Magicalamity (19 page)

Tom was very tired, and very worried about his mum. He thought about her, and suddenly remembered his dream—could it mean something, like the first time she had sent him a dream-message?

“I had another dream about my mum,” he told the others. “It sounds a bit mad—but she was right last time, so maybe it means something.” Pindar and Abdul looked at him eagerly. “She said she was safe in one of her table mats.”

There was a silence.

“Table mats?” Abdul echoed. “What have table mats got to do with anything?”

“I don’t know.” Trying hard to concentrate, Tom found himself staring at Mrs. Baggs’s calendar. Suddenly he remembered. “Wait … that picture … I know where I’ve seen it! Mum’s National Gallery table mats!”
He jumped up. “And in my dream, she was sitting inside it!”

The three of them crowded round the calendar. The writing underneath the picture said it was
The Hay Wain
, by John Constable. It showed a pretty house, swirly green trees and a horse and cart in the middle of a pond. Tom’s eye was drawn to a little speck of bright red, next to the man in the cart. If you looked really, really closely, you could see that it was—

“A jar of tomatoes!” Abdul cried joyously. “My clever brother—no wonder Dolores didn’t see it!”

It was enormously odd to think of Mum inside a famous painting; would the real one in the National Gallery now include a small jar of sun-dried tomatoes, or was it just this one? And how would they ever get her out?

Abdul took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers. “I’m going in.”

“Do you know how?” Tom asked.

“I studied history of art in college.” Abdul neatly rolled his socks into a ball. “I’ve entered some of the greatest paintings in the world.”

Tom was so interested that the dreadful, gnawing worry about his parents sank to the back of his mind. He and Pindar watched as Abdul vanished in a puff of smoke and suddenly appeared in the painting.

“He’s in there!” Tom gasped.

Constable’s famous painting now included a stout man in rolled-up trousers, who waved at them like a painted cartoon. Tom and Pindar burst out laughing. The figures in the picture—the horse and the man—stayed still, like wax figures, but the painted genie splashed through the shallow pond, climbed up beside the painted man on the cart and picked up the jar of tomatoes.

Inside the picture, Abdul held up the red jar like a trophy, and the boys cheered and did high fives.

Another puff of smoke—and a second later Abdul stood on Mrs. Baggs’s linoleum floor in a puddle of pond water.

“You got her—that was brilliant!” Tom hugged Abdul.

“We’d better go,” Pindar said. “My mother—I mean Dolores—will be back.”

Abdul sat down and hastily dried his feet with a tea towel. “You’re right—she’ll soon find out she got the wrong tomatoes.” He stuffed his feet back into his shoes and socks and slipped the jar into his trouser pocket. “Your mother will be quite safe here.”

“Well, thanks for popping in,” said Mrs. Baggs (who didn’t seem to have noticed anything at all unusual). “Give my love to that smashing brother of yours!”

The doorbell rang.

“That’s funny,” said Mrs. Baggs. “I’m not expecting anyone.”

She shuffled out of the kitchen, not noticing that Tom, Pindar and Abdul were frozen with fear.

“Achoo! It’s my mother again—I can smell her!” said Pindar, grabbing at Abdul in a panic. “What shall we do?”

The genie’s face was pale and terrified, and Tom could see that he was making a huge effort to be brave.

“We can still make a run for it.” Out of nowhere Abdul conjured his carpet—the colors were shockingly clear and pure on top of Mrs. Baggs’s old red flooring. “Sit behind me—link arms and hold on to the back of my belt!”

Abdul (back in his genie clothes) sat down on the carpet as Tom and Pindar hastily took their places behind him. Tom linked one arm through Pindar’s, and they both took hold of Abdul’s belt.

Outside the kitchen door they heard Mrs. Baggs say, “The gas meter’s down in the cellar, dear.”

“Huh!” Pindar said scornfully. “That’s no mortal gas man—achoo!”

Something terribly strange was happening to Mrs. Baggs’s kitchen. At first Tom thought it was growing, and then he realized they were shrinking. Suddenly, they were hovering above a sink the size of an Olympic swimming pool—and still they were getting smaller, until he was afraid they would disappear.

“Sorry about the smell,” Abdul said as the tiny
shrunken carpet zoomed down the plughole. “Two thousand years ago the genies of the Roman Empire built a secret path along a beautiful London river. Unfortunately the river has now been covered up and turned into a sewer. There might be quite a bit of poo.”

T
he sewer part of the journey was short and disgusting. The shrunken carpet twisted and turned along a spaghetti of pipes and tunnels, dodging sudden rushes of soapy water and enormous boulders of poo. The smell was terrible.

“Hold tight!” Abdul yelled.

There was a ripping sound, so loud that it made Tom’s ears sing, and a flash of intense white light. He felt a chill in the marrow of his bones as if someone had filled them with toothpaste, and then a blast of deathly cold, and knew he had entered the Realm—crossing between the dimensions was quite uncomfortable for his mortal molecules.

The carpet juddered to a halt.

“Achoo! Hey, we’re back!” Pindar gave Abdul a slap on the back. “Nice work!”

The smell wasn’t as strong now, and Tom could look around properly. He was his normal size again, and they were at the bottom of a drain, with daylight showing through a grating above them. He could hear a confused babble of shouting and chatter. The carpet they sat on was half covered with dirty water, yet the beautiful colors still shone eerily in the semidarkness.

Abdul was pale with relief. “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever done—I don’t think I like being brave!”

“Lorna will be impressed,” Tom said encouragingly.

“Oh, I hope so! Now, if I took the right exit we should be in Hopping Hill, in the heart of Genietown.”

“Genietown? You mean like Chinatown in London?”

“Yes, it’s where the exiled genies live when they don’t like the mortal world.” Abdul brushed something brown off his shoulder with a deep shudder. “I’ll go up first and take a quick look.”

There were iron footholds set in the damp walls. Abdul rolled up the carpet, putting it over his shoulder, and climbed up to the grating. “Safe!” he called. “Come up!”

Tom and Pindar climbed out of the drain and emerged in a busy market. After the darkness of the sewers Tom’s senses whirled at the explosion of light and color.

The narrow street was lined with stalls that sold all kinds of genie stuff—lamps, bottles, jewels and gorgeous magic carpets. He also saw stalls piled high with sticky sweets and luscious dates. The air was full of shouting and music, and they were in the middle of a crowd of bustling genies.

Nobody took much notice of three people climbing out of a drain (though two lady genies wrinkled their noses when they walked past). Tom saw then that though most of the people around them were genies, quite a few were fairies, strolling about in sunglasses and taking photographs.

“Tourists,” Abdul said.

“I thought people weren’t supposed to come to Hopping Hill.”

“Not officially,” Pindar said, “but nobody takes much notice—it’s only a Falconer law, not the old law, so you don’t die if you break it.” He added, “There are some great restaurants here—achoo!”

“My friend Cassim from the cafe is staying with his sister, who has a house on this street,” Abdul said. “Someone there will know where to find Clarence and your godmothers.”

“Get away from my stall!” shouted a nearby genie. “The stench of poo is putting off my customers!”

Tom and Pindar snorted with laughter, suddenly noticing how filthy they were, but Abdul cried, “A
thousand pardons! Come, boys—I can’t do a cleaning spell here, or it’ll make the food taste of soap.”

He led them through the jostling, noisy crowd to a wooden door in a white wall.

The second they were through the door, something swooped down on them out of the air and knocked off Abdul’s turban.

“Iqbal, you little monkey!” shouted a woman’s voice. “Stop mucking about!”

Tom and Pindar had thought they were under attack, and they started laughing when they saw that the “attacker” was a cheeky little genie of about four years old, zooming around a courtyard on a little magic carpet the size of a doormat.

The heavy door shut out the racket of the market. The courtyard was quiet and very pretty, with flowers and fruit trees and a small fountain with a lazy-sounding splash. Tom counted four—no, five—little genie children, dressed in gaudy satin, playing in midair like hummingbirds.

“Ha ha—they smell of POO!” cried the cheeky little boy.

“I’ll do that cleaning spell,” Abdul said. “Keep your mouths shut.”

He babbled out a spell and Tom was glad he’d shut his mouth—for a few seconds he was covered in thick white
foam. The foam evaporated a moment later, leaving the three of them incredibly clean and smelling of roses.

“Well?” A cross-looking woman with a baby had come out into the courtyard.

Abdul bowed low. “Madam, we are searching for Cassim.”

“CASSIM!” yelled the woman. “It’s MORE of your friends!” She added, “He’s on the roof.”

“May we fly up?”

“I can’t stop you.” She flounced back into the house and smartly shut the door.

“Oh dear,” said Abdul. “Cassim’s sister doesn’t seem very pleased to see us!”

He unrolled his carpet to take the three of them up to the roof of the house—very slowly, because the flying children kept getting in the way.

Tom hadn’t understood why Cassim would be on the roof. When they got up there, however, he saw that the flat roof was like a large and comfortable room. A big awning kept the sun off, and there were low sofas and tables. And it was crowded—no wonder Cassim’s sister hadn’t exactly been welcoming. There had to be at least twenty genies sitting cross-legged on the cushions.

One of them jumped to his feet to greet them, and Tom recognized Cassim from the cafe.

“Abdul, my old friend! I got a message from Clarence’s
men that you were coming!” He bowed to them all. “Please sit down and relax, before the next stage of your journey.”

He sat them all down on a long sofa, and another genie gave them glasses of a lovely cool drink that tasted like candy.

“What is the next stage?” asked Tom. “I have to find my godmothers.”

“They will be very worried about him,” Abdul said. “He’s a stowaway—he wasn’t meant to be on this mission.”

“But it’s a really good thing he came with us,” Pindar said. “We’d never have found the jar without him.”

Tom had been wondering how he was going to face his godmothers after jumping on the carpet, and he smiled gratefully.

“All this is known,” someone said, from the middle of the crowd of genies. “Dolores Falconer told her husband, and we have a top spy in Tiberius’s private office—she’s a woodworm in his desk, so she hears everything.”

“The end is coming for the Falconers,” Cassim said, passing round a plate of fresh dates. “Their foes are gathering on Hopping Hill, waiting for the moment they twist the old law too far—then we will swoop down and take the Realm by storm.”

“You seem very sure about all this,” someone else said, in a grumbling tone. “But if it doesn’t happen soon, I’ll
have to go back to the mortal world—I own a pastry factory on the North Circular Road, and it doesn’t run itself.”

“Yes, and I have to get home to Macclesfield,” someone else said. “My wife’s a mortal and I told her I’d given up magic. If she finds out about this, she’ll go berserk.”

“Patience!” cried Cassim. “Clarence wouldn’t have summoned us all unless he was sure the time had come. And the mountain is quaking! Didn’t you feel it last night?”

Several voices broke out at once.

“Rubbish—that wasn’t a quake!”

“Yes, it was! It shook my alarm clock right off the shelf, and it hit me on the head!”

“It threw me out of bed!”

“It was nothing but a hiccup!”

“Shut up, all of you,” snapped Cassim. “You’ll wake the baby, and then my sister will kill me. Clarence says the mountain is quaking, and you know what that means.” Seeing that Tom was puzzled, he added, “It’s one of our ancient proverbs—
When the mountain quakes / The Falconer shakes
. It’s a sign that the One Good Falconer is among us at last.”

Tom’s heart sank—here was that One Good Falconer stuff again, when he wanted to take Pindar back to the mortal world.

Pindar’s face turned bright red, and then very white.
“It’s not me!” he said loudly. “I wish people would stop saying it’s me!”

Several of the genies laughed.

“Well, if it’s not you,” Cassim said, “who is it? Do you know of any other Good Falconers?”

All the genies laughed now.

“But I’d be useless at leading the Realm!” Pindar argued, “and there have been good Falconers before—why didn’t any of them kick the others up the bum?”

“The young Falconer is quite right.” An elderly genie with a white beard spoke out in a solemn voice. “There have been decent members of his cursed family in the past. I am old enough to remember Tiberius’s second cousin Trajan, and how bravely he spoke up for the gnomes when there was that cruel fashion for making gnome-bombs. But he wasn’t in the direct line of Tiberius, Vespasian, Cassius or Seneca, the four sons of Julius Falconer. That’s where the One Good Falconer must come from.”

Pindar said, “Dolores isn’t my real mother.”

The crowd of genies gasped.

“Your mother is of no consequence,” the old genie said. “It is well known that Tiberius has many mistresses. When Dolores couldn’t have children, he used one of them to get himself a son. You are that son. Therefore the mantle must fall upon you.”

“But what if I don’t want to lead the Realm?”

The genies laughed softly and muttered among themselves.

“They are saying ‘kismet,’ ” the old genie said. “That word means something like ‘fate’ or ‘destiny.’ It is kismet. You cannot argue.”