The Extincts Read online

  “Come on, Frogface.” I gave him a yank. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we…”

  I turned to look at him and stopped dead. No wonder my arm was aching.

  I wasn’t pulling a dog along behind me. I was pulling a lump of stone.

  Somewhere along the way, while he was having one of his sniff ’n’ piddles, Sir Crispin had found himself eyeball-to-eyeball with a basilisk.

  TWELVE

  WHAT WAS I going to tell Frank? Worse, what was I going to tell Mrs. Poker-Peagrim?

  “Sorry about your dog. Here’s a nice doorstop instead.”

  I could only hope that Mrs. Lind got the Depetrifaction Ointment to work soon, while Frank was still glued to the sofa and Mrs. Poker-Peagrim was still at her sister’s.

  Meanwhile, here I was, with a rock on a leash, at Prudence’s house. I looked at the upstairs windows, in case there was a message for me. You could see toothpastey smears still on the glass, but the curtains were drawn and there were no signs of life.

  Mump’s cat was there, cleaning the tip of her tail. The good news was that there was no pink car in the driveway. With luck, that meant that Diamond was out.

  * * *

  Mump opened the door.

  “Nnnghh!” he said.

  “I’ve come to see Prudence,” I told him. “It’s very urgent. To do with school.”

  You can usually trick grown-ups into thinking something’s important if you say it’s for school. Not Mump.

  “Nnn-nnghh!” he said firmly, wedging himself into the doorway so that not even a fly could have squeezed past.

  I did a bit of quick thinking. Mump was a lot bigger than me and a lot stronger. That did not mean he was any cleverer.

  I shrugged my shoulders and turned away as if I were leaving. Then I pointed at a flower bed just out of Mump’s sight.

  “Hey!” I said. “What’s that? Wow! It looks like the Squermington Wyrm!”

  It was the oldest trick on the playground, but it worked.

  “Hnnnghh?”

  Frowning, Mump lumbered out from the doorway, peering in the direction of my finger.

  It was all I needed. I charged at the doorway and was halfway up the stairs before Mump even realized I’d gotten past him.

  At the top of the stairs, I stopped.

  “Prue!” I yelled. “Where are you?”

  “George! George—don’t!” Her scared voice came from behind a door down the hallway. “Get to Wormestall and warn them Diamond’s coming. Go, quick—before they—”

  “I’m letting you out first,” I told her. “Just hang on.” My hand was on the doorknob. “It’s okay—the key’s in the door.…”

  “All the better to lock you in with,” breathed a voice in my ear.

  “George—RUN!” screamed Prudence.

  Sometimes it’s not such a bad idea to do what you’re told.

  I ran. But not fast enough. I choked as something grabbed me around the neck. Spluttering, I put my hands up to my throat and felt cold, hard steel.

  “Prue…,” I gasped.

  “She’s right here,” said Mintzer, pulling me toward him like a hooked fish. “You can join her if you like. Or even if you don’t like.” Turning the key in the lock, he kicked open the door and pushed me through.

  * * *

  There were eyes and teeth and horns all around me. Heads without bodies staring out from every patch of wall. Lions and leopards and panthers and pumas snarled and glared. Different kinds of deer, with antlers like tree branches, stared sadly at nothing through dusty glass eyes. A stuffed eagle hung from the ceiling, talons outstretched, and I nearly tripped over a tiger skin, baring its teeth at my ankles.

  “Welcome to the Trophy Room. Magnificent, isn’t it?” said Mintzer. He had let go of my neck, but the fingers of his one hand were pinching my arm. “All shot by Mrs. Pye’s great-great-grandfather, Sir Waldo Whippenslitt. A great man. There he is, between the kudu and the panther.”

  He shoved me toward the photograph hanging on the wall between a gentle-eyed creature with horns like giant corkscrews and a black cat that looked as if it was trying to cough up a hairball. It was an old picture; everything in it was tea-colored. Sir Waldo Whippenslitt had a big gun and a big mustache and was standing with one foot on a dead elephant, looking pleased with himself.

  You could see Prudence had been crying; her eyes were red. She was sitting hunched, with her arms around her knees. She couldn’t have stood up if she’d wanted to—she was in a cage.

  My mouth felt dry. This was worse than I had imagined. Who put children in cages? All I could think of was the witch in Hansel and Gretel, fattening Hansel up for her dinner.

  “Here you are, missy,” Mintzer told Prudence. “Here’s your little friend come to play, so you can stop complaining.” Turning to me, he said, “You can’t get her out of there, so don’t even try. Mrs. Pye’s gone to see a woman who wants her racehorse stuffed. She won’t be long. You can keep each other company until she gets home. Then we’re off to that run-down old farm you’re so fond of. Mrs. Pye’s very interested to see what you’re hiding there. We’ve some idea already—thanks to Little Miss Arty Pants here. As soon as we find it, we’ll catch it, we’ll bag it…” He pointed at a pile of sacks in one corner. “And then…” His eyes gleamed as he drew the edge of his hook across his throat.

  “No!” I said furiously. “Leave Wormestall alone! You’re not stuffing anything. I won’t let you. I’ll…”

  “You’ll what?” asked Mr. Mintzer. “I’ll leave you to think about it, shall I? Catch you later, stuffed alligator.…”

  And with a mean, mocking laugh, he was gone, the key scraping in the lock behind him.

  I knelt down, tugging at the padlock on the cage door.

  “It’s no use,” Prudence told me hopelessly. “It won’t open. Not without the key, and Mump’s got that.”

  “How long have you been in there?”

  “Don’t know,” said Prudence. “Time works differently when you’re locked up.”

  “They can’t keep you shut up like a … like a hamster! Have they done it before?”

  “Loads of times. Whenever I do something bad.”

  “They’re the ones doing something bad. What do we do now?”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” said Prue. “The door’s locked and the window’s useless—there’s nothing to hold on to. If you jumped, you’d break a leg, at least. We’ll just have to wait. Sometimes Mump brings me cake. Maybe that’ll be our chance.”

  So we waited. Time passed. Prudence looked as if she was dozing, with her head bent and her cheek resting on her knees. I started playing the Million Game. Something has to happen, I told myself, before I get to a million. It always does.…

  * * *

  By the time something did happen, I had beaten my record. I was up to 4,658 when the door opened and Mr. Mump came in, locking the door behind him.

  “Nnnghh,” said Mump, setting down a tray. “Hunngghry.”

  He gave us each a glass of milk and a large slice of cake, squashing Prudence’s through the bars of the cage. My mouth was too dry to swallow properly. The milk was cold and refreshing, but it made me think of Mrs. Tuesday and Mrs. Wednesday. I imagined them ending up among all the other horned heads nailed to the wall, and put the glass down again.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” said Prudence. She caught my eye as she said it. I gave her a little nod. Mump was big, but he was slow. Once the door was unlocked, we had a chance—just as long as we didn’t run into Mintzer.

  Mump undid the padlock on the cage and Prudence crawled out. She stood up and had to grab hold of the kudu’s horns to stop herself from falling over.

  “My leg’s gone to sleep.” She shot me a worried look. A dead leg wasn’t going to help our getaway. Mump was unlocking the door when a horn blared sharply.

  “Nnnghh?” said Mump. Heaving himself over to the window, he pushed it open. I heard the growl of a car engine and Diamond’s rai
sed voice.

  “What idiot left a statue in the middle of the drive? How am I supposed to park? Mintzer, get it out of my way!”

  Mintzer’s footsteps crunched on the gravel. “I don’t know how it got there.” He sounded surprised. “It wasn’t there ten minutes ago. That’s odd—it looks just like—”

  “Betty!” bellowed Mump, suddenly, making me jump. “Nnnghh nnnghhh nnnghhh Betty!”

  He was leaning so far out the window, he might have fallen if he hadn’t been too big to fit.

  “Smelly Betty. That’s his cat,” whispered Prudence, hopping up and down behind me.

  “Not anymore, she’s not.” I peered around Mump’s bulk. “She’s a lump of stone now.”

  It could only just have happened. Which meant that Mortifer wasn’t far away.

  Something in the bushes caught my eye: a gleam of gold. A colossal shape was gliding, like squeezed toothpaste, through the shrubbery.…

  I wasn’t the only one to have seen it.

  “It’s the Wyrm! Get Great-Great-Grandfather’s gun,” shrieked Diamond. “Catch it! Bag it! Stuff it!”

  Mump turned around. His face had twisted, and he was making grunting, snuffly noises. Was he crying? Hanging on the wall above Sir Waldo’s picture was a gun—the same gun he was holding in the photograph. A gun big enough to kill an elephant. Or a basilisk.

  “No!” Prudence clutched Mump’s arm. “No, Mump—don’t! We know someone who can make Smelly Betty better. Wait—please, wait!”

  But Mump brushed her off and took down the gun. Outside, I could still see the glint of scales between the bushes. Mump propped the gun on his shoulder and took aim through the open window.

  When it really matters, you do things without thinking. I seized the first heavy thing I saw, lifted it, and brought it down hard over Mump’s head. The gun went off like a crack of thunder. Birds rose out of trees, cawk-cawking in alarm, and Mump slumped over the windowsill.

  “You’ve killed him!” Prudence’s face was white. “Did he hit Mortifer?”

  “I don’t think so.” I felt a bit dizzy. I’d never knocked anybody out before. I looked at the bloodstained weapon in my hands and realized it was Sir Crispin.

  “It went that way!” Diamond was shouting at Mintzer. The shot must have missed. “After it!”

  Mump wasn’t moving. Mum wasn’t going to be too happy about me being a murderer; she wanted me to be a detective.

  “Poke him,” said Prudence.

  “I don’t want to poke him. You poke him.”

  We both poked him. Mump twitched.

  “He must have a very hard head,” I said. “He chipped Sir Crispin.”

  * * *

  The door was unlocked. Mump was unconscious. This was our chance.

  “Hurry,” said Prudence. “We’ll go out the back.…”

  “Oh no, you won’t.”

  There, in the doorway, stood Mintzer, polishing his hook with his hanky. He closed the door behind him. “Mrs. Pye’s not going to be very happy with you two, spoiling Mump’s aim like that and scaring off the Wyrm. You’ll be back in that cage until Christmas, I shouldn’t wonder,” he told Prudence. “Starting now.”

  She backed away from him, but the hook shot out and caught her.

  “Leave her alone!” I ordered as he bundled her, wriggling and struggling, back into the cage.

  Mintzer kicked out with one of his pointy-toed shoes, catching me on the shin.

  “Ouch!” I said.

  He laughed and stepped on my foot. On purpose.

  I was properly angry now. The kudu, with its corkscrew horns, stretched out its neck and looked at me, as if it was trying to tell me something. I had a sudden flashback: Mintzer in the stable yard at Wormestall, pinned between Mrs. Wednesday’s horns …

  I tore the kudu off the wall and charged.

  “Now, wait a minute…,” said Mintzer.

  Letting go of Prudence, he took a step backward, then another, then another, until he was backed up against the door. I didn’t stop—and neither did the kudu. Its horns drilled right through the wooden door and out the other side—with Mintzer trapped in between them, his arms pinned to his sides. It was his turn to struggle now, but it wasn’t any use.

  “Thanks for that,” I told the kudu. I couldn’t help thinking it looked a tiny bit more cheerful.

  It was a bit awkward having to open the door with Mr. Mintzer still attached—the things he said to us weren’t very nice—but we got through it and out into the corridor.

  “Back stairs,” said Prudence. “Follow me.”

  THIRTEEN

  WE MIGHT HAVE made it if my shoelaces had been tied.

  They weren’t, because they never are. It’s not my fault; my knots just don’t stay knotted. People nag me about it all the time—Mum, teachers, everyone. “Tie your shoelaces, George, or you’ll trip.”

  I’d never listened, but it turns out they were right. I tripped.

  Prudence had just started down the stairs and I was right behind her when I gave a sudden lurch. I had no way of saving myself; my arms were full of Sir Crispin. Together, we went clattering and crashing down the stairs, taking Prudence with us—and making enough noise to wake the dead.

  We landed in a tangled heap at the bottom. I was lying facedown; all I could see was carpet.

  “Are you okay?” I turned my head to look at Prudence. Instead, I saw a foot. A foot in a high-heeled silvery boot, resting on top of Sir Crispin.… Oh no, I thought. Oh no!

  Diamond Pye pulled Prudence to her feet.

  “A slippery little fish, aren’t you?” she said, grasping Prudence by the elbow. “First you wriggle out a window, then you wriggle out of a cage. Let’s put you in the Stuffing Room and see if you manage to wriggle out of that.”

  “No!” Prudence shrank away from her, her face white and scared. “No, please! Not there!”

  “It’s your own fault,” Diamond said impatiently. “I’m busy. I have no time for children right now.” Opening a door, she pushed Prudence in, then pointed her lollipop at me. “You, too.”

  As I hesitated, she drew one of the chopsticks out of her hair, spinning it between her fingers. “Hurry up, boy. I don’t have all day.”

  Prudence’s eyes were fixed on the chopstick. “George … do as she says.”

  “It’s a chopstick,” I said. “You can’t hurt anything with a chopstick.”

  “You can when it’s sharpened and dipped in poison,” said Prudence. “I’ve seen her kill a rat with that. The poor thing—it was horrible!”

  Diamond laughed. I swallowed.

  “It’s very strong poison,” she told me. “From a species of tree frog. It only takes a scratch. First your eyeballs melt, then your insides turn to soup and your brain begins to bubble out of your ears. Do you want to know what happens after that?”

  I shook my head. Without a word, I followed Prudence through the door.

  * * *

  The Stuffing Room must have once been a garage. It was dim, lit only by a little square window in the roof, until Diamond flipped a switch and fluorescent lights flickered on.

  “Don’t!” said Prudence, in a strangled voice. “I don’t want to see.…”

  Diamond laughed. “This is my favorite place,” she told me. “Where I create my special pieces.”

  Blinking in the glare of the lights, I looked around at the bare white walls and white-tiled floor. A row of gleaming metal instruments were laid out on a tray next to a marble slab. There were shelves of tall glass jars like the ones in the Candy Shop—except they weren’t full of candy. Glass eyes, hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes and colors, stared back at me.

  “Oh,” I said, the hairs prickling on the back of my neck. “Is this where…?”

  “Yes,” said Prudence, in a very small voice.

  I tried not to look at what was in the other glass jars. Bits of things, floating in murky liquid. I didn’t want to look at the big white chest freezer in the corner, either. I really
, really didn’t want to know what was in it.

  The far end of the room was screened off by a sort of giant plastic shower curtain. “What’s behind the curtain?” I asked.

  “My magnum opus,” said Diamond triumphantly. “My greatest work so far. Why don’t you have a look?”

  “Don’t!” said Prudence, again. “Oh, please—don’t!”

  Something in her voice made me do it. I couldn’t not. I pulled back the curtain.

  A horse. A big gray horse. Its rider was in battle armor from head to toe and pointing a spear at something long and scaly, coiled in fat loops on the ground. Gaping jaws bristled with teeth. Featherless wings, bat skin and bone, stretched out like sails to either side.

  I turned cold, my stomach knotting. Mortifer, I thought. She’s killed Mortifer.

  But that didn’t make any sense. Not even Diamond could kill and stuff a basilisk in the time it had taken us to get out of the Trophy Room and down the stairs.

  “What is it?”

  “Can’t you tell?” Diamond sounded annoyed. “Saint George, of course. And the dragon.”

  I looked at the “dragon’s” coils, and remembered the story of Mintzer and the stolen snake.

  “That’s Long Sally!”

  “Mr. Mintzer has his uses,” agreed Diamond. “He had his revenge on the crocodile that bit off his hand—that’s its head. The wings belonged to a wandering albatross. I plucked them myself. It’s good, don’t you think?”

  “You shouldn’t have done that to Long Sally,” I said. It was all I could think of. “Or the crocodile. Or the poor albatross.”

  Diamond laughed. “Silly boy. How many dumb beasts get the chance to become a work of art? I have improved on nature, and they were lucky to be a part of it. But is it enough to win the Golden Brain Spoon?

  “I shall not rest,” she declared, “until the Spoon is mine and I am Taxidermist of the Year. But for that, I need perfection. I had little hope of finding a real dragon, but then I heard rumors about the Squermington Wyrm. Now that I’ve seen it, I must confess I am a little disappointed. I was hoping for something with legs. Never mind—it will have to do.”