Carnival in a Fix

by Philip Reeve

  Mr. Moonbottom turned an interesting shade of purplish red. “And why would I do that, little girl?”

  Emily said, “Because you enjoy shutting funfairs down! But you knew Jinks and O’Hare keep Funfair Moon running so well that you’d never find a reason, so you decided to make a reason! You planted those poor Puffballs here and told them to make trouble so that there’d be lots going wrong when you came to inspect us!”

  “That’s absolutely…I mean to say…How dare you suggest that…,” spluttered the funfair inspector. Then he said, “All right! It’s TRUE!”

  Everyone said, “Gasp!” again. Even Emily. Even the cotton-candy monster. Even the Puffballs, peeking from their hiding places.

  “I HATE FUNFAIRS!” bellowed Mr. Moonbottom. “What a waste of time they are! People sliding down helter-skelters and twirling around and around on merry-go-rounds. What’s the point of that? Entertainment? Pah! Entertainment should educate people and prepare them for the real world! And that’s why I set up my own theme park. It’s called OFFICE WORLD. It’s a place where visitors can enjoy rides that introduce them to the joys and thrills of filing and the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping. A sensible theme park for today’s galaxy!”

  “Office World?” said Lord Krull. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Nobody has,” said Mr. Moonbottom bitterly. “Nobody ever came to visit it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” whispered Miss Weebly to Emily.

  “No,” the funfair inspector went on. “They were all too busy frittering their time away at Funfair Moon. So I decided the only thing to do was close you down for good, and that’s what I’ve done. Don’t think you’ve beaten me. I’ve already gathered all the evidence I need to close this place permanently. It’s all stored in my computer-hat.”

  Emily looked at his huge hat again. What she had thought were little decorative studs were really camera lenses and microphones. He must have been recording everything, she realized—or, at least, all the bits that made Funfair Moon look bad.

  Mr. Moonbottom laughed. “All I need to do is get back to my spaceship and transmit this information to the Galactic Council,” he said. “Then you’ll be officially shut down!”

  “But I’ll tell them it’s all a lie!” said Miss Weebly.

  “Oh, will you, Wendy?” sneered the funfair inspector. “You can try, I suppose—but that will mean filling in Form Z-B-4876/L. In triplicate!”

  Miss Weebly gasped. “Not Form Z-B-4876/L! That could take years!”

  “Exactly,” sneered Mr. Moonbottom. “By the time this place is allowed to reopen, everyone will have forgotten about it. They’ll all be having the time of their lives at Office World, and I’ll be rich! So long, you twits!”

  And he leaped into Emily’s bumper car and went shooting off through the crowd.

  “Quick!” shouted Jinks. “After him!”

  “Where is he going?” asked See-Through George.

  “His spaceship!” said Emily. “It’s parked near the main entrance!”

  “We’ll never get there in time!” said Jinks.

  O’Hare just turned around and looked at the cotton-candy creature, but it seemed to have gone to sleep again. Then he looked at Lord Krull’s Space Commandos and shrugged.

  O’Hare could put a lot of meaning into a shrug. This one was the sort of shrug that meant Can we borrow your jetpacks?

  Only three of the commandos had jetpacks. Jinks took one, O’Hare took another, and Emily helped herself to the third before they could tell her not to. Everyone else followed on foot, hurrying toward the entrance.

  It turned out that jetpacks were quite hard to steer. Jinks and O’Hare must have done it before because they took off in a straight line, but Emily went spiraling across the fair and zoomed past a surprised podful of visitors in the giant Ferris wheel. “That looks fun!” they shouted. “Where can we get one of those?”

  But before she could explain, the jetpack went into a dive and took her swooping down toward the waters of the Mermaid Lagoon. Just before she hit the water, a friendly voice beside her said, “Pull back on the red lever!”

  She looked around. See-Through George was flying beside her, still clutching his penguin. She found the red lever on the controls and pulled it back. The toes of her sneakers cut V-shaped wakes across the surface of the lagoon as the jetpack flew upward again, and the mermaids cheered and waved.

  “How did you know about the red lever?” she asked when they were safely above the level of the carousels and swingboats.

  George waved a pamphlet at her. It was the jetpack instruction manual. “Now use the blue lever to steer!” he said.

  Soon they were flying side by side.

  “Look!” said Emily as they shot through the archways of Sheikh Rattle’s Rock-’n’-Roll-O-Coaster. Down below them, Mr. Moonbottom’s bumper car went bouncing through the alleyways between the snack bars and amusement arcades. He was halfway to his boring spaceship. Emily couldn’t see Jinks and O’Hare anywhere, and she was a bit uncertain about tackling the funfair inspector on her own.

  Then she looked at all the flickering lights and whirling merry-go-rounds spread out beneath her. A couple of Space Commandos were wandering away from the shooting gallery, weighed down by all the cuddly toys they’d won. A hollowed-out log full of screeching Cub Scouts came whooshing down the log flume and splashed into the water, throwing up a wave that filled with rainbows in the light from the big sign outside the Hall of Mirrors. This place is fun, Emily thought to herself. It’s silly and noisy and it isn’t educational, but it’s pretty and it’s fun and I love it, and I will never let Mr. Moonbottom close it!

  She checked the instruction manual, which See-Through George was holding in front of her, and put the jetpack into a dive, straight at Mr. Moonbottom.

  Mr. Moonbottom was just zooming past the Space Twizzler when he heard the swoosh of the jetpack. He looked up in time to see Emily come swooping out of the sky. “Aaaargh!” they both said. Then she hit him. The empty bumper car went pootling on and crashed into a fortune-teller’s tent. (“I knew that was going to happen!” shouted the fortune-teller from under the collapsing canvas.) Emily and Mr. Moonbottom landed on the grass outside the entrance to the Space Twizzler. Emily’s jetpack came off. So did Mr. Moonbottom’s hat. It rolled across the ground, and Emily scrambled after it.

  “Give that back!” shouted the funfair inspector.

  “No!” shouted Emily, sitting on it. See-Through George came down and hovered beside her. “It’s three against one,” he said. “You should give up, Mr. Moonbottom.”

  “Give up?” scoffed Mr. Moonbottom. “Because of a girl and a ghostie? And what do you mean, ‘three against one’? There’s only two of you!”

  See-Through George waved Penguin at him.

  The funfair inspector wasn’t impressed. “Give that hat here!” he growled.

  “No you don’t, Moonbottom,” said Jinks, coming down out of the sky nearby.

  Mr. Moonbottom hesitated, then started to advance on Emily again. Emily looked up. In the sky above the funfair inspector, O’Hare was hovering like a big, furry balloon. Emily waved at him. He grinned at her and shrugged. Then he turned off his jetpack.

  SPUDGE. He landed on top of Mr. Moonbottom and covered him so completely that all Emily could see of the funfair inspector was his official shoes poking out from somewhere underneath O’Hare. For a moment, she was afraid O’Hare had squashed him flat, but the shoes kept twitching, and muffled, furious shouts emerged, so she knew he was all right.

  “Sorry about our late arrival,” said Jinks, taking off his hat and brushing some dust off it. “We took a wrong turn. Good work, Emily!”

  Emily beamed and hugged See-Through George. It was like cuddling a cloud.

  Other people were starting to arrive: Colin and his dad, Amy Peeploid and her parents, a crowd of curious fairgoers and Space Commandos. Peladorian Puffballs bounded and bounced around their feet like overexcited furry footballs.
Even the other ghosts had come out of the ghost train to see what was going on.

  Miss Weebly came pushing her way to the front, and the Commandos got their guns ready as O’Hare carefully stood up, revealing the cross and crumpled form of Mr. Moonbottom.

  “You’re under arrest, sir!” she said. “I’m going to take you back to Galactic Council HQ.”

  Mr. Moonbottom got up. He looked at his hat, which Jinks was very carefully taking apart. He looked at Lord Krull, who stood with his arms folded, as if daring Mr. Moonbottom to try to run away.

  “Oh, very well,” he said.

  “I hope you’re very sorry,” said Miss Weebly as sternly as she could. “It’s our job to make sure that funfairs are safe and fun, not close them down and set up boring office-themed replacements.”

  “I am sorry,” said Mr. Moonbottom, hanging his head. And everyone had been having so much fun that they were ready to forgive him; they cheered and laughed and shouted, “That’s all right—don’t do it again!”

  But Mr. Moonbottom wasn’t really sorry. He was one of those people who always think they’re in the right. As soon as the commandos had lowered their guns and people had started to turn away, he shouted, “Ha! You’ll never capture me!”

  Before anyone could stop him, he ran through the entrance to the helter-skelter. Lord Krull started to go after him, but O’Hare held him back. Jinks said, “Careful!”

  “Ha-ha!” shouted Mr. Moonbottom, running toward the foot of the slide. “The cotton candy will break my fall, and I’ll be out of this place long before you muppets can catch up with me!”

  He dived onto the slide and shot up it. Emily looked up and saw his tiny shape go shooting off the top of the helter-skelter with a wild “Wa-hoooo!”

  “What did he mean, cotton candy will break his fall?” asked a large green alien standing next to Emily. It was Figgis, the owner of the Space Twizzler.

  “Mr. Moonbottom may be a villain, but he didn’t want anyone getting seriously hurt,” said Jinks. “When he got his Puffball friends to reverse your helter-skelter, they must have turned it around a bit to make sure that anyone who flew off the top of it would get a soft landing. It’s aimed straight at the cotton-candy vats.”

  Figgis shook his head. “Not anymore, it’s not,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I noticed someone had turned it around. I just turned it back.”

  “So what is it pointing at now?” asked Emily.

  Across the fairground came drifting a long scream and a loud, soft

  It was the sound of a funfair inspector falling from a great height into one of Funfair Moon’s enormous trash bins.

  Mr. Moonbottom was lucky; the pile of rubbish broke his fall, and Jinks and O’Hare fished him out of the bin before it was taken away for recycling. Once he’d been hosed down, he didn’t even smell too bad.

  “What will you tell the Galactic Council (Leisure and Entertainment Subcommittee) about us, Miss Weebly?” Emily asked as they watched Lord Krull’s Space Commandos handcuff Mr. Moonbottom and march him aboard the official spaceship. “I’m afraid a lot has gone wrong today—it isn’t always like this.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” said Miss Weebly.

  “And we do have an infestation of Peladorian Puffballs….”

  “Yes, but I don’t think anyone will mind now that they’ve grown out of their spiky phase and you’ve told them to stop doing all the bad things Mr. Moonbottom ordered them to.” Miss Weebly smiled.

  The Puffballs had all grown very fond of O’Hare, perhaps because he was even rounder and hairier than they were. They followed him about in a happy crowd, but they never seemed to mind when somebody else picked them up and gave them a cuddle. Emily guessed they hadn’t had many cuddles before, what with being all spiky and everything. Maybe they were making up for lost time.

  “But what are we going to do with them all, O’Hare?” asked Jinks. “They can’t come and live in our little house; there isn’t room.”

  O’Hare just shrugged and passed him a Puffball to cuddle.

  The cotton-candy creature was awake again. It was much calmer now, and it was helping the owners of Terror Mountain to repair some of the damage it had done. Emily thought it looked quite cool, scrambling about on the crags of the giant roller coaster. Maybe they could ask it to stay and pretend to menace all the roller coaster rides.

  Colin was looking at Terror Mountain, too. He tugged at Lord Krull’s gauntlet. “Dad, Dad, can we go on the roller coaster?”

  “Hmmm,” said Lord Krull nervously. “I’m not sure….It’s nearly your bedtime….”

  “Oh, come on!” said Emily. “We should all go on it! It will be fun!”

  So they did.

  And it was.

  And after that they went on the trampolines, and the airplanes, and the swingboats, and went rowing on the Mermaid Lagoon, and Emily thought how pretty Funfair Moon looked, all lit up under the midnight sky, and how amazing it was that you could make something so magical out of just wood and metal and machinery and colored lights.

  But the most amazing bit came right at the end, when Mr. Jinks said, “Come on, young Emily, time for bed.”

  Emily tried to say she wasn’t tired, but she was yawning so much she couldn’t get the words out, so she said good night to See-Through George and arranged to meet him again tomorrow, and said good-bye to Colin and promised to take him on the ghost train the next time his dad brought him to Funfair Moon. Then she let Jinks and O’Hare lead her to where their little car was waiting.

  They flew her home to the Lost Property Office. Mrs. Mimms was already asleep, so they didn’t bother waking her; they just set the car to hover outside while they all climbed in through Emily’s bedroom window. Emily went into the bathroom to brush her teeth and change into her pajamas. When she came back, Jinks and O’Hare were still there. O’Hare was looking at Emily’s model funfair; Jinks was just looking awkward.

  O’Hare gave Jinks a shrug that meant Go on, then—tell her!

  “Er, well,” said Jinks. “I just wanted to say that we couldn’t have managed without you today, young Emily. You’ve got the makings of a very good funfair repairer. Anytime you’re not at school and you feel like helping us, we’d be glad to have you on our team. That is, if you want to be…”

  “Of course I do!” shouted Emily.

  O’Hare gave her a huge, hairy hug. Then he pulled something out of his toolbox.

  “What’s that, O’Hare?” said Jinks. “Oh, it’s the manual for the skelter-helter. I mean, helter-skelter. Our first job tomorrow is to get it working properly again.”

  O’Hare held the manual out to Jinks.

  “What?” said Jinks.

  O’Hare gave him a look.

  “Ah, well, I guess now is as good a time to start as any,” said Jinks. He sat down on the end of Emily’s bed, opened the book, and began to read.

  “How to fix your helter-skelter in five easy steps. First, let’s check some standard guidelines. No matter what type and make of helter-skelter, basic principles remain the same….”

  Emily got into bed. There was a Peladorian Puffball already in there, sleeping soundly, like a fluffy hot-water bottle. (Those Puffballs had got everywhere!) She snuggled up to it and listened to Jinks read while the lights of the funfair flickered through the open window, and the noise of the funfair lulled her off to sleep.

  When she woke, someone had drawn the curtains, and daylight was showing around the edges of them. Emily smiled, remembering yesterday’s adventures and all the brilliant stuff that had happened. Then she sat up with a start—what if it had all been a dream?

  She jumped out of bed and ran to the window. She opened the curtains. There on the sill sat her Peladorian Puffball, basking in the morning sun. Outside, Jinks and O’Hare were already hard at work. They had propped a ladder against the front of their house, and Jinks was shouting directions from below while O’Hare teetered on the top with a paintbrush.


  The sign above their door said:

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