Читать книгу Mr Humperdinck's Mysterious Manuscript - Wynand Louw - Страница 8

The Inner Sanctum

Pete stormed into the flat at twenty-three minutes past nine. Twenty-three minutes late. Twenty-three minutes of trouble. He dreaded facing his father.

Peter Smith was sitting at the table, waiting. So were Mrs Burton, their neighbour from across the landing, and Nathaniel the Artist, and Mr Jones, who lived on the second floor, with his dog Mangler.

And Sandra. She was actually Her Royal Highness Cassandra, Queen of Fairy and Empress of the Lost Islands and the Ethereal Planes, but of course Pete’s dad did not know that. Very few adults believed in such nonsense. She was also Pete’s fairy godmother, but Pete would rather die rather than admit to anyone that he had such a thing as a fairy godmother.

Pete greeted everybody with a nod. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, trying his best to look very, very sorry.

His father shrugged. “It’s the weekend. I’ll let you get away with it this time.” He opened a tin to reveal a freshly baked chocolate cake. Then he got up and fetched a bottle of cool drink from the fridge. “We have something to celebrate,” he said, smiling.

“Wow! Where did you get this?” Feasts like this had never happened in their home before.

“Mrs Burton baked it for us.” Smith nodded at the old lady with the bun of blue-grey hair and the red jersey.

She blushed slightly, and passed the knife and some plates. “We’d like to know what the occasion is.”

Pete could not take his eyes off the cake. “Yeah!”

Smith grinned. “Number one: Today, I’ve been dry for exactly four months!”

“Hooray!” Pete whistled and everybody clapped their hands. “And number two?”

“I have been …” Smith paused dramatically, and then said with glee, “… offered a job!”

Pete thought his chest would explode. He whooped and cheered and jumped up and down on the bed, then opened the window and shouted at the gargoyle, “Did you hear that, Larry? DAD’S GETTING A JOB!”

And Larry Rockbottom said, “Congratulations!” (Of course, Pete and Sandra were the only ones to hear him.) Pete ran over to the kitchen sink and shouted down the drain, “DAD’S GETTING A JOB!”

Peter Smith laughed as his son grabbed him and they did a little dance around the flat, bumping into their startled neighbours.

When he had calmed down a bit, Pete asked, “What’s the job? Are you going to be a lawyer again?”

“Legal consultant at the Department of Welfare’s law clinic for the poor. If you’re in trouble and can’t afford a lawyer, you come to me.” He passed slices of cake around. “Sandra helped me get the job.”

Mr Jones whistled. “That’s excellent! We could’ve used someone like that when they wanted to throw us out of the building.”

“Well,” said Smith, pulling himself up to his full height and raising his glass of cool drink, “from now on, you have Peter Smith on your side.”

Nathaniel the Artist cleared his throat. “I have this small problem with the gallery that sold my piece Contemplating my Big Toe …”

Smith threw his arms triumphantly in the air. “You see? I’m already in business!”

At exactly one o’clock on Sunday morning the gargoyle Larry Rockbottom tapped on the window. Pete was still awake. He glanced at his father where he lay in the double bed in the corner. Yes, he was definitely asleep. Pete got up, took his canvas schoolbag and quietly opened the window. Then he climbed out onto the ledge. The window to the third-floor landing was only a few metres to the right. He had opened it earlier that evening. Once on the landing he quickly changed from his pyjamas into the clothes in the schoolbag. He stuffed his pyjamas in the bag and dropped it in a corner. According to his watch, he had thirty minutes to get to the school to meet Freddy. He had to run.

Pete stifled a scream as he fell on the hard asphalt next to the red brick wall that surrounded the dark schoolyard. Instead he just groaned and nursed his sore knee.

“You should’ve made sure that the rope was long enough,” he hissed at Freddy, who sat next to him in the shadows, also slightly injured.

“Or we could’ve entered through the main gate,” said Freddy. “But that wouldn’t have been half as much fun.”

Pete wanted to start an argument, but Freddy grabbed his sleeve. He pointed to the corner of the school building.

Someone was walking towards them.

“Rose …” whispered Pete. He could see the pale face of the school caretaker in the light of the streetlamps outside the schoolyard. Deep shadows hid her hollow eyes.

He held his breath. For a moment he was sure that they would be caught, but she stopped a few paces from them, fumbled in her pocket and lit a cigarette. After a very long time she finally turned and her wiry frame seemed to float back to the door of her room under the school hall.

He sighed with relief, and Freddy whispered, “They say she sleeps in a coffin.”

Pete glanced at his friend, but could not bring himself to ask for details. Instead he stalked to the library window, which they had left open the previous afternoon.

The school corridors were cold and spooky in the pale light that shone through the windows. Every breath, every careful footstep, echoed in the empty halls, loud enough to wake the dead. Or Rose for that matter. Pete knew the territory well. He took the shortest route to the offices. In the waiting area at the entrance to the offices, he stopped.

“You’re sure it’ll work?” he whispered. They had sprayed the lens of the motion sensor with white paint on Friday morning.

Freddy nodded. He walked across the room to the receptionist’s desk. “Dictaphone!” he commanded, and held out his hand.

Pete waited for the alarm to go off. When nothing happened, he said, “I don’t have it.”

Freddy seemed to panic. “We need that dictaphone! When the alarm goes off, the security company will phone in. We need to …”

“I told you I couldn’t get one! There was an explosion in the bicycle shop!”

“But the other motion sensors are all active.” Freddy thought for a moment. Then he rummaged through the drawers. When he found nothing, he grabbed a computer’s mouse. The screen flickered to life, and a password window popped up. He typed a few words and the window closed.

Pete could not believe it. “You know the password?”

Freddy smiled smugly and worked in silence for a minute or so.

“Why didn’t you hack into the security system, like you did when we raided Greenback’s building?”

“Don’t be stupid! This system’s low tech; it isn’t wired to the Net.”

After about a minute, a short text document opened on the screen.

“Bingo!” Freddy grinned. “Mrs Hogness keeps the security code on the computer. She’s a sitting duck.” He walked over to the alarm console on the wall and punched in the code. “Bye-bye alarm!”

He fished a key out of his pocket and handed it to Pete, who inserted it into the lock of the double glass doors that separated the offices from the rest of the school. At first the key would not move, but he wiggled it a few times and then it turned. The big doors opened smoothly to the offices beyond.

Pete could not help but feel uncomfortable. Kids passed through these doors only when they were in trouble. Big trouble. He closed the doors softly behind them. Schiz’s office was at the end of the hallway.

When he touched the doorknob, Freddy said, “That’s not where we want to go.” He headed for a door that was half hidden by a potted palm. Pete had never noticed it before. It opened to a steep, narrow staircase that ended at another door. He tried the copy of Rose’s master key, and again it worked.

The door swung open.

Pete could feel his heart thumping in his throat as they crept inside. It was as silent as a tomb. He took his penlight torch from his pocket and switched it on. The beam caught Rose’s face where she stood in the shadows next to a bookcase.

Pete screamed and dropped the torch.

Freddy grabbed him by the collar as he turned to run. “Shut up, you’ll get us in trouble,” he whispered. He picked up the torch and shone it on the figure.

It wasn’t the school caretaker after all. It was a skeleton.

In the moment it took Pete to realise that it was a plastic skeleton like the one in the biology classroom, his heart almost stopped.

Freddy did a quick scan of the sofa and the desk, but there was nothing of interest. Stale sandwiches. Empty cool drink cans. Chewing gum wrappers. A toothbrush. Clean? Underwear. In one drawer was a huge file. Freddy opened it. It contained copies of school reports. Every single one of them had a fail mark. Many had remarks scribbled across them in red, like Hooray, serves you right to fail, or Johnny is a lazy no-good who is bound to end up in the poorhouse, or Most useless student I ever had the pleasure of failing.

Behind a door next to the skeleton was a dartboard with a photograph stuck onto it.

“Check this out,” exclaimed Pete, “it’s me!” He pulled a dart from his left eye and two from his forehead.

“Well, this just proves it. Schiz loves you. He adores you. I always knew you were his pet!”

“That’s why I visit him in his office so often.” Pete crossed his index and middle fingers. “We’re like this. Blood brothers.”

Freddy raised his fists. “I should beat you up for being the teacher’s pet!”

“Okay! Monday after school, behind the bicycle shed!”

Pete opened the door, and suddenly both boys were silent, in awe of what they saw in the dim torchlight. It was a huge storeroom with row upon row of shelves, all filled with stuff that Schiz had confiscated from his students over the years. Yo-yos, dingbats, hula hoops, pogo sticks, rollerblades and skateboards. Handheld computer games and cellphones. Tennis balls, golf balls and superballs. There were white mice in bottles of formaldehyde (“Good thing Squeak’s not here,” muttered Pete). And yes, there were jars upon jars filled with lumps of what could only be old chewing gum.

Freddy disappeared among the shelves.

Pete sensed his skateboard’s presence. It was somewhere to his left. He grabbed the skeleton’s hand and shook it. “Goodnight, Rose. We have to fly now!”

“Good evening, Smith!” said Rose behind him. “I should have known that Rat Boy would be involved when a mouse stole my key!”