The Great Brain Robbery (7 page)

Frankie pulled up his hood to shield his face from the roving mechanical eyes and made a dash for the bottom of the stairway. His heart was pounding like a locomotive as he cupped his hands
around his face and peered through the ground-floor window. Through the smoky glass, Frankie made out a series of flickering television monitors displaying images from security cameras inside the
store. He felt a sudden jolt of sadness as he recognised his classmates on the monitors. There was Dave and Charlie playing in the Super-Spy section. And there was Joseph and Alice trying out the
rocket-propelled rollerskates. The images changed and Frankie recognised Neet. She was standing on her own by the Mechanimals, quietly looking through some accessories. Frankie sighed. He still
wished he could join them, but there wasn’t much time and he needed to do some proper snooping.

He kept moving up the stairs. The blinds of the first and second floors were shut tight, blocking his view. As he pressed his face against the glass of the third-floor window he began to wonder
whether he should turn back and look for another way. But no, this time he was in luck. The window stood ajar and the blinds were tilted slightly, allowing Frankie to see through a narrow crack. On
the other side of the glass was an enormous office. People in smart suits swarmed about like ants in a nest, shouting down their phones or tapping furiously at keyboards. Frankie could make out a
few words here and there over the general hubbub. ‘I want this done yesterday!’ yelled a man with a face like a beetroot.

‘Failure is not an option!’ shouted another.

Frankie pulled away from the window as a woman with a tightly-scraped bun glided dangerously close. She was speaking to a younger, bewildered-looking colleague. ‘They may be
children,’ she sneered, ‘but they are also customers. Don’t forget that.’ She then led her colleague over to a wall covered with charts and diagrams and pointed to one that
appeared to show a cross-section of a child’s brain. Printed above it was a single question: ‘
What do children want?
’ Frankie felt confused. It all seemed so different
from the magical world of Marvella’s. Where were the smiling faces and merry tunes? He wanted to get the jiminy out of there. But there was one more floor to see.

Frankie took a deep breath and climbed the final flight of stairs right to the top of the building. It was a long way up and he was starting to feel slightly queasy. As he neared the top floor
he saw that the roof was sprouting with twitching antennae and swivelling satellite dishes and he began to feel a heavy pulsing in his temples, like he did whenever a storm was gathering. Frankie
approached the windows and squinted through the dark glass. At first he thought he had stumbled across another security office. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of TV monitors flickered on the high walls.
But there were no security guards. Instead, stern-looking men and women, each wearing a large set of headphones, were watching the screens through narrowed eyes and pushing buttons on an enormous
control panel. It was an enormous computer laboratory but far more high-tech than anything he had ever seen. Frankie strained his eyes to try to make sense of the rapidly-moving images on the
screens.

One thing was for sure, these images had not been filmed by security cameras. The monitors displayed scenes that looked as if they had been taken from family movies or photo albums. There were
holidays, birthday parties and days at the beach but there were also more everyday images. There was a child with grazed knees being comforted by his dad, and another in which two small girls were
reading comics and rolling around in fits of giggles. All of these scenes seemed to give off a warm, magical glow. But the people in the headphones didn’t seem to notice. They just rewound
and replayed the tapes, squinting at the children on the monitors as if they were tadpoles in a jar. But some of the monitors showed other things. Things that made Frankie gulp with sadness or
sweat with fright. There were scenes of a small boy being told off for something he hadn’t done, and a sequence in which a girl wandered across a park at twilight, lost and howling with
terror.

Then, all of a sudden, Frankie saw something that shook him rigid. On one screen, there for everyone to see, was a ten-year-old boy sitting alone on a bench as the other children played together
at the end of the playground. Frankie felt as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs. His head was pounding and he felt the same swilling, soupy feeling in his stomach that he had felt the
night before. He lurched away from the glass and staggered down the fire escape as fast as he could.

He found Alphonsine rummaging headfirst in a huge bin, tossing promising-looking scraps to Colette.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Frankie. ‘Quickly.’

‘What is it?’ said Alphonsine, pulling a bit of cabbage out of her hair. ‘What did you find out?’

Frankie took a deep breath. ‘I think I know what’s wrong with my Mechanimal.’

Neet Banerjee sat on her own on the bus back from Marvella’s. Since she’d come back to school her old friends Millie and Miranda weren’t talking to her. They
had said that if she wanted to stay in their
Best Friends Forever Club
then she’d have to stop hanging out with that loser Frankie, at which point Neet had told them that she
didn’t give a monkeynut about their club, and that was the end of that. She didn’t regret it for a second, but all the same it was horrid to be left out.

To cheer herself up, Neet rummaged through the loot in her goody-bag. There was an
I Love Marvella’s
T-shirt and an
I Love Marvella’s
badge, but best of all there
was a Gadget the Rabbit schoolbag that she had picked out especially for Frankie. It had a pair of shiny rabbit ears sticking out of the top and a billion different pockets to keep all your gadgets
and gizmos in. As Neet was inspecting the different zips and flaps she suddenly saw something that didn’t look like it was supposed to be there. Sticking out of one of the inside pockets was
a slip of creased paper. Neet pulled it out and carefully unfolded it. It was a message. Neet smoothed out the creases so that she could see it clearly. The words were written in a large spidery
scrawl as if the writer had been in a terrible hurry. Suddenly, she drew a sharp gasp. She knew that handwriting.

As soon as the bus pulled over, Neet jumped out, ran as fast as she could to Frankie’s house and hammered on the door

‘Frankie,’ she blurted, waving the note in the air, ‘I found this! I think Wes wrote it! Something’s wrong!’ Frankie took the note and read the two trembling words
out loud: ‘
HELP US!
’

‘Good grief!’ said Frankie. ‘I think you’re right. It really does look like Wes’s writing. Nobody else joins up their letters like that.’ Alphonsine took the
note and turned it between her fingers.

‘Most fishy,’ she mumbled. ‘There is something most stinky going on at Marvella’s, my friends, no doubts about it.’ Eddie nodded in agreement as Colette growled
softly.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Neet. ‘What’s going on?’

They gathered round the kitchen table and Frankie described all the strange things that he had seen through the windows of Marvella’s – the diagram of the child’s brain, the
swivelling satellite dishes and, strangest of all, the spooky images in the computer lab.

‘It was
me
, Neet,’ he whispered. ‘It was me, sitting on my own in the playground. It was like they sucked the thoughts right out of my brain.’

‘But that is exactly what they did!’ said Alphonsine with certainty. ‘Watch this.’ Alphonsine whipped her screwdriver out of her apron pocket, seized Frankie’s
Gadget the Rabbit and set about unscrewing the panel at the back of the toy’s head. ‘Look!’ said Alphonsine, pointing at the complicated circuitry inside. ‘This is not a
toy. This is a mind-sweeper!’ Alphonsine fished about in the back of Gadget’s head with a pair of tweezers and pulled out what looked like a miniature crystal ball. ‘You see this
little wotsit here . . .’ Neet nodded. ‘. . . It is for snitching your thoughts, dreams and memories, everything that you is keeping between your ears!’

Neet gulped and examined the tiny crystal ball, which looked as if it were filled with trapped lightning.

‘Our Mechanimals have been reading our minds in our sleep,’ Frankie explained, peering at the long, flexing sparks that clawed the glass like electrical fingers. ‘They have
been burgling our brains, collecting all our thoughts then beaming them back to the computer lab at Marvella’s.’

‘But why would they do that?’ She frowned. ‘And how is Wes mixed up in all of this? Poor Wes! What’s happened to him?’

‘
That
, my friends,’ said Alphonsine, scratching her nose in thought, ‘is what we must be finding out.’

Frankie and Neet watched from a distance as Lady Buntley-Bottom, the Mayoress, declared Marvella Brand’s Happyland officially open. No sooner had she snipped the ribbon
than hordes of children and parents stampeded through the golden doors like buffalo into a waterhole.

‘Right,’ said Frankie, pulling up his hood, ‘we need to go in and have a proper snoop round. Find out what we can. Anything at all that might tell us what’s going on.
Anything that could help us find Wes.’

‘Got it,’ Neet replied. ‘You take the ground floor, I’ll go upstairs. Ready?’ The two friends took a deep breath, then plunged into the crowds.

The throng of people inside the shop was so dense that Frankie could hardly breathe. The crowd pushed him this way and that as children and parents scrambled to get their hands on the most
popular toys. Over the blaring of the loudspeakers and the ringing of the tills rose shrieks of excitement, but also howls of disappointment as the most-wanted toys sold out.

‘They’ll have some more in next week,’ said one tired-looking mum trying to calm down a damp-faced little girl. ‘We’ll come back then.’ But the girl
didn’t stop bawling. A whole week! A week was forever!

Frankie worked his way towards the edge of the store where the crowds were a little thinner so that he could get a proper view of the inside of the store. Frankie gasped. The inside was even
more spectacular than the outside. The high ceilings left space for dozens of remote-control birds, helicopters and rockets zipping and dipping high over his head. But the Mechanimals were, of
course, the star attraction. A giant Sparky the Squirrel, three times Frankie’s height, swivelled forward, blinking its eyes, and making a mechanical chuckling noise, while an enormous
Gigawatt plodded slowly through the centre of the store, roaring and swishing its tail.