Shrinking Ralph Perfect (16 page)
Read Shrinking Ralph Perfect Online
Authors: Chris d'Lacey
So there you have it. Something horrible happened. Some
things
horrible happened. Ghastly things.
Appalling.
If you were Ralph, what would be the worst of the adventure, do you think? To be bullied and teased by Kyle Salter? To be miniaturised and cooped up in an arcade exhibit? To sleep on a scouring pad? To have to drink water tainted with dog slobber? To grow scrawny on a diet of hundreds and thousands? To do battle with dust mites and grubby buzzing flies and a mad-mad-mad-mad-bad professor?
Or would it be what happened to Ralph next that would spook you?
Imagine this: being taken to a secret laboratory, deep underground below a moor in Northumberland. You’re locked in a room where cameras watch your every move. Even when you’re sleeping. Even when…yes, that too. You have plenty to eat and are well looked after, but every day, for three months, scientists hook you up to strange machines that make your head buzz while they record any interesting
changes
in you, scratching out
results on rolling charts, in looping graphs, in diverse colours. They put needles in your arms and draw your blood. They take snippets of your hair. They bottle your wee. They monitor your dreams, especially your nightmares.
Is this what aliens do to us, you wonder?
Once a day, for two short hours, you’re allowed to see your mother and the man she has fallen deeply in love with. They intend to marry, Tom Jenks and Penny Perfect. Lack of height is not a barrier to human feeling. From this you will have guessed that they are still tiny. All the miniones are, including the unfortunate Detective Inspector Bone (like Ralph, you might feel a little guilty about dragging him into Miniville). Berringford, who heads the scientific inquiry into the strange goings-on in Midfield Crescent, as yet has little hope to offer them. Every day he says to Ralph, ‘This is why we need you in the project, dear boy.’ The project. He always talks about ‘the project’. As if Tom and Penny and Ralph and Knocker are little more than mice being prodded with a stick. ‘We need to observe your
metabolism
—’ he says (He uses a lot of words ending in ‘ism’. None of them give very much away.) ‘—so we might determine the precise effects that transgeneration has on tissue health and, erm, brain power.’ And yet
when he says this he always slips a tape measure round Ralph’s biceps and notes any increase in muscle size and tone.
Now, why would he do that, do you think? You wouldn’t be interested in
muscle tone,
would you? You’d be saying to this scientist, ‘I want my mum back. My
whole
mum back. When are you going to make her big again?’
And Berringford would tell you, ‘It’s not that easy,’ and do that irritating thing that gentlemen in white coats do with their spectacles: cough on the lenses then polish them on the end of their tie.
Not easy? Phooey! ‘Delta theta!’ you’d be shouting. Surely the scientists must know
that
? It’s written on the wall in the tower room. ‘Talk to Professor Collonges,’ you’d urge them. ‘He’ll know what to do.’
But your reply from Berringford would be suitably ambiguous. He would drum his fingers on his clipboard and say: ‘Yes, we’ve, erm, acquired his notes on particle displacement from his academic files at Oxford. We have also recovered the original transgenerator which Bone took from Jack Bilt’s wrist. It’s very small, of course, and the
felgate crystal
has lost its charge.’ (The felgate crystal; ah, that was the stone.) ‘Our specialists are attempting to…reconfigure it. We have also hired
the services of an excellent archaeologist to, erm, piece together the vase that the boy Luke Baker was mixed up in. He was damaged, I’m afraid, during the disturbances. We’re still missing a small section of his left ear.’
‘What about…?’
The professor? Hmm. Now, take a deep breath. Are you surprised when Berringford shakes his head? Collonges was squashed by a cushion full of dust mites. The only thing the scientists recovered was his brain. It lies in a deep freeze in Berringford’s laboratory. But no one’s going to tell Ralph that, are they?
And what of good, kind neighbour, Annie Birdlees? The dear old lady of lavender and lace, described as gruesome at the front of our story (more on that in a moment). Did
she
go into quarantine? No, not Annie. She was allowed to visit Ralph daily and keep him up to date with what was happening in the Crescent.
‘They won’t allow me into my house,’ she complained. ‘Do you know, they put a wheel on that poor maimed dog and took him in, hoping that he’d sniff out Mr Bilt?’
Ralph threw up his hands. ‘I told you,’ he said to a whirring camera, ‘the ants took Jack.’ They would have stunned him with their sprays of formic acid and…well, you can probably picture the rest. Ralph knew, as I’m
sure you clever ones do, that ants cannot chew or swallow solid food. They squeeze out the juice from their prey and drink it, then throw the dry husk of the body away.
Charming.
‘How’s Miriam?’ Ralph would whisper every day.
Oh yes, Miriam, the feisty ghost. You’d certainly want to know what became of her.
‘Pining,’ Annie would whisper back. ‘She believes you’ve left her, like her intended. It’s her lot, Ralph: to pine away until eternity. She won’t be happy until you go back.’
So here we are, back, one snowy morning in February. Three months to the day since the miniones were rescued. Annie’s house has been cleared of debris and cigarettes and dark blue sheets and seaside attractions (Ralph inquired of PC Robbins what had happened to
The Frisker
and was told it might be used at their local station). The fifty thousand pounds Jack gave for the house was, wouldn’t you know it, counterfeit. So the transaction has been annulled and the keys have been returned to their rightful owner. Number 9 Midfield Crescent is Annie’s again.
Is she happy to be home? Yes, she is. A brief spell living with her sister in Totnes has taught the old
cuckoo that a life of solitude can have its rewards. But she is not fully alone now, of course. Being a woman who has always had encounters with ‘the spirits’, she has welcomed Miriam into her home. Ralph, too, has moved in for a spell. While the scientists work to ‘reinstate’ his mother (and oh how he misses her, every hour of every day) he will live, for now, as a ward to Annie.
So, here’s the cosy final scene. Annie makes them both a cup of hot chocolate and they sit in the lounge, with Miriam blowing cool air across Ralph’s drink and Annie stroking Knocker’s head. It was either the bullet or a dogs’ home for him until Annie stepped in and said she would have none of it. Blame not the mutt for the malice of its master. That was her line.
Admirable.
The room feels dreadfully large to Ralph. There is very little in it apart from the seats and the shoes Annie Birdlees was wearing at the time (she broke a heel when Ralph played the genie on her lap and took them off because she couldn’t walk in them).
The room, yes. It really is a desert. Even the remains of Annie’s ferns were taken to the lab so the soil could be filtered through a fine, dry sieve, just in case Jack had wriggled in among the roots and burrowed out a hide
deep down in the earth.
Jack, Jack, still unaccounted for. For this reason, the ‘authorities’, the men in white shirts and plain black suits who hover in the shadows around the scientists have never been able to ‘close the book’. They want the builder in their clutches. They want him pinned to a board like a moth. They want evidence of his ‘whereabouts’. And nothing, it seems, is beyond their ‘reach’. If Ralph and Annie were to strip away these floorboards or look into the garden a metre beyond the window, they would notice signs of ‘excavations’. The colony of ants was quickly captured. Forty thousand were taken back to the lab. All were examined (and eventually released). Neither Jack nor his husk was found among them.
So what
did
become of the builder, Bilt? This is on Ralph’s mind as Knocker starts to sniff around Annie’s shoes and Annie twitters on about her dolls’ house in the attic which she thinks could be converted to a number of flats to comfortably hold a dozen or so mini-people. And Miriam says, ‘Rafe, what’s the matter with your poodle?’ (Though inaccurate, she prefers this description to ‘terrier’.) And Knocker growls and backs away from an upturned shoe. Is it the pong that’s got to him? Or is he wanting to play a game of fetch? Ralph
slides to his knees and takes a look.
And oh, lordy-dordy, pump up your heart. There on the sole of Annie’s left shoe is a small, squashed figure. It is not an ant. Ants know to run when the shadow of a human foot falls over them. Look closely. No, no, closer than that. You can
just
see the pin-striped suit, perhaps?
Annie. It was Annie who done for Jack.
Dear sweet…innocent…Annie.
Told you she was gruesome, didn’t I?
