Casper Candlewacks in the Attack of the Brainiacs! Read online

  “Three years ago,” murmured Julius, staring at the wall. “Took me two years to work out the meaning. That word has haunted my dreams every single night since. Revenge. I knew he’d come for me eventually. Looks like he finally has.”

  “But hang on, why didn’t you recognise him earlier? I mean, if he’s haunted your dreams for years…”

  “Well, it seems obvious now,” Julius snorted. “You’d be surprised what a shave and a change of hat can do to a man. Anyway, I thought all French people looked the same.”

  “Not all of them, Dad. Only Jean-Claude and Renée, and that’s because they’re the same person. Perhaps if you’d noticed that, we wouldn’t be in this hole now.” With a grimace, Casper put the lid on the shoebox and slid it away from them. “So. What do we do?”

  “There’s only one thing we can do. We close the restaurant, we pack our suitcases and we leave for Africa.”

  “Africa? Are you mad?”

  “Isn’t that far enough? Fine, what’s that place with all the penguins? Mexico, that’s it. Do the buses go there? We’ll start a new life, live in an igloo, eat salted fish. I’ll have to take a new name, obviously. I’ve always liked Rupert. You can be Solomon Junior.”

  “No way, Dad.” Casper shoved his chair back and stood tall over his dad. “We’re going nowhere. You’ve put on a whopping spread tonight and the villagers loved it. What did he do? Omelette. You’ve got this in the bag, Dad. You’re going to win the cook-off on Friday and send Renée packing.”

  “Jean-Claude.”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “Send him packing. Right.” There was no strength behind Julius’s voice.

  A long stiff pause fell on the room. Feeling a bit silly, Casper sat down again.

  Julius sighed. “We’re doomed.”

  Ting-a-ling.

  Lamp tumbled into the restaurant amidst a cloud of herbs. “Casper, Casper! Renée loved my invention! Did you see? Did you?”

  “What did you think you were doing over there?” cried Casper.

  “Omlits. I was doing omlits.”

  “I saw that!” Casper felt let down, betrayed. His best and only friend had been cooking for the enemy, even after Casper had asked him not to. “But why?”

  “Renée asked me to show him my Omlit Gun and… I’ve done something wrong, haven’t I? Your face has gone all scrunchy, Casper, and it only does that when I’ve done something wrong.”

  Casper softened as he saw confusion rise in Lamp’s face. “Listen to me, Lamp, that man’s not what he seems. His name’s Jean-Claude, not Renée, he lied about the cheese shop, he’s out for revenge against my dad and I think he’s using you to help him.”

  “No!” cried Lamp, shocked. “His name’s not Renée?” All of a sudden his face blushed plum-red. “But I’ve been calling him that all this time! How embarrassing.”

  “That’s the least of it. Did he ask you to make that omelette gun?”

  “I’m my own man, Casper Candlewacks.” Lamp prodded a thumb into his own chest and puffed up proudly. “I make what I like and I like what I make. Except for my automatic pillow plumper. That hurt.” He rubbed his head.

  “All right. Just keep it that way. If Jean-Claude asks you to invent something, what do you say?”

  “No,” Lamp nodded determinedly.

  “And if he asks for help, what do you say?”

  “No.”

  “Got it. Promise you’ll practise that for me?”

  “No.”

  “Is that you doing it now, or—”

  “No,” said Lamp, and he turned to leave. “No, no, no, no, yes. I mean no.”

  Ting-a-ling.

  “Keep an eye on him, Casp,” said Julius. “Jean-Claude doesn’t need anyone else on his team.”

  “You can count on me,” smiled Casper. “I’ll watch him like a hawk. I was going to keep an eye on him, anyway. There was something weird about him today.”

  “What, more weird than normal?”

  “Way more weird than normal.”

  Like Tuesday mornings tend to do, it arrived soon after the end of Monday night. Casper yawned his way down to breakfast.

  In the kitchen, Cuddles was bashing her bowl of mashed banana with a plastic fork while Amanda tried once more to make toast. Her latest attempt (putting bread in the kettle) had produced some soggy results and a terrible pot of tea.

  Casper checked the cupboards and pulled down the mouse-nibbled box of Funky Flakez. On turning back round, he found Cuddles wearing a proud little grin and an empty bowl on her head. The mashed banana was dripping down the front of the fridge. Cuddles giggled and stuffed her mouth with thirty-seven pence from the kitchen table.

  “Now, come on, darling.” Amanda scraped the banana back into the bowl. “Those coins just won’t keep you going till lunchtime.”

  Cuddles jangled and spat out a penny.

  “Growing kids like you need all the food groups: fruit, dairy, jelly, bacon, carbohydrates, spaghetti and… erm… help me out here, Casper.”

  The box of Funky Flakez contained some mouse droppings, the ripped plastic bag and a grumpy mouse, but not a single Flake, Funky or otherwise. Casper put the box back on the shelf. “Mum, leave her. She doesn’t like fruit, OK?”

  “Ooh, actually,” she chirped, “Cuddles does catch a lot of birds. Are they a fruit?”

  “Close enough,” Casper grimaced.

  Cuddles squawked like a seagull and batted the mashed banana away once more.

  The second day of school awaited Casper at the other end of a tractor ’n’ train carriage journey. He groaned into his empty bowl. What he really needed was a bodyguard – a friend even stronger and fiercer than Bash Brewster. “But that’s not going to happen, is it, Cuddles?”

  Cuddles was busy grazing the varnish off the kitchen table with her fangs.

  “Or is it?” Casper’s eyes lit up and a plan hatched inside his head like a sneaky newborn chick with a plan inside its head. “Mum?”

  “Hmm?” Amanda was trying to light the bread on the scratchy bit of a matchbox.

  “Isn’t it time Cuddles started going to school?”

  “Oh, is she old enough? What age is normal?”

  “Any age, really. She’s very bright.”

  Cuddles bashed her head against the table and grinned at Casper with cross-eyes and a penny stuck up her left nostril.

  “Oh. Well, it would be marvellous to get a day off. I like them loads more than days on. Could you take her today? See if she likes it?”

  Underneath, Casper’s heart pumped manically, but he maintained his composure, not looking up from the plate. “Suppose I could, yeah.”

  “Oh, thanks, Caspy.” Amanda skipped over and kissed him on the forehead. “You’re a gent.”

  This day was getting better more quickly than a jet-plane full of cheetahs in a hurry. With Cuddles, Casper had a first line of defence against the Brewsters. “Come on, girl, let’s get you to school.” It was tough not to bounce up from his chair and juggle Cuddles down the corridor, but Casper hid his glee, so Amanda wouldn’t catch wind of his plan.

  Back upstairs, Casper stuffed Cuddles into his backpack and zipped it closed. Next he searched his cluttered floor for everything else: a dog-eared pad of paper, a cracked biro, a spare yellow tie for Cuddles’s uniform and his TuneBrick™, a little music player he’d got last Christmas to drown out Lamp’s ramblings. Weighed down with necessaries, he returned to his backpack to find Cuddles standing on top of it, arms held aloft like a champion wrestler, with one foot still caught in the hole she’d gnawed through.

  “Cuddles,” Casper groaned. “That was my favourite bag.” (By ‘favourite’ he meant ‘only’.) Luckily, he had a spare roll of gaffer tape. Unluckily, the bus left in fifteen minutes.

  Twelve minutes later, Casper tumbled down the stairs with something resembling a silvery beehive that squirmed and screeched like he’d snared a pair of weasels. “OY! Behave back there or you’re not coming,” He jiggled his bac
kpack up and down to keep Cuddles quiet.

  “See you tonight, Mum!” Casper shouted, slamming the door a bit too hard and taking the doorknob with him. He shrugged and stuffed it in his pocket.

  Casper sprinted so fast that all Mrs Trimble saw running past her window was a blur (but then she had lost her glasses). Casper careered down the street, through the park, into the square and on to the train carriage so fast he never noticed Betty Woons soaring about in her new rocket-powered wheelchair, or Mitch McMassive standing on an upturned bucket and reciting poetry to a small but captivated crowd, or Mayor Rattsbulge roaring with joy as he discovered the chemical symbol for sausages. Neither did he notice Jean-Claude sneaking off towards Lamp’s garage or even the four new inventions sitting at the doorstep of Bistro D’Escargot.

  If he had noticed, he would’ve thought, How odd… but he didn’t, so he didn’t.

  Sweating like Mayor Rattsbulge at a pie museum, Casper squeezed down the aisle of the carriage, avoiding the flight paths of paper aeroplanes and Ted Treadington, and plonked down next to Lamp just as the tractor grumbled into motion, jerking the kids backwards in their seats.

  “Hullo, Casper.” Lamp barely looked up, furiously scribbling on a piece of paper covered in dense pencil scrawls and a complicated diagram involving an eagle and a garlic crusher.

  “What’s that?”

  “It pipes the choclit sauce into choclit croissants.” Lamp chewed his pencil, shook his head determinedly and rubbed out a whole corner of calculations (and the garlic crusher). “I’m putting in a nuclear reactor.” He scribbled lots of numbers over the eagle’s wings and then, when he ran out of space, drew another wing and scribbled on that.

  “Oh.” This was wrong. Casper knew Lamp like the back of his own hand (two brown freckles and a scar from the pigeons). His were simple clunky contraptions invented off-the-cuff that took weeks of oily explosions before they finally worked. But now he was messing around with nuclear reactors? That was far too clever for Lamp. Wasn’t it?

  But that wasn’t it. More changes struck Casper as he looked about the bus. Across the aisle, Milly and Milly Mollyband, who spent yesterday’s bus journey pinching each other, were reciting times tables. Samson Jansen was recreating Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus with felt tips on the front of his pencil case. But the biggest change, and the only one Casper could explain, was Anemonie Blight. She sat snarling on the back seat with her arms crossed, not doing any bullying at all. In the end, Ted Treadington was so confused that he trotted to the back and handed his lunch money to Anemonie, anyway.

  “What’s the point?” Anemonie spat. “They’ll only nick it once we get there.”

  “Oh…” whispered Ted, and he put the money back in his pocket.

  A muffled snarl distracted Casper from his frowning. Below the seat, his backpack was trying to eat itself.

  “Shh,” whispered Casper, gripping the backpack a little tighter between his legs.

  A light rain pattered on the windows like tiny goblin fingers. Grey concrete buildings lumbered out of the smog and the tractor pulled right off the main road.

  “Here we go again.”

  Casper shuddered to think what role Snivel was playing in his brothers’ game of football – if you’re interested he was playing the role of goalkeeper’s gloves – but he didn’t stick around to find out. He fled with Lamp and the other Corne-on-the-Kobb kids, straight through the playground and into school to find the maths room.

  “Hey, Candlewacks,” smirked Anemonie Blight, plonking her pink bag down on a desk at the back. “Blown up your restaurant yet?”

  “Actually, last night went quite well,” said Casper proudly.

  “Not what I heard.” Her pointy nose wrinkled. “I heard you’re gonna be driven out of the village cos the Frenchman’s a better cook than your daddy.”

  “He’s not!” shouted Casper. “All he does is omelettes!”

  “But such lovely omelettes,” Milly and Milly Mollyband chimed in together.

  “Crispy and juicy!” added Ted Treadington.

  “Hah!” Anemonie snorted. “Looks like you’d better start packing, Candlewacks.”

  Casper felt his skin prickle. “How do you know, anyway? I didn’t see you at either restaurant last night.”

  “As if I’d eat your swill.” Anemonie turned her nose to the ceiling. “I’m the heir to Blight Manor, not some common serf like you. I’m three-hundredth in line to the throne. I’ll get my servants to cook my dinner.”

  Casper had been to Blight Manor. He knew Anemonie had no servants. The house itself, once the grandest in the Kobb Valley, was now a crumbling rotten heap with half a roof. Nevertheless, Anemonie Blight and her pointy mother thought themselves too important to be seen eating in public. Casper would get no support from her.

  “Look, my dad’s going nowhere, whether you like it or not,” Casper said confidently. “You just wait and see.” He wished he could share the confidence of his voice. In truth, he was terrified.

  Snivel appeared five minutes later, a bit wobbly, but still in one piece, give or take a few clumps of hair and a tooth that he didn’t want, anyway.

  Then the maths teacher, Mr Flanty, pranced in. He had a floppy fringe and an orange Hawaiian shirt with palm trees and mongooses on it. He’d also brought a guitar. He popped himself down on a stool at the front of the class and tuned up.

  Casper groaned.

  “Today, boys and girls, Mr Flanty is going to teach you about pi,” Mr Flanty cooed, lightly strumming the strings. Mr Flanty was the sort of man who saw a lot of musicals and talked about himself in the third person. “Anybody know what pi is?”

  Lamp’s hand sprang up like it was trying to escape his shoulder. “Ooh! Ooh!”

  “No, you lovable scamp,” chuckled Mr Flanty, “Mr Flanty doesn’t mean the type of food.”

  “But I wasn’t going to say that,” squeaked Lamp. “It’s the mathematical constant defined by—”

  “Uh-uh-uh.” Mr Flanty held up a silencing finger. “If you don’t know, don’t guess. Now, who wants to hear Mr Flanty’s pi song?”

  Not me, thought Casper. He wanted to plan some menus or get started on the spotted dick. He wanted to win over the villagers with his dad’s Best of British and ensure victory on Friday. He wanted to be free of the bullies whom he knew would burst through that door any moment now. He did not, on balance, want to hear Mr Flanty’s pi song.

  “Let’s rock!” Mr Flanty bobbed up and down on his stool, strummed a jolly G-major chord and started to sing.

  “Oh, pi’s a mathematical constant,

  Not a meaty treat you find in your fridge,

  If you give it a bit of work, you’ll

  Find the area of a circle,

  Which is useful when you’re building a bridge.”

  Mr Flanty bowed to Lamp’s rapturous applause before starting up again.

  “Sing it with me now! Three point one four one five nine two…”

  Lamp was the only one singing along to the second verse, but then again he was the only person who knew the lyrics. Casper and the others watched in bewildered abandon.

  Ten minutes later, Lamp and Mr Flanty were still at it. Casper wondered how long the second verse would go on, and whether he should duck out at lunchtime. Cuddles was starting to get quite restless too, so Casper gave her his pocketed doorknob to gnaw on.

  “Nine three nine three two five one nine—”

  SLAM!

  Mr Flanty’s squeal was accompanied by the six-note twang of a dropped guitar.

  Filling the doorway was Bash Brewster and his burly brothers, Spit, Clobber and Pinchnurse. “Lunch munny.”

  The kids knew what to do by now. Each pulled out their coins and placed them on the desk ready for collection. Lamp pulled out his final egg.

  Bash tromped straight to Casper’s desk and grinned his toothless grin. “Lunch munny.”

  Casper’s heart was beating out of his chest. He’d brought defence this time in the s
hape of his sister Cuddles. But it could go so wrong, and then… Casper shuddered to think of the consequences. He lifted his silvery backpack on to the desk and shakily unzipped it. “It’s all in here. Help yourself.”

  “Oh. Fanks.” Bash plunged his hairy hand inside Casper’s bag and rifled around. He found something hard and sharp. “Whassis?”

  What he’d found was one of Cuddles’s fangs. What Cuddles’s fangs had found was a mid-morning snack. The other three Brewsters heard the splintering crunch before they saw what caused it, but when Bash’s face contorted with agony they knew something was wrong. The biggest Brewster’s arm withdrew from the backpack with a new addition – a snarling baby in a pink all-in-one and a yellow tie, savage jaws locked round his finger.

  “AAAAARGH!” roared Bash, jumping up and down and swinging Cuddles round his head like a lousy yo-yo trick. The other Brewsters blundered around, knocking into desks and walls as Bash clamped Cuddles between his knees to prise his fingers free. With a hefty tug, he flung his hand upwards and Cuddles soared high across the classroom, landing in the outstretched arms of Snivel.

  Casper stared at the carnage and gulped. “RUN!” He dashed towards the door, closely followed by Lamp, grabbing Snivel with Cuddles on his way out.

  The three sets of footsteps clacked down the empty corridor. In all the bluster of the Brewster hysteria, nobody saw them leave.

  “Think we’re safe. Good catch, by the way!” said Casper.

  Snivel blushed. “F-fanks.”

  “Why did we leave?” asked Lamp. “I love that song.”

  A slam from behind them was followed by a fourth pair of footsteps. The boys spun round in terror, only to see Anemonie Blight rushing towards them.

  “Anemonie?” called Casper. “What are you doing?”

  “I ain’t staying in there, am I?”

  “Did they see you leave?”

  “What? How do I—”

  “THERE THEY IS. GET ’EM!” The brutes emerged from the maths room, snarling like caged beasts.

  Casper’s insides turned to fondue.