The Extincts Read online

  I looked at the Jack Russell terrier sniffing my sneakers. It was Jamie May’s Peanut. And there was Snuffy, the missing tabby cat I’d seen in the Candy Shop window. “You’d make a lot of money,” I said, “if you claimed all the rewards people are offering to get their pets back.”

  “What would I want a lot of money for?” said Mrs. Lind. “Money’s like one of those annoying itches—the more you scratch, the itchier it gets. Once you start having a lot of it, you just want more. Stick to cake, is my advice, like Mr. Mump over there. Mr. Mump!” she called. “Here’s your cat—a little smelly, but good as new.”

  Mump looked up from his slice of cake, his face splitting into a great big grin as Smelly Betty trotted toward him, her tail curled into a question mark.

  “Nnnghh!” he said. “Betty better!”

  “That just leaves a couple of squirrels,” said Mrs. Lind. “And your friend.”

  I’d forgotten about Crazy Daisy. Doom hadn’t. He was huddled against his mistress’s stone feet, with his ears down flat and his tail between his legs.

  “Oh, poor Doom!” said Prudence. “Can we do Daisy next?”

  “I’m afraid she may not be very pleased.” Mrs. Lind looked anxious. “I don’t know what she’s going to say.…”

  “I do,” I said. “She’ll say what she always says. The End of the World is upon us and we’re all going to be eaten by caterpillars.”

  I was wrong. The first thing Daisy did, when Mrs. Lind had toweled the ointment off her, was bend down rather stiffly and pat Doom. Then her eyes, as bright and beady as ever, fell on Mump, sitting on the doorstep with Smelly Betty on his lap and a plate of cake.

  “Aha,” said Daisy. “Cake. That’s the ticket. Move over, big fellow.” And she sat down beside him.

  Mump opened his mouth, then shut it again. “Nnnghh,” he said at last, and passed her the plate. “Nnnghh nnnghhh!”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” agreed Daisy.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” said Mrs. Lind. “Whoops!” she added as her foot caught the bucket of ointment, splashing one of the stone gryphons’ tails. “Mustn’t waste it. Lo won’t be pleased if he has to catch another weasel—”

  She broke off, staring. We all stared. The gryphon’s tail, smeared with green slime, had twitched. Without a word, Mrs. Lind slopped on another dollop of ointment. The tail began to wave. Prudence and I both plunged our hands into the green slime, not even caring about the smell as we plastered it over the two gryphons.

  “Be careful,” warned Mrs. Lind. “Do the beaks last. They may be snappy.”

  But the gryphons weren’t interested in us. As we rubbed them down, they arched their backs, stretching like big cats, and preened each other’s neck feathers. The bigger one lifted his leg on the stable door, while his mate scratched at a depetrified flea. Then they began to play. Round and round the stable yard they went, in a mad game of tag, scattering the other animals as they lolloped and leaped and spread their wings and soared. Daisy and Mump had frozen, mouthfuls of cake halfway to their lips.

  “I wasn’t expecting that!” admitted Mrs. Lind. “I wonder how long they’ve been trapped in stone. Centuries, probably.”

  “They’re certainly pleased to be free,” said Prudence as we watched them skim the chimney tops.

  At last the gryphons grew tired. The cats scattered, spitting with fright, as they flapped up into the tree, where they draped themselves gracefully over a branch and fell asleep. Once the show was over, Mump and Daisy blinked and went back to their cake.

  “I wonder if those gryphons are a breeding pair?” mused Mrs. Lind. “It’s a long time since we’ve had gryphon chicks at Wormestall. Speaking of chicks, I wonder if Dido and Lo are getting anywhere with that hatchling?”

  What with Smelly Betty and Daisy and the gryphons, I’d forgotten about the hatchling.

  “Where is it?” I asked. “And what is it?”

  Mrs. Lind sighed. “It’s still in its egg. It’s refusing to come out. Dido tried to help, but it just snapped at her. We’ve been trying to get it to eat, but it won’t. Dido’s brought it beetles and snails and worms from the garden. Lo’s offered it mice and sausages and hot buttered toast. It’s just not interested. Come and see.”

  We followed her into the house, stepping over Daisy and Mump, who seemed to be getting on very well. In the kitchen, Lo was on his knees, dangling a fish stick over the dog bed. Dido was beside him, cocking her head and clucking anxiously.

  “Any luck?” asked Mrs. Lind.

  Lo shook his head.

  I knelt down beside him. Dido gave me a halfhearted peck, but I ignored her.

  “What’s the matter with it?” I asked.

  Lo hunched his shoulders. “Don’t ask me.”

  I stared down at the egg. Zigzag cracks ran all over the marbled pink shell. The hole my shoe had made was bigger than yesterday—big enough for the little creature inside to push its snout out and flop limply over the edge. It was very pale, the color of strawberry yogurt, and the ruby eye, which had fixed on mine so brightly, was gummy and dull. It wasn’t making its weep-weep noise. It wasn’t making any noise at all. I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. This is your stupid fault, I told myself. Why did you have to go and put your big foot in it? You stepped on it, and made it hatch too early, and now—

  “It’s not going to die, is it?” Prudence was standing just behind me.

  “No!” I said, desperately. “No, it can’t! It was fine yesterday! When I took it out of the bread bin, it looked right at me. And it was talking to me.”

  “It’s very weak,” said Mrs. Lind sadly. “I’m afraid that it won’t be long before—wait a minute—what did you say, George?”

  There was nothing for it. I had to own up.

  “It was when Diamond was here. Before she … you know. Mingus exploded and everyone was barging about, trying to get out of the kitchen. I stepped on the egg. I’m really, really sorry. It seemed to be all right, so I put it in the bread bin to keep it safe. I didn’t want Diamond or Mintzer seeing it.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Mrs. Lind. “When the egg cracked, you were the only person in here? So you were the first living thing it saw?”

  I nodded.

  “That explains it, then,” said Mrs. Lind. “It’s been pining.”

  “Pining?” I frowned. “What for?”

  “You, George.” Lo was sitting back on his heels, grinning. “It thinks you’re its mother. Look, it’s perking up already. Now that Mummy’s back!”

  It was true. There was a change. The creature stirred. The ruby eye blinked and rolled, seeking mine.

  “What d’you mean?” I said.

  “It’s imprinted on you, George,” explained Mrs. Lind, looking much more cheerful. “A hatchling like this thinks the first living thing it sees must be its mother. The first person it saw was you, and now it’s fixated. It expects you to feed it and look after it and teach it everything it needs to know. Nobody else will do. It’s a big responsibility. You can accept it or not. It’s up to you. But if you don’t, the hatchling will die.”

  Weep-weep, peeped the hatchling faintly.

  “I accept.” I didn’t even stop to think.

  “Congratulations on your new baby, Mummy!” said Lo, and passed me the fish stick. “You can try getting it to eat this, for starters.”

  As soon as the baby saw me holding the fish stick, the weep-weeps grew louder and it tried to wriggle out of its shell, opening its jaws to show rows of tiny, pin-sharp teeth. A package and a half of fish sticks later, it had crawled right out of its egg and was curled up in my lap. I stroked its scaly spine with one finger, wondering how I was going to smuggle it home and look after it without Mum realizing that there was an unidentified reptile in the house. And what was I going to feed it? Looking at those teeth, I guessed it didn’t eat vegetables. Possibly it ate vegetarians.

  “It’s a pretty color,” said Prudence. I could tell by her voice that she wa
s a tiny bit jealous. “Pink.”

  I quoted Mum. “Real Men aren’t afraid of pink,” I said firmly.

  “Hmm,” said Mrs. Lind. “I wonder. If that’s what I think it is, then one day, when it grows up, Real Men are going to be very afraid of it indeed.…”

  * * *

  The very last of the Depetrifaction Ointment was used up on the two leftover squirrels.

  “That’s that,” said Mrs. Lind as the squirrels scampered away. “I’ll be glad to get rid of that smell!”

  Lo raised his eyebrows at her. “Aren’t you forgetting something? Or … somebody?”

  For a moment, Mrs. Lind looked puzzled, then she clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “Numpty!” she exclaimed. “How could I forget poor Numpty?” She peered into the empty bucket. “There’s not enough in there to depetrify a mouse! What are we to do?”

  “Nothing,” said Lo, yawning. “Until I find another weasel. That could be ages.”

  “I feel very guilty!” said Mrs. Lind. “Never mind. It can’t be helped. I’ll make more ointment—and a cake like he had on his birthday, with the fish-paste icing and the crystallized spiders on top.”

  * * *

  Everything went back to normal, but better.

  Mrs. Poker-Peagrim didn’t notice the chip in Sir Crispin’s ear. Neither she nor Frank ever guessed that he had spent the weekend turned to stone. Everyone at home was glad to see Next-Door’s Cat back in his place on the ironing board.

  Mortifer showed no signs of wanting to run away again, and the gryphons settled in very quickly, although Mrs. Lind complained that they took up the whole sofa and left feathers everywhere, as well as hairs.

  Daisy and Doom didn’t live in the park anymore. The park staff had been painting all the benches, and Daisy’s had a sign on it that said WET PAINT—DO NOT TOUCH, so she went to live with Mump and Prudence instead. Daisy didn’t like the idea of walls and a roof—she said she was used to sleeping under the stars. Mump moved the sofa out into the garden for her, but she complained it was too soft and she couldn’t get comfortable. Luckily, it turned out that while Daisy was petrified she had actually, finally, won the lottery. She had enough money to buy a bench of her very own, and there was enough left over to buy a little tea shop, too, where she and Mump were going to sell cake.

  As for Mintzer, we dressed him in a flappy old raincoat and put him in the vegetable garden at the farm. He was supposed to scare the crows away, but he wasn’t very good at it. Mostly they just perched on his head and pooed on him.

  One morning, when Mrs. Lind and I were doing the milking together, I tried asking her about Lo.

  “It’s true, isn’t it, about him being a … you know what?”

  Mrs. Lind sat on the milking stool, her cheek resting against Mrs. Wednesday’s hairy flank as milk hissed into the bucket.

  “Hmm?” was all she said.

  I tried harder. “The A word. It’s true he’s an a—” I hesitated, and lost my nerve. “An Above-Average Flier?”

  Mrs. Lind smiled. “He is, isn’t he? Much too fast, of course—one of these days he’s going to crash.”

  “But what’s he doing here? On Earth? At Wormestall?”

  Mrs. Lind looked thoughtful. “I suppose you could say he was in detention.…”

  “Detention?” Mrs. Tuesday’s milk squirted all over my shoe. “What for?”

  “Speeding, mostly,” admitted Mrs. Lind. “Where he comes from, they’re fussy about rules. You know Lo. He doesn’t like being told what to do. There may have been more to it than that. He doesn’t choose to talk about it, and it would be bad manners to press him.”

  The hiss of milk stopped. Mrs. Lind stood up, picking up her bucket and stool. I knew better than to ask any more questions.

  I didn’t have time to waste wondering about Lo. I was too busy looking after the hatchling. It’s hard work, being something’s mother, especially when you have to keep it a secret. I took it to school, zipped into my backpack, and never got to play soccer at recess anymore because I had to lock us both in the bathroom and stuff it full of food to keep it quiet until lunch. Then I had to do the same thing at lunch, to shut it up until the end of the day. At home, it lived in the Emergency Bike Fund box under my bed. I had to stop Mum from coming into my bedroom and poking about, which meant that I had to start making my bed and picking up my dirty socks and not leaving crumbs. I also had to set my alarm to go off every three hours at night, before the hatchling woke everybody up with its hungry weep-weeping. Most of my Wormestall wages went to fish sticks and meatballs. You have to make sacrifices when you’re a parent.

  At least Mum was in a good mood. She had a new mermaid to replace the one Doom chewed up. Mump had made it, with a little help from Harry. It had a proper silvery fish’s tail (I recognized half the Piano Tuna) and long, seaweedy-green hair. Gazing out onto the street, through a pair of mirrored sunglasses, it held a colored cockleshell up to its lips, almost as if it were licking a lollipop.

  People passing by stopped to look at it. Sometimes they even went inside the shop and bought something. Mum was thrilled.

  “So much better than that sad old thing I had before!” she said happily. “It’s so lifelike!”

  “Too lifelike,” said Prudence, with a shiver. “Like an evil step-mermaid. It gives me the creeps.”

  She had locked the doors to the Trophy Room and hidden the keys somewhere only she knew. The “dragon” in the Stuffing Room had had a proper burial in the orchard at Wormestall, and we’d planted flowers on its grave. As for Saint George, he turned out to be a stuffed baboon.

  “Nobody hurt it. Its name was Biff and it died peacefully of old age in the zoo,” Daisy assured us. “Mump said so.”

  We were all around Mrs. Lind’s kitchen table, having tea. Everyone looked at Daisy in surprise.

  “Did Mump really say all that?” asked Prudence, impressed. “And you understood him?”

  “Of course,” said Daisy. “I understand everything he says. The rest of you just don’t listen properly.”

  Dido was on her eggs. Tail-Biter was sucking his tail on the rocking chair. Prudence was feeding the Ping Feng piglet, which was growing fast. (Lo had been heard muttering about sausages and bacon. Mrs. Lind promised us he was only joking, but I wasn’t so sure.) The hatchling was on my lap, working its way through a plate of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I hoped the Ping Feng hadn’t noticed the ham. Mump had popped upstairs to visit the kraken. (He had the hang of it now, and kept fish sticks in his pocket like the rest of us.)

  “Daisy?” I had to ask. “Is The End of the World still coming?”

  “I expect so,” she said, cutting another slice of cake. “But it doesn’t matter much. I’ll tell you a secret, George. There’s no point in worrying about The End, because, really, there’s no such thing. The end of one thing, you’ll find, is always the beginning of another.”

  “Like chapters in a book,” agreed Prudence.

  “Or like Tail-Biter,” I said. We all looked at the ouroboros. Where his tail ended, his snout began, and the other way around, on and on, forever and ever.

  “Shouldn’t he be allowed a day off?” I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

  Prudence shook her head. “Time would stop. And then what? It would be the end of Everything.”

  “And the beginning of Nothing.” I tried to imagine it. What could you do in a world full of Nothing?

  I knew what I’d do. Start counting.

  Something would happen before I reached a million. It always does.

  THE ANIMALS OF WORMESTALL FARM

  THE EXTINCT ONES

  (LINGERLINGS)

  ARCHAEOPTERYX (“ancient wing”)

  ar-kee-AHP-ter-ikss

  Extinct for 150 million years. Looks like a bird, but with claws on the ends of its wings and a beak full of teeth. Not very good at flying, especially taking off and landing.

  AUROCH (Mrs. Tuesday and Mrs. Wednesday)

  OR-ahk
r />   Hunted to extinction by humans in 1627. Long before that, it found its way into prehistoric cave paintings. Enormous wild cow with ferocious horns. Not keen on being milked.

  BULLOCKORNIS (“ox bird”—Donald and Jemima)

  bull-AHK-or-nuhss

  Extinct for fifteen million years. Nicknamed Demon Ducks of Doom. Taller than a man (8.2 feet), a bullockornis can’t fly, but it can run fast. It enjoys ripping up meat with its heavy, curved beak. Any meat will do. It’s not fussy, but it doesn’t like bread. It prefers boy.

  DODO (DIDUS INEPTUS; “stupid dodo”—Dido)

  Extinct since 1681. Fat, flightless bird, with a tail like a feather duster. Dodos were perfectly happy minding their own business on the island of Mauritius until humans arrived in 1598 and spoiled everything. Dido guards her egg collection fiercely—even though she didn’t lay the eggs.

  EARLY MAMMAL (Mingus)

  Not properly extinct. First appeared about 210 million years ago and has been evolving ever since into the mammals alive today. Small, hairy things, like saber-toothed squirrels, they scurried about between the dinosaurs’ feet. Those that didn’t get stepped on or eaten survived when the dinosaurs died out—which proves that bigger is not always better.

  EOHIPPUS (“dawn horse”)

  ee-oh-HI-puhss

  Extinct for fifty million years. Pygmy pony, about the size of a spaniel, with toes.

  ICHTHYOSAUR (“fish lizard”)

  IK-thee-uh-sor

  Extinct for ninety million years. Looks like a dolphin, but with a long jaw full of very sharp teeth.

  THE OTHER ONES

  (CRYPTIDS)

  Serious, sensible people say these animals do not exist. Serious, sensible people are very often right. But not always.

  BASILISK (Mortifer)

  A giant serpent with a mane of feathers and a beaked nose. Its breath is so bad it shrivels vegetables, and any creature that meets its eyes is instantly petrified (turned to stone). It’s not the basilisk’s fault. It can’t help it.

  DRACUNCULUS DENTATUS (small toothed dragon)

  Mrs. Lind’s great-aunt Hepzibah met one of these in the shrubbery, after which she needed the emergency wooden leg. It was the dragon that was small, not the teeth.