Playschool (9 page)

‘Where on Earth am I going to get a tracking device?' Orkward said to no one in particular.

‘Well, you're not clever enough to, like, build one,' said The Mirror.

‘Shut up, shut up,' said Orkward.

‘The only person who could build one,' The Mirror continued, ‘is Winchflat Flood, and I happen to know that he's actually made one before to keep track of his sister Betty when she was a baby.'

‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!'

‘I'm sure he'd lend it to you,' sneered The Mirror, ‘seeing as how you like him so much.'

‘Hippie lavatory brain,' said Orkward and wrote a rude word on The Mirror with his greasy finger.

The door flew open and Matron marched in, followed by Romeo and Juliet.

‘There you are, you evil little boy,' she said. ‘I want to see you about burning The Toad, but first of all I want you to tell me where he is. He ran away with my Enchanted Wax and I suspect you had something to do with it.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' Orkward lied.

‘We'll see about that,' said Matron, grabbing
Orkward by the ear and dragging him out the door. ‘You need to visit the sick bay, my boy,' she added.

‘But I'm not sick,' Orkward protested.

‘I know that,' said Matron, ‘but you're going to be.'

As well as all the ordinary medicines like aspirins and sticking plasters, Matron had a whole range of special wizard and witch remedies. As she dragged Orkward along, the boy tried to put a spell on her. He muttered the ancient French spell that turns people into a pig's bladder, and the deadly Welsh spell that makes you wear a hat with a torch on it and sing dreadful songs for weeks on end, but Matron was immune to everything. He even tried the spell that no one realises you're doing because it sounds as if you're sneezing – the famous spell that turns you inside out. But Matron had seen every spell that had ever been invented, and had inoculated herself against all of them. She had even come up with some pretty wild spells of her own.

‘You might as well stop all that,' she said. ‘Far better wizards than you have tried. Okay, Nurse
Romeo, I think we'll give him a spoonful of cough medicine first.'

‘But I haven't got a cough,' said Orkward.

‘No, of course you haven't. That's why we're giving you cough medicine, to make you cough up the truth.'

Nurse Juliet poked her beak in Orkward's right ear while Nurse Romeo pecked the top of his head on the other side.

‘AHHHHOOOWWWWWWWW,' Orkward cried and, as he did so, Matron tipped a glass of cough mixture into his open mouth.

‘We'll just give that a minute to start working,' she said. ‘Though, come to think of it, nasty little liars like you sometimes need a second dose.'

So the nurses attacked him again and Matron gave him another lot. It was disgusting – not just the awful taste, which was like a cross between strawberries and cow manure, but the terrifying feeling it sent through Orkward's brain. It was as if every closed door inside his head was suddenly thrown wide open and he knew that no matter how hard he tried to
fight it, he would tell the truth to whatever question he was asked.

‘Where is The Toad?' said Matron.

‘I don't know,' said Orkward. ‘The last time I saw him, he was on his way here to bring back your wax.'

‘Well, he never arrived.'

‘It's the truth,' Orkward whimpered. ‘Honest.'

‘I can see that,' said Matron. ‘Well, let's start from the last time you saw him.'

Orkward didn't want to tell her about going into the forest to polish Narled, but every time he stopped telling the truth, he began to cough, not just a bit of cough like you get with a cold, but a deep down cough that brought up his breakfast and bits of last night's dinner.

‘We were in the forest …' he began.

But the last thing he wanted was for anyone to know he had been to see Narled. So gritting his teeth, he tried to lie.

Cough, bacon, cough, carrots, cough …

‘You went into the forest?' said Matron. ‘You know that's not allowed, don't you?'

‘We were only a tiny bit in,' said Orkward. ‘No more than a hundred metres.'

‘And that's where you saw The Toad for the last time?'

‘Yes. He set off back here, just before me.'

‘You stayed behind to bury a jar with some of my stolen wax in it, didn't you?'

‘No, I …'

Cough, banana, cough, carrot, splutter …

‘I, er, didn't …'

Cough, porridge, cough, shoelace,
²³
and then Orkward collapsed on the floor.

‘Yes,' he whispered.

‘Right,' said Matron. ‘That's enough for now. Get into bed and rest while the cough mixture wears off. We'll talk about punishment for you burning him later. And don't go bothering Winchflat in the other bed. He's resting his genius brain. He was splitting
the atom all morning and then invented an anti-gravity engine after lunch, and he's totally exhausted. I don't want to hear a sound from you. You can stay here while we go and find The Toad.'

Matron locked her patients in and went to see Professor Throat. The thought of anyone, never mind an innocent like The Toad, being out in the dark forest all night, was very worrying. The two nurses flew around the school asking everyone if they had seen the poor creature.

No one had.

‘And I'll tell you something very unusual,' Prebender Glorious told them with a sigh, ‘I haven't seen Narled either. It's probably a coincidence, but he
always
checks the quadrangle at the end of lessons without fail. Seventy-five years I've been here, and every single night I've looked out of my window and seen him making a final check round the place before dark.'

After school, Professor Throat gathered everyone in the Grate Hall. The fire that burned in the Great Grate had been alight since Quicklime's had been built seven hundred and fifty years ago. Doorlock the handyman was the fifteenth generation of his family to care for the fire, and not once in all that time had the fire ever died. Even in summer when the temperature in the remote Patagonian valley soared up as high as five degrees, the fire was kept alight. Generations of children and teachers had been warmed by its magical flames and hypnotised by the dancing elves that lived in its fiery heart.

Among the staff and students, there were dozens of witches and wizards who could send their thoughts out into the world and find things.

This was how the school had become so immensely wealthy – so wealthy that it didn't have a bank account in Switzerland, it actually owned Switzerland, though they kept very quiet about it. Quicklime's economics teacher, Aubergine Wealth, had sent his thoughts out into bank vaults to look over people's shoulders when they were putting in the secret numbers to open combination locks. Then, when everyone was asleep, he sent his body over to join his thoughts and robbed them all blind.

‘I only do it for a great cause,' he confided in Professor Throat. ‘I am robbing the rich to help the even richer … us.'

There was only one place in the whole world where no one could send their thoughts, and that was into the dark forest.

Everyone sat very still and concentrated. The fire in the grate burned down to ash, almost dying before Doorlock came in with armfuls of fresh logs.
The school buses sat impatiently in the quadrangle and around the world parents began to wonder what was keeping their children.
²⁴
Night fell in an enveloping silence while everyone searched the world high and low for The Toad. At midnight the children were all sent home and the staff made one final search.

‘He has to be in the dark forest,' said Professor Throat.

He began to feel rather guilty. Maybe turning the boy into a toad had been too harsh a punishment. Maybe it had driven him over the edge. Though one thing didn't quite add up.

‘What I don't understand,' he said, ‘is that
if
he is in the dark forest, how did he get there? We all know it locks its branches against anyone who tries to enter.'

‘Not everyone,' said Matron. ‘Orkward Warlock
told me that Narled went into the forest. He said it opened its branches for him and then closed them again before they could follow him.'

‘You can't believe anything that boy says,' said Prebender Glorious.

‘You can when he's had a dose of my cough mixture.'

‘Ahh,' said Prebender Glorious, remembering his own childhood at the school and Matron's formidable pharmacy. ‘So maybe Narled has taken The Toad.'

‘I've never heard of him collecting children before,' said Professor Throat. ‘It's usually iPods and socks and bits of paper.'

‘And quite a lot of unfinished homework,' Doctor Mordant laughed. ‘We've all heard that excuse, haven't we?'

‘Yes, yes,' said Professor Throat, ‘but never children.'

‘But he isn't a child, is he?' said Matron. ‘He's a toad.'

‘I know. I know,' said the Professor. ‘But I don't
think Narled has ever taken any sort of living creature before.'