Shrinking Ralph Perfect (13 page)

Until that moment, Ralph had always imagined that towering genius would be matched by height. But even with regard to his miniaturised state, the professor would have stood little taller than the average post box. Fidgety and nervous, he eyed Ralph suspiciously, a task not made particularly easy by a serious tic below one eye. The skin there was twitching like a rabbit’s nose. Ralph stuck it for a second then had to look away, fearful of some kind of strobe effect.

From a shirt pocket stained by yellow chalk dust, Ambrose Collonges pulled out a pair of unruly spectacles and wired them around his cup-handle ears. He leant forward, pupils splashing wide open, eyes the colour of wetted slates. ‘A boy. What joy. Another toy for Jack.’

Now it was Ralph’s turn to back away in fear. ‘Please. Don’t hurt me. I k-know who you are. I’m not your enemy. My name’s R-Ralph.’

‘R-Ralph!’
Collonges barked.
‘Ralph! Ralph! Rrr-alph!’
Scratching his ear like a flea-bitten squirrel, he approached with a half-maniacal leer, not so much a
scientist as a mad scientist’s assistant (the one who was always called ‘Igor’ in the movies).

Thump.
Ralph found himself up against a heavy wooden door, similar in size and thickness and shape to the one they’d stopped by on the landing of the house. He rocked the handle. It was firmly locked. No key. No escape from the mad professor. Collonges stretched out his hairy hands, raising his chains to the level of Ralph’s neck. Calamity. The Frankenstein monster had been unleashed and the innocent victim had nowhere to run.

But just then, the air between them shimmered and Miriam, the dainty Miriam, appeared. The professor immediately shrank into a corner, the shackles rattling against his bones.

Miriam put her hands on her hips and frowned. ‘You see, Rafe? You see what a dreadful tangle he makes?’ She pointed to an overturned writing desk, a broken chair, a full-sized matchbox (presumably a bed), an upset bucket of human waste and a couple of half-eaten hundreds and thousands.

‘The ghost! The ghost!’ Collonges wailed.

‘Oh, boo!’ went Miriam, to shut him up.

The professor jumped like a wounded gazelle, worrying his hands underneath his chin in the way that a hamster might bunch its paws.

‘Miriam, you’ve got to get me out of here,’ said Ralph. Two minutes of his hour were already up. And his mum would be going frantic with worry. He thought about shouting out to her or Tom (
Tom: was he alive or not?
), but even if they’d heard him, could they get him out?

Miriam, meanwhile, swished towards a wall. ‘Look here, Rafe. What did I tell you? Wiggly, squiggly scribbles, all over.’

Ralph had noticed the writing on the walls and was faintly curious to know what it meant. Steering well clear of the terrified prisoner, he crunched through some pieces of shattered window pane to investigate the doodles a little more closely. They were chalked up in every available space, like hieroglyphics on a mummy’s tomb. Complex scientific equations. Ralph recognised some letters from the Greek alphabet and one or two familiar mathematical symbols, but a monkey might just as well have written the maths for all the sense it made to him.

‘All day,’ Miriam chuntered. ‘Rattle, scribble; scribble, rattle. It’s enough to drive a girl to bubbly, Rafe.’ And from some everlasting cupboard of ghostly props she produced a long-stemmed, fluted glass and sipped what appeared to be champagne from it.

Ralph looked at the equations again and this time
noticed something unusual. There was a pattern to them. They weren’t the random squiggles that Miriam seemed to think: a whole block was repeated over and over. He circled one example with a piece of chalk. ‘What does this mean, Professor?’

Collonges lifted the flap of his shirt and scratched at his sore-skinned, bag o’bones ribs. ‘Particle redistribution,’ he babbled, ‘reversible functions. Converging parameters. Counter iterations. Delta theta.’

In the car-boot sale of dumb brain cells, Ralph suddenly had a major clearout. Delta theta.
That’s
what the old man had been wailing all this time. Not ‘Belt the Keeper’ or ‘Melt the heater’.
Delta theta.
But what could it mean?

He stepped nearer. Collonges twitched his chains. ‘It’s OK, I just want to talk,’ Ralph said. ‘I know about transgeneration. I read in the paper how you proved your theories by moving a potato from one plate to another.’

Collonges nodded, his eyes almost bouncing off the inside of his specs. In a voice full of fearful memories he said, ‘A spud. A spud. He was up to no good.’

‘You mean Jack?’

‘Jack! Jack! Stabbed me in the back!’

‘He saw you, didn’t he? That’s what happened. He sneaked into your laboratory and watched the tests. Then he stole the watch. Didn’t he?’

The professor beat his fists against his knees. ‘Into the dog bowl, whole,’ he wailed.

‘And then threatened to feed you alive to Knocker? If you didn’t teach him how to use it?’

Collonges let out a high-pitched moan. In the rafters above him, something stirred. Ralph shuddered and raised his gaze. The sloping beams were alive with bats. Bats. Oh, good. This house got better all the time.

‘Why is he keeping you in chains?’ he pressed. And how had Jack managed that, anyway? he wondered. The chains were bolted firmly to the wall. It would have been impossible for Jack’s big hands to shackle the professor after he’d been miniaturised. So was he chained to the wall before he was zapped? Had Jack taken him to the house in Yorkshire? Had they gone there together as business partners, where Jack had done the dirty on him?

The tic began to drive Collonges’ eye again. Something wasn’t right here, Ralph decided. But for now he let it pass. In fifty-five minutes’ time, it wouldn’t matter who was misleading who: piranhas weren’t fussy who they ate.

‘Professor, I’ve something to show you,’ he said and closed his hand around the stone in his pocket.

‘Rafe, the ogre’s watching,’ said Miriam.

Ralph glanced through the broken window. The great round eye of the magnifying glass was trained on the tower room. If Jack saw the stone, that would be that. ‘Miriam, have you got curtains?’

‘Why, yes,’ she said and turning into vapour, she whooshed into the rafters, displacing all the bats. They took flight in one gigantic flock.

‘Miriam!’ Ralph complained, flapping and ducking and falling to his knees. Next time Mr Gifford, his Drama teacher, asked him to imagine how a teaspoon felt in a mug of swirling tea leaves, he would be able to draw upon the perfect life experience. He covered his ears to block out the squeals the bats were emitting and prayed they wouldn’t land on him and suck his veins dry (or worse, turn into a vampire army).

The first
thunk-thunk
erased that fear. Glancing up, he saw the bats clustering in the bay, settling flat against the window panes, shutting out the light and even covering up the holes. They were forming a living quilt. Curtains.

Ducking as the last bat strafed his collar, Ralph turned quickly to Ambrose Collonges. ‘What does this do?’ He pulled out the stone.

‘Oh, Rafe,’ cried Miriam, as the stone sent out a pulse of light and she had to disappear to dodge being zapped.

A sticky trail of frothy saliva trickled off Professor Collonges’ lips. The tic below his eye slowed down, then stopped, and he was at Ralph’s shoulder in a bow-legged stride. He snatched up the stone and held it to his eye.

‘I found it in Jack’s fridge,’ Ralph said, slightly concerned that the old man had mugged him. He tried (politely) to take the stone back, but Collonges buried it inside his shirt as if he were protecting a week-old kitten. Its hard rays splintered the loose-knit cotton, lending him a kind of electrified look.

‘Can we use it?’ Ralph asked. ‘It did something to Miriam—’

‘Rafe, you’re such a cad,’ came her disembodied voice.

‘If I don’t give it back to Jack in an hour, he’s going to drown us. Do you understand?’

Collonges ground his teeth. His eyes slewed sideways towards the wall. He touched a finger to the boxed equation, pressing so hard that his knuckle cracked. ‘Coat hanger,’ he hissed.

‘Pardon?’ said Ralph.

‘Coat hanger,’ Collonges snapped, making a spiralling upward movement.

Ralph thought about this. ‘Like an aerial, you mean?’

The professor squeaked and did a little shuffle.

Ralph responded with a long, slow nod. ‘Anything else?’

‘Mirrors!’ said Collonges, glaring at him wildly.

Ralph chewed his lip. ‘My mum’s got a mirror – in her bag.’

Collonges batted his fists in excitement. ‘Wire,’ he snorted.

‘Easy,’ said Ralph. He’d seen a large reel of it somewhere in the house.

‘Lenses,’ Collonges challenged him loudly.

‘You’re wearing them,’ said Ralph. He pointed to the specs.

The old man jumped as if a nettle had stung him. ‘A box! A box! For ten bundles of socks!’

Ralph bracketed his hands about a foot apart. ‘About this big?’

The professor’s eyes bulged with triumph and delight.

Ralph turned a half-circle and shouted to the rafters. ‘Miriam, where are you?’

‘I’m not coming out till you put that thing away!’

‘Miriam, I
need
you.’

‘Here, dahling,’ she said, manifesting at his side in a flash.

Ralph pointed to the door. ‘You’ve got to get me out of here.’

‘But Rafe, this is the best room in the house. It captures the sunlight in the afternoons.’

‘Miriam, please, this is important. Walk through the door and go and find my mum. Tell her I’m here. Tell Neville he’s got to break the doors down.’

‘Oh Rafe, don’t be such a ruffian,’ she said. ‘Use the key, like everyone else.’

‘There’s a key?’

Miriam raised the mat. There on the floor was a large, old-fashioned key. Ralph gritted his teeth. What was that line that actors always used: ‘Never work with children or animals’? Someone ought to add ‘ghosts’ to the list.

He snatched the key up and opened the door. Within seconds, he was pounding down a spiralling flight of steps to unlock the second door out to the landing. He shouldered it open, bursting through, covered in cobwebs and spiders. The sound brought several miniones running. Among them were Penny and Neville Gibbons.

‘Oh Ralph,’ Penny cried. ‘We thought he’d killed you.’ She swept him madly into her arms. She was shaking and Ralph could taste blood on her neck. He
didn’t like to think about what she’d been through. Even so, he squeezed himself clear.

‘Mum, let me go. We don’t have much time.’ He touched her face to comfort her. With her jeans badly ripped and her hair exploding out of her clip, she looked like a wild-eyed cavewoman. ‘Jack’s given us an hour to find the stone. If we don’t give it back to him, he’ll flood the tank.’

‘Have you lost it?’ she asked, looking frightened.

Ralph shook his head. ‘The professor’s got it.’

Neville squinted up the stairs. In the mayhem, he’d lost his glasses. Without them, he looked rather child-like and vulnerable. ‘Is that him, in t’chains? Chap who made t’transgenerator?’

Ralph nodded. ‘Jack’s been holding him prisoner. He’ll save us. I know he will. All he needs is some wire and a mirror and a coat hanger and—’

‘What for?’ asked Penny, cutting him off.

Ralph stared at his mum with a physicist’s eye. ‘We’re going to build a new device,’ he said.

‘To do what?’ said a voice.

Ralph whipped around. Kyle Salter was standing at the back of the group. He banged a spear against the landing and the miniones parted to let him through. Stripped to the waist like a Navajo brave, the bully had never looked quite so scary. On his head and chest were lines of warpaint, drawn from a mixture of blood and charcoal. In his eyes was a hungry desire for combat.

‘You
gave
the stone away?’

Ralph felt his knees buckle. ‘Where’s Tom?’ he begged his mum.

‘Dead,’ said Kyle.

Penny wheeled on him. ‘He is
not.
Don’t
say
that.’

‘Good as,’ sneered Salter. ‘He’s broken. Useless. He’s in the next room, laid out like a stiff. Wally’s done his back in, Spud’s as bad, and Nev needs a guide dog without his specs. I’m in charge now,
Rafe.
’

‘Over my dead body,’ growled Penny. ‘You’re going to listen to Ralph and listen carefully. He hasn’t once been wrong about Jack or this house. Your swaggering won’t set us free, Kyle Salter, but this professor might. It makes
sense to give the stone to the one person who’ll know what to do with it. So get down off your high horse and start searching for the things Ralph needs for this device. What were they again, Ralph, so we all know?’

She planted her feet and put her hands on her hips. Ralph sighed and rattled off the list.

‘Well?’ Penny said, giving Kyle the eye.

‘I repeat,’ he snarled, using his height to intimidate her. ‘What’s this gadget gonna do?’

‘Return us to full size, we hope,’ said Wally, pulling Kyle round to face him. ‘Then Jack’s yours. We all agreed, people?’

The group nodded.

Jemima, standing next to Wally, shuddered.

Kyle sloped his spear and looked around the faces before coming back to poke Wally’s shoulder. ‘I wanna be the first one big again, deal?’

‘Deal,’ said Wally, without taking a vote.

Neville sighed. He took a hammer and a cold chisel out of his belt. ‘I’d best get upstairs and set this chap free. Ralph, come and do the introductions, will thee? The rest of you mend your wounds – and start searching for these components, fast.’

As the group dispersed, Ralph whispered to his mum, ‘I want to see Tom.’

‘No,’ she said quietly, clasping his hand. ‘He’s very poorly. The quickest way to help him is to overcome Jack. Go with Neville. I’ll stay with Tom.’ And she kissed him once and told him she loved him. And for once, Ralph was comforted to hear it.

Over the next fifteen minutes, all manner of bits and bobs were delivered to the table in the tower room. This was Wally’s suggestion to the miniones: bring anything you can find that might be used in some kind of electrical gadget. He privately agreed with Ralph that the stone was some form of alien metal, a bit like the legendary dilithium crystals that drove the engines of the
Starship Enterprise.
It was clearly capable of destabilising force fields. You didn’t need the brain of a super-computer to guess that Professor Collonges was planning to construct a device that could tune into the wavelengths of the bipolar transgenerator and somehow scramble or reverse its functions. But could this be achieved by cobbling together coat hangers, hair grips, thimbles, clothes pegs, tin foil, bottle tops, mirrors, coins, the motor from Neville’s clapped out razor and the entire contents of Wally’s electrical kit? Mrs Spink had even brought a tasselled cushion – for the professor to sit on, she claimed.

Ambrose Collonges seemed to think so. He rummaged and clawed through the heap of rammel, throwing away anything he didn’t need and barking out requests for anything he did. There were plenty of tools to hand, and it wasn’t long before the smell of melting solder was charring the air and fizzing blue sparks were perforating the shadows in the tower room. Ralph had never seen genius like it. One of his favourite TV programmes was a thing called
Scrapyard Challenge,
in which teams of people were given the task of building a rocket, say, from the pieces of scrap they found around the yard. This was the same, in a scaled-down version. At first, it seemed impossible that anything useful could be made from the gubbins Professor Collonges was winnowing through, but the object that eventually came together, though looking deceptively simple, was, in actuality, impressively scientific.

It was not unlike a kitchen juicer (its body was a plastic measuring jug): round, with a funnel-shaped extension on top. Inside, through the curved transparent walls, wires twisted in pasta-shaped spirals, and mirrors trapped and bounced the light. The rod of Tom’s belt buckle swung back and forth, acting as a switch of some kind between two carefully-bent paper clips. A coat hanger aerial wagged and trembled. And in
the funnel extension, a circle of hair grips was arranged in an overlapping, criss-crossing cradle, into which the professor now fitted the stone.

The insides of the jug turned silver-blue.

Ralph caught his breath. ‘Is it done?’ he asked. He checked his watch. Two minutes left. Salvation, just in time.

The professor stood back, grinning like a haddock. ‘Iterations, iterations, iterations…’ he muttered.

Ralph flagged a hand. ‘Shall I call the others?’

Ambrose Collonges slewed his eyes sideways. ‘Door,’ he hissed. He made locking gestures.

Ralph shrugged in confusion. Why would he do that? Why would he want to lock them in again?

Collonges gathered the device into his arms and carried it further across the room.

‘What does it do?’ Ralph asked. He was beginning to feel just a little uneasy about the professor’s selfish behaviour. He didn’t seem grateful for the help they’d given him. He hadn’t even said thank you for being unchained. And he certainly wasn’t acting like a man whose first interest was the liberation of his fellow prisoners. Ralph took a step forward. ‘Show me how it works.’

‘Back! Back! Or I’ll turn your eyes black!’

Ralph jumped back automatically. But was he suspicious or was he frightened? He couldn’t pin the feeling down. ‘Is it dangerous?’ he asked. For now he came to think about it, surely it had taken years in the lab for Collonges to develop the device on Jack’s wrist? This do-it-yourself-in-under-sixty-minutes version was completely untested. How many potatoes had exploded or atomised before the boffin had got the technology right?

Too late to be thinking that now. Collonges prodded a switch, made from a toggle off Mrs Spink’s cardigan. The gadget sent out a high-pitched whine. To Ralph’s amazement, a vortex of green light began to fan out from the tip of the aerial. The bats that were covering the windows screeched. Quickly, they took to the air again, fleeing through the ragged holes in the glass or sluicing away down the well of the stairs. Ralph heard shouts from the body of the house and knew there’d be a crowd in here once the bats had cleared.

‘What’s happening?’ he cried, cupping his ears to shut out the hum.

The professor licked his nose with the tip of his tongue in the manner of a man who was concentrating
deeply.
He twiddled two knobs made from plastic bottle tops and levered a clothes peg on the device, directing
its signal out into the lounge. ‘Delta theta,’ he cackled.

Ralph peered into the lounge. There stood a perplexed-looking Jack, checking the settings on the transgenerator watch. The green pyramid was blinking rapidly. He tapped it, then twisted it left and right. The professor let out an evil laugh. His new device hummed and bobbled about the table. A ball of light bounced from mirror to mirror. From somewhere within it came a warning beep.

‘The red! The red! To be in my bed!’ Collonges tweaked the knobs again and the green light crackling out of the aerial turned a particular shade of red.

On Jack Bilt’s wrist, the same-coloured pyramid began to blink…

‘Don’t move that clothes peg!’ Ralph cried out. At last, he’d worked out what was going to happen.
Touch
the red and you’ll be in my bed.
He meant his matchbox bed, here in Miniville. The professor had no intention of restoring the miniones back to full size, he was out to gain his revenge on Jack – by swapping places with him.

Ralph lunged towards the table. He grabbed the device and turned away with it, shielding it from the professor’s grasp. But as he fiddled with buttons and catches and pegs, anything that might be an on-off switch, his foot located a rolling pin (how
that
could
have been used in an electrical gizmo was anybody’s guess) and he crashed to the floor, holding the device in the well of his chest.

Collonges was over him, roaring like a bear. The Frankenstein hands came forward again and were on Ralph’s neck as he screamed for help.

Schwuup!
A spear flashed through the air, striking Collonges hard in the shoulder. He yelped like a puppy and slumped to one side. At the same time, the space above them shimmered and Miriam tried to come to Ralph’s aid. But the strange device had not been deactivated, merely retargeted. There was a pop, followed by an intense flash of light and Miriam’s form went whooshing through the ether, as if she’d been accelerated to ‘warp factor nine’.

Kyle Salter and Neville pounded forward. Kyle pulled the spear from Collonges’ shoulder. With the flat of his foot, he pushed the professor away from Ralph. ‘Tie him up,’ he said to Neville, and to Ralph: ‘Get up.’

Ralph struggled to his feet.

Kyle yanked him forwards by the hair. ‘So, you’ve never been wrong about anything, eh, mummy’s boy?’

‘Get off, Salter. I stopped him escaping.’

‘No,’ said Kyle, ‘we did that.’ He shook his spear tip under Ralph’s nose so the boy could smell the scent of
blood. Then his gaze fell on the device. ‘Nice toy,’ he said and snatched it up. At last, Kyle Salter had what he wanted: command of the group and the power of the stone.

His triumph, however, lasted all of three seconds. First, Knocker gave out a warning howl. Then a meteor crashed into the side of the tank.

That was what it felt like, at any rate – some spinning object impacting unstoppably with the world as the miniones knew it. The boom alone was almost enough to shake the house to rubble. For several seconds there was utter confusion. Shoving Ralph aside, Kyle started yelling orders, thinking Jack had taken a hammer to the house.

Then Neville reported, ‘No, it were a plate. It flew into the tank wall and smashed to smithereens.’

‘A plate?’ said Ralph.

Neville rubbed his eyes. ‘Aye – oh ’eck, look out!’ He ducked as a dog bone flew towards them and ricocheted off the trestle table.

‘What’s going on?’ Kyle shouted at Ralph.

Typical. As if Ralph knew the answer.

But, as usual, he was the first to work it out. A hurricane was whistling through Annie’s house. Dozens of objects were lifting off their resting places and flying
at great speed around the lounge. Air traffic control was non-existent. Ralph knew straight away there was only one force capable of producing such activity. A ghost. A very unstable ghost.

Miriam was out of Miniville – and how.