The Great Brain Robbery (13 page)

‘That’s her,’ said Eddie.

‘Really?’ Frankie replied, struggling to believe it. ‘You wouldn’t know it, would you?’

‘Hey look at this,’ said Neet, picking up a large cream-coloured envelope. The envelope had been lying on the bench for so many years it left a dark oblong shadow in the dust.
‘It’s addressed to Marvella. It must be from her uncle.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ said Frankie, taking the envelope and turning it between his fingers. He was about to open it when Eddie swiped it out of his hands.

‘Manners!’ said Eddie, tweaking Frankie’s ear affectionately. ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to read other people’s mail?’

‘Sorry, Eddie.’ Frankie blushed.

‘I’ll make sure it gets to its owner,’ Eddie replied, dusting it off and slipping it into his pocket, ‘Better late than never.’

Alphonsine made up a fire in the ash-filled hearth and, as they huddled round the greenish flames, they plotted their next move. There was no time to lose. Come midnight,
Project
Wishlist
would launch into action. In bedrooms all over the country Mechanimals would be crawling out of their toy boxes, clambering on to their sleeping owners and giving their minds a full
Marvella makeover.

‘We
have
to find a way to sabotage
Project Wishlist
,’ said Frankie. ‘All those logos and jingles need to be deleted before the Mechanimals put them into
children’s heads.’

Everyone nodded in agreement. Yes indeed, that was what had to be done. But who would do it? Who
could
do it? Alphonsine was a spectacular mechanic. She could fix a motorbike or rewire
a radio in no time at all, but neither she nor Eddie knew the first thing about computers.

‘Ah!’ sighed Alphonsine, shaking her head in frustration. ‘I know nussing about these wizzy wotsits. Nussing at all. We never had ze chance to learn these things. We is too
old, Frankie.’

Frankie and Neet looked at each other in dismay. They had computer classes once a week, but neither of them was very talented. Neet got decent scores on
Space Invaders
, but that
wasn’t the same as knowing how to program a computer. The technology that Dr Gore was using to transform children’s memories was extremely complicated. Only an expert, a genius in fact,
would be able to hack into Gore’s systems and reverse all the damage being done.

‘We need Wes!’ Neet cried, stamping her foot in frustration. Wes was a total whizz with computers. There was nothing he didn’t know about gigabytes, cookies, firewalls, widgets
and dongles. Frankie’s head hurt just thinking about what all those words might mean, but Wes was a fearless cyber-explorer. No computer program could outsmart him. But where
was
Wes?

Suddenly, Frankie had a brainwave.

‘Do you still have that Christmas card, Neet?’ he asked. ‘The one Wes sent us.’ Neet dug into her pocket and handed it to Frankie.

‘It’s not much use.’ She shrugged. ‘There’s no return address.’

‘I know,’ said Frankie. ‘But what if he is trying to tell us something? Look . . .’ Frankie pointed to the picture on the front of the card. It showed Santa Claus and his
elves loading up the sleigh.

‘Elves!’ Neet exclaimed. ‘Like that list we found in the office. The one with Wes’s name on it.’

‘Exactly.’ Frankie opened the card and reread Wes’s message. It was full of boring chit-chat about the weather – not like Wes at all.

‘And all this stuff about the rain,’ said Frankie. ‘Maybe he’s writing in code or something. He might be trying to tell us where he is.’

Eddie sat up in his chair and pointed at the card. ‘If that’s a code,’ he said, ‘then my Alphonsine will crack it. She’ll crack a code faster than you can crack an
egg, isn’t that right, Alfie?’ Alphonsine blushed a deep shade of crimson, but she didn’t deny it.

Everyone held their breath as Alphonsine swivelled her glass eye firmly into place and set to work on Wes’s message. She turned the letters this way and that, she read it backwards in the
mirror, she applied complicated mathematical formulae and covered sheet upon sheet of paper with elaborate diagrams. But, as the minutes slipped by, she didn’t seem to be making progress.

‘Ach!’ she puffed. ‘I have never seen such a brain-bender!’

‘A brain-teaser,’ Eddie corrected her.

‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Alphonsine. ‘Mind-teaser, brain-bender – my head is as scrambled as a breakfast!’

Frankie cast a worried glance at the old cuckoo clock above the fireplace – it was already past six. They all set their minds to the task. Neet got Frankie to read it out backwards, Eddie
pretended it was a big crossword puzzle, and Colette sniffed at the letters with a frown of deep concentration, but not one of them could extract any sense from Wes’s words. The sun had set
hours ago and the team was getting desperate. The piles of screwed-up paper were mounting higher and higher, until all of a sudden . . .

C
uckoo!
Midnight struck. Colette lifted her snout in the air and howled. They were too late.

The next morning the nation’s children woke up feeling ever so slightly out of sorts. They had a strange swilling feeling in their bellies and felt as if their heads had
been stuffed with cotton-wool. After a few fuzzy moments, they rubbed the sleep from their eyes, shuffled off to the bathroom to brush their teeth and started to feel normal again. However, there
was nothing in the least bit normal about that particular December morning. Nothing normal at all.

At first, the children went about their usual business. They ate their Weetabix, trudged off to school, giggled at a cheeky drawing of the teacher and swapped stickers. But before too long, the
inevitable occurred. For some it happened when they were watching telly. For others it happened while they were listening to the radio, or staring out of the car window on their way to football
practice. But, one way or the other, it happened. Sooner or later, every child in the country stumbled across an advertisment for Marvella Brand’s Happyland and, at that moment, it was if an
enormous Christmas cracker went off inside their brains.

Let me tell you what it felt like. Think about how you feel when you are starving hungry. Your belly starts to rumble, you can’t think of anything else and you keep on moaning at your mum
and dad until dinner is on the table. Well it was just like that, only children weren’t desperate to be fed, they were desperate to get to the toyshop. As soon as a child saw a Marvella
poster on a billboard, or heard Teddy Manywishes sing the Marvella song, they were gripped by an urgent desire for toys, toys and more toys. Not any old toys, mind you. It had to be Marvella toys
– and right that very instant! There was no wrapping of presents or putting them under the tree or waiting till Christmas Day. No. The children had to have toys immediately and they were
doing everything in their power to get them. From the peaks of the Scottish highlands to the shores of the Cornish coast a single cry could be heard, ‘Muuuuuuum! Daaaaaaaad!
Pleeeeeeeease!’

The grown-ups of the land couldn’t work out what had happened. They had never known a craze like it. In fact it was far too crazy for a craze. The nation’s children had gone
completely and utterly bonkers. Teachers couldn’t get them to sit still in lessons, babysitters couldn’t get them to bed, and parents looked on in despair as their children screeched
and squawked like hungry chicks. They were no longer interested in books, or football, or dance classes. They didn’t talk about their friends or films or the big match on Saturday. All they
thought about was Marvella Brand’s Happyland. It was as if their whole world had shrunk to one long tunnel with a pair of golden doors at the end of it.

Right across the country, Marvella stores witnessed the most extraordinary scenes. So many children were hammering and howling at their windows that the shops were opening hours before time, and
the moment the doors gave way, there was complete and utter pandemonium. Children stampeded into the shop like a herd of raging buffalo, then charged round the store seizing everything in sight.
And hot on the heels of every child was an anxious parent wondering how they could possibly afford to buy everything their little angel was demanding. Within minutes, rows had broken out across the
land. Children were sobbing, wailing and stamping their feet, parents were digging to the bottom of their purses or dragging their children outside for a good telling-off, and all the time the cash
registers were ringing, ringing, ringing. Marvella’s had never sold so much, so fast, and, as stocks of favourite toys ran low, tempers began to fray. Brothers and sisters squabbled over
their presents, children fell out over a last Pocket Princess or Gotcha Goo-Machine, and desperate parents started swiping toys out of other people’s trolleys the moment their backs were
turned.

Never had the nation’s children been so utterly miserable. But not everybody was miserable. No, some people were not miserable at all. In a sugar-pink house on top of a hill a party was in
full swing. And what a party! There were clowns, puppet shows, a bouncy castle, party-poppers – it was every child’s dream! Except there was not a single child in sight. Only a crowd of
grinning grown-ups and, at the centre of it all, in a glittering tiara, the party-princess herself – Marvella Brand.

Marvella tinkled on the edge of her glass with her fairy wand. ‘Friends!’ she chirruped. ‘A toast to our success!’ The party guests raised their glasses. ‘I always
knew that children were the most excellent customers,’ she smiled, a frosty hardness round the edge of her lips. ‘They truly are the most ravenous little monsters, the most grasping
little gremlins.’ The guests shifted uneasily at these cruel words. ‘Yes indeed,’ Marvella continued, her voice tart with bitterness, ‘every single one of them is nothing
but a bottomless pit of greed!’ Marvella paused for breath and saw that her guests were looking extremely uncomfortable. It was time to turn back on the charm. She smiled sweetly.
‘Which is excellent news for us, of course!’ she giggled. The guests chuckled in relief. She was only joking. Wasn’t she? ‘To children!’ Marvella cried, raising a
goblet of pink lemonade high in the air.

‘To children!’ the guests echoed back.

‘And to the person who has helped the little rascals reach their full potential – to the brainbox of the century, Dr Calus Gore.’

The audience whooped and cheered, but the brainbox of the century wasn’t listening. He was having far too much fun on the bouncy castle.

‘Happy Christmas to me! Happy Christmas to me!’ he chuckled as he somersaulted through the air. Watching all those glassy-eyed children marching to the shops had been enormous fun.
Indeed, Dr Gore hadn’t had so much fun since the time he fried a column of ants under a magnifying glass.
So why stop at Britain?
he thought to himself. With this kind of success he
could conquer Europe, Asia, America, the world! He felt unstoppable, all-powerful, like an evil Santa Claus.

‘He sees you when you’re sleeping!’ he sang gleefully to himself. ‘He knows when you’re awake!’ He turned a full backflip then belted out the chorus.
‘CALUS GORE is coming to town!’ he sang. ‘CALUS GORE is coming to town! CA-LUS-GORE-IS-COM-ING-TO-TOOOOWN!’ And this time no twerpy little school kids were going to stop
him.