Casper Candlewacks in the Time Travelling Toaster (5 page)

Four guards came sprinting from Blight Manor and launched themselves on top of the escapee, but his howls of laughter continued.

“You can stop now,” muttered Chrys. “We’ve got him.”

But Briar kept the button held down. “A little longer. I want him to remember this.”

The guards could barely keep hold of the escapee as they carried him back, wriggling and giggling as he was. “Stop!” he yelled. “Too much! I can’t!”

Eventually, once they’d disappeared into the building, Briar let go of the button and inspected his remote lovingly. “Tickle Tags. Invented by a friend of ours. Tap in a channel, activate the electronic bracelet round the employee’s ankle, and,
bzzt!
It sends a tickling sensation round the wearer’s entire body. Genius, I’d say.”

Casper shivered. “Brutal, I’d say.”

“Brilliant, I’d say,” grinned Anemonie.

“Sausages, I’d say,” said Lamp, who’d sniffed lunch.

Lunch was exquisite and ridiculously expensive. Once Briar had finished his caviar and ketchup he threw his gold-plated dinner plate to the gold-plated carpet, where it shattered into a hundred wasteful pieces. Then he wiped his mouth with a twenty-pound note, threw it over his shoulder and burped. At the press of channel 26 a maid came with a vacuum cleaner to gobble up the mess.

Casper had no interest in the mother-of-pearl-barley stew on his plate. He glanced over to Chrys, who picked away quietly at her hard-boiled dodo’s egg (procured at great expense from Charles Darwin’s private collection of extinct stuff).

“Everything you can see we’ve earned through hard work,” announced Briar, even though nobody had asked. “I like to think back to when my granny started this company in olden times. Did even she know how successful it’d be?” He snatched a look at Anemonie, but she was busy tearing a roast quail apart with her teeth.

“Within two years she was shipping to sixteen countries, shifting one million units per month and having to hire her cousins to help out with all the spitting. Even the Queen was drinking
Essence of Nobility
to top up her poshness. Turned out everyone wanted a drop of Blight.” Briar threw back his chair, stood up and walked to the fire. Quickly the maid returned with her vacuum cleaner and sucked up the chair, the rug and then the tablecloth. Casper and the others had to leap back as the silver tableware whooshed away from them.

“Now, you will retire to your rooms. Supper is at six.”

Casper coughed. He didn’t feel comfortable amidst all this wealth. “Sorry, Briar, but we really must be getting on.”

“And where do you plan to go?”

“Erm…” With the Time Toaster out of commission and the village a hundred years out of time, Casper hadn’t a clue. “We’ll just wander.”

“In these streets? With those pigeons? Bah! Too dangerous. And anyway –” Briar extended his welcoming arms and pressed channel 51 to summon a clutch of butlers – “my home is your home. Whatever you need, it’s within these four hundred walls.” By the look Briar gave Casper, it was all too clear that the lad knew every detail of how they’d got here and, crucially, why they couldn’t return.

“I’m staying.” Anemonie had been mostly swallowed by an enormous comfy chair.

“Good. And the boys?”

Lamp was rolling on the floor with a bundle of kittens that he’d found in a basket marked
KITTENS
. “Say we can stay, Casper! I love kittens the best of all.”

“You’re too kind, Briar, but we mustn’t put you out like that. We can stay at Bernie Biffin’s Beds & Burgers. It’s only up the road.” Casper grabbed a handful of Lamp’s boiler suit and made to leave.

“You’re out of touch, old boy. Bernie Biffin’s burnt down years ago, and I had absolutely nothing to do with it. No, I won’t have it. You must stay, or what sort of a host am I?”

Reluctantly, and only after the offer of a session in Briar’s 5-D cinema (where you can actually
taste
the explosions), Casper agreed.

His room was smaller than he’d imagined and the bed was fairly lumpy. Obviously in the last hundred years breeze-block walls, bare light bulbs swinging from ceilings and wonky loos in the corner had become the latest fashion in interior design. Casper wasn’t a massive fan, to be quite honest.

Through a grate in the wall, the sounds of Lamp getting comfy in his room next door could be heard. “Casper,” Lamp moaned, “I can’t jump on my bed if it’s not bouncy.”

Sounds of jumping were replaced by a
thonk
noise, which spelt the end of Lamp’s attempts to soften the bed up.

“You all right?” asked Casper.

“Landed on the floor,” said Lamp. “Can’t feel my bottom.”

Five minutes later, deep snores resonated through the grate.

I’ll wake him up for supper
, thought Casper. After all, it had been a long morning.

Casper shared the room with a line of ants and a noisy wasp at the window, but when he tried to let the wasp out, he found the window was locked.

“Looks like we’re bunkmates,” Casper said.

“
Buzz
,” said the wasp predictably.

Casper had noticed on the way in that the number on his door read 34128. Lamp’s was 34129, and other doors on his corridor held similar numbers like the rooms in a hotel. Blight Manor was obviously set up for a lot of guests, some more important than others. Perhaps Briar had given Casper and Lamp the wrong rooms.

The door of Casper’s room was locked too. Security was quite tight here, and most of the important doors were opened with a handprint scanner, this one included.

Casper fitted his hand to the scanner, but after a few short seconds it flashed red. “I’m sorry,” said a friendly robot voice, “your print has not been recognised. Please hang up and try again.”

“I’m Casper Candlewacks,” Casper said. “I’m a guest of Briar Blight. Can you go and get him? I think I’ve been given the wrong room.”

“Sadly, I’m only a handprint scanner and am incapable of movement,” the scanner said cheerily. “Otherwise I’d go right up there and talk to his lordship myself. In the meantime, would you like me to read your palms? Your longevity line looks particularly pronounced.”

“You know what, I’m fine,” said Casper, disappointed. “It’s probably a mistake. I’ll wait for Briar.”

Casper shared a withering look with the wasp and lay down on his lumpy bed. Lamp had been right. A granite slab was bouncier than this mattress.

The afternoon dragged on in room 34128. Casper realised he’d left his book at home and the only bits he could remember were the bits he’d already read, which was frustrating. He tried to wake Lamp up for a chat, but Lamp mistook Casper’s voice through the grate for a ghost and hid under his bed. Briar never came back to show Casper to the 5-D cinema. He hadn’t returned to offer them tea, either, and supper was looking less and less likely. Had Briar forgotten about them? Outside, the sun set and Casper’s room filled with gloom.

The wasp stopped buzzing.

Lamp was snoring again.

The light bulb flickered out and Casper let his eyes droop.
I’ll sort it out in the morning
, he thought, and then drifted off to sleep…

***

BZZT.

“Ooh!” Casper jolted awake and scratched his leg. It was morning, and by the feel of it the wasp was already up.

BZZT. BZZT.

“Stop it!” He sat up, scratching his arm and his neck. “If you’re not careful you’ll sting me!”

BZZT.

“OY!” The wasp was all over him now, tickling his knees and his armpit and the tip of his nose. But wherever Casper scratched, it just tickled more. And then a word resonated in Casper’s head.
Tickled…

With disbelief he reached down to his right ankle – and felt cold, hard plastic. All Casper could do was laugh. A white bracelet, sturdy and bleeping red, had been clipped to his leg. And over his jeans and T-shirt he wore a set of heavy grey overalls. He should’ve seen it coming.

BZZT.

“All right!
Bzzt!
I get it!” Casper bellowed to nobody, leaping up from his bed and shaking out his itching ankle. “I’m up. Better?”

The handprint scanner hummed into motion. “Good morning, employee 34128! And how are you today?”

Casper checked his ears for wax. “Employee
what
?”

“Please place your hand on the scanner and we’ll sort you out with some breakfast.”

Bewildered, Casper did so. After a moment it flashed green and the door swung open.

At the same moment, Lamp emerged, giggling, from his room, wearing the very same set of overalls Casper had, only a couple of sizes bigger. “Hello, Casper – OOH!” he cried, kicking his right leg upwards like a can-can dancer. “Someone’s tickling me. I think it’s a ghost. He was talking to me last n—EEH!” He jiggled around once more.

But as Casper waited for Lamp to calm down, doors up and down the corridor started to open. Then other people in the same grey overalls emerged from them, silent as mute buttons. Each one had a sullen, heavy frown and downcast eyes. The nearest, a gaunt young man with cropped brown hair and a depressed moustache, looked at Casper with a puzzled face.

“Morning,” said Casper cheerily.

The man’s eyes flitted to his feet and he shuffled off down the corridor, towards the door that led to the stairwell. Others filed away in the same direction.

Casper frowned. “Bit rude.”

“Maybe he doesn’t speak human,” suggested Lamp. “’Scuse me,” he said, grabbing the arm of a middle-aged lady, her cheeks ruddy as apples. “Where are you going?”

The lady’s mouth twitched, her eyes bulged and she sped away without looking back.

The corridor emptied of all its grey residents except for Casper and Lamp.

“We have to find Briar.” Casper found himself talking to Lamp in a hushed tone. “Something odd’s going on and I’m sure it won’t end well.”

BZZT.

“Oy!” Casper shouted at the ceiling. “I didn’t even do anything.”

BZZT.

“I’m going! I’m going!”

The boys danced after the workers, clutching their bottoms. On the stairwell they found themselves joining an endless tide of grey people, all trudging soundlessly downwards. Every unremarkable corridor led to another unremarkable corridor. Windows disappeared as dank whitewashed stairwells led down and further down, and then up a bit, but then down again. Eventually, the stairs emptied into an enormous room with long steel tables set with hundreds of bowls of porridge.

“Breakfast!” cried Lamp.

BZZT.

“Sorry,” said Lamp.

Following the others’ lead, Casper took his place at a bench in the middle of a long table. Lamp squeezed into a space that didn’t exist between Casper and a podgy bearded man, starting a domino effect that ended up with a little granny falling off the end.

The porridge tasted of metal, and the spoons had holes in them. When Lamp asked for syrup, he received a full five seconds of
BZZT
that left him rolling on the floor giggling and covered in porridge, which was still, sadly, syrup-free.

Lamp was hungry enough to eat the porridge off his own overalls, so he did (as did the chubby bearded man who’d finished his already).

“Somewhere up there, the Blights are laughing into their bacon.”

Lamp’s face darkened. “I want to laugh into some bacon.”

No guards were present in the dining room, but somebody was watching, because every time someone talked, coughed or chewed too loudly their Tickle Tag was set off and they tumbled backwards off their bench howling with laughter between desperate yelps of “No more!” or “Not there!”.

And then a room-wide
BZZT
meant breakfast was over, so the workers jumped up from the benches and marched out towards a far door.

Once again, Casper and Lamp flowed downstream. This time the stairs led up into the light of a cloudy day, across the courtyard and through a large double door on to the factory floor of Warehouse 2.

Inside, the crowd filtered this way and that, taking up their stations at a panel of bleeping buttons or overlooking a conveyor belt.

“We’re not supposed to be here,” cried Casper, but nobody batted an eyelid.

A hush fell as the final few stragglers found their way to a free spot. Casper and Lamp stood idly in the middle of a clangy metal walkway, bewildered.

“I don’t like this place,” said Lamp. “Shall we have breakfast again?”

WAANG, WAANG, WAANG.

All heads whipped towards the main entrance, where three figures strutted inwards flanked by half a dozen burly guards.

“Morning, chaps!” shouted the one in the centre. “Sleep well?”

Casper’s toes curled at the sound of this voice. “Briar…” he muttered.

In step with Briar Blight, smartly dressed in a dapper black suit, were his two female relations: Chrys on his left and Anemonie on his right. Both wore smart white blouses and fitted black jackets, with matching shiny black shoes that clacked threateningly on the metal walkway. They came to a halt a few metres in front of the boys.

“What are we doing here?” demanded Casper. “Is this what counts as a joke in the future?”

Briar’s satisfied smile settled on Casper for only a moment, before flicking over to Lamp. “Three four one two nine, you’re with me. We have something special to show you.”

Lamp pulled a confused face and looked behind him, but nobody was there. “My name’s called Lamp, not numbers.”

A shadow of amusement passed across Anemonie’s lips. “Not no more, it ain’t.” She pointed a sharpened finger at the tag on Lamp’s overalls.

The same number as on Lamp’s door – 34129.

Casper looked down at his own tag – 34128.

Lamp got halfway through explaining that he’d been given the wrong overalls when two bodyguards stomped forward and grabbed an elbow each, lifting him high into the air. He was still explaining when the Blights turned on their heels and strutted off down the walkway.

“Oy! Bring him back!” shouted Casper, but the Blights didn’t seem to hear.