Grizella snorted. ‘Stupid mouse. It must be thirsty. It’s trying to turn the tap on.’
‘It’s going to break it if it keeps pushing it like that!’ exclaimed Tom, as the frustrated mouse began to pull at the tap with its teeth.
Crack! The mouse hauled the tap out of the ground. Crunch! It pulled a length of water pipe, too. Whooosh! A jet of water speared up into the sky! Higher, higher, higher it fountained! Water cascaded all over the school yard, forming a shallow lake across the netball court then funnelling down towards Tom and Grizella and the magic carpet. Deeper, deeper…and deeper still.
There was no time to run. There was no time to do anything! One minute Tom was staring at the wall of water rushing towards him, the next he was swept off his feet in a seething mess of dragon droppings, orange peels and flood!
‘Glub!’ squawked Tom, trying frantically to get to his feet, to swim across the rush of water, to do anything except sink in the swirling muddy mess.
Something bumped against him. Tom caught a glimpse of the magic carpet, with Grizella still atop, floating past him. He grabbed the carpet’s fringe and held on tight, then slowly hauled himself aboard.
Grizella gazed at him with panicked eyes as the carpet bore them down the street on the flood. Tom gazed back at the school. The tap had stopped cascading now. Everyone else seemed fine. It was just his luck that the water had funnelled his way.
Luck, thought Tom dismally. My bad luck…
But at least this time his bad luck had caught Grizella too. He glanced at her. She was gripping the sides of the carpet, too terrified even to scream.
At least the water was taking them down the street, thought Tom. The flood hadn’t crashed them against anything. Any minute now the water would disperse and leave them stranded or maybe they’d float past Uncle Gus and he would rescue them…
Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle…Tom stared in horror. The water was gushing into the vast black opening of the giant stormwater drain!
They had to leap off! But before he could even finish the thought the carpet plunged into the drain carrying him and Grizella with it.
CHAPTER 15
It Smells Like…
Darkness, cold and gurgling. The water flowed black on either side. More water must flow into the drain from somewhere else, thought Tom, trying to stop his teeth chattering. There was far more water here than could ever come from the broken pipe at school.
‘Tom?’ Grizella’s voice was small and frightened.
‘Yes?’ said Tom, trying not to let his voice quaver.
‘Where are we headed?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tom frankly. ‘I think the drain flows out to sea.’
‘Out to sea!’ Grizella was nearly crying now. ‘We’ll be drowned.’
‘Maybe we can jump off at the beach on the way past,’ said Tom reassuringly.
‘What if we drown before then?’ Grizella was crying in earnest now.
Fra wouldn’t be crying, thought Tom. He bet Fra
didn’t even cry when the assassins grabbed her. Fra would be sitting here planning their escape.
But how could they escape from a magic carpet floating down a stormwater drain? Even if they jumped off the carpet the water would still carry them along.
Maybe if they yelled for help? But who would hear them? And even if someone heard them they’d have floated further away before help came. Maybe…maybe…Tom tried to think.
‘Tom,’ said Grizella in a small voice.
‘Yes,’ said Tom. Was she going to apologise to him? Say that if they ever got out of here she’d make her mum take off the bad luck spell?
But all Grizella said was, ‘I can see some light.’
‘Where?’ demanded Tom. But now he could see it too, a tiny pinpoint of yellow in the blackness of the tunnel.
Was it daylight? Somehow it didn’t look like daylight.
The light was brighter now. They were getting closer, and closer still. Was this the end of the tunnel? wondered Tom hopefully. Suddenly the drain walls opened out around them.
Tom stared. No, they weren’t outside. Instead they were in a wide underground chamber, the daylight filtering in from grates above.
Tom gazed around. Was there anything they could grab and hold on to? But there seemed nothing at all, just the inky water and the slimy walls, and two other smaller channels flowing into theirs.
‘Tom?’ said Grizella again. ‘Can you smell something?’
‘Yes,’ said Tom hollowly.
‘It smells like…’ Grizella tried to find the right word.
It smells like dog doo-doo and puke, thought Tom. It smells like the time the school toilets overflowed on a Sunday and no one discovered the mess till Monday morning. It smells like sabre-toothed tiger droppings, but worse, it smells like…
‘It smells like sewerage,’ said Tom. ‘I reckon this is where the sewerage tunnel meets the stormwater tunnel.’
‘No!’ Grizella’s anguished cry echoed round the chamber. ‘No—o—o, I refuse to float down a sewerage tunnel on a magic carpet! Take me home at once!’
‘I can’t!’ said Tom. ‘I can’t even get me home, much less you!’
‘It’s all your fault,’ Grizella snivelled.
‘My fault!? You’re the one who got your mum to cook up a bad luck spell! It’s just your bad luck that you got caught in my bad luck this time!’
‘It is so too your fault!’ screamed Grizella. ‘If you’d said you would take me to the dance I wouldn’t have got Mum to put a spell on you!’
‘I don’t even understand why you want me to go to the dance with you!’ yelled Tom. ‘You can have any other boy in the whole school!’
‘I don’t want them!’ sniffed Grizella. ‘They just want to go out with me because I’m gorgeous and clever and rich and I can ask my mum for spells for anything! That’s all!’
They all sounded pretty good reasons to go out with someone, thought Tom. But all he said was, ‘Why me?’
The magic carpet swirled about in a little eddy. It turned round twice then slipped further down the smelly water.
Grizella gave a little gulp. ‘Because you’re always happy,’ she sniffed. ‘You’re the happiest boy in the whole school.’
Am I? thought Tom. He wasn’t very happy now. But had he been happy before the bad luck spell struck?
Maybe it was true, he thought. He was always happy. He had a great family, a great friend, Mog, and he had Fra. Mum loved her job as First Assistant Tooth Fairy and Dad was a really dedicated bogeyman. In fact, up until the bad luck spell Uncle Gus had been the happiest garden gnome in the world and all the families he worked for had been happy, too.
Even Fra was happy. Okay, she had been shut in a tower for 214 years, but she made the best of it, and Fra had him too.
Maybe he was the happiest boy in the school, thought Tom.
‘But aren’t you happy?’ Tom began. ‘You have everything a girl could want!’
But Grizella didn’t seem to be listening.
‘Tom?’ she whispered.
‘What?’ asked Tom, trying not to look down. Round, brown things were bobbing against the edges of the carpet, but they couldn’t be that, he thought. Surely the sewerage was treated before it joined the stormwater…maybe they were chocolates. Yeah, he thought hopefully, some dumb kid had dropped lots of chocolates into the stormwater, maybe the strawberry creams that nobody liked.
‘Can you hear something?’ asked Grizella, still very scared.
Tom listened. ‘It…it sounds like a roar. A bit like the sabre-toothed tiger from next door.’
‘But there aren’t any sabre-toothed tigers down here,’ said Grizella.
Tom listened again. The roar was louder now. ‘Maybe it’s a waterfall,’ he suggested. Uncle Gus had told him a cool story once about kids who had been washed down a waterfall on a raft and discovered a treasure chest and…
Grizella shook her head. ‘There aren’t any waterfalls in a sewerage tunnel!’
<
br /> Tom supposed there were no treasure chests either.
‘Then it’s…’ Suddenly, the magic carpet rushed into the tunnel on the other side of the chamber. Darkness washed over them again. But this was a different darkness, with a strange new smell—powerful enough to cover the stink of sewerage.
Faster, faster, faster…it was like sliding down a slippery dip. Except slippery dips weren’t dark and slime didn’t drip from their roofs, and they didn’t roar either.
The roaring got louder, and louder still. The tunnel was getting lighter. There was a glow again in front of them, brighter than before. The brightness grew and grew, till Tom could see the walls of the tunnel, green and slimy, and the ceiling, even slimier.
Then suddenly they were out!
Tom gazed around.
‘Oh!’ he gasped.
CHAPTER 16
Way Out to Sea
Tom had hoped that the sewerage tunnel went out to sea. That’s what Dr Maniac had said it did in Civics class. But while Dr Maniac was pretty good at transplanting mice brains, or explaining how if you had eight zombies and cut each of them up into quarters you’d have thirty-two bits of zombies to sew back together again, he hadn’t exactly given the class a lot of detail about sewerage systems.
The sewerage went into the sea, all right. But it didn’t dribble out of a tunnel on to the beach, with nice bright sand around it. Well, apart from some sewerage slime and a few brown things.
Tom gulped as the carpet bobbed and swayed in the water. This sewerage pipe went way out to sea! All around them was sea—white-topped waves and flying seagulls and just a few bobbing brown things. There was nothing else to see at all, apart from the tunnel, and even that was a sea-coloured, seaweedy green, splashed with waves.
Tom blinked into the distance. Yes, he could just see the land, high brown cliffs with waves crashing at their bases. No nice yellow beach at all.
How long could magic carpets float, he wondered.
‘Bother,’ said Grizella calmly.
Tom stared at her. ‘Bother?’ he demanded.
‘Yes, bother,’ said Grizella. ‘My school bag must have got bumped off in the tunnel.’ She yawned. ‘Never mind. Mum will magic it back for me.’
‘Never mind!’ yelled Tom. ‘We’re stuck in the middle of the ocean,’—which was a bit of an exaggeration, but Tom felt it was justified—‘on a magic carpet which is getting soggier and soggier and all you can say is “Bother” and “Never mind”!’
Grizella shrugged. ‘What else do you expect me to say?’
Tom blinked. He had expected her to say, Tom, Tom, save me!, or even, Yuck, look at all that smelly brown stuff, or maybe, Glerp, I think I’m seasick. But he didn’t think it would be tactful to mention any of those. Instead, he demanded, ‘How come you were all trembling inside the tunnel and you’re not now?’
‘Because we were going so quickly in the tunnel that the genie couldn’t find us. But now we’re out here,’ she shrugged, ‘I bet he’ll be here to save me within thirty seconds. He’d better or Mum will give him heaps.’
‘What do you mean, save you?’ asked Tom suspiciously. ‘Don’t you mean, us?’
Grizella looked at him pointedly. ‘In case you’ve forgotten, zombie zits, it was you who got me into this mess!’
‘Me!? It was you!’
Zing!
CHAPTER 17
Back to Grizella’s Place
The air flashed pink and purple and a particularly nasty shade of green. Tom grimaced. Uncle Gus said only show-offs did show-off magic.
Zing! The genie appeared in another puff of all- colours-of-the-pencil-box smoke. ‘To hear is to obey, oh mistress,’ he intoned.
Grizella glared at him. ‘What kept you?’
‘A giant, nasty, hairy thing, oh mistress,’ intoned the genie. ‘It grabbed me and carried me away.’
Grizella sniffed. ‘A likely story. You wait till Mum hears about this. Now take me home!’
‘At once, oh mistress!’ agreed the genie.
Tom grabbed the edge of the carpet. He wasn’t budging! If they thought they were leaving him in the sea they had another thing coming!
The genie settled cross-legged on the front of the carpet. Slowly, slowly, the carpet began to rise above the sea water with the odd brown lump dripping from below, then it moved faster and faster.
Grizella glanced at Tom, as though wondering whether to push him off. She must have thought that being unlucky was enough punishment—or maybe, thought Tom gloomily, she thought there just wouldn’t be enough bad luck out at sea. Only sharks, tsunamis, giant octopus…
This flying carpet moved faster than any Tom had ever been on. The wind blew through his hair and even most of the sewerage pong blew away. Tom looked down. They were over the cliffs now. There was the school and there was Tom’s place, with the bats fluttering around Fra’s tower. Tom wondered for a second if the genie might drop him off at home. But he didn’t dare suggest it. He was afraid the genie—and Grizella—might take the word ‘drop’ literally.
Tom had never seen Grizella’s house before. No one at school had ever been invited there either. Even Grizella’s birthday parties—fantastic birthday parties with everyone in the school invited—had always been held somewhere else, so they didn’t disturb Grizella’s mum and her magic.
Once Grizella’s mum had magicked up a giant spaceship and sent them all off to a party on the Moon. Well, not the real Moon, conceded Tom, as the party one had been made of green cheese, which tasted pretty good on crackers. He suspected the real Moon would taste pretty yuck. But it had been a great party.
The magic carpet was descending now. Tom gazed down.
Grizella’s house was on a mountain, tall and massive above the plain below. There were no roads to it. Tom supposed that guests either came by magic carpet, or were high enough up in the magic world not to need one. Tom gulped. Mum was a great First Assistant Tooth Fairy but Tom doubted whether
she could fly as high as that. Nor was Grizella’s place really a house. It was a castle, with straight stone sides and fearsome towers that made Fra’s tower seem tiny.
Down, down, down they spiralled. Tom began to sweat. How was he going to get out of there?
CHAPTER 18
The Most Powerful Witch in the World
Zoooom! The magic carpet glided skilfully down on the stone battlements. Grizella scrambled off, without a word of thanks to the genie, who disappeared in another puff of pink and purple smoke.
‘Hey!’ yelled Tom.
Grizella turned. ‘What now?’
‘How do I get home?’
Grizella shrugged. ‘That’s your business! Call a taxi carpet.’
‘But no taxi carpet could fly this high!’
‘True,’ said Grizella. She began to stomp off again.
‘Well at least tell me where your front door is!’ shouted Tom.
Grizella turned again, and sighed. ‘Go down the stairs, then down the next stairs, turn left, down the passage, take the sixth turn right, then left, then left again, go through the Great Hall and the Lesser Hall and the Really Quite Tiny Hall, then down the stairs again and you’re at the front door. Then ring the bell for the gorilla to put the drawbridge down.’
‘The gorilla?’ said Tom weakly.
‘Ordinary people have butlers,’ said Grizella snootily. ‘We have a gorilla.’
‘Then what?’ demanded Tom.
‘Then walk down the mountain. It’ll only take you three days or so.’
‘No way!’ yelled Tom. ‘Do you know how worried Mum and Dad and Uncle Gus and Fra will be if I’m not home for three days?’
Grizella glared at him. ‘Well, it’s all your fault!’
‘It’s not!’
‘Is too!’
‘Isn’t!’
‘What is the meaning of this racket?’ Tom blinked. There had been no tacky pink and purple smoke this time, not even a sonic zoom. Just a sudden very angry witch, her hands on her hips.
>
The Most Powerful Witch in the World was a short, fat, frumpy woman with thin tight lips, and her hair looked like it had been hacked off with a pair of kindergarten scissors. Tom supposed that when you were The Most Powerful Witch in the World it didn’t really matter what you looked like. She wore an ordinary tracksuit, a bit baggy round the knees and bum, with a gravy stain down the front. But there was no doubting that she was The Most Powerful Witch in the World.
Grizella suddenly looked nervous. Tom had never seen Grizella look nervous before. She’d been scared in the tunnel, and furious when he said he wouldn’t take her to the dance, but she’d never looked nervous.
‘Sorry, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘We didn’t mean to make so much noise.’
‘Saying sorry doesn’t make it any better. You totally ruined my concentration. Have you any idea how much concentration it takes to be The Most Powerful Witch in the World?’
‘Er, no,’ said Tom.
The Most Powerful Witch in the World looked at him for the first time. ‘Who is this?’ she demanded. ‘No, don’t tell me…’ She closed her eyes briefly then opened them again. ‘You’re Tom Goodle and you are the one who refused to take my daughter to the dance!’
‘I…um. Yes,’ said Tom. ‘You…you couldn’t take the spell off me could you?’ he pleaded.
‘Why should I?’ she said coolly. ‘The daughter of The Most Powerful Witch in the World can have whatever she likes.’
Not my daughter, thought Tom, or even Grizella. Just the daughter of The Most Powerful Witch in the World. He suddenly felt a little sorry for Grizella.
The Most Powerful Witch in the World sighed. ‘I have no time for this!’ she snapped.
There wasn’t even a zing, much less coloured smoke. Suddenly Tom tumbled onto the front doormat. He was home! He just had time to catch his breath when his school bag landed…on his head.
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