Shrinking Ralph Perfect (9 page)

‘What’s happening?’ Penny cried, leaping up. Around the room, the miniones were running for the corners or grabbing hold of anything stable they could find.

Heart thumping, Ralph stood back a pace as a grubby-looking fingernail yanked the balcony windows open and some sort of tube crashed into the room. It was a long, double-width, waxed paper drinking straw. It slid in like a tank gun, knocking Rodney Coiffure off his feet. Wally ran over and dragged him to safety. For one horrible, heart-stopping second, Ralph imagined that Jack was about to indulge in a brutal game of blow football. His pulse came down a few beats when Tom said: ‘Stay calm, Penny. This is how Jack communicates with us. Hang on tight to something. If he shouts, it can turn a bit blustery.’

With that, Tom, Neville and Spud O’Hare hurried over to the end of the straw, positioning themselves just behind the opening.

With a whoosh like an express train going past, Jack’s voice came rumbling out. ‘Wakey! Wakey!’

Ralph’s hair seemed to double in length as the power
of the blast tried to tug it from its roots. The corned beef wind that was Jack Bilt’s breath picked him up as though he were a weightless leaf, and sent him tumbling across the floor. He grabbed for the corner of a mattress but missed, hitting the far wall with a painful thud. When he opened his eyes, he saw Tom standing at the mouth of the straw, bellowing up it through his cupped hands. ‘What do you want, Jack?’ He dived aside as Jack replied,
‘Smells.’

Tom came back, this time accompanied by Spud and Neville. To Ralph’s astonishment, Neville gave Spud a quick leg up and pushed the roofer into the straw. Spud punched a chisel through the paper wall, put his head down and held on tight.

‘Smells? We don’t understand,’ hailed Tom.

‘Stinkies,’ said Jack, making Spud O’Hare flip like a sock on a washing line. Somehow, the roofer managed to hang on and even had time to crawl further up the straw and hammer in another chisel hold. ‘I want odours. Stenches. Reeks galore. It’s pegs on noses for you little worms. This is a job for
Mummy.
Got it?’

‘You mean Penny?’ Tom replied, stalling for time.

‘I mean Mrs Pretty Penny Perfect,’ Jack bellowed. The chandelier, already swinging on its chains, looped so high that it crashed loudly against the ceiling, blazing
a shower of glass to the floor.

Still Spud O’Hare climbed up the straw. He was over the threshold of the balcony now.

‘Knocker’s nobbled,’ Jack railed. ‘Drugged. Dogged out. Sherried like a bloomin’ trifle, he is. She meant to do me in, didn’t she? Oh yes. You tell Mrs Bake-Me-a-Cake to make the house reek like a wrestler’s armpit or her boy goes into the Unlucky Dip.’

Ralph heard a glassy clink.

‘That’s Jack, tapping the tank,’ said Tom. ‘Ralph, he needs you to come to the balcony.’

Ralph hobbled across. His ribs were on fire and his ankle was throbbing. Neville helped him on, telling him to look at Jack, not the straw. Spud was nearly halfway up it, between the outer wall of Miniville and the side of the aquarium.

To Ralph’s horror, Jack slammed a sweet jar on the trestle table. The one full of nail clippings, from the cellar. He unscrewed the lid and waved a lollipop stick. Stuck to its end was a small chunk of corned beef. ‘See this?’ he boomed. ‘This is what happens if Mummy doesn’t work.’ And he plunged the lolly stick into the clippings, stabbing and stirring and finally pulling out. Ralph turned away with his hands to his face. All that was left of the meat were strands.

‘All right, Jack, she’ll do it,’ Tom shouted.

‘I’ll be sniffing,’ said the builder, pressing his hideous nostrils to the tank. ‘Don’t get lazy, Jenks.’

‘The work’s almost done. The house is ready. You can’t keep us here for ever, Jack.’

‘I’ll keep you as long as I like,’ Jack roared. ‘You snivelling little—’

Suddenly, he paused and narrowed his eyes. Ralph filled up with terror. For he knew that Jack had spotted something, and that something could only be the tiny shadow of an Irish roofer climbing up a straw made suddenly transparent by a narrow chink of sunlight from the garden outside.

‘No,’ Ralph cried, as he saw Jack pick up the magnifying glass and hold it across the path of the light, focusing the rays to a laser-fine point. Within seconds, the straw was smoking and buckling. The tiny shadow inside it wriggled.

‘Jack, no!’ Tom shouted.

At its centre, the straw burst into flame. It wilted and quickly dissolved into two. The minute figure of Spud O’Hare fell what, for him, must have been the best part of twenty feet. All Ralph could think of as he watched Spud drop, was spiders. How many had he caught on paper tissues and floated out of the bathroom window,
reasoning that something as light as a spider wouldn’t hit the ground so very hard?

Spud O’Hare, when he hit, was lucky to survive. In his youth, Ralph would discover later, Spud had served in the Royal Marines and knew how to land a parachute safely. Clutching to a canopy of burning straw, he glided, rather than fell, to earth. He landed heavily on the soles of his feet, collapsed and rolled sideways, into the base of the dying tree. The damp weeds growing up around the walls of Miniville snuffed out the flames that were licking at his jacket and combat trousers. He was knocked out, and that was his escape attempt done.

Ralph sank to the balcony floor, holding himself in a very tight ball. The dangers involved in the attempted break out had brought the scale of their predicament sharply into focus. A growing tide of nausea reached his throat and a bubble of vomit burnt against his palate. Kyle was right, Jack was a madman. He could keep them here till the day they died. They were helpless mice in a cage called Miniville.

There was no escape.

‘Tom, why can’t we just break the glass? Throw a brick at it. Smash our way out?’

Penny was sitting on the edge of her mattress, knees drawn up, looking through the window at the dark wall of the tank. Several hours had passed since Spud O’Hare’s fall. The roofer, once revived, had managed to stagger back inside the house, where he was quickly attended to by Mrs Spink. She had once been a country midwife and knew a thing or two about basic first aid. She diagnosed a broken collarbone and put Spud’s arm into a makeshift sling she had cut from Neville’s carpentry apron. Spud had not returned to his leaky roof that day. But the strange practice of Miniville deterioration work had carried on in double shifts throughout the afternoon until Jack had ended the punishing schedule by throwing the blue sheet over the tank, just as though he’d covered up his parrot for the night. Barring Penny, Ralph and the gutsy Tom Jenks, all the other miniones, including Spud, had fallen into an exhausted sleep.

‘The tank walls are thicker than you think,’ Tom
explained, eventually coming round to Penny’s question. He put a smoky candle on the boards beside her. Its flame sent long shadows snaking up the walls and arcing across the plaster-cracked ceiling. ‘We’ve tried hammers, iron spikes, battering rams, fire. Nothing comes close to cracking it.’

‘What about drills?’ Ralph said quickly. He was propped up on one elbow next to his mum. He’d seen Neville use a power drill that very afternoon to weaken and crack a floorboard joist. Someone must have tried a
drill.
Surely.

Tom unbuttoned the neck of his boiler suit. He looked tired and overworked. Stressed, Ralph thought; disappointed that Spud had not succeeded. Nodding, he said, ‘We used a diamond-tipped bit at the highest speed possible. It was like trying to dig a tunnel through an iceberg with a toothpick; it barely scratched the surface. We’d need explosives to really break through.’ He adjusted his position to untie his boots. ‘We were hoping we might get lucky with the sealant—’

‘Sealant?’ Penny queried, holding her nose as a waft of cold air brought a foul-smelling current into her nostrils. The house in general smelt pretty awful. Having been threatened with a nose like ‘Pinocchio’ if she didn’t start making ‘eggy odours’, Penny had asked if
the toilet door might be left open for a while until she could think of ways to make a safer stink. Tom’s sweating feet were, strangely, not the answer.

Throwing his laces wide he said, ‘Those beads of silicone you see around baths. It’s used in fish tanks to seal the joins and make them watertight. We stripped some back from a likely-looking corner, but we couldn’t find a gap that was large enough to slip through.’

Ralph sighed and flopped back against his pillow (a tasselled cushion that smelt like the middle of an old dog’s blanket). Normally he loved a good, challenging conundrum, but he liked the safety net of answers, too. There was no back page to flip to here. This was real life and this was serious: how could the toys defeat their master? ‘What about upwards? Can’t we climb over?’

Tom eased off his boots and gripped them in his fingers. There were holes in three of the toes of his socks. ‘Even standing on the chimney pots, the tank’s too high for ladders or ropes. The first week I was here, Nev and I had a crack at making suckers for our hands and feet so we could try to scale the glass.’

‘Like Spiderman?’ Ralph gasped. He was born under the sign of Cancer the Crab and his eyes were living up to the tag. ‘Wow. What happened?’

Tom pushed back his sleeve. His arm was a mass of
purple-yellow blotches. ‘This happened. And that was with four mattresses breaking my fall. Try to get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. If you need me, I’m the scouring pad nearest the door.’

‘Goodnight,’ Penny whispered, slipping almost fully-clothed under her bedsheet, the way she’d been advised to do by Mrs Spink.

Tom smiled and let his gaze linger over her face. ‘I’ll get you out of here. That’s a promise.’ He winked at Ralph. ‘We’ll find a way, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Ralph gulped.

But he’d no idea how.

That night was the loneliest Ralph had ever known. Even though he lay snuggled up close to his mother (for the first time since he was five years old, when a thunderstorm had chased him into her bed), he couldn’t break away from the utter despair of being held prisoner in a house he could fit into his bedside cupboard.

So he might have been excused for lying awake in a drowsy state of terror or a woozy state of woe, but it was neither of these moods which kept him from tipping into some relief of sleep. In the early hours of that first bleak morning, with a weak ridge of moonlight slipping through a tear in the blue plastic sheeting and knifing
across the bare wooden boards, he became aware of a woman’s voice.

‘Rafe… Oh, Rafe… Where are you, my love?’

It floated through the house like a gathering mist.

The candle light flickered.

Ralph opened his eyes very wide indeed.

‘Speak to me. Don’t be a stranger, I beg you. All these years. I’ve been waiting so long.’

A window rattled. Ralph’s shoulders froze. He made a moustache of the hem of his bedsheet and held it tightly up to his nose.

‘Oh, Rafe, I just know you’re here,’ cried the voice.

And then came the sound of dainty sobbing.

‘Jemima?’ Ralph whispered. ‘Is that you?’

What remained of the chandelier clinked.

A door creaked.

The candle light went out.

‘Miriam?’ Ralph squeaked, barely moving his lips. But that tiniest of verbal acknowledgement seemed to be all the contact required to call the Miniville ghost into being. Within seconds, a current of air had dropped through the ceiling and was thickening into a swirling cloud. The cloud funnelled to a point just below the chandelier, then began to descend to the floor in a column. Although Ralph had not long visited the toilet,
his body was screaming that he really ought to think about going again. Now.

‘Mum,’ he tried to say, but the word seemed as frightened to rise up as he was.

And so there he lay, tongue-tied,
glued
…while a spectre materialised at the foot of his bed.

As hauntings went – those which Ralph had read about at any rate – it wasn’t quite the expected thing.

‘My darling,’ the ghost said brightly and opened her shimmering arms to him.

Ralph’s bedsheet immediately flapped aside. For shame! How glad was he that everyone in Miniville slept with their clothes on. Drawing his knees up tight to his chest, he tried again to call to his mother. But Penny was asleep and Ralph couldn’t jolt her. He felt the way he did when a nightmare gripped him: in another dimension, unable to move.

Yet, apparently, he could. With no conspicuous effort – no ropes, no tackle, no mirrors of any kind – his body was swept upright, onto his feet.

‘Rafe…’ the apparition implored, floating like a giant sea anemone before him.

Ralph covered his face. He didn’t like this. Why had the ghost picked on
him
to haunt? And why did she insist on calling him ‘Rafe’, just like Kyle Salter did? Just his luck if she turned out to be Kyle’s great-great-long-dead aunt or something.

‘Wh-wh-what do you want?’ he spluttered, risking a peek through the cracks of his fingers.

The ghost blinked, cocked her nose and turned away sniffily – ‘petulantly’ Ralph’s mum would have said. He’d learnt this word during a crushing defeat at
Scrabble
when his mum had not only cleared her tiles but scored huge triple points by adding ‘ulantly’ to his trifling, five-point-scoring, ‘pet’. Right now, things were well beyond
Scrabble.
Ralph’s bloodstream was in top gear and racing. And somewhat worryingly, despite her huffy mannerisms, he had the strange sensation that Miriam
liked
him. This was so weird. Ralph had never had a girlfriend and didn’t really want one. But he’d never expected his first taste of romance to begin with a pretty, flirtatious phantom.

And she
was
pretty. Extremely pretty, if a little ashen (but then, she
was
dead). Her small, round face was set alight by her sparkling doe eyes. The bob of her hair and the straight-cut fringe gave her an innocent, boyish appearance, but she was clearly a stylish, elegant young woman, probably no more than seventeen years old and slimmer than a blade of fresh spring grass. She wore a long white dress that displayed no curves (not that Ralph really knew about curves) which seemed to be practically bandaged to her body. It stopped below her
knee in a sea of fringes that whispered when she turned or cocked her hip.

Swush.
She cocked her hip now. ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask, why you chose a giddy thing like Cecily above me?’

‘Pardon?’ said Ralph. Who the heck was Cecily?

‘Oh,’ went Miriam, pressing the back of one hand to her forehead. ‘Even now you have to tease and taunt me. Why were you always such a cad to me, Rafe?’

Ralph opened his mouth and shut it again. He’d done this twice, before a sentence tumbled out. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ he said as politely as he could, ‘but I think you’ve mixed me up with someone else. This isn’t my house. I don’t really live here. And I don’t know anyone called Cecily, either.’

Miriam made a gesture of disbelief and turned away with her back to him now. When she tilted her head to look back across her shoulder, she was puffing away at the longest cigarette holder Ralph had ever seen. ‘How could you leave me on our wedding day, you bounder?’ She blew a smoke ring that passed right through his face.

‘I didn’t,’ said Ralph. ‘I’m only twelve.’

‘Hah!’ exclaimed Miriam, laying a gloved hand flat across her breast. ‘My poor heart, broken like a piece of
crystal. Why should I forgive you, you faithless rake? If only you weren’t so devilishly handsome.’

‘Help!’ Ralph shrieked as she turned to face him, batting her ghostly eyelids so fast that it felt as if butterflies were fanning his face. Through her wispy body, he could see the far wall in perfect detail. Goosebumps rose on his trembling forearms. And if his hair had not been spiky in the first place, it was certainly doing a really good hedgehog show now.

Miriam raised a hand to his face. She made a stroking movement but didn’t quite touch. Ralph felt as though a shower of ice cold glitter or a small comet had just flown by. ‘You do seem a little youthful,’ she said, ‘without your moustache and monocle. But then you always were a frivolous thing. Oh Rafe, tell me you’ve come back for ever. Stop teasing. Show me your manly form.’

Ralph made a noise like a squealing rat.

‘Say you love me. Show me the ring.’

‘What ring? I haven’t got a ring,’ Ralph tweeted. In panic, he fumbled around in his pockets. Perhaps if he showed her there was nothing there but a pebble and a conker and an old laggy band and… ‘All I’ve got is this.’

He opened his hand. And lo and behold and wouldn’t you know it, there in his palm was the stone he’d taken
from Jack Bilt’s fridge. It twinkled in the darkness and changed colour twice, gradually shaping a soft blue halo right around Miriam’s vaporous form.

The phantom gasped with delight. ‘My sweetheart, it’s so beautiful.’ And in her joy, she threw her arms around him.

Contact. The moment Ralph had been dreading. He closed his eyes and grimaced for England, wondering if his body had now been possessed and he would turn into a woman at periodic intervals, and a priest would have to be miniaturised in to exorcise the spirit that was wrestling for his soul. But nothing quite that dramatic happened. The stone sent out a pulse of light and Miriam was propelled like a burst balloon into the cobwebs in the corner of the room.

‘Oh, Rafe. You cad. How could you?’ she wailed, her voice thinning out to a faraway dot as she disappeared back to humanknowswhere.

Freed from her aura, Ralph found he was able to shout without restraint. Mini-people stirred on their mini mattresses. Tom came hurrying up, pulling on a T-shirt. ‘Ralph, are you OK? Are you having a nightmare?’

Ralph shook his head. ‘Miriam was here.’

A look of concern passed over Tom’s face.

But Ralph was no longer afraid. In fact, a sudden ray
of hope had fired his heart. He looked at the stone, bouncing its blue light off the four walls. It had power, this stone, the power to ward off ghosts. So what had it been doing in Jack Bilt’s fridge?

And was it the key to defeating him?