the far end of the room. The little ghost quivered with fright and pressed close to Emily. “Hear that?” it whispered. “This place is haunted!”

  Emily was frightened, too, but she knew that she mustn’t let the little ghost know that, so she looked as brave as she could and took hold of his hand. It was like holding a handful of smoke.

  “It’s all right, See-Through George,” she said. “I’m working with Jinks and O’Hare, and they can sort out any problem. Listen! I can hear a pod coming. Maybe it’s Stan, coming to look for me! He might even have Jinks and O’Hare with him. They’ll know what to do.”

  The doors banged open, and the pod appeared. But as the beam from its headlamp swept across the room and reflected from the dusty mirrors on the walls, Emily saw that it wasn’t Stan riding in it. It was Mr. Moonbottom and Miss Weebly.

  “Honestly!” the funfair inspector was saying. “Not a single spook! Disgraceful! Make a note of that, Miss Weebly: ‘Ghost Train—V. Disappointing’…”

  Emily pulled See-Through George back into the shadows with her as the pod rumbled past and vanished through the far doors.

  “Oh no!” she said as the pod’s noise faded. “This is bad! That’s Mr. Moonbottom, the funfair inspector. He’s trying to close down Funfair Moon!”

  “What are we going to do?” asked See-Through George.

  Emily thought for a moment. “Can we go and get your mom and dad and Uncle Thingy and Headless What’s-Her-Name?”

  “They’re right up in the attic,” said See-Through George. “They’re too scared to come out!”

  “Okay, then we’re going to have to scare Mr. Moonbottom ourselves,” Emily decided. “He just needs one really good fright; he can’t call the ghost train ‘V. Disappointing’ then. Can we get around in front of his pod?”

  See-Through George nodded. “Yes. There’s a secret shortcut from here to the dining room. The dining room is the last room the pods go through on their way to the exit. But what about all the Rustlers?”

  “I don’t believe there’s any such thing,” said Emily. “I think you’ve all been letting your imaginations run away with you. Those noises you heard were probably just some dropped candy wrappers rustling about in a draft. Now, how can I get into one of these suits of armor?”

  But it turned out that the suits of armor were much too big for her, and much too complicated to climb into quickly. So she just grabbed a helmet from one of them and hurried after See-Through George. There was a tiny door at the far end of the room. It was so small, and so deep in shadows, that Emily wouldn’t have noticed it, but luckily, there were helpful signs pointing to it:

  She pushed the door open, and See-Through George brushed past and floated ahead of her down a cobwebby secret corridor.

  They came out on a sort of balcony—See-Through George called it a gallery—overlooking a huge dining room. Candles flickered in big chandeliers above a table shrouded in more cobwebs. The rail that carried the ghost train pods ran in a loop right around the table, and it was already starting to thrum and tremble as Mr. Moonbottom’s pod approached.

  “As soon as it comes through the doors,” whispered Emily, “we need to start waving our arms and shouting ‘Booo!’ and ‘Woooo!’ and things. You probably know more about it than I do, being a ghost and everything. Do you think you’d be scarier if you weren’t carrying a cuddly penguin?”

  See-Through George just clutched his penguin more tightly.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Emily, “I’ll look after him for you, and you can have him back after we’ve done the scary bit.” She took the toy, but unfortunately she didn’t have any pockets big enough for it, so she opened the visor of her helmet and popped it inside. The helmet was quite roomy, so there was plenty of space for a cuddly penguin between her head and the top of the visor—it worked like padding and made the helmet much more comfortable.

  Just then, the dining room doors opened, and the pod came humming in. “Oh, Funfair Moon is going to fail its inspection at this rate!” Mr. Moonbottom was saying. He sounded rather pleased about it. “We shall have to shut the whole place down!”

  “Booooo!” yelled Emily up in the gallery.

  “WooooOOOOoooo!” wailed the little ghost. But his voice wasn’t very loud, and Emily’s voice was muffled by the penguin, which had chosen that moment to flop down between her face and the visor. Mr. Moonbottom and Miss Weebly didn’t so much as look up at the gallery. They hadn’t heard the bloodcurdling cries!

  Something had, though. In the shadows at the far end of the gallery, spiky black shapes moved and rustled. They reminded Emily of the spiny creature she had seen scurrying across the top of the helter-skelter as she shot over the handrail.

  “Rustlers!” squeaked See-Through George, wrapping his arms around Emily’s waist. She stepped backward, and the weight of the big helmet on her head made her unbalanced. She crashed through the balcony railing, with the frightened ghost still clinging tightly to her. Luckily, she caught hold of one of the chandeliers as she fell, and from there it was just a short drop to the table. But the table wasn’t meant to be stood on—not by anyone who wasn’t a ghost, anyway. It collapsed with a huge crash, and Emily tumbled off straight into the path of the oncoming pod.

  “Aaaaargh!” screamed Mr. Moonbottom and Miss Weebly as See-Through George whirled over their heads. “Eeeeek!” they shrieked as the dust from the collapsing table cleared to reveal an awful figure on the tracks ahead.

  It swung its huge armored head to look at them and said, “I can’t see a thing through this penguin….” Then it fumbled with the helmet, its visor popped open, and a weird birdlike face stared out at them.

  “Eeeeeeek!” screamed Mr. Moonbottom and Miss Weebly, grabbing hold of each other. “Aaiiiiieeeee!” they screeched. “Ghosts! Monsters! A haunted penguin!”

  The apparition jumped out of the way, and the pod carried them through the door at the far end of the dining room and out through cobwebs into the open air. Emily pulled the helmet off and looked about. There was no sign of the spiky things that had moved in the shadows. Just See-Through George, hugging his penguin and doing a little dance. “We scared them!” he said. “Did you see how scared they were, Emily? That was awesome!”

  Emily checked again for signs of the rustling things and decided it was safe to leave See-Through George on his own for a bit. She said, “Listen, you go straight back upstairs to your family, all right?”

  “Okay, Emily,” said the ghost, grinning from ear to see-through ear. He shot across the room and vanished through a side door marked STAFF ONLY, while Emily followed the tracks through the double doors, pushed another curtain of cobwebs aside, and stepped out blinking into the daylight.

  Funfair Moon was filling up fast. There were people everywhere, and all the rides were busy. The sky was full of flying pleasure boats and, higher up, big spaceships waiting for a parking space. Over the loudspeakers, a c
heery voice announced, “Welcome to Funfair Moon! Among our visitors today, a party of Cub Scouts from the Fox Fur Nebula! A whole wandering wood of tree-people from Grobag Twelve! And a star cruiser full of Space Commandos from the Darkvoids of Quorn! Yes, everyone comes to share the fun here on Funfair Moon!”

  But to anyone who knew the sights and sounds of the great funfair—and nobody knew those sights and sounds better than Emily—there were definite signs that something odd was happening today. The music from the carousels sounded wonky and out of tune, and on the main fairway Peeploid’s Seven-Story Merry-Go-Round and Fudge Shoppe was spinning much faster than usual, with little wisps of smoke seeping from it.

  Luckily, Mr. Moonbottom didn’t seem to have noticed. He and Miss Weebly were clambering out of their ghost train car at the end of the ride, looking white and shaken. “It was a long buildup,” Miss Weebly was saying, “but it was certainly scary in the end!”

  “I’m not so sure, Miss Weebly,” said the funfair inspector, straightening his hat and brushing cobwebs off his briefcase. “I’m not sure it can be called a ghost train when it features only one ghost and that strange armored penguin thing….”

  They hadn’t noticed Emily. She hurried past them to the kiosk.

  “There you are!” said Stan. “I was getting worried. I was going to come in and look for you, but then that inspector turned up. He’s not very nice, is he? He reminds me of a customer we had last week, a right grumpy sort, complaining about everything….”

  “Are Jinks and O’Hare here yet?” Emily asked.

  Stan shook his heads. “They won’t be for a while, either. I heard they’ve drained the duck tank, but now there’s another emergency going on, over at Peeploid’s Merry-Go-Round and Fudge Shoppe. Young Amy Peeploid came running over to tell me about it. The brakes have failed! The whole ride is spinning out of control. If Jinks and O’Hare can’t stop it soon, it will—”

  A huge echoed across the fair, and it started raining fudge. Emily gasped and looked toward the fairway. Where the Peeploids’ ride had stood, there was just a spreading cloud of purple smoke. Out of the smoke, big chunks of fudge were hurtling.

  “Oh no!” Emily whispered, hoping that none of her friends had been on the merry-go-round when it blew up. “It’s a fudge-tastrophe!”

  Mr. Moonbottom came hurrying over. “Whatever was that din?” he asked. “It registered one hundred fifty decibels on my noise-o-meter. Let me tell you about the Galactic Council’s noise regulations….”

  But Emily and Stan never did hear about the noise regulations, because at that moment, a large cardboard box labeled PEEPLOID’S DELICIOUS FUDGE (VANILLA) came whooshing out of the sky and landed with a loud thud on Mr. Moonbottom’s head. He frowned, dropped his briefcase, and fell over.

  “Oh dear!” twittered Miss Weebly, running over to him. “He’s out cold! I’m pretty sure that’s a health-and-safety violation….Do you always throw fudge about like that?”

  “Oh yes!” said Emily, hoping that Miss Weebly wouldn’t notice the wreckage of the Merry-Go-Round and Fudge Shoppe, still feebly spinning in the distance as the smoke cleared. “The Fudge Display is a very popular feature. It happens every day, and twice on weekends. Only usually they take the fudge out of the boxes first.” She started to pick up the things that had fallen out of Mr. Moonbottom’s briefcase when he dropped it. Some sandwiches covered in plastic wrap, a few brochures from other funfairs, and a small book. It was the kind of book that you find in pet shops, and it was called How to Keep and Care for Your Peladorian Puffball. There were pictures inside of round, fluffy creatures so puffy and cuddly-looking that it made Emily wonder if she had been wrong about Mr. Moonbottom. Surely someone who kept such cute pets couldn’t be all bad?

  “We’d better put him somewhere comfortable,” she said.

  “Yes, probably best he’s out of it,” said Stan, emerging from his kiosk. “Everything’s going wrong today. Maybe when he comes to, we’ll be able to make him think it was all a dream.”

  “We’ll take him to the Lost Property Office,” said Emily. “Mrs. Mimms will look after him. She knows first aid, and she has a nice comfy sofa we can put him on. Comfy sofas are good for people who’ve been knocked out by fudge.”

  So Stan put a notice on the window of his kiosk saying

  Then he fetched his little hovertruck, and Emily helped him and Miss Weebly load the unconscious funfair inspector onto the back of it. Miss Weebly brought the fudge along, too. “It seems a pity to waste it,” she said, and they all ate fudge as Stan drove them through the fair toward the Lost Property Office. Miss Weebly seemed quite nice—she said it was her first day on the job, and how excited she had been when Mr. Moonbottom said they were going to Funfair Moon. “But he’s very strict, isn’t he?” she said between mouthfuls of fudge. “I became a funfair inspector because I love funfairs, but Mr. Moonbottom seems to hate them. He’s always finding fault with them and closing them down….”

  “Oh, look over there!” said Emily, pointing out of the left-hand window so that Miss Weebly wouldn’t see the cranes lifting giant ducks out of the tank on Sideshow Hill, which had just come into sight on the right. A few moments later, she had to make Miss Weebly look out the right-hand window to avoid the view of the wrecked merry-go-round on the fairway. People were milling about at the bottom of it, happily picking up bits of scorched fudge. Emily was relieved to see the Peeploids and Jinks and O’Hare among the crowd. They were looking a bit more fudge-splattered than usual, but basically all right.

  There was another crowd at the Lost Property Office. That was unusual, too—most days, people only arrived in ones or twos. Today, the queue was spilling out the doors, which made it quite difficult for Miss Weebly and Stan to carry Mr. Moonbottom inside. But Emily was used to slithering her way through fairground crowds. She wove her way to the front, where a very embarrassed Mrs. Mimms was trying to deal with about thirty complaints at once.

  “This isn’t my hat!”

  “That’s not my jetpack!”

  “Where are our spoons?” demanded a Poglite space captain, beating his tentacles on the countertop while all his crew bounced up and down in their chimney-pot space suits shouting, “Spoons! Spoons! Spoons!”

  “I’m so sorry, so sorry!” poor Mrs. Mimms kept saying, blushing every color of the rainbow as she rummaged among the shelves of coats and hats and bags, trying to reunite angry customers with their belongings. “Oh, Emily,” she said, spotting Emily peering over the counter, “something dreadful has happened! I’ve never known so much lost property in one day! Things have been getting lost and mislaid all morning, and people are handing them in almost as fast as I can label them. And now the owners have started turning up to claim them, and I can’t find them! Someone comes in asking for a lost bobble hat, and I check my list and see Bobble Hat—Number Seventy-Nine, but when I fetch Number Seventy-Nine, it isn’t a bobble hat. It’s a pair of skis or a cement mixer. Somehow all the labels have got mixed up! You haven’t touched them, have you, dear?”

  Emily shook her head. “I’ve got an injured funfair inspector. Is it all right if we put him in the front room?”

  “Of course, dear,” said Mrs. Mimms absentmindedly, reaching behind her for a teddy bear and coming back with a marble statuette of Floomish Spoob.

  Suddenly a huge, booming voice cut through the din. It sounded as dark as space and so commanding that everyone fell quiet at once and drew aside to let the owner of the voice stride up to the counter. He was tremendously tall and dressed in some kind of black space armor and a long black cape. The only things about him that weren’t black were his eyes, which glowed red through the holes in his helmet.

  “Is this the place where lost things are brought?” he demanded.

  “Y-yes, sir,” said Mrs. Mimms.

  “I have lost my son.”

  “Your son? Well, a lost child is not technically lost property, sir. I think you need to—”

  roared the stranger. “I am
Lord Krull, Commander of the Black Spacefleet, Conqueror of Worlds, Supreme Ruler of the Darkvoids of Quorn. Star systems tremble at my very name. But my wife’s gone to her sister’s for the weekend and she left me in charge of our little boy, so I thought I’d bring him to your Funfair Moon. I’m told children enjoy this thing you call fun.”

  “Yes, we do,” said Emily.

  bellowed Lord Krull. “Unfortunately, I got rather dizzy on the Learny-Go-Round.”

  “But the Learny-Go-Round isn’t a ride,” said Emily. “It’s our school…”

  “I was told it would be educational,” said Lord Krull. “But it went a bit faster than I was expecting.”

  “…and it isn’t even open today!” said Emily.

  “While I was recovering, my lad must have wandered off. I asked those spiny black creatures who were operating the ride if they saw which way he went, but they just rustled at me.”

  “What spiny black creatures?” asked Emily. Some of her teachers were pretty odd-looking, but none of them was black and spiny, and she couldn’t think why they’d be operating the Learny-Go-Round when it wasn’t a school day.

  Lord Krull wasn’t listening. “I’ve been looking everywhere,” he said. “I need you to FIND HIM. NOW! Or shall I order my Space Commandos to tear your puny fair to pieces?”