Charlie and the War Against the Grannies (12 page)

‘You like him,' I said.

‘Negative,' said Hils. ‘What I am doing is called “manipulating an intelligence asset”.'

‘You do like him. Stop liking him. He's creepy. Stop manipulating him. He's not even a very good asset. He didn't even tell us where the Stinkly Wrinklys' HQ was. I don't think he even knows.'

‘He knows. He also knows that you never reveal important intelligence if there is a chance someone might overhear it. He'll leave the pertinent information at our secret drop-off.'

Hils and The Lurker have a secret drop-off.

She does like him.

‘You do like him.'

‘Negative. It's just business.'

Simon Bolivar walked past. His nose was bleeding.

I wished The Lurker's nose was bleeding.

I wished I had been the one who made it bleed.

I know that's not a nice thing to think. Even so, I kept on thinking it.

All day.

‘I found it!' I shouted to Hils. ‘It's definitely an old barbecue.'

I was kind of lying when I said what I had found looked ‘definitely' like an old barbecue. What I had found didn't look ‘definitely' like anything at all.

It was definitely rusty.

It was definitely dented.

It was definitely charred.

It was definitely rotten.

It was definitely something.

Something that looked enough like a barbecue to make it okay to tell Hils it was ‘definitely' an old barbecue.

 

‘I've found the possum skeleton,' shouted Hils from behind a heavily graffitied recycling bin.

‘What's next?' I said.

‘A wig,' said Hils. ‘We have to find a wig.'

The Lurker had given Hils a map of how to find the Stinkly Wrinklys' HQ. The first thing we had to find was a secret door. A secret door down an alley, behind a café, east of an old barbecue, just near a possum skeleton and behind a wig.

We found the café. We found the behind-the-café. We found the barbecue. (I think.) We found the possum skeleton.

Now all we had to find was the wig and the secret door.

I had never looked for a secret door before.

I had always wanted to look for a secret door.

At night – when I'm lying in bed, getting ready to go to sleep – I like to plan what I am going to dream about that night. Lots of nights I plan to dream about finding a secret door and all the dangers I have to avoid and puzzles I have to solve before I can open it.

I should have been really, very, super happy that I was looking for a secret door. With my best friend. Who had a secret map to help us find the secret door. (A secret map to find a secret door makes it a double-secret situation. Not many people get to be in a double-secret situation. There is no such thing as a triple-secret situation. There just isn't.)

But I wasn't happy that I was with my best friend in a double-secret situation. I wasn't happy because we were in a double-secret situation because of The Lurker.

The Lurker had wrecked my-best-friend-double-secret situation.

Even when The Lurker wasn't around he was around.

Wrecking everything.

I joined Hils behind the recycling bin.

She was standing next to the possum skeleton.

We started to look around for the wig.

‘I bet there's no wig,' I said. ‘I bet The Lurker's got it wrong. I bet there's not even really a secret door.'

‘There
is
a wig and there
is
a secret door,' said Hils. ‘You might not like him but The Lurker is the best at finding things.'

I bet he isn't the
best
. There are a lot of billions of people in the world and I bet one of them is the
actual
best at finding secret wigs and secret doors.

‘Here it is,' said Hils. ‘The wig.'

There it was. The wig. A ladies' wig. It looked like it used to be blonde coloured. Now it was alley coloured.

But it was definitely a wig.

The wig was right in front of a wall that had so many plants growing out of it that it looked like a garden had stood up and not been able to work out what to do next so had decided to lean against the wall.

Hils looked at the map. She then started pushing bits of wall-plant out of the way.

‘The secret door must be here somewhere,' she said. ‘Come and help me look.'

Hils was excited. She was right to be excited. This was an exciting double-secret situation. I was trying hard not to be excited. I didn't want to get excited over anything The Lurker had anything to do with.

The next thing I knew I was standing next to Hils, pushing wall-plants out of the way.

‘This is so exciting,' I said.

‘Affirmative.'

Hils dug both her hands into a big clump of grass halfway up the wall.

‘Owww!'

‘What?' I said.

‘I just hit something hard,' said Hils.

We both started grabbing handfuls of grass and tearing them off the wall.

A few handfuls later there it was.

A doorknob.

A secret doorknob.

A secret doorknob on a secret door.

The secret doorknob was really old and rusty and didn't look all that exciting or special but I knew that it was definitely a secret doorknob.

Even though I had never seen a real secret doorknob before I had read about a lot of secret doorknobs and I knew that secret doorknobs never look that exciting or special. They never look like they're the way of opening a portal to a secret world. They don't glow. They don't glitter. They don't
suddenly grow teeth and try to chew your hand off
. Secret doorknobs are always really ordinary looking.

‘We've found it,' I said. ‘We've found the secret door.'

Being able to say ‘We've found the secret door' is a really, very, super cool thing to be able to say.

‘You should open it,' said Hils.

I grabbed hold of the secret doorknob and pulled.

Nothing happened.

The secret door didn't open.

‘It doesn't work,' I said. ‘It's not the secret door. See! I told you The Lurker didn't know anything and couldn't find secret doors. The Lurker is stupid. Dumb The Lurker.'

‘Charlie,' said Hils. ‘Why don't you try pushing the secret door, not pulling it?'

I grabbed hold of the secret doorknob and pushed.

The secret door opened.

The Lurker was still dumb though.

Hils and I walked through the secret door.

It led into an old house.

It was the untidiest house I had ever seen. Bits of everything were lying everywhere.

You know when your parents say, ‘Go and clean up your room this instant it's a disgusting mess'? Well, imagine they were right. Imagine that even you had to admit that your room was a ‘disgusting mess'.

Times your actually-disgustingly-messy room by a million and that's what the house we were standing in was like.

Only slightly messier.

And more disgusting.

There were big, jagged holes in all the walls.

The ceilings were brown and saggy.

A broken toilet lay on an old rotted couch. The broken toilet had a cracked aluminium cooking pot sticking out of the bowl. In the cracked cooking pot was a pigeon. The pigeon gave Hils and me an angry stare.