The Extincts Read online

  “What a lovely hat,” said Prudence politely.

  She put out a hand to touch the band of fur stretched around the brim, then snatched it back, blood oozing from her finger.

  Serves her right, I thought, for sucking up!

  Lo laughed. “You like the hat, but the hat doesn’t like you!”

  Mrs. Lind tut-tutted at the Early Mammal, who was chittering angrily, having been disturbed from his nap.

  “Naughty Mingus.” Then she noticed Prudence’s pink cheek and frizzled hair. “Dragon-burn,” she said. “Lo, get the first aid box.”

  Lo lifted the box down from the dresser and handed it to Mrs. Lind. As he did so, he said something to her in a low voice. I caught the words “strangers” and “Big Nigel” and “Grissel” and “doughnuts.”

  Mrs. Lind gave Prudence one of her sharp, twinkly looks. “If you offer a dragon a gift, and they accept it, they will never harm you—unless you try to take the gift back. Did you know that?”

  Prudence shook her head.

  “And hardly anyone,” Mrs. Lind went on, “sees the unicorn. Most people only see what they expect to see. They look at Big Nigel, and they see a horse. You must be … unusual.”

  Great, I thought. Prudence gets to be Unusual, while I’m ordinary, boring Most People. I didn’t want to be Most People. I wanted to be different.

  Rummaging in the first aid box with her one good hand, Mrs. Lind held up a small glass jar.

  “Cucumber and alicorn. My grandmother’s recipe. You just rub it in and it stops the stinging.” She looked thoughtfully at Prudence. “We could do with some extra help while my arm heals. There’s a lot to do. Some of it’s messy, some of them bite, and I can’t pay you very much. I don’t suppose you want a job?”

  “Yes!” breathed Prudence. Her face had gone as pink as her dragon-burnt cheek—as if somebody had given her the best present ever. “Oh, please, yes!”

  No! I thought. Oh, please, no! Part of me wished that Grissel had cooked her to a crisp. I wanted Wormestall to go on being my secret. I didn’t want it muddled up with the rest of my life. I especially didn’t want it muddled up with Prudence.

  “She might bring those men back,” I said meanly. “She might tell them stuff.”

  “I won’t,” said Prudence. “I wouldn’t. I swear it. Not ever.”

  “They might come back anyway,” I said. “For another look. Do you think they believed Mrs. Wednesday was a cow?”

  “She is a cow—sort of.” Lo helped himself to an orange off the hat, and started peeling it. “It’s an extinct sort, that’s all. They won’t think of that. And they wouldn’t have noticed Big Nigel. They’re not the type of people to know a unicorn when they see one. There’s no reason for them to come back. Why does that fellow have a hook?”

  The light died out of Prudence’s eyes. “Mr. Mintzer used to work in a zoo. He was head reptile keeper. Until a crocodile bit off his hand.”

  “Serves him right,” I said. “Three cheers for the crocodile. What happened to the hand?”

  “He had it stuffed. Diamond—my stepmother—made it into a tie rack for him.”

  I tried to imagine a row of spotty bow ties, hanging neatly on a stuffed hand. “That crocodile—was its name Long Sally?”

  Prudence shook her head. “Sally was a snake, a Burmese python. She was famous, the biggest snake in the country. Then she disappeared. They never found out what happened to her, but I know it was Mr. Mintzer who took her. He stole her for Diamond. But Sally wasn’t enough.” She squeezed her hands together, biting her lip. “There’s a competition, you see. For taxidermists. The winner gets the Golden Brain Spoon.”

  “What’s a brain spoon?” I wanted to know.

  “It’s for spooning out brains, of course,” said Prudence. “Taxidermists use them. Diamond’s desperate to win the Golden Brain Spoon. She’s looking for something new to stuff. Something that hasn’t been stuffed before. Like the Squermington Wyrm.”

  NINE

  DIAMOND PYE WASN’T the only person looking for Mortifer.

  People were getting twitchy.

  Mrs. Chen from the Golden Pearl restaurant said she had seen a Chinese dragon scavenging in the bins behind the restaurant. A little boy called Ryan and his sister both said that they had definitely seen a Very Big Snakey Thing curled up asleep on their trampoline. Something left long, winding tracks in the grass up at the golf course, as well as a large poop next to the ninth hole. There was a poop expert talking about it on the news. He reckoned it was definitely snake, although it was much bigger than normal, and he was a bit surprised that it had bean sprouts and noodles in it.

  “With the number of missing pets still rising,” said the TV reporter, looking very serious, “the question is, does the Squermington Wyrm eat people?”

  A lot of kids weren’t allowed out after that. The streets were quieter than usual and the park was almost empty, except for Daisy standing on her bench, waving her walking stick and shouting about plagues of frogs and the human race being eaten by caterpillars. Police helicopters circled overhead. Everyone agreed: it was time somebody did something, before the worst happened.

  Mum didn’t ground me, but she wasn’t happy about me going to Wormestall.

  “I don’t like the thought of you being out by yourself,” she said. “Not with that Thing about.”

  “I’m not by myself. There’s Mrs. Lind and Lo,” I told her. “And now,” I added gloomily, “there’s Prudence.”

  Mum was standing on her head in the bathroom, with her toes pointing at the ceiling. The bathtub was full of all our dirty clothes. The washing machine was still broken.

  “Who’s Prudence?”

  “She’s in my class. She’s new. She lives in that big white house on High Holly Hill.” I had ridden past it on my bike, and knew it was hers for two reasons. First, there was a shiny pink sports car parked in the driveway. Second, there was a sign outside the gate saying:

  DON’T SAY GOOD-BYE TO YOUR DEAD

  WHY NOT HAVE THEM STUFFED INSTEAD?

  Pye’s Pet-Stuffing Service

  Taxidermist of the Year Runner-up

  No Job Too Large

  “The Pyes’ house? Have they come back?” Mum was surprised. “That house has been empty for years. I knew Daniel Pye way back, before you were born. We went to yoga class together. A nice man—never said very much, but he had kind eyes. He had a job in a museum somewhere, and a wife with amazing red hair. I remember they were expecting a baby—your friend Prudence, I suppose. The next thing I heard, his wife was dead, poor Daniel, and he had moved away. I don’t know what happened to him after that.”

  “I do,” I said. “He married an evil taxidermist, and then he was killed by a hippopotamus. Prudence lives with her stepmother. And she’s not my friend.”

  Just then, Steve and Debbie from next door came by to ask if we’d seen their cat, but we hadn’t. Which was odd because he’s nearly always asleep on our ironing board.

  * * *

  I told Mrs. Lind about the police helicopters and the TV reporter. She said that basilisks were like dragons and unicorns. They had had a lot of practice at hiding, over the centuries, and they were very good at it.

  “Mortifer will be all right,” she said. But you could see she wasn’t sure. She had that look in her eyes that Mum has when the electricity bill comes.

  “Don’t be worried,” I told her. “We just have to find him before anybody else does.”

  Mrs. Lind put her hands on my shoulders. “It was a lucky day when you came to Wormestall, George,” she said. “I belong here at the farm and it’s difficult for me to leave. Lo goes looking for Mortifer when he can, but he has to take Grissel out for her exercise at night and he’s not happy being around people by day. We need somebody who can go between here and Out There.” She waved her hand at the world beyond Wormestall. “Somebody who belongs in both places. The Right Person. As soon as I saw you, I knew that was you.”

  Prudence might be Un
usual, but I was the Right Person. That was good enough for me.

  * * *

  Prudence and I didn’t see much of each other at Wormestall. We were too busy. My auroch-milking skills improved, until I was almost as quick as Lo. I threw raw meat to Donald and Jemima and carried buckets of grain to the eohippuses—pygmy prehistoric ponies the size of cocker spaniels, with toes instead of hooves and gravy-colored stripes on their legs. I learned where the flock of archaeopteryx laid their eggs in the orchard, when they weren’t crashing clumsily from branch to branch between the apple trees.

  “It’s not as if they’d ever hatch,” said Lo, biting into a fried-egg sandwich. “They’re not fertile. We think a fox ate the male.”

  I remembered the odd, long-legged creature with the beak full of teeth I had seen on my very first visit to Wormestall. Part-bird, part-dinosaur.

  “Actually,” I said, “I think you’ll find him living in Wyvern Chase Woods.”

  * * *

  I was mostly in charge of the “extinct” animals, while Prudence saw to the others, the ones that were supposed to belong in myths and legends. She mucked out the stalls where Grissel and Crackling Rose lived; took care of Big Nigel, who even let her comb his mane and tail; and threw fish to the kraken. We took turns giving the Ping Feng piglet its bottle, and spooning porridge and honey into Tail-Biter. It’s not easy feeding something that won’t take its tail out of its mouth. You get very sticky.

  Sometimes, watching Prudence go in and out of the dragon’s stable, I felt a little bit jealous, but I couldn’t help noticing she often came out of the stable rather dragon-burnt around the edges. And anyway—I had the ichthyosaur.

  I had forgiven it for trying to eat me. You can’t blame an animal for being hungry. I didn’t dare get in the water with it, but I was teaching it tricks. Heaving a smelly bucket of fish up the tree with me, I would sit on the stump of broken branch, dangling a mackerel at arm’s length, and whistle. The surface of the water would tremble as the ichthyosaur woke from its doze beneath the duckweed. Then, quite suddenly, it would shoot like a speeding arrow, leaving a long V behind it in the water, and leap to snatch the fish between its chain-saw jaws before diving back into the water with a mighty splash. It was awesome—just as good as a killer whale—although I never watched it without a little shiver, remembering how close I’d come to being an ichthyosaur snack.

  Our training sessions were a secret. I didn’t tell anyone, especially not Prudence. I still wasn’t really talking to Prudence—not if I could help it.

  * * *

  Sometimes, I couldn’t help it.

  Like the time in the middle of a science lesson when a tooth fell out of Prudence’s pocket.

  We were supposed to be labeling a diagram of the parts of a flower. Prudence had a cold. She gave one of those exploding sneezes and pulled out a tissue. Something dropped onto the floor by her feet, so I glanced down to see what it was.

  “George Drake! What on earth’s the matter?”

  Miss Thripps had been writing on the whiteboard. Now she turned around to stare at me. I changed my yelp of surprise into a cough. Everyone was staring at me, so I covered the thing on the floor with my foot. Prudence bent down to pick it up, then put it calmly back in her pocket. At recess, I went looking for her.

  She wasn’t hard to find. She was where she always was, leaning against the jungle gym, reading a book.

  “What was that?” I demanded.

  Prudence took her hand out of her pocket. I looked at the object lying on her palm. It was about a finger’s length, curved—and very sharp. A tooth.

  “I found it in the woods,” she told me. “On my way home from Wormestall that first day, when you took the bike. Mrs. Lind says Grissel’s losing her teeth all over the place because of being old, and because of all the sweet stuff she eats. She said I could keep it.”

  Slightly envious, I wondered if I could persuade the ichthyosaur to spit out a tooth.

  “Be careful” was all I said. “You’d better hide it. What if Mintzer or your stepmother sees?”

  * * *

  The trouble was, after that, Prudence seemed to think we’d stopped Not Talking. She kept popping up beside me when I was being goalie on the playground, or behind me in the lunch line.

  “Don’t you think that cloud looks like a flying dragon?” she’d say, or “Don’t forget to save your apple core for Big Nigel,” or “It’s your turn to feed Tail-Biter today. I’ve still got porridge in my hair from yesterday.”

  People began to notice. Josh and Matt started making jokes. The girls were worse. Somebody put a piece of paper in my pencil case with a heart drawn on it and a G and a P. Mum found another one when she emptied my PE bag. Harry and Frank thought it was funny, and they started in on me as well. Chants of “George likes Prudence. Prudence likes Geo-orge” followed me wherever I went.

  I hadn’t liked her to start with. Now I liked her even less.

  * * *

  And then, suddenly, Prudence wasn’t there.

  For three days in a row, she didn’t come to school. She hadn’t been seen at Wormestall, either.

  “Something’s wrong, I know it,” declared Mrs. Lind. She had boiled up a new batch of Depetrifaction Ointment and lugged it out to the stables, where she was experimenting on the stone rabbit. She had covered it from nose to tail in green slime, while we coughed and gasped in the fumes, but it still wasn’t showing any signs of depetrifying.

  “She’s probably just sick,” I suggested. “Aisha puked in the bus on the way back from swimming the other day. Prudence was sitting next to her.”

  Mrs. Lind shook her head. “It’s something else. Something worse. You know, this rabbit really ought to be showing signs of life by now.” She poked it and frowned. “Not even the twitch of a whisker. I’ll run out of rue at this rate. Lo, are you positive that it was weasel pee you gave me? Not stoat … or ferret?”

  “Mmm,” said Lo. He was writing a label to go around the latest stone animal’s neck, and not really listening. “Number 35 Ashmole Road. Or was it 33?”

  “Hey, I live at 33 Ashmole Road!” I looked at the stone cat at his feet. “And that’s Next-Door’s Cat!”

  “Maybe you can stop by Prudence’s house on your way home, George,” suggested Mrs. Lind, “just to check nothing’s wrong?”

  I wasn’t thrilled about the idea.

  “What if Mr. Mintzer’s there? He wants to feed me to the Squermington Wyrm.”

  “He’ll have to find it first,” said Mrs. Lind.

  Mortifer was still at large. He had last been seen by a frightened waiter at The Star of India, scavenging leftover chicken biryani out of the bins in the middle of the night. The waiter had called 911, but by the time Emergency Services arrived, the basilisk was gone. So was the biryani.

  I tried to think of an excuse, but there wasn’t one. Which is how I found myself standing on Prudence’s gravel driveway, staring at her door knocker. The door knocker stared back at me: a real stuffed fox’s head, with a brass ring clamped between its teeth. I didn’t want to touch it, but I’d promised. I raised my hand and knocked.

  Nobody came, except for a skinny cat, which jumped off the wall and sat down to clean its tail in a patch of sunlight. I was just turning to go when I heard the scrape of a key in the lock.

  “Nnnghh?”

  It was Mr. Mump, filling up the whole doorway. The cat came to rub against his legs. “Unghh,” he said. “Betty.”

  He bent down to scratch her ears, but she sniffed at his hands and walked away with her tail in the air.

  “This is for Prudence.” Miss Thripps had given us a math worksheet for homework. Generously, I was giving mine to Prudence. I’d had to think of something, to give me a reason for being there. “Is she all right?”

  “Proooodence,” repeated Mr. Mump, squinting at the worksheet, which was full of questions about hexagons and cubes and triangular prisms.

  “Yes,” I said. “Is she sick?”

 
“Proooodence.”

  We weren’t getting very far.

  “Never mind,” I told him. “I’ll come back another time. Or I’ll see her at school. Tell you what, I’ll write a note.” Taking a pencil out of my schoolbag, I tore a sheet out of my homework notebook and wrote: ARE YOU DEAD OR SOMETHING? MRS. LIND WANTS TO KNOW. I handed it to Mr. Mump. “Can you give her that? And the worksheet has to be handed in on Monday. Thanks.”

  I was turning to go when Mump grabbed my arm.

  “Nnnghh,” he grunted. “Come.”

  He yanked me into the house, and the door slammed shut behind me.

  * * *

  “I didn’t know you had a dog,” I said, putting out my hand to greet a fat black Labrador with a graying muzzle.

  When the dog didn’t move, I realized someone had turned him into a coffee table. I snatched my hand back. The sheepskin rugs on the floor still had their heads attached and at the foot of the stairs an enormous polar bear balanced on its back legs, wearing a top hat. There was a grand piano in one corner; on top of it stood a penguin with a lamp shade where its face should have been, and a pair of candlesticks made out of two white rats. Above the piano, a gigantic silver fish swung from the ceiling.

  It was even bigger than Mump.

  I stared at it. “Is that a shark?”

  “Nnnghh.” Mump tugged on my arm. “Piano tuna.”

  He marched me all the way through the house and out the French doors on the other side, across a lawn and through a gate in a brick wall. The air smelled of swimming pool.

  Diamond Pye was floating in one of those inflatable rubber armchairs. Mr. Mintzer sat in a deck chair, polishing his hook. Beside him was one of those old-fashioned strollers with big silver wheels and a hood. I looked at it in surprise. Prudence hadn’t said anything about a baby.

  “I know you!” The long, wet hair streaming over Diamond’s shoulders was blueberry blue this time. So was the lollipop she took out of her mouth when she saw me. “You’re the boy who saw the Squermington Wyrm!”