Dragons at Crumbling Castle Read online

  The bus rolled to a stop in the long grass and Driver Grind looked in her mirror. In the road behind them a knight in black armour was sprawling in the dust, while men-at-arms looked at the bus in astonishment and a very shaken horse galloped away. There was a girl with the men, and when she saw the bus she broke away and leaped onto the platform.

  ‘Save me from Baron Bonebuster!’ she cried, and threw her arms around Ravi Singh’s neck. He grabbed the bell rope and the bus roared off.

  ‘I am the Lady Kathleen,’ said the girl. ‘Are you from the king? I thought you’d never come.’

  ‘Er – yes, we’re from the king,’ said Ravi cautiously. ‘Um – which king?’

  ‘Arthur, of course.’

  They all looked at each other.

  Meanwhile the knights were galloping after the bus, and arrows rattled off the rear destination board – Inspector Norris got one through his hat. He’d always fancied himself as a knight in shining armour, but now he wasn’t so sure. Lady Kathleen sat quite unconcerned.

  ‘Merlin sent us,’ said Ravi, who thought an explanation was necessary. ‘He created this moving castle by magic.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ said Lady Kathleen. ‘This is a number 59A from East Slate.’ Then she told them how she used to be a conductress on a 35 Relief bus and one day when they were crossing Even Moor there had been a funny noise, and the bus had ended up in King Arthur’s summer castle at East Slate. That had been a year ago.

  ‘What happened to your bus then?’ asked Conductor Bream.

  ‘I don’t know. I got off, and suddenly it was gone.’

  ‘What happens when the bus runs out of diesel?’

  ‘It stops wherever it is.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Ravi. ‘We’ve only got a couple of gallons left!’

  Whup! Hiss! An arrow had punctured the back tyre of the bus.

  ‘And the nearest garage is a thousand years away!’ moaned Driver Grind.

  The black knights galloped up and surrounded the bus. Soon the crew were tied up to the handrails and Baron Bonebuster’s men were towing the machine. Lady Kathleen was strapped onto a horse, and the baron led them in triumph back to his castle. He was surprised at the bus, but not frightened, because in those days magic happened all the time.

  ‘Some of Merlin’s work, I’ll be bound,’ he said to himself.

  He led them to a black stone castle high on a cliff, and the four bus crew shivered as the heavy portcullis was lowered behind them. They were led into the great hall of the castle.

  ‘Mrs Grind,’ whispered Ravi. ‘If the bus starts time-travelling again and we’re not on it, we’ll be stuck here! But it won’t go, will it, with a puncture? If we escape, can you change the wheel?’

  ‘Baron Bonebuster is King Arthur’s sworn enemy,’ whispered Lady Kathleen. ‘If we don’t get out of here, we’re worse than dead.’

  ‘Enough of that, you five!’ roared the baron, sitting on his throne. ‘Now, you tell me why Merlin sent you out in this cast-iron dragon thing.’

  ‘It’s a bus,’ said Ravi. ‘It’s used for carrying people from place to place.’ He watched the baron closely.

  ‘Like soldiers, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Just let me go free and I’ll show you,’ said Ravi.

  He was cut loose and led down to the courtyard, where the bus stood. Knights were standing around it, looking puzzled, and Ravi climbed into the driver’s seat. He drove it round and round the courtyard, bumping along on the flat tyre while Baron Bonebuster had the time of his life ringing the bell.

  Then Ravi slammed all the brakes on, just like Driver Grind used to. Clang! Dong! He grinned as all the knights fell over one another. Then he dashed up to the hall, set the others free and they raced back to the bus. The baron’s men were all dazed and shaken, and it didn’t take long to push them off the platform. Already – despite the flat tyre – the bus was beginning to vibrate.

  The mists swirled around it again . . .

  When they cleared, the bus was standing on a small grassy hill overlooking a lake. There was a smell of smoke, and on the horizon a line of volcanoes grumbled to themselves. Forests of giant ferns waved in the breeze.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about you lot, but I’m going to walk down to the lake,’ said Ravi, and he jumped off. The rest followed, except for Erica Grind, who stayed behind to mend the tyre.

  The fern forest reminded Inspector Norris of a picture he had seen when he was at school but he couldn’t place it. Big shining dragonflies skimmed over the lake.

  ‘I wonder where this is,’ he said.

  ‘I wonder when this is,’ said Ravi.

  Oh dear, oh dear, thought Conductor Bream, who was watching a dinosaur heave itself out of the lake.

  The dinosaur splashed its way to the shore and peered down at the four time-travellers.

  ‘It looks like one of the herbivorous variety,’ said Ravi. ‘It only eats water plants.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ asked Bream nervously.

  ‘No,’ said Ravi. ‘Shall we run away?’

  They backed away into the fern forests again, and the dinosaur watched them go with a bored expression.

  ‘So we’re that far back,’ muttered Ravi. ‘Well, I hope we don’t meet a Tyrannosaurus Rex – that’s all teeth. I think that one was a diplodocus, and they’re harmless enough. But I once had a picture book about prehistoric monsters and I think most of them are dangerous.’

  ‘Is there anything else we need worry about?’ asked Kathleen.

  ‘Bottomless swamps, poisonous insects, volcanoes, hot springs, earthquakes and thunderstorms,’ said Ravi. ‘Shall I say any more?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Conductor Bream.

  They reached the bus, where Driver Grind was mending the back tyre. ‘The hole is rather large,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can repair it. And since it was a pretty bumpy ride from King Arthur’s time, I don’t think the bus will stand another journey.’

  ‘Do you mean we’re marooned!’ said everyone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, we might as well have something to eat,’ said Kathleen, looking up at the rack where four lunchboxes were stowed.

  So they sat on the platform while Ravi told them all he knew about prehistoric times.

  ‘Are there any people?’ asked Erica, after a while.

  ‘Not for millions of years,’ said Ravi.

  ‘Oh. Only I was watching that smoke over there. It doesn’t look like a volcano.’

  They all looked. Several miles away a thin column of smoke was rising above the ferns. Other people? It might be!

  ‘Grab some weapons!’ said Ravi. ‘And follow me!’

  Armed with spanners and bits of railing from the bus, the five of them ran down the hill and into the forest. It was slow going, since the ground between was choked with the ancestors of weeds and the grandfathers of all stinging nettles.

  ‘They can’t be cavemen,’ puffed Ravi. ‘Perhaps they are more time-travellers!’

  ‘I’ll just nip up this fern and have a look,’ said Inspector Norris. The rest stood waiting for him while the minutes ticked by.

  ‘Inspector?’ said Ravi. There was no answer, but something rustled high above them. Something was creeping away.

  ‘Mr Bream,’ said Ravi. ‘You and the others go on ahead.’ He shinned up into the fern before they could protest. It was very quiet in the ferns, but out of the corner of his eye he saw a brown shape shuffling away from branch to branch. Grasping his spanner, he followed it. What had happened to the inspector?

  Large blue and green dragonflies zoomed around as Ravi tried to keep the brown shape in view. Then something furry dropped onto his shoulders and hit him on the head.

  When Ravi came to he found he was tied up with creepers. Inspector Norris sat next to him, on a wide branch high above the ground.

  Opposite them sat a large gorilla-man with Inspector Norris’s cap on. It had a knobbly club in one hand.

>   ‘Thank goodness you’ve woken up,’ whispered the inspector. ‘I thought these brutes were going to eat us! What’s happened to the others?’

  ‘They’ve got away, I hope. Which is what we’ve got to do.’ Ravi looked at the ape man; there were others too – a whole tribe of them, in the surrounding trees. He tugged at the creepers. They didn’t budge.

  Then the leaves by his ear parted and an unfamiliar voice hissed, ‘Don’t look surprised and do as I tell you.’ There was a soft snick! as the creepers were cut.

  ‘Right,’ said the voice, ‘now jump.’

  Ravi and Inspector Norris threw themselves off the branch and scrambled down the fern. Someone dropped down behind them, and shouted out for them to follow him.

  ‘Crikey, we thought no one would ever turn up,’ said the stranger as they ran. ‘I’m Arnold Primley, late of the East Slate Sanitation Department. One moment we were going across Even Moor – the next we were in the middle of the Wars of the Roses!’

  ‘We had Roman soldiers and King Arthur’s knights,’ puffed Ravi. ‘I suppose it was your smoke we saw?’

  The binman told them that his waste collection lorry had landed in the forest two months before, and then it had run out of petrol.

  They came to the lorry, which by now was overgrown, in a forest clearing. Two more council binmen and the rest of the bus crew were there with Kathleen. Ravi had to think fast.

  ‘Take a wheel off the lorry – quick!’ he said. The ape men were almost upon them when they made a dash for the bus, rolling one of the wheels along with them.

  They were struggling through the mud by the lake when the dinosaur shuffled out of the trees. It took no notice of them, but when it saw the ape men it roared angrily.

  It was the work of a moment to bolt the new wheel onto the bus, pile in and start the engine. The battle between the dinosaur and the ape men was just getting interesting when the bus disappeared.

  Driver Erica Grind drove like mad. The time mist didn’t come this time, and instead they were able to watch the land change below them. The forest was whisked away like a puff of wind, a great sheet of ice came and went three times, hills rose and fell, then the stream that had fed the lake became a river along which houses appeared. And all the time the sun went round and round the sky like a rocket, days and nights flickering like an old film.

  Soon the outline of East Slate appeared, and there was only a few hundred years to go.

  Actually, Driver Grind (who by now was getting expert at this sort of thing) stopped the bus at a quarter to four in the afternoon they had started off from and drove into East Slate only twenty-five minutes late, which was not bad.

  ‘You’re twenty-five minutes late,’ said the transport controller, coming out of his office. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well,’ said Ravi, and then thought how ridiculous the truth would sound. ‘We had a puncture.’

  fn1When this story was written, a British bus had a conductor to take your money and – if you were lucky – help you get off at the right stop. Or the wrong one, if you were rude to him or her.

  THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN

  There was once a young man called Captain the Honourable Sir Herbert Stephen Ernest Boring-Tristram-Boring, who was known to his friends as Bill and was very rich indeed. He was also very bored with living in London.

  One day a man knocked at his door, pushed past Bill’s butler and said, ‘Are you Captain the Honourable Sir, and so on?’

  ‘That’s me!’ said Bill.

  ‘Well, I’m Alfred Tence, the famous explorer,’ said the visitor, brushing a heap of fifty-pound notes off a chair and sitting down.

  ‘Not the man who walked up the Amazon?’

  ‘I am that man,’ said Tence modestly.

  ‘Not the man who punted from Brighton to Bombay in the bath?’

  ‘I am that man,’ said Tence, swelling with pride.

  ‘The man who sailed across the Pacific on a raft made from mahogany and shoelaces, and discovered the lost islands of Odium?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t that man, actually,’ said Tence, deflating suddenly. ‘That was another man. Anyway, look at this.’ He whipped out his wallet and showed Bill a blurred photograph of a white blob in a snowstorm. ‘Know what that is?’ he asked. ‘That’s an Abominable Snowman! If I had twenty thousand pounds I could go and capture it,’ he added, looking sharply at Bill.

  Bill signalled to the butler. ‘Give this gentleman twenty thousand pounds from the jar in the hall,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent!’ cried Tence. ‘You must come, of course. We start tomorrow, at dawn.’

  ‘Where to? Mount Everest?’

  ‘Nonsense! That’s like Disney World these days – the Snowmen are only found on Ben Drumlin. That’s a real mountain for you. It’s in Chilistan. I must rush, I’ve got things to do.’

  Bill watched him go. ‘What a strange man, Twist,’ he said to his butler. ‘But a genius when it comes to exploring, of course. I wonder where he got that photo?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, sir. Shall I pack?’

  ‘Yes, Twist. I think something warm is called for – hot-water bottles, woolly vests and so forth. Chuck a lot of money into a suitcase too.’

  They had locked up the house and were waiting on the step when Tence turned up next morning, wearing a blue anorak and a hat with a bobble on it. He was followed by a small Chilistanian man – his guide and interpreter – pulling a suitcase along behind him. There was a label on the suitcase with his name on it, but his name was so long that the label wrapped round and round the suitcase like a long scarf.fn1 There were also a lot of newspapermen, asking questions all at once and taking photographs while they ran.

  Tence waved them aside and shouted at Bill: ‘Just get a taxi, my boy!’

  Bill stepped into the road and waved his umbrella.

  ‘Where to, guv?’ said the taxi man, as the vehicle pulled up.

  ‘Chilistan, please.’

  The taxi man looked puzzled. ‘Is that anywhere near Shepherd’s Bush?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s about six thousand miles away. Here’s five thousand pounds to start with,’ said Bill.

  The taxi man paled when he saw all that money. ‘Right-ho, then,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t go by taxi all the way to Chilistan!’ cried Tence. ‘There’s sea in the way!’

  Bill leaned forward and tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder. ‘I say, old chap,’ he said, ‘have you got a passport?’

  ‘Yes, guv. I got it when we went to the Costa Lotta for our holidays last year,’ said the taxi driver.

  Bill told him to fetch it, so they drove round to the taxi driver’s house, which was No. 8 Tramway Place, London NW3. He went inside, and reappeared not long afterwards followed by a small fat woman in a brown coat and a velvet hat stuck full of hatpins. She carried two suitcases.

  ‘It’s me missus, guv!’ said the taxi driver sadly. ‘She says she’s not going to have me gallivanting about abroad without her to keep an eye on me.’

  ‘Sensible woman!’ said Bill. ‘What is your name, madam?’

  ‘Agnes Glupp,’ she said, and curtseyed, because she knew a gentleman when she saw one.

  ‘Twist, just shove the lady’s luggage on the roof. Get in, madam. Are you a good cook? Splendid! I can’t boil an egg myself.’

  ‘This is all wrong!’ cried Tence, almost in tears. ‘This isn’t the proper way to go exploring! You can’t just take someone’s wife along! Madam, there are Abominable Snowmen, and man-eating plants, and dangerous mountains and things like that where we’re going!’

  Mrs Glupp just smiled absent-mindedly.

  Mr Glupp drove down to Dover, and before long they were bowling through France.

  ‘Head south,’ said Bill. ‘Down to the Costa Lotta – it’s sunny there.’

  They drove for ages through cabbage fields. When they reached the Costa Lotta, it was all blue sea, blue sky and rich people in swimsuits.

  ‘Oo-er, I remember this,’ sa
id Mrs Glupp.

  Bill bought a small villa for them to stay at and then they all went down to the beach, where Mr and Mrs Glupp paddled with their shoes tied together round their necks – Mr Glupp even took his coat off. Tence, of course, was still wearing his fleecy-lined explorer’s clothes, which made people stare.

  Twist the butler bought himself a copy of The Times, his favourite newspaper, and settled down to read it, while Tence’s Chilistanian guide said he wanted to stay with the taxi, where he had made himself a home amongst the suitcases.

  ‘I say, sir,’ said Twist suddenly. ‘It says here that a party of Arbrovian gentlemen are climbing Ben Drumlin to look for the Abominable Snowman. I thought we were.’

  Tence almost exploded. ‘They’ll get there before us! All my work is in ruins!’

  ‘Let me see that paper!’ said Bill. ‘Hmm . . . It says here that those Arbrovians have just set out for Chilistan. I reckon we could get there before them. Stop crying, Tence. Twist, find me a telephone.’

  A moment later he was back, and ordered everyone to pile into the taxi.

  ‘Drive to Nasti airport, runway three,’ he said to Mr Glupp.

  Fifteen minutes later they were driving up a ramp and through the giant doors of a cargo plane. The propellers were already spinning.

  ‘How did you arrange this?’ gasped Tence.

  ‘I bought it,’ said Bill. ‘That’s the best of being a multi-millionaire – you don’t have to hang about.’

  ‘Oo-er, I’ve never been up in the air before,’ said Mrs Glupp. She sat down and put her hat-pinned hat down on the table. Except that it wasn’t a table. It was the control panel, and she accidentally moved a switch.

  ‘We appear to be moving, sir,’ said Twist the butler. ‘And sir, there is a uniformed gentleman running along behind us shouting, “Oi,” sir. I venture to suggest that he is the pilot, sir.’

  The plane trundled along the runway, getting up speed. The wall at the edge of the airfield was getting very near.

  ‘Has anyone got any suggestions?’ said Tence.