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For Plato, Popper and Pop
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Hello
Chapter 1
Bon Voyage
Chapter 2
Big Boys’ School
Chapter 3
Five Brewsters and a Brainiac
Chapter 4
The Battered Cod
Chapter 5
Best Served Cold
Chapter 6
The Guilt Box
Chapter 7
A New Dawn
Chapter 8
The Best Defence
Chapter 9
A Village of Brainiacs
Chapter 10
Humble Pie
Chapter 10
Rematch
Chapter 11
Deep Cover Dining
Chapter 12
Molecular Gastronomy
Chapter 13
What Happens Tomorrow
Chapter 13b
What Happens the Next Day
Chapter 14
Brain Food
Chapter 15
Breaking Bread
Mr Flanty’s Pi Song
Copyright
About the Publisher
More adventures with
Casper Candlewacks in Death by Pigeon!
Casper Candlewacks in the Claws of Crime!
Map
Hello.
You’ve all heard of the old English tradition of the Village Idiot, right? No? Well then…
There’s this age-old law in Britain, passed through Parliament over one million years ago, that decreed the following (translated from caveman): ‘Every collection of stone huts shall, at all times, contain one idiot.’ It’s thought that this law aimed to cheer up the people’s boring lives, giving them something to laugh at between sessions of boar-hunting or wheel-inventing.
Fast-forward to the present day and if you visit any English village you’ll still find their idiot. Follow the curious smell and muddy footprints, look out for the man in a bobble hat chasing pigeons. Throw him a penny and the rest of your sandwich and thank him for his hard work – people like him are what make Britain great.
But there’s one village where things are slightly different. You see, in Corne-on-the-Kobb, a pretty little village with a pretty little cobbled square hidden away in the picturesque Kobb Valley, there isn’t an idiot. In Corne-on-the-Kobb there are about two hundred. In fact, every single person who lives in Corne-on-the-Kobb is a magnificently, hilariously wonderful specimen of a village idiot, all apart from one blond-haired scruffy boy called Casper Candlewacks.
Casper is the only non-idiot in Corne-on-the-Kobb, and that’s why he’s interesting. When an arrogant Italian magician cursed the village, only Casper could un-curse it. When an evil cat burglar stole the village’s precious bejewelled sword, only Casper could steal it back. When somebody filled their trousers with custard, only Casper could work the washing machine and tumble dryer and get the trousers back to them, custard free, in under forty-eight hours.
You get the point. Corne-on-the-Kobb is a village of idiots, and that’s the way it’ll always be. Or is it?
(Yes, it is.)
But is it?
(Yes.)
Look, have you read this book?
(Not yet, no.)
Well, get on with it! You might learn something.
(Sorry. I’ll read it now.)
“Lamp? You up yet?” Casper Candlewacks hauled open the corrugated door, flooding the garage with the morning’s sunlight. “It’s gone half seven and we really shouldn’t miss the bus. Not on our first day.”
There was a loud bump upstairs as Lamp Flannigan fell out of bed. “Casper?” came the muffled reply. “Where are you? All I can see is carpet.”
“You’re on the floor, Lamp. Come on, we haven’t got long.” Casper wriggled in his starched black blazer and loosened his tie. The emblem on Casper’s breast pocket showed a snake strangling a bear, with ‘SSSS’ written below in curly writing. This stood for ‘St Simian’s School for Seniors’ (not the sound the snake was making, as Casper had first thought).
Casper hated the idea of school uniform. Until the start of the summer he’d been at Corne-on-the-Kobb Primary, where the dress code was ‘clothes, if you have them’. But, just like Free Envelope Week at the Corne-on-the-Kobb Envelope ’n’ Bin Liner MegaMarket, all good things must come to an end. St Simian’s demanded a white shirt, black blazer, stiff grey trousers that creased like cardboard and shiny black shoes, all topped off with a mustard-yellow tie. Casper’s mum had forgotten about the shoes until last night so she’d dipped his trainers into a tin of black paint. They felt crispy. Casper had had a go at taming his bushy mess of blond hair, but after losing two combs and a metal fork he decided to leave it as it was.
To Casper, Lamp Flannigan’s garage felt just like home. He’d spent the whole summer here, building ‘Bubbel Buggies’ and ‘Bluff Boilers’ and getting progressively oilier day by day. But a newcomer to the garage would struggle to believe this magical junkyard kingdom was even real. Piles of metal, batteries and raw pasta littered the floor next to boxes filled with wires and bleeping circuit boards. Mad contraptions the shape of armadillos or saxophones (or both) whirred, clicked and honked from every worktop. A pot of smoking silver stuff bubbled away on the edge of a wooden shelf, while a robot with three wheels and a tennis racket for a head trundled in wobbly loops across the floor after a squealing self-bouncing tennis ball. Under a shelf full of wrenches sat a large chicken hutch with a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the front.
Two things had changed since yesterday. First, there was a new heap of scrap metal in Junk Corner, which was the place Lamp liked to keep his stuff when Bric-a-Brac Basket was full. Along with the usual old tat was a huge blue canister with a nozzle at the top and Helium printed on the front. But the second new thing really captured Casper’s attention. A pulsing, wheezing contraption took up most of the space on the workbench, replacing the gearbox filled with jam that had sat there yesterday, but now sat on the floor, gathering ants. Casper didn’t mind; this new machine was miles more exciting than Lamp’s jammy gearbox. A set of red bagpipes floated in the air like a tartan zeppelin, tethered in place by several lengths of string reaching up from a heavy iron rack. Strapped tightly round the bagpipes’ belly was a bleeping calculator fastened on to a leather belt; the mouthpiece had been extended up into a big yellow bowl that waggled in polite circles above the rest of the machine. The instrument had three wooden pipes, two of which were connected to each other with a length of rubber tube, while the third was taped to the long black neck of a vacuum cleaner that swung about close to the floor like a clumsy tail.
“It cooks omlits,” said Lamp. “D’you want one?”
Casper jumped. “Crikey! How did you get down here?”
A short podgy boy with a scrub of soot-black hair and a pear-shaped dongle of a nose stood in the far corner of the garage. In his left hand was a huge red helium balloon; in the other was an anchor on a string. He wore a blazer just like Casper’s (except the arms went down to his knees), his trousers were three sizes too small and his tie was made of yellow sofa fabric, looped twice round his neck and knotted in the middle. “I built a lift!” grinned Lamp.
“Ah…” Above Lamp’s head there was a hole in the ceiling, just the right size for a large red helium balloon, a boy and an anchor to fit through. “Ahh.”
“Look.” Lamp let go of the anchor and the balloon lifted him into the air.
Casper giggled. “Come back down here!”
Lamp disappeared through the hole in the ceiling. “Hang on,” he called. “I need another anchor.” There was some clunking, and a moment later down he floated with a second anchor on a string. “It’s for when the stairs are broken,” said Lamp, tethering his balloon to a handy knob he’d glued to the wall. “I get through a lot of anchors, though.”
“Can’t you reuse them?”
Lamp chuckled. “Don’t be silly.”
“Anyway, what did you say this thing was?” Casper turned back to the captive bagpipes.
“It’s my Omlit Gun,” smiled Lamp. “It makes lovely omlits and shoots them out here.” He waggled the head of the vacuum-cleaner neck in Casper’s direction.
Casper ducked, just in case. “Omelettes? I should’ve guessed.” He was used to Lamp’s eggy inventions by now. Two months ago Lamp had found Mavis and Bessie, the two egg-laying hens, sitting on his doorstep with a note saying they were his distant cousins. He took them in and gave them a coop, and in return the girls always made sure he had a surplus of eggs to invent stuff with.
The bagpipes let out a weary wheeze.
“So? Does it work?” asked Casper, slightly fearing the answer.
“Dunno,” shrugged Lamp. “Let’s give it a try. Ladies?”
Mavis and Bessie, Lamp’s two prize egg-laying hens and long-distant cousins on his mum’s side, popped their rubbery heads out of the coop and clucked sleepily. Mavis, the darker one, flipped over the Do Not Disturb sign with her beak. The other side said The Hens Are In. Please Knock.
Lamp lifted the lid of the hens’ coop to pick out two speckly brown eggs. “Watch this!” He did a little trot on the spot, galumphed over to the Omelette Gun and cracked both eggs into the yellow bowl.
The machine wobbled into motion, a nauseous groan from the belly of the bagpipes tightening into a tuneless wheeze. The strings grew taut, the bag puffed fuller and the eggs slipped down the mouthpiece and out of view. Then the pipes began to whistle a screeching, tuneless tune, a melody of such demonic ugliness that even when Casper blocked his ears, he could smell how bad it sounded.
Lamp did a highland jig around the garage.
The screech rose louder, the bag pumped fuller, the strings stretched and frayed to hold it still, and then when Casper was sure the thing was about to explode, there was a tremendous rattle as something shot down the vacuum-cleaner neck and spat across the garage, splurging against the far wall and sticking fast.
Casper dared to unblock his ears. “Wow.”
Lamp grinned. “Wait for it…”
CHOO!
With a final sneeze, the vacuum cleaner belched a cloud of herbs after the omelette, which filled the air like edible confetti.
Casper could do nothing else but clap. “Amazing!” he cheered. “Encore!”
Lamp bowed deeply. “I thank you,” he said. “Want one? There’s plenty more eggs.”
Before Casper could answer, Lamp was already back at the coop, rooting around in the straw. His face crumpled into a frown. “Strange…”
“What’s up?”
“I can’t find any more eggs. What with the two I’ve already got this morning that means today they’ve only laid…” Lamp pulled his arm from the coop and counted up on his fingers, “…six. I mean ten.”
“Two,” said Casper.
“Exactly. Three. That’s the lowest yet.”
Apart from the counting part, Lamp was absolutely right. Until a couple of weeks ago, Mavis and Bessie were prize egg-layers. They’d pump out eggs like faulty bubblegum machines, filling their coop right to the top and proudly sitting on the lid. But something had changed because each morning the boys would find fewer and fewer eggs, with no explanation why.
“I don’t like this,” said Casper suspiciously. “Maybe they’re ill or something.”
“Chicken pox?” said Lamp.
“Do chickens get chicken pox?”
“Er, yeah.” Lamp clicked his teeth. “Clue’s in the name, silly.”
Bessie pecked at a little vending machine. It gave a bloop and its dispenser scattered a handful of seeds on to the garage floor.
“Come on, Lamp, we’ve a bus to catch.”
“Ooh!” Lamp squealed. “We’re going to big boys’ school!”
The pit of Casper’s stomach wiggled. He wished he shared his friend’s enthusiasm, but in truth, he was terrified. Corne-on-the-Kobb wasn’t big enough to have its own senior school, so once the kids were old enough, they were shipped off to the sprawling city of High Kobb. You could see its grey towers from the top of the Corne-on-the-Kobb village hall, climbing high into the clouds and beyond, probably into space. Casper had never been to High Kobb, or any city, as a matter of fact. The villagers had told stories and Casper had listened, quivering: the never-ending traffic, murderers on every street corner and giant alligators that crawl out of the sewers and eat your firstborn. Cities struck fear into Casper’s heart. And now he had to go to school inside one!
If Casper survived the day, though, he’d have worse waiting for him back in Corne-on-the-Kobb. Tonight was the opening of his dad’s brand-new restaurant, an event two months and three kitchen fires in the making. Casper was to be head waiter and mopper of spills, his least favourite job since nappy-recycling.
“Oh, Casper, aren’t we gonna have so much fun?”
Casper was jolted back to reality as Lamp stuffed a handful of marbles and an iron into his oil-stained backpack.
“D’you think they have chairs there? Otherwise I’ll take this one with me.”
“They’ve already got chairs. I think. Come on, we’re going to be late.”
“Race you to the bus!” Lamp galumphed out of the garage and veered left down the road.
“This way, Lamp.”
“Righty-ho!” He wheeled round and galumphed back into the garage.
Lamp Flannigan was Casper’s best friend. He wasn’t the fizziest bottle in the fridge in terms of brain power. Directions weren’t his strong point, and neither were counting, spelling, herding cattle, walking, breathing, not falling into puddles… Actually, this list is going to continue for an awfully long time. To save money and rainforests it’d be easier to flag up his one and only strong point. Lamp Flannigan was an absolute genius at inventing. He invented the things that nobody in their right mind would ever attempt. But that’s the point: Lamp didn’t have a right mind. He didn’t even have a left mind. He had a sort of slushy heap that mulched around in his skull and gurgled when you shook it. But whatever it was, it sure as beans made him good at inventing. He’d invented telepathic typewriters that type what you think and collapsible caravans that fit into your lunchbox. He’d made rubber paint for bouncy walls and disposable flags that you only wave once. Inventing wasn’t just Lamp’s hobby, it was his life.
Casper walked through the park with Lamp trotting behind him, stopping every so often to sniff a flower or re-Velcro his shoes.
At the entrance to the village square sat Casper’s dad’s brand-new restaurant, The Battered Cod. There were about two weeks’ worth of jobs to do before The Battered Cod was ready to open, which was fine, except that tonight was the opening night.
Ting-a-ling.
“Casp!” The balding head of Julius, Casper’s dad, popped out of the front door like a hairy egg, but without much hair. “Glad I found you. Can you help me with this oven? It’s still in bits, and Cuddles ate the manual.”
“Sorry, I can’t. The bus leaves any minute.”
“Bus? Where d’you think you’re going on a school day, young man?”
“School, Dad. St Simian’s, remember?”
“Oh yes.” Julius scratched his scalp. “Course I remember. Well, have fun. I’ll just do the oven myself, then.”
“Good luck,” Casper grimaced. He wouldn’t normally leave his dad alone with an oven, even though he was a chef. “Don’t… explode… or anything.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“Hi, Mister Candlewacks,” piped up Lamp.
“Hi, Lamp.” Julius waved and disappeared back into his restaurant.
Ting-a-ling.
(One thing Julius had fixed was the thing that went ting-a-ling when you opened or closed the door. It’s a very important piece of equipment, particularly to deter robbers, who are generally terrified of bells.)
The village square was packed that morning with weeping mothers and trembling children standing by a huge train carriage lashed to a green tractor. It was the closest thing to a school bus Corne-on-the-Kobb could muster, but it didn’t half look grand there, grumbling away on the cobbles. In the centre of the square stood the massive gleaming stone statue of Mayor Rattsbulge, clutching his bejewelled sword in one hammy fist.
The real Mayor Rattsbulge stood in the shadow of his chiselled stone twin, twice as fat, not nearly as handsome, and clutching a sausage rather than a sword. The statue had been finished two weeks ago, and every day since, the mayor had stood proudly beside it, pointing it out to passers-by and loudly telling them how accurate it was.
Other villagers trotted across the cobbles on their morning errands, waving at each other and giving their mayor a wide berth. Betty Woons – a sprightly 107-year-old – whizzed in skittering circles across the square in her turbo-powered wheelchair, running over so many toes that she lost count and had to start again; village gardener Sandy Landscape leant against a wall, chatting to a hedge; bent-backed Mrs Trimble tugged at the nine leads attached to the collars of nine stubborn cats that licked their paws and meowed throatily; and four-foot-tall pub landlord Mitch McMassive puffed and wheezed as he tried once more to roll an enormous beer barrel towards The Horse and Horse, only for it to roll backwards and flatten him against the cobbles.
Casper and Lamp passed through the crowd, bumping into a grubby little man with a pinched face hidden under his grubby black beret.
“Hullo, Mr Renée!” Lamp said.
“’Allo, boys,” growled Renée in his thick French drawl. He grinned, his rubbery lips parting to reveal a few brown teeth. In the corner of his mouth hung a soggy, thin cigarette that wobbled as he talked. Renée’s gaze settled on Casper, and Caspar shivered.
“Hi,” Casper said briskly. He didn’t know why Renée made his skin crawl like that. He wasn’t a cruel man, just a little cold. Renée had come to Corne-on-the-Kobb from France a couple of months ago. Quite why he’d done that, nobody had bothered to ask. None of the other villagers paid the poor chap the slightest bit of attention because he was French. (The people of Corne-on-the-Kobb were scared of two things: foreigners and dinosaurs. Renée was at least one of those.)
“How’s your cheese shop getting along?” asked Casper politely.
“Ah, not bad, not bad,” nodded Renée. “I think it will be making quite ze splash.”
“Why?” Lamp scratched his hair. “Is it wet?”
Renée frowned and reached for the little English dictionary he’d taken to keeping in a pocket. “I, er, do not…”
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Casper, motioning for Renée to put his dictionary away. “He just means to say how excited we are about tasting all your cheese.”
“Heh,” said Renée, breaking into a gruff smile. “Yes. Ze cheese.” He winked at Lamp and turned to shuffle away.
Casper turned to Lamp and saw that he was grinning. “What was that wink?”
“Huh?”
“ALL ABOARD, TICKETS ’N’ RAILCARDS, MIND THE GAP!” shouted Sandy Landscape, clambering up the side of his tractor. “TRAIN NOW STANDIN’ ON PLATFORM ONE’S THE TEN PAST EIGHT TER HIGH KOBB.”
As children tottered up on to the train carriage and mothers wailed ever louder, Casper’s nerves flooded back in and stung him like a mouthful of seawater. What waited for him at the other end of this journey? Did High Kobb really have alligators? Would he even make it home to see the opening of The Battered Cod?
The ‘bus’ roared into life, pumping black fumes and a sleeping hedgehog out of the exhaust pipe and into the crowd. The tractor shunted forwards and the carriage jerked into motion behind, throwing the children back in their seats. The villagers cheered, tearful mothers waved their hankies and little children and dogs chased the carriage down the road, although it wasn’t going very fast so they just stood there and wondered what to do once they’d caught up with it.
At the back of the crowd, Renée shuffled away across the cobbles. He stopped at the door to a boarded-up shop with a small sign that said Le Cheese Shop. He open tonight. He fiddled with the key, pushed open the door and shuffled inside. But that’s not important because Renée’s obviously not anyone to worry about and he’s certainly not hatching any evil plans or anything. Don’t even know why I mentioned him, actually.
The country lanes trawled by slower than a lazy snail. Casper smudged his nose on the window of the train and sighed. Summer was over and school was ready to take its place, filling his days with boredom and sums.
Casper and Lamp sat at one of those four-seat tables opposite Milly and Milly Mollyband, the identical twins (who’d been given the same name to save time and name-badges). They’d obviously heard about the alligators too because they both trembled so hard that Lamp thought there was an earthquake going on.
Eventually, Lamp decided he liked earthquakes, so Casper had some more time to look out of the window. When he looked back, Lamp was scratching his oily black hair and then sniffing his finger. “Strawberry,” he said. “Must be Monday.”
Casper frowned. “What?”
“I invented a shampoo that knows what day it is. It changes flavour to match. Monday means strawberry.”
“Oh…” Casper frowned.
“And you know I smelt of eggs yesterday?”
“Was that the shampoo too?”
“Nope, I’d just been eating them. Got my last three here. Want one?” He pulled three boiled eggs from an inner pocket of his blazer.
Casper took an egg to keep Lamp happy and placed it carefully in his backpack.
Lamp licked his lips and saved his two for later.
“OY! WOSSAT?” A shriek tore from the back of the carriage.
“It’s Anemonie!” whispered Casper. “What does she want?”
“I want that! It’s mine!” A small, pointy-nosed girl with squinty eyes and dark hair stomped up the aisle, pointing straight at Lamp with her sharpened pink fingernails. Her sickly sweet perfume made Casper gag.