Aunt Effie's Ark (4 page)

Peter ticked off on his fingers. “Aunt Effie said to screw steel shutters over the doors and windows,” he whispered.

“We did that,” we whispered back.

“Caulk the walls.”

“We did that.”

“Schenam them with whale oil and shell lime.”

“We did that.”

“Tar them, felt them, sheathe them with totara.”

“We did that.”

“Then caulk and tar the totara, just like our scow.”

“We did that!”

Peter counted his fingers and nodded. “That's the lot!” In a louder voice he said, “And if anyone tries to hack down the door with the halberd, or blow it down with the blunderbuss, he'd better watch out.”

“Open the door,” whispered the terrible voice through the keyhole, “or I'll hack it down with the halberd!”

“Down with the halberd,” Alwyn answered back.

“Don't say I didn't warn you…” The voice was so cold, frost crystals formed around the keyhole.

“Didn't warn you,” Alwyn repeated.

“Don't you dare answer me back!” An icicle hung down from the keyhole.

“Answer me back!”

“Nobody gives cheek to the Tattooed Wolf!”

“Cheek to the Tattooed Wolf!”

“All right – take this!”

“Take this!” echoed Alwyn, and there was a colossal clang on the door.

“Ow!” somebody screamed, and the halberd
clattered
on the steps outside.

Alwyn called back, “Ow!” He winced and shook his hands above his head. “Like Mr Jones – with the strap!” he whispered. We spluttered and stuck our hands over our mouths. Lizzie snorted and laughed aloud.

“Don't you dare laugh at me!” bellowed the
Tattooed
Wolf.

“Laugh at me!” said Alwyn. We rolled on our backs, kicked our feet in the air, and let our breath go in one enormous laugh. “I'll show you!” the voice screamed.

“I'll show you!” We laughed even louder.

“I'll blow your door down!”

“I'll blow your door down!” repeated Alwyn.

“No, by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin!” said Lizzie who knew all the nursery rhymes and stories by heart.

“Try huffing and puffing!” Jessie sang out.

Boom! The Tattooed Wolf fired the blunderbuss. The nikau berries were so much harder than bullets, they
dented the steel shutters, and the wood stood out in little bumps on our side.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” screamed the Tattooed Wolf.

“The berries bounced back and hit him,” said Peter. “It's called a ricochet.”

“Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“Ow! Ow!” said Alwyn.

We followed Peter upstairs. He rolled out the wicked little barrel, painted with the skull and crossbones, that Aunt Effie kept under her bed – where most people kept a chamber-pot. Gingerly, he worked off the top.

“I thought so. Gunpowder!”

Aunt Effie had taught us how to load and fire a cannon. We pushed a canister of gunpowder down the barrel and tamped it into place. We stood in a circle, heaved up a cannon-ball, and rolled it down the barrel. With a broom handle, Marie made sure it was in place, and poked in a wad to hold the cannon-ball.

The window screeched. We pulled on the gun-tackle and ran the cannon up so the barrel poked over the sill. Peter tapped in the wedges to point its mouth down.

Despite the window's screech, the rumble of the cannon's iron wheels across the floor, and the tap of Peter's mallet, the Tattooed Wolf heard nothing.

“Ooowhooooo! Ooowhooooo!” With all four paws, it was patting its bruises. It raised its face, “Ooowhooooo! Ooowhooooo!” and we saw it was tattooed all over, not just the forehead, the cheeks, the chin, and the nose, but the insides of the ears, the nostrils, and the eyelids.

“There's something familiar about that tattoo,” said Jazz.

The monster stuck out its tongue and licked its bruises. “Ooowhooooo! Ooowhooooo!”

“That's why it's got such a terrible voice!” Ann gasped. “Its tongue is tattooed, too…”

Jazz said, “I'm sure I've seen that tattoo somewhere else.”

“Touch-powder…” Peter trickled some grains of black powder into the touch-hole.

The Tattooed Wolf heard him, looked up, and saw the cannon. He must have been fired at before because he shrieked and ran away over the paddocks. “
Ooowhooooo
! Ooowhooooo!”

Between two sticks, Peter picked up a burning coal from the fireplace and put it to the touch-hole. The
cannon
boomed, recoiled, bumped Aunt Effie's bed, and filled the room with smoke. We cheered, leaned out the window, and saw the black cannon-ball streaking over the white snow.

The Tattooed Wolf saw it coming, screamed, “
Ooowhooooo
! Ooowhooooo!” and jumped out of sight in a ditch. He stuck up his terrible head to see what was happening, and the cannon-ball whipped off the tip of one ear as clean as whistle.

“Ooowhooooo! Ooowhooooo! I'll get my own back!” he howled. “I'll crop the ears off the sides of your heads.” Lizzie and Jared felt their ears.

“What? What's going on? What…” Aunt Effie sat up, eyes half open, nostrils flaring and sniffing.

“It's all right,” Marie told her. “We just chased away a Tattooed Wolf that came down from the Vast Untrodden Ureweras. Everybody's safe and sound. Go back to sleep.”

“Eberybuggle's shafe. Glow black to sheep,” Aunt Effie mumbled. “What a nishe shmell!” We laid her back against her pillows.

“Gunpowder smoke,” Marie told her and said to us, “You know how she always says she loves the smell of battle!”

Aunt Effie sniffed the smoke and snored again. Ann straightened the sou'wester she wore. Peter mopped out the cannon and reloaded it just in case. And we tiptoed downstairs where Daisy was still having hysterics.

“We've had The First Day of School, The Last Day of School, The Gallant Rescue of the Little Ones, and The Battle of the Tattooed Wolf all in one day,” said David. “I think we deserve a feast!”

“Hooray!” we all shouted.

“There's one problem we have to solve first,” said Peter. “How to get out to the barn.

“If we open the door, the snow will pour in, and we won't be able to close it again. Then, when the snow melts, the house will fill with water and sink. Besides, if we dig a tunnel through the snow, what's to stop the Tattooed Wolf from digging a hole and catching us?”

We shook our heads.

“My banty will be getting hungry,” said Jessie.

“And my donkey,” said Lizzie.

“The chooks will stop laying if they're not fed
tonight
,” said Daisy. “And we didn't collect the eggs this morning, thanks to you,” she told Marie. “The cows will stop giving milk, and the geese and turkeys will start fighting again. A nice mess we're in! All because none of you would listen to me and get up this morning when
I told you to.”

“Told you to,” said Alwyn.

“Don't you copy me!”

“Copy me!”

“I'm older than you!”

“Older than you!”

“You be quiet!”

“Be quiet!”

Daisy was silent. Alwyn could keep it up all day.

“Remember Aunt Effie told us about her
great-great-grandfather
in that hard winter several centuries ago?” Peter said to Marie. “How he got out to the barn?”

“Yes, he dug a tunnel, but the snow collapsed on top of him.”

“It took them two days to pull him out of the snow by his feet, and they stretched so he couldn't ever find shoes big enough to fit him afterwards,” said Alwyn.

“Have you no sense at all?” demanded Daisy.

“No sense at all?”

Peter ignored them. “Well, he had to find another way into the barn. Just like us.”

“Did he find one? What was it? How did he get into the barn? I've forgotten!” we all shouted.

“There's only one person old enough to remember,” said Peter. “Hubert!”

All this time, Hubert had been sitting in the rocking chair in front of the fire. He stopped rocking, swivelled his ears toward Peter, and shook his head.

“You're the oldest,” said Peter. “You must
remember
!”

“Not as old as that.” Hubert rocked backwards and forwards.

“But you've heard Aunt Effie tell the story?”

“A hundred times,” said Hubert. “She said her
great-great-grandfather
cut a door through the back of the house and into the barn.”

“A door through the back of the house! That's how he did it! Good old Hubert! I knew he'd remember!” we shouted.

“Now we can feed my banty!”

“And my donkey.”

“Yes,” said Peter, “but which door, Hubert?”

“I don't know,” said Hubert. “Up the stairs from Aunt Effie's enormous bedroom, there's another floor. And above that floor there's another. And another. And
another
. Nobody's explored them for thousands of years.

“And on each floor there's a thousand rooms. And in each room there's a thousand doors into another thousand rooms. Lots of explorers have gone upstairs, but nobody's ever come back alive. That's why we don't know which is the door Aunt Effie's
great-great-grandfather
cut into the barn all those years ago.”

“Let's explore!” said Alwyn, and the little ones shouted, “Explore!”

“Hubert's right,” Marie said quickly. “Remember the story of the two little princes?”

“What's that story?” asked Lizzie.

“Long, long before Aunt Effie was born, two little princes lived here. Her bedroom was their nursery. They had an old nurse whose job was to stop them from ever going upstairs. One wet day, the old nurse was spinning wool, and she pricked herself on her
spindle
and fell asleep. The two little princes couldn't go outside because of the rain, and they weren't allowed
down in the kitchen. They got sick of playing Monopoly with their chests of diamonds and gold coins, and they couldn't wake their nurse, so they went exploring up the stairs.”

“What happened to the nurse?” asked Alwyn.

“She's still asleep in Aunt Effie's bedroom
somewhere
,” said Marie. “In one of the wardrobes.”

“What about the little princes?”

“They've never been seen from that day to this. They must have got lost and died.”

Jazz wept noisily. A remarkably cheerful boy usually, any mention of the royal family, and the melancholy side of his nature came uppermost. “Poor, poor little princes!” he cried.

“For goodness' sake!” said Daisy. “Marie just made up that story to scare you.”

“What if my poor little banty goes upstairs and gets lost looking for us?” asked Jessie. “She's had nothing to eat since this morning.”

“And my poor little donkey,” wept Lizzie.

“I've got an idea!” said Marie. “Remember the story of Theseus and the Minotaur?”

“How he found his way through the Labyrinth?”

“That's it!” Marie told Lizzie. “He used a ball of string so he didn't get lost!”

We found a huge ball of string in the cupboard
under
the sink and ran up the stairs above Aunt Effie's bedroom, all of us but Daisy who was having hysterics again. We unrolled the ball as Marie and Peter tied the other end of the string around their waists and began searching for the door into the barn. We stood at the top of the stairs above Aunt Effie's bedroom and watched
their lantern disappear into the dark, the string
wriggling
after them.

They'd been gone a couple of hours when we felt the string being tugged. “It's funny,” said Becky. “It doesn't feel like Peter and Marie wanting more string; it feels as if something's trying to pull us into the dark.”

“Don't talk nonsense!” said Daisy who had just rejoined us.

“What if Peter and Marie found the Minotaur?” asked Alwyn. “What if it ate them, and now it's
following
the string back to eat us?” Daisy shrieked her way downstairs again.

“I don't care,” said Jessie. “I want to give my banty some wheat.”

“I want to feed my donkey,” said Lizzie.

“I want to light a lamp for the small pig,” said Ann. We all cried profusely as we thought of the small pig alone in the dark. We wiped the tears from our eyes, blew our noses, and flapped our hankies in the air to dry them.

“Something's still tugging the other end,” said Becky.

Just then Daisy climbed back upstairs. White-faced, she looked over our shoulders, pointed, and fainted. We turned and saw a grey shape drifting towards us.

“‘Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned?'” said Bryce who never forgot he had once acted the part of Hamlet in Standard Two.

“Stop mucking about and give us a hand,” said
Marie's
voice. She rolled closer, bandaged in thick layers of cobwebs. Though they were sticky, we unwound and pulled them off until she could breathe again and
point to where Peter lay almost suffocated in another ball of cobwebs. We dragged them off his face and thumped his back.

“‘For this relief much thanks',” said Bryce, but Peter just lay gasping.

Marie told us how they had found the door into the barn. “It was the first one we tried. We undid the string from around our waists, tied the end to the doorknob, and decided to do everything at once. We mucked out the stalls, swept out the pens, milked the cows,
separated
, fed the poultry and stock, and collected the eggs.”

Peter got his breath back. “We fed the banties and the donkeys,” he told Jessie and Lizzie, “and left a lamp burning for the small pig.”

“When we came back, the string had come off the doorknob and we couldn't find it,” Marie told us, “but Peter said he remembered the way. I followed him through door after door, and room after room. Then we walked into the cobwebs. They swathed themselves around us till we couldn't breathe. Luckily I saw your lamp and managed to roll to you.”