The Ministry of SUITs (14 page)

 

20

BEAKER OF FOAM

 

Between break time and lunch Jack had double science. Some days it was interesting when you got to do experiments and create beakers full of foam. Some days it was dull, like when you had to write up notes and draw diagrams about experiments that had created beakers full of foam.

It was rarely practical. Jack couldn't imagine a situation in real life where it would be necessary to create a beaker full of foam except, of course, working in a coffeehouse. He was also slightly suspicious of scientists. Anytime they turned up in movies they were always putting together a device that would be used to destroy the world. Normally because they'd been bullied at school or picked on by work colleagues. As a member of the Ministry, Jack imagined this was exactly the sort of thing that he had to watch out for.

Jack's science teacher was an oldish man called Dr. Holmes. He had twinkling blue eyes and a dramatic thatch of blond hair. He looked more eccentric than evil. Jack decided that as he was now a Ministry Agent he should check that Dr. Holmes was not, in fact, an evil genius with a taste for world destruction.

“Umm, sir?” Jack sidled up to Dr. Holmes.

“Yes, boy, what is it?”

“I don't suppose you've ever suffered humiliating treatment at the hands of a bully that has made you hate the world?”

Dr. Holmes considered this question for a minute. “I don't think so. I'm sure if I had been humiliated in such a way I would have remembered.”

“Umm, what about … have you ever had your heart broken so cruelly that it has left you dead inside? Left your insides burning with an ice that makes you insensible to the suffering of others? A suffering that could only be ended by the destruction of the world?”
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Again Dr. Holmes carefully considered the question before answering. “I've certainly had my heart broken, but not that badly. It was broken by a girl when I was six years old. But later that day I was given a pedal car for my birthday and the heartache seemed to disappear.”

Jack wondered how many of the world's great villains could have been morally turned around if only someone had given them a pedal car at the right time. Would Hitler have still felt the need to invade Poland if only someone had given him a scooter? Would Osama bin Laden have turned out as bad if he had been presented with a red hula hoop?

“So generally you haven't been scarred by life?”

“No,” said Dr. Holmes. “Not so badly. Life's been pretty pleasant, I would say.”

“Good,” said Jack, reasonably happy that Dr. Holmes would not turn out to be an evil scientist.

Dr. Holmes turned away from Jack and let him get on with making his beaker of foam. “I don't know,” Dr. Holmes mused to himself. “You pupils ask the funniest questions.” As he walked away he laughed in an almost maniacal way.

“Maniacal laughter,” muttered Jack to himself. “Maybe he is an evil scientist after all.” Jack decided he would later check with Grey to see if there was a standard test for insanity in scientists.

“What were you asking those questions for?” David had wandered over to Jack to see how he was getting on with the beaker of foam. David was always Jack's lab partner. However, it was generally agreed that, considering David's clumsiness, he should always be kept far away from experiments involving volatile chemicals or flames.

Jack decided that now was the time to tell David about the Ministry.

“Sit down, David. I have something to tell you.”

And so, while his classmates were completing their experiments, Jack explained to David about the secret elevator at the museum, the stone guardians, the insane Minister, the Porcupods, Trudy's amazing skills, the squid-headed lord-of-filing Cthulhu, and all the other bizarre events that had taken place on Monday.

For a few moments David just stared blankly at Jack. Then he spoke. “So what you're telling me is that you have an after-school job?”

Jack couldn't believe how calmly David had taken it. “Haven't you been listening to what I was saying? I'm working for the Ministry of Strange, Unusual, and Impossible Things.”

“Yes,” David agreed. “You have an after-school job.”

“But isn't it amazing that all this strange stuff is going on in the world?”

David shook his head. “I always kind of expected it. I mean, think about it. All the mad things that we're meant to accept. Computers that can think a million thoughts at once, people on the bottom of the Earth that don't fall off, huge metal tubes that can fly through the air. It's all mad.”

“But that's just science.”

“Explain how metal planes can fly. Or how metal boats can float.”

Jack shook his head. “I don't know.…”

“You see,” said David triumphantly. “If you pay attention, everything in the world is very odd indeed.”

“I … I suppose you're right.”

“Look, if you ever need any help with the Ministry stuff, I'm always here to lend a hand.”

Jack smiled. “I could always ask them if you could join up.”

“No, thanks!” David said. “I'll help out if you need a hand, but I've already got an after-school job in my folks' corner store. I don't need two jobs. Especially when I could get killed in one of them.”

“I understand,” said Jack solemnly.

“I don't think you do.” David shook his head. “Corner stores are dangerous. My Uncle Cecil was once almost crushed to death by a delivery of the Sunday papers.”

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK

EVIL SCIENTISTS

C
AREER
P
ATH

If you want to be an evil scientist, it's worthwhile consulting your school's career adviser or guidance counselor. You will need to study all the sciences and achieve good grades in them.

The only other qualification that you need is the ability to look sinister and evil while stroking a white Persian cat that is wearing a diamond collar.

*   *   *

Sadly the careers of many evil scientists have been ruined before they even properly got started due to a cat-hair allergy.

 

21

BACK DOOR AND BLACK DOOR

 

At the end of the day Trudy was standing outside the front gates waiting. Jack had just called his parents to tell them he was going to Trudy's for tea and would be home late.

“What are we doing tonight, then?” asked Jack.

“Training.” Trudy smiled. “Tonight I take you to the Misery.”

“The Misery? I don't really like the sound of that.”

Jack had a suspicion that training was going to be hard. But he hadn't expected it to be miserable.

“Look, I'm sure training's important and everything, but the reason I joined up with the Ministry was to try and find out if the box of spares is caused by odd kids going missing. I just want to make sure that David doesn't end up … missing.”

“Okay, well, we could go out and try and find out if someone is kidnapping the missing kids.”

“Great!”

“Of course, then we'd have to stop them somehow. Do you feel strong enough to fight a gang of sinister kidnappers?”

Jack admitted that he wasn't exactly ready for that eventuality.

“And that's why tonight you're going to get trained,” Trudy said, ramming her point home.

The Ministry car had pulled up outside the school. Jack held his breath and clambered into the back of the smelly car.

When they reached the museum Jack headed for the elevator. Trudy caught his arm. “Not that way.”

“But I thought this was the way in? I mean, the stone giants and…”

Trudy shook her head. “Kevin and Barry are all right, but it's a lot quicker to sneak in the back entrance.”

Trudy led Jack up a flight of stairs and into the mummy exhibit.

Jack had visited this room before on a school trip. It held the remains of the Lady Takabuti, an ancient blackened mummy. Her skin was dark, withered, and leathery. But that was understandable considering she was more than two and a half thousand years old and had been born in an era before moisturizer. She lay beside her intricate sarchophagus, which was covered in tiny hieroglyphics.

“She gives me the creeps,” said Jack, leaning over the glass case and looking into the empty eye sockets of the ancient, bandaged corpse.

Trudy shot a disapproving look at Jack. “Don't say that, Jack. She might hear you.”

Jack looked startled. “What, you mean she's alive?”

Trudy laughed at Jack. “Don't be ridiculous. She's been dead for more than two thousand years.”

“I knew that,” Jack said, pretending to be considerably braver than he felt.

“But she still might hear you.”

Jack stood quietly. “She can still hear even if she's dead?”

“Yeah, mummies. You've seen the movies. Part alive, mostly dead, wander around attacking people.”

Jack thought that was all make-believe, but from his recent experience with the Ministry he knew that was not the right thing to say.

“Don't worry about her now, though; generally she's asleep during the day. She only gets up when the museum's closed. She's kind of like the night-watch-woman.”

Jack didn't want to think about that. “So you were going to show me a back door?”

Trudy looked around and confirmed that they were the only visitors in the mummy display. She reached over to a gray stone object—an enormous sculpture of a hand, which presumably had broken off of a much larger statue. She pressed three of the fingernails
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in a rapid sequence. There was a brief sliding noise and the glass case that had surrounded Takabuti and her sarcophagus lifted upward.

Jack silently prayed that he wasn't going to have to move the blackened corpse to get to the back door.

“Follow me,” commanded Trudy as she walked over to the display. She reached out a hand, and for a minute Jack thought she was going to touch the mummy. Instead she had grabbed ahold of the front of the sarcophagus. It was sitting beside the actual mummy, looking much friendlier with a pleasant, painted face.
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Trudy moved the lid and Jack was shocked to see that it was secured to the display by hinges. Trudy jumped up on the display. She started walking down stairs and into a hole that had been hidden underneath the lid of the smiling sarcophagus.

“Hurry up!” insisted Trudy. “The whole setup is on a timer switch. In about thirty seconds the sarcophagus lid snaps shut and the glass display pops back up.”

Jack followed her quickly.

“It doesn't pay to dawdle when you're using the back entrance. One time I was slow and got trapped underneath the glass display. No one came and got me out for thirty minutes. Let me tell you, it isn't fun having school trips of primary school children pointing at you and saying that you don't look particularly Egyptian.”

After the first fifteen or twenty meters the stairs started curving to the right and spiraling downward.

Trudy and Jack walked along one of the Ministry's corridors until they came to a door made of rotten timber. At one stage it had been painted black, but the paint had clearly grown tired and was starting to flake off.

Trudy knocked on the door. Instead of hearing a rap, there was a dull echo. “I'd say try and enjoy yourself, but it really won't be possible.”

“What's going to make the training so miserable?”

“What makes it so miserable is the Misery,” said Trudy.

Jack opened the door.

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK

MUMMIES

T
HE
W
EARING
OF
B
ANDAGES

Over the years many people have wondered why the ancient Egyptians covered their dead in bandages. Given even a minute's thought, the answer is obvious. When people were unwell in Ancient Egypt they would go to the doctor. Ancient Egyptian doctors had no penicillin, they had no X-ray machines, and they had no vaccines or antibiotics.

What they did have was a lot of bandages.

Therefore, when you went to the doctor in Egypt you generally got covered in bandages. Many people who did get sick went on to die. They were then buried in the bandages they already had on … because … who wants to use a bandage that has been used on a corpse?

It is also interesting to note that many archaeologists now believe that the number-one cause of death in Ancient Egypt was “Accidental Smothering Due to Excessive Bandages.” The number-two cause was crocodile bite.
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22

THE MISERY

 

Jack looked inside the room and saw a slouched figure wearing a pair of black jeans and a large, black, baggy, hand-knitted sweater with the letter
M
in white on the front. Initially he couldn't see the figure's face at all because its head was facing toward the floor. All that was visible was a mop of black, greasy, tangled hair.

“Jack Pearse, meet the Misery,” said Trudy.

The head of the Misery snapped up as it heard its name. It was a he. He looked to be about fourteen, but it was hard to tell in the gloom. The Misery looked at Trudy and Jack in the same way you would look at dog poo that you had just stepped in. He sighed.

Jack held out a hand to be shaken. The Misery stared at Jack's hand as if he had never seen one before. Jack put his hand back down by his side.

“We're here for training, Misery.”

The Misery sighed. “I was just getting myself ready to go out.” The Misery sighed again. “And now … this?”

“Afraid so,” said Trudy.