by Sally Prue
‘It’s worse than that,’ said Slacker, backing away, too. ‘They are serpent sick!’
Winsome picked up a long piece of tissue from the floor.
‘The sea serpent’s turned back into paper again,’ she said, in amazement.
‘Of course,’ said Mr Hazel. ‘Well, you know what happens if you put things in too-hot water, don’t you.’
‘You shrunk it,’ said Slacker, admiringly. ‘Brilliant!’
Winsome folded the sea serpent back into its plastic envelope and she’d just sealed it with seven layers of tape when sharp heels came clacking along the corridor.
Class Six stared round in horror. Anil and Rodney stunk of serpent sick, there were overturned chairs everywhere, and the magic-cupboard door was wide open.
Before they could move, a sharp nose appeared round the classroom door.
Then it recoiled.
‘What’s that disgusting smell?’ demanded Mrs Knowall.
Mr Hazel went to the door.
‘It’s the dear sweaty children,’ he told her. ‘They’ve been taking some exercise.’
A hand came up to hold the nose.
‘Um. Excellent,’ said the voice, rather honkily. ‘Good. Um... I’ll leave you to it, then.’ And the footsteps went away again.
‘Phew. I thought I was dead, that time,’ said Anil, weakly.
‘We nearly all were,’ said Winsome.
‘Ah well,’ said Mr Hazel, yawning. ‘It turned out all right in the end. It’s just one more turn of the wheel of fortune, my dears.’
Serise snorted.
‘Yeah, right,’ she said. ‘And I wish someone could put a brake on the thing, because it’s making me dizzy!’
Chapter Nine
Class Six spent the next two days busily baking cakes (the More-on-Top Cakes took ages because they were made with cast-off hairs from caterpillars who lived in oak trees) but at last it was the weekend and the day of the school fair dawned.
Class Six arrived bright and early – well, Rodney was just early. Anil stood by the school gates and directed all the stallholders as they arrived in vans or horseboxes, by broomstick or by carpet, to their places on the field.
‘Slacker will show you the Treasure Hunt pitch,’ Anil told a big bearded man with a wooden leg and a parrot.
‘My sister loves the Treasure Hunt,’ Slacker said, as he led the way across the grass. ‘Well, she doesn’t actually do much hunting, but she likes going to the tropical island. She’s bringing some extra-strong sun cream specially.’
‘A-harrrr!’ said the bearded man.
‘Fifty pee a go! Fifty pee a go!’ said the parrot.
The unicorn rides were behind the wildlife garden.
‘Could I help with the saddling?’ asked Emily, shyly.
‘If you like,’ said a unicorn. ‘And look, could you give my horn a bit of a polish while you’re at it? It’s covered in dust from that dirty old horsebox.’
Soon the Unlucky Dip (gifts guaranteed from a troll’s dustbin), Trifle Range (splat the teacher!), Wing Boats, Balloon Flights, Worm Charming, Guess the Name of the Ugly Bad-Tempered Dwarf, Hook the Spook, Thirty-Eight-Point-Eight-Nine-Two Kilometre Boot Tours (yes, said the man running this stall, they were the same as Seven-League Boot Tours but he’d had to go metric because of the regulations) were all ready to go. Slacker Punchkin’s cake stall was piled high with Toasted Lean Tarts, Curl Cakes, Pretty-Nose Pastries, More-on-Top Cakes, Bouncer Buns and Champion Cookies. The wellie-wanging pitch was marked out, the tea tent was up, and the tombola stall was piled high with dusty bottles of perfume and old tins of prunes – but that was because the tombola stuff was always donated by people’s grannies.
The last stallholder to arrive was an old lady dressed in seaweed. She was carrying a goldfish bowl containing something long and brown.
Anil looked at his clipboard. There was only one stall not ticked off.
‘Are you the fortune teller?’ he asked.
The old lady’s hair seemed to be made of seaweed, too.
‘Oh no, dearie,’ she said. ‘No, my old brain can hardly keep track of the past, these days. No, it’s Barry you want for that.’
Anil suddenly got the feeling that this was going to be a long day.
‘Barry,’ said the old lady, fondly, holding out the goldfish bowl. ‘He’s a marvel, is Barry. Look at the slime on him. Look at those teeny eyes. Yes, it’s Barry who’s the talent.’
‘Um... right, er, Mrs... er...’
The old lady gave a sudden cackle of joy.
‘I am Miss C Weed,’ she announced, proudly, ‘and this is Barry, the marvellous, the magnificent, the one and only eel of fortune!’
* * *
Anil escorted Miss C Weed to her place on the field. On the way back he met Winsome. She was carrying a sealed envelope as if she was expecting it to explode at any moment.
‘It’s the sea serpent,’ she told Anil. ‘Have you seen Mr Wolfe and Mr Bloodsworth?’
‘I think they’re marking out the squares for the Worm Charming,’ said Anil. ‘They’re over there with that bunch of the stall-holders’ friends.’
Winsome found Mr Bloodsworth and Mr Wolfe surrounded by a small crowd of… well, people wasn’t exactly the right word. Some of them were ten feet taller than people, some of them had more tusks, and some of them had more warts and were wearing pointier hats. They were all watching intently as Mr Wolfe marked out squares of grass using string and wooden tent pegs.
Mr Bloodsworth seemed rather glad to get away from the wooden tent pegs. He took charge of the sea serpent and led the way to the pond where Miss Elwig was waiting.
‘The sea serpent ate Anil and Rodney the other day,’ Winsome told him, doubtfully.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Bloodsworth, ‘but then she was bound to be a bit bad-tempered if she had no sea to swim about in.’
Winsome looked at the school pond. It was two metres across and less than a metre deep.
Miss Elwig leaned over to whisper.
‘I’m sure the sea serpent will find her way down into the sea, somehow.’ And as she said this, an octopus’s head popped out of the pond, waved an arm, winked and submerged again, slyly pulling a garden gnome with it as it went.
The gnome’s friends thought that was hilarious.
‘Right,’ said Miss Elwig. ‘Next. Rodney, dearest!’
Rodney was soon staggering backwards and forwards carrying stones from the rockery to the place where Mr Wolfe was setting up some speakers. Class Six had suggested booking a rock band to add a bit of atmosphere, and Miss Elwig seemed to think a rock band couldn’t play without... rocks.
In another part of the field, Emily came across a large bundle of cloth hopping about and shouting rude things.
‘I didn’t know you were entering the fancy dress as a camel,’ she said, putting down the unicorns’ lemonade bucket, as Serise’s head appeared out of a slit in the fabric.
‘Camel?’ spat Serise. ‘Camel? This isn’t a camel costume, this is the fortune-telling tent!’
It turned out that Serise had got the tent upside down, inside out and back to front. By the time Emily had sorted it out there was only an hour to go until the start of the fair.
‘It should be all right,’ said Winsome, looking round at the bright grass and the cloudless sky. ‘It’s a pity about all those indigestion tablets and knee bandages on the tombola. Still, I suppose the zombies will like them.’
‘The unicorns are lovely,’ said Emily, happily. ‘They’re a bit fussy about their apples being the right shade of pink, but they’re ever so friendly. I wish Miss Broom was here, though. For emergencies.’
Winsome sighed.
‘I know. All those giants. They do look quite nice giants, but...’
‘And I’m sure the trolls have only brought their hammers in case they want to hammer something,’ said Emily. ‘Something like... a nail. But not one on someone’s finger. Obviously.’
‘The ones that worry me are those tall pale peo
ple with the fangs and the long black coats,’ said Serise, coming up.
‘Them?’ said Rodney, cheerfully, staggering past with another rock. ‘That’s just Mr Bloodsworth’s family.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ said Serise.
But as it happened it wasn’t the Bloodsworth family, or the trolls, or the giants, or even the sea serpent, that nearly gave them all heart attacks.
It was the band.
* * *
They were called The Sirens. They wore feathery, tight-fitting costumes (at least, they might have been costumes) and one had a turtle-shell harp, one had some sea-urchin bongos, one had a shell trumpet, and another had a xylophone made, apparently, out of whale bones.
‘They aren’t going to liven things up much,’ Serise complained.
Slacker sighed.
‘I wanted Miss Elwig to book some wizard guitarists,’ he said, ‘but she would have this lot. Huh! Just because they came with some silly guarantee about bringing in the crowds.’
‘I hope they don’t spend the whole afternoon wailing about drowned sailors, like Miss Elwig,’ said Serise, gloomily. ‘It would clear the field in five minutes.’
‘Maybe they’ll sing something cheerful,’ suggested Slacker. ‘Like sea shanties.’
‘That would clear the field in four minutes,’ said Serise.
The Sirens ate a hasty packed lunch (‘I didn’t know you could eat live lobsters,’ said Jack, fascinated) and at ten minutes to opening time everything was set to go. Everyone was tremendously excited: even the sea serpent rippled with pleasure as Mr Wolfe and Mr Bloodsworth strapped on its twenty-seater saddle.
‘Do you think the fair will go well?’ Emily asked Miss C Weed.
‘That’ll be fifty pee, dear,’ said Miss Weed.
Emily hesitated, then handed over the money.
Miss C Weed put her head close to Barry’s goldfish bowl and seemed to be listening.
‘Well, the next few minutes are going to be terrifying,’ she said, as she tore two seaweedy strips off her dress and stuck them in her ears. ‘What?’ she demanded, taking one of them out again for a moment. ‘What did you say, dearie?’
‘I said, what about the next few minutes after that?’ whispered Emily, palely.
‘Oh, I can’t tell you that,’ said Miss C Weed. ‘What do you expect for fifty pee?’
Across the field, The Sirens were tuning up. The harp was twanging like a broken bicycle wheel, and the shell trumpet sounded like a constipated elephant.
‘What do you think?’ Anil asked Slacker Punchkin.
‘I think it’s going to put everyone off their cake,’ said Slacker.
At last the harpist opened her mouth at least four centimetres wider than any mouth should go, and began to sing. Well, it wasn’t exactly singing: the sound was more like someone spin-drying a gibbon.
Everyone clapped their hands over their ears at once, but that didn’t help because somehow the sound still found its way into their earholes.
It was sort of... itchy.
‘It’s like having ants in my ears,’ said Jack, squirming.
‘Hermit crabs,’ winced Slacker, sticking iced buns on to the sides of his head.
‘It’s as if something’s pulling me,’ said Anil. ‘Harder and harder...’
‘I know,’ said Serise. ‘She sounds like a train whistle filled with gravy, but I just can’t stand still.’
Winsome sat down on the grass, but within seconds she found herself crawling towards The Sirens’ rocky stage. ‘I’ve just got to get closer,’ she panted. ‘I’ve got to!’
Now everyone on the field except for the sea serpent (which had no ears) and Miss C Weed was being pulled towards the band.
‘I saw a film a bit like this once,’ muttered Serise.
‘How did it end?’ asked Anil.
‘How do you think? With the credits.’
‘Of course!’ exclaimed Winsome, as her arms and legs took her towards the stage. ‘They’re sirens! You know, like in that old Greek story. They lure people on to the rocks and then eat them!’
‘I’m not going any closer,’ said Anil, turning away – but his feet kept on going by themselves until he’d done a complete circle and was travelling in the same direction as before.
‘Look!’ gasped Jack.
There was something like an enormous jellyfish just outside the school gates.
‘What is it?’ whispered Emily.
Slacker shaded his eyes against the sun. Then he whistled.
‘It’s a crowd,’ he said.
And it was: it was hundreds and hundreds of people walking down the road towards the sound of The Sirens’ music. Thousands of people were handing over entrance money so they could come closer to The Sirens’ song.
Class Six were at the edge of The Sirens’ rocks, now.
‘I don’t want to be eaten,’ gasped Emily – and at that moment, quite suddenly, the terrible twanging and wailing stopped.
The siren with the trumpet grinned down at them.
‘How about that?’ she asked. ‘Works every time, yeah?’
She jerked her head at the vast crowd pouring through the gates.
‘You can have jazz bands or brass bands,’ she said, happily. ‘You can even have elastic bands. But there’s nothing, simply nothing, like The Sirens to bring in the crowds!’
And then she put her shell trumpet back to her lips and led the rest of the band into an afternoon of amazing feet-jiggling, talent-contest-winning rock music.
And they were absolutely brilliant.
Chapter Ten
The huge crowd, released from The Sirens’ spell, streamed across the playing field. Some of the people were wearing sun hats, and some were carrying ladders, stethoscopes or cricket bats, because until they’d heard The Sirens’ call they’d planned to spend their afternoon doing something entirely different.
Winsome waited by the school gates and watched out for Mrs Knowall’s sour face. Winsome’s job was to go round the fair with Mrs Knowall and make sure she didn’t see anything unusual. The trouble was almost everything at the fair (apart from the knitted tea cosies and tins of metal polish on the tombola stall) was unusual.
The first things they saw after Mrs Knowall had arrived, appearing in the crowd like a Brussels sprout in a bouquet of roses, were a couple of giants strolling over to the Trifle Range.
‘Um, yes,’ said Winsome, thinking fast. ‘They are good costumes, aren’t they? It’s hard to believe they’re made out of toilet-roll tubes.’
‘Humph,’ said Mrs Knowall, and she got out a black book and made a note.
Winsome steered Mrs Knowall away from the snake-like queue for the sea-serpent ride, but Mrs Knowall stopped dead three stalls on.
‘Look at that!’ she exclaimed.
The bouncy castle was busy with eager children bouncing up-and-up-and-up-and-up and dowwwwwwwwwwwn. At the top of their jumps the children who weren’t making faces at people in the tower block opposite were snatching sunbeams to eat on the way down.
‘They’ve got that castle pumped up far too much,’ snapped Mrs Knowall, writing something else in her black book.
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Winsome. ‘It’s all the... the exercise we get in school. You know, knee-bends and arm-stretches and things. It means we’re all terribly fit and good at jumping.’
‘Humph,’ said Mrs Knowall. ‘Well, what’s that going on over there?’
‘Oh, that’s nothing very interesting,’ said Winsome, hastily, but Mrs Knowall had already set off across the grass to the place where three wizards, a dwarf and what appeared to be a large cat were kicking off the worm-charming competition.
The first worms were appearing out of the soil just as Mrs Knowall arrived. One of the wizards soon had his worms doing the hokey-cokey (impressive, considering they weren’t equipped with arms or legs to put in and out), and the cat had soon got his worms to crochet themselves into the form of a pink, and rather slimy, rat. The
most popular charmer, however, was the dwarf, whose worms quickly made a wonderfully life-like portrait of the Queen entirely out of worm casts.
‘Um... environment,’ explained Winsome, randomly. ‘We make all our own compost and everything.’
Mrs Knowall frowned so ferociously that the dwarf dug himself a hasty hole and jumped down it, and she made another note.
‘I shall be reporting everything to my friend Mr Ogersby, the District Chief Inspector of Schools,’ she announced, peering round so nastily that one of the wizards turned himself into a pot plant.
‘Come and see the tombola,’ said Winsome, hastily. ‘There are lots of interesting... er... tins of prunes.’
It was lucky that Mrs Knowall, for all her peering and spying, wasn’t really very observant. She didn’t spot the fact that that every time Slacker’s big sister Violet passed them munching yet another cake she was, strangely, a little thinner, and Mrs Knowall didn’t notice that the ponies on the pony rides came in candy colours and had horns sticking out of their foreheads. Even so, there was no way even Mrs Knowall could fail to notice that everyone who got to the front of the queue for the Treasure Hunt vanished the moment they stuck their pin in the map, so Winsome led her round the back of the Blood Donation Tent (Mr Bloodworth’s family seemed to be running that) to avoid it.
Unfortunately this meant they came face to face with a little old lady.
Who was dressed entirely in seaweed.
Chapter Eleven
‘Well,’ said the little old lady, looking Mrs Knowall up and down. ‘You look as if you could do with some cheering up. Like to have your fortune told, would you? Only fifty pee for ten minutes!’
‘What?’ said Mrs Knowall. ‘Pay money to a fraud? Certainly not.’
The old lady drew herself up tall. That brought her head up to the level of Winsome’s shoulder.
‘A fraud?’ she echoed, outraged. ‘I’ll have you know the Mayor of Bognor always relies on Barry and me when he’s working out his dates for the sardine dancing!’
A tall dark man in a cloak appeared at Mrs Knowall’s elbow. He smiled charmingly, his fangs glistening in the afternoon sunshine.
