The Extincts Page 4

  The bit about cookies reminded me that I was hungry. Whoever that note was really for, surely they wouldn’t care if I ate just one cookie?

  The door swung open easily. As I crossed the hall, I glanced up the stairs, remembering my trip to the bathroom. According to the Internet, the kraken is a legendary sea monster that doesn’t really exist. Clearly, the Internet was wrong, though the Wormestall kraken was more of a legendary toilet monster.

  “Ouch!” Not looking where I was going, I had stubbed my toe. “Not you again!” I said. It was the stone rabbit. I was positive it was the same one. “What are you doing here?”

  Limping into the kitchen, I found a jug of lemonade, chinking with ice, on the table. Stuck to the cookie tin was another note: Help yourself. So I did.

  With a glass in one hand and a cookie in the other, I wandered around the kitchen, being nosy. There was a very large saucepan on the stove. I peeped inside.

  “Yuck!” I slammed the lid back on quickly. The pan was full of stinking green slime.

  The Emergency Wooden Leg was in its corner by the door, and a note stuck to the fridge said, Lo, don’t forget to catch the weasel. Apart from that, everything seemed normal enough. There were jam jars full of flowers, and a rocking chair, and cheerful yellow-checked curtains blowing in the breeze through the open window. I wondered about the dog bed. Who slept in it? And why was it full of those curious lumps?

  I was just prodding one of the lumps with the toe of my sneaker when something hurtled through the cat flap like a feathered cannonball, hitting the back of my knees and knocking my feet out from under me. Half a glass of lemonade and the remains of a chocolate chip cookie flew through the air as I went over backward.

  Various bits of me hurt, quite a lot. I shut my eyes. Then I found I couldn’t breathe, so I opened them again.

  An angry bird with a fat body, stubby little wings, tufts of gray feathers, and a big, curved beak was standing on my stomach, pecking at my nose and glaring at me with fierce orange eyes.

  “Ow!” I said faintly, putting up my hands to protect my nose.

  “Oh, you bad bird!” Mrs. Lind was standing in the doorway with an odd-shaped bundle in her hands. She was still wearing her rain boots and her beads, and the Early Mammal was perched on her hat, cleaning bits of banana off his whiskers. “Dido, get off!”

  “I told you!” The boy had appeared at Mrs. Lind’s shoulder. “She’d be a lot less annoying if we cooked her.”

  Dido hopped off my stomach. Letting go of my nose, I propped myself up on my elbows, but the relief didn’t last. Now she was attacking my ankles. I kicked out at her, but it wasn’t any use. This bird had problems with anger management.

  “What we need,” said the boy pensively, “is a good recipe for bird vindaloo.”

  Mrs. Lind clicked her tongue. “Hold that,” she told me, handing me her parcel, then she flung herself, in a sort of rugby tackle, on top of the bird. “There, now.” Panting slightly, she tucked it, squawking, under her arm. “She doesn’t really mean any harm.” She looked at my bruised nose and bleeding ankles. “Did you touch her eggs?”

  “Eggs?” I looked at the dog bed. Beneath the edge of the blanket, I could make out something pale. “Oh. That’s what the lumps are.”

  “She takes her egg-sitting very seriously,” explained Mrs. Lind. “I’m sorry we weren’t here when you arrived. We were up in the barn. Crackling Rose had her piglets today. Twelve of them. That one’s the runt.”

  I looked down at the parcel in my lap. A pig. A tiny black piglet, wrapped up in a towel.

  “Pigs in blankets,” said the boy hungrily. “Sausage roll. Pork chops. Suckling pig, with—”

  “This is Lo,” Mrs. Lind told me, interrupting him. “Short for Lobelius. It’s not his real name, but I have to call him something and that’s what I was doing when he came out of nowhere—planting lobelia. Blue, like his eyes. He likes you to think he doesn’t care about anything, but it isn’t true. He’s a great help to me, although it makes him very cross when I say so. And he hates it if you use the A word.”

  “What’s the A word?” I asked.

  “Absolutely-none-of-your-business, that’s what.” Lo yawned, showing very white teeth. He might be named after a flower, but nobody in their right mind was going to give this boy a hard time about it. “We’ve already met,” he informed Mrs. Lind. “In the bathroom. The kraken was trying to give him a cuddle.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Lind guiltily. “Sorry, George. I should have warned you. I’m afraid the poor thing gets bored, all by itself in that bath. Would you like to give the pig its bottle? I’ll warm up some milk.”

  As she set Dido down on the floor, I scrambled to my feet. Clutching the piglet, I edged around the table, away from that wicked beak.

  I’m not great on birds: I can tell an owl from an ostrich and a parrot from a penguin, and that’s about it. But now that I looked at this bird properly, I knew I’d seen it before—in a glass case, in the Natural History Museum. You couldn’t mistake it: it looked like a turkey crossed with a feather duster.

  I stared. “Isn’t that…? That’s a dodo! Shouldn’t she be … extinct?”

  The boy laughed. Mrs. Lind put her finger to her lips. “We don’t use that word here, George. The E word.”

  “You don’t. I do.” Lo helped himself to a cherry off Mrs. Lind’s hat, flicking the pit at Dido. “Extinct. Extinct. You stink. You’d smell better in a stew.”

  The bird glared at him, snapping her beak.

  “Dido is the only dodo left that we know of,” said Mrs. Lind sadly. “There were never very many to start with, and they were all on one island. I’m afraid they were too trusting, and too easy to catch.”

  “Proof,” said the boy, “that it doesn’t pay to be nice. While the other dodos were clucking about in the open, being stupidly friendly and getting eaten, Dido’s lot hid behind a bush and sulked. Saved by their own bad temper.”

  With an evil look at Lo, the bird waddled over to her dog bed. Twitching back the tartan blanket with her beak, she inspected the clutch of eggs nestling underneath it. Creamy white, buttery yellow, freckled green, all different shapes and sizes. The biggest was enormous, the size of a watermelon.

  “She didn’t lay that!” I hoped not, for her sake. I don’t know what it feels like, laying an egg, but that would have to hurt.

  “She didn’t lay any of them,” said Mrs. Lind. “That one came in the mail. The parcel was marked FERTILE. The post office read it as FRAGILE and managed not to break it, which was lucky. We have no idea what’s inside. We don’t know what any of them are, until they hatch.”

  “If they hatch,” the boy corrected her. “She’s been sitting on some of those for years. They’re probably rotten by now. One of these days they’ll break, and the stink is going to make your eyes water.”

  Mrs. Lind was pouring milk into a baby’s bottle. She tested the temperature, then handed it to me. “You had better sit down—no, not there!”

  She spoke too late. I was lowering myself into the rocking chair, and my bottom had already made contact with the top cushion. At least, I thought it was a cushion—covered in blue and yellow zigzags—until it let out a muffled squelch, like a punctured water balloon, and slithered out from under me. Holding the end of its tail in its mouth, it dragged itself sideways under the table, where it lost its stripes and turned the same color as the flagstones.

  “Show some respect,” said Lo. “You nearly sat on Tail-Biter.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know it was there. Er—what is it? And what’s it doing?” Curled in a circle—half reptile, half doughnut—it still hadn’t let go of its tail.

  “It’s representing eternity,” said Mrs. Lind, with a sigh. “Not really very sensible, but it’s an ouroboros and that’s what they do. It makes it very difficult to feed, and it gives itself terrible sores, sucking its tail like that, but it’s afflicted by a sense of duty. It believes that if it ever lets go and breaks t
he circle, Time will stop.”

  “Would it?” I asked. “Would Time stop?”

  “We don’t know,” said Mrs. Lind. “It’s never happened.” She gave the rocking chair a brush with her hand. “Look at that,” she complained. “Scales all over the furniture. You’re not allergic, are you, George? It used to make poor Numpty sneeze so.”

  Numpty Numbskull, who didn’t work there anymore.

  “Was that why he left?”

  “Who said anything about him leaving?” Lo pulled a custard cream apart, throwing Dido the half with no cream. She caught it in her beak with a snap. “He’s upstairs, in the cupboard.”

  “For safekeeping,” explained Mrs. Lind. “But you’ll do very well in his place, George. You have a way with animals.”

  “Do I?” I rubbed my sore nose.

  “You caught Mingus, didn’t you? And Dido could easily have pecked your eyes out, if she didn’t like you. She bit off one of Numpty’s toes. I did warn him about walking around barefoot.”

  “It’s still in the freezer,” said Lo. “The toe.”

  “You shouldn’t throw away people’s toes,” said Mrs. Lind. “Not without asking.”

  * * *

  The hungry piglet quickly got the hang of the bottle, and was soon slurping noisily on my lap. Dido perched on top of her egg collection, with her feathers fluffed out and her eyes half-closed. Mingus was snoring on Mrs. Lind’s hat. Tail-Biter stayed under the table, watching me with emerald-eyed suspicion.

  “Where do they all come from?” I asked. “How do they get here?”

  “The world is running out of hiding places for anything that doesn’t want to be found,” said Mrs. Lind sadly. “Humans are taking up too much space, cutting down the forests, blasting through the mountains, poisoning the water. Creatures lose their homes; they have nowhere else to go. Sometimes they’re lingerlings, like Mingus and Dido, left behind when the rest of their species dies out. Others are cryptids, like Tail-Biter and the kraken. People say these animals don’t exist, but they do. They keep out of sight, away from human eyes. One way or another, many of them make their way here. We never know when they’ll arrive—or how. Sometimes they’re born here. Like that piglet. You had better turn it around now, George, while there’s still some milk left. The other end will want a turn.”

  I stared at her, then down at the pig. The other end? Cautiously, I unwrapped the towel. I was getting used to Wormestall. It wasn’t that much of a surprise. The piglet had a head at both ends.

  “Ping Feng,” said Mrs. Lind. “They’re Chinese.”

  “Sweet-and-sour pork,” said Lo, licking his lips. “The question is, which end is which?”

  “Don’t listen to Lo,” Mrs. Lind told me. “He doesn’t mean it. George—I have to ask you not to talk about what you have seen here. If people ever found out—well, there would be a fuss. They would want to take the animals away, and put them in zoos or laboratories or … or something even worse. We’ve already lost one. We have to keep the others safe. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. “I won’t say anything. You can trust me.” I meant it. I would not betray the animals of Wormestall Farm. Not ever. I remembered the headlines in the Squermington Echo, and frowned. “You haven’t lost some sort of snake, have you?”

  “Not exactly.” Mrs. Lind hesitated. “George, what do you know about basilisks?”

  Mostly what I knew about basilisks was that they didn’t exist, except in stories. And video games. Josh had bought a game at a yard sale. It was called Slime Spitter: Battle of the Basilisks. We soon found out why it was cheap—it kept freezing.

  “Basilisks are like giant snakes. They spit slime balls at you and if you look them in the eye, they turn you into stone. You have to kill them by throwing bombs at them, or shooting them with your…”

  I saw the look on Mrs. Lind’s face, and stopped.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said quietly. “That’s what people are going to want to do to Mortifer.”

  I understood now. I looked at the stone rabbit by the kitchen door. “That’s a real rabbit, isn’t it?”

  As Mrs. Lind nodded, I remembered the stone cat Lo had brought in through the bathroom window. “And the cat…?”

  “Eleven cats. Five dogs. Eight rabbits.” Lo listed them on his fingers. “A ridiculous number of pigeons. A fox, a badger, three squirrels, and a Vietnamese potbellied pig. So far.”

  “They’re not dead,” Mrs. Lind assured me. “Just petrified. We can turn them back. That’s what the ointment’s for. It’s my grandmother’s recipe. Although I haven’t quite gotten it to work yet.” She twisted her beads together, a worried look in her eyes. “Mortifer doesn’t do it on purpose, you know—he doesn’t mean it. He can’t help what he is. People never understand that. If they catch him, I can’t bear to think of what will happen. It will be like Saint George and the dragon all over again.”

  When both ends of the Ping Feng piglet had had enough milk, Mrs. Lind put it to bed in a cardboard box.

  “There’s work to be done.” Lo picked up a bucket and looked at me. “Have you ever milked an auroch?”

  I was used to getting my milk out of the fridge, not out of an animal. Especially not an animal I’d never even heard of. I shook my head.

  “In that case,” said Lo, “you had better start with Mrs. Tuesday. Mrs. Wednesday kicks.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Tuesday and Mrs. Wednesday turned out to be two of the giant cows, living in a paddock of their own, away from the herd. They had chocolate coats, milky noses, and long, spear-like horns, and looked even bigger up close. They were much taller than I was.

  Lo told me to watch while he milked Mrs. Wednesday, who danced about stamping her feet and tossing her head, then he said it was my turn. He stroked Mrs. Tuesday’s nose and fed her peppermints while he gave me instructions.

  “Be polite,” he told me, “and she won’t mind.”

  I wasn’t very good at it. At first the milk wouldn’t come out at all, then it started going everywhere, all over the grass and my sneakers.

  “You’ll get better,” said Lo. “I hope.”

  As we crossed the yard back to the house, we could hear the TV on in the stables.

  “… Spread with chocolate fudge frosting, and decorate with sugar sprinkles…”

  “Grissel likes cooking shows,” said Lo. “Especially anything to do with cake. You wouldn’t think she’d ever been a man-eater. These days, she’d rather have a muffin.”

  By now, I reckoned I knew what Grissel was. What sort of animal sets fire to things and eats people? Only one that I could think of.

  “Doesn’t she eat people anymore?” I asked instead. I wanted to be sure on that point, before I met her.

  Lo shrugged. “Not for years. We think she may have had a bad one. The taste put her off. And she’s old; she’s lost a few teeth along the way. She has trouble with a pork chop, let alone human bones. But that doesn’t mean she’s safe. She’s not. Especially not with people she doesn’t know. It’s not a good idea to go barging in on her. I’ll introduce you, but not now. She was hatched in a very deep cave, and doesn’t care for daylight. I take her out at night, to stretch her wings.”

  Farther down the row of stables, one had its doors wide-open. There was sand piled thickly on the floor, and the walls were hung with mirrors.

  “Mortifer’s. We leave it ready, in case he comes back,” said Lo.

  I remembered Josh’s Slime Spitter game. One of the weapons you could use to kill the basilisk was a mirror. “Aren’t basilisks turned to stone by their own reflection?”

  Lo shook his head. “That’s gorgons. People get them muddled up. Although it’s true that basilisks don’t like their reflections much. They won’t look at themselves if they can help it. Those mirrors are there so you don’t get taken by surprise. They’re angled so you can see every corner of that stable, wherever you’re standing. Like Mrs. L. said, Mortifer doesn’t mean any harm—unless he’s hung
ry—but you have to be careful. Look what happened to Numpty.”

  “What did happen to him?” I wanted to know.

  “He took Mortifer his dinner, forgot to check the mirrors, found himself eyeball-to-eyeball with a basilisk, and turned into stone, of course,” said Lo.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to leave, but it was getting late. Mrs. Lind took money out of a cracked blue teapot and handed it to me. I’d forgotten about getting paid. Money didn’t seem important, compared with basilisks and dragons and two-headed pigs.

  “Come back soon,” she told me. “It doesn’t matter when. We’ll expect you when we see you.”

  “And the other way around,” said Lo.

  At the bottom of the track, as I was turning left into the lane, I nearly got knocked over by a bike.

  My bike. With Prudence riding it.

  “You!” I said as the bike swerved crazily and wobbled to a stop. “You thief!”

  For a minute, she didn’t seem to know what I meant. Then she went even redder than her hair. “Is it your bike? I didn’t mean to steal it—not properly. I only took it because I was going to be home late. I get into trouble if I’m late. I only borrowed it. I mean … I was going to give it back.”

  “Oh yeah? When?”

  “Today. I took it back to the Candy Shop, where I found it. But then I saw the card: HELP WANTED. MUST BE THE RIGHT PERSON. I thought I’d get here faster if I came by bike. I didn’t want to be too late.”

  “You are too late,” I told her. “Way too late. And you’re the Wrong Person. I’m the Right Person. I caught the Early Mammal, and Mrs. Lind gave me the job.”

  You could see from Prudence’s face that she minded. All she said was, “Oh. That’s that, then. I’ll go…”

  “Not on my bike, you won’t.” I grabbed the handlebars. “I had to walk all the way home when you nicked it. Now it’s your turn.”

  Prudence slid off the saddle without arguing.

  “There’s a shortcut through the woods,” I told her. “See you in school.”

  Unless the basilisk saw her first—and turned her into stone. She wouldn’t get any sympathy from me. It would serve her right.