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Dedication
For Amy
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 18 - The End
Chapter 2 - The Bus Stops Here
Chapter 3 - The Time Toaster
Chapter 4 - Upgrade
Chapter 5 - Spot the Difference
Chapter 6 - Family Reunion
Chapter 7 - Men O’ the Manor
Chapter 8 - Casper Gets a Job
Chapter 9 - Blight Betrayal
Chapter 10 - The Unemployed
Chapter 11 - Know Thyself
Chapter 12 - The Legendary Casper Candlewacks
Chapter 13 - Mission: Implausible
Chapter 14 - Sweeping Up the Crumbs
Chapter 15 - The Time Toaster Flies Again
Chapter Minus 637 - Sir Gossamer
Chapter 17 - The Battle of the Kobb
Epilogue
Another Epilogue
Chapter 1 - The Big Dog Who Wouldn’t Stop Eating Muffins
More adventures with
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Copyright
About the Publisher
PS Oh dear. This book seems to have developed the capability of time travel. It’s actually a pretty common thing, especially when there’s time travelling going on within the book’s pages. The story gets ideas of its own, you see, and soon you’ve got Chapter 1 following Chapter 12, Chapter 4 hiding in the middle of Chapter 5, and Chapter 7 fighting barbarians somewhere in the Middle Ages. It’s a nightmare, I tell you.
Listen, the best thing to do is just ride it out. I’ll fill you in as we go along, OK?
Oh, that’s close enough. I mean, ideally you’d start with Chapter 1, but not much happened, really. There was this big dog that wouldn’t stop eating muffins, but it’s not central to the story. So let’s just begin from here.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this may be the proudest moment of my life.”
Mayor Rattsbulge wiped a greasy tear from his enormous cheek and licked his finger.
“To be standing in the shadow of such a majestic structure, and to have that structure named after little old me? Well, few people in this world could feel as proud as I do now. To have our very own bus shelter here in Corne-on-the-Kobb.” The mayor trembled. “To enjoy its many uses, such as, well, actually… what does a bus shelter do?”
A murmur of confusion spread through the crowd. Beards were scratched, shoulders were shrugged. The 107-year-old Betty Woons gasped and almost rocked her wheelchair over, but then her smile wrinkled up and she shook her head. This was a problem. Nobody had a clue what a bus shelter did, and if nobody knew, what was the point in having one?
In truth, this sort of thing happened quite a lot around these parts. You see, Corne-on-the-Kobb was what’s known in the trade as A Village of Idiots. With an average IQ of just under fifty-six, and an average reading age of minus three, the villagers of Corne-on-the-Kobb weren’t the shiniest spoons in the drawer. If left to their own devices they’d often end up stuck in a tree, buried neck-deep in a vegetable patch or sleeping inside your washing machine. But that’s exactly what makes Corne-on-the-Kobb brilliant.
“Somebody must know,” groaned Mayor Rattsbulge. “Where’s that clever lad? The one with the face. Oh, what’s his name – Camper Catalogue or something. He’ll know.”
The name spread through the crowd like Chinese whispers.
“Find Catcher Capricorn!”
“Where’s Candy Calculator?”
“Get Calcium Carbonate!”
At the very back of the crowd, Casper Candlewacks sighed. “You mean me?”
Heads nodded eagerly and the crowd parted to let Casper through.
“Ah, just the fellow,” said Mayor Rattsbulge, ruffling Casper’s scruffy blond hair. “Got any idea what this chap actually does?” He gestured to the shiny new bus shelter.
The wide-eyed crowd looked on expectantly. Noise trickled down to silence as they waited for the boy’s verdict. Even the pigeons stopped pecking to listen in.
Casper pointed inside to the wooden seats. “Erm… you sit here to wait for a bus.”
“HOORAY!” The crowd exploded with joy and Casper was promptly forgotten.
Not being an idiot in a village full of idiots was a full-time job, as Casper would tell you (between bouts of averting disasters and saving days). It meant late nights, early starts and a terrible pension package. But deep down, Casper loved it.
He wandered off to sit on a bollard just as the mayor asked, “What’s a bus?”
Casper picked up a soggy copy of Corne-on-the-Kobb’s weekly newspaper, the Daily Kobb, which floated on a puddle. On the front page Casper could still read the headline, the story that everyone had been talking about (until Mayor Rattsbulge announced the opening of his bus shelter):
Below the headline was a picture of Blight Manor, a once-great mansion, now old and crumbling, with missing windows, half a roof, and walls that had buckled and bent more than a bent buckle.
The Blight dynasty existed long before Corne-on-the-Kobb had even been thought of. A baron of Blight ruled the Kobb Valley after the Norman Conquest, and the family have held the seat with their cold-knuckled fists ever since. But in the years that passed, the Blights’ hold on the Kobb Valley slipped, their lands shrank and their finances dwindled. The last Lord Blight died under mysterious circumstances – after his daughter poisoned him. It’s not that mysterious, really. Now Lady Lobelia Blight and her daughter, Anemonie Blight, resided in Blight Manor, desperately clutching at the embers of their once-great empire. With the sale of Blight Manor, the lordship would slip away and the estate disappear, leaving nothing in its place but a nesting-place for the pigeons.
A steel-capped black leather boot slammed down on the soggy paper, splashing a muddy puddle all over Casper’s trousers.
“Oy!” Casper jumped back to avoid more wetting. Then he looked up to see the owner of the boot… and shivered. “Anemonie Blight. What d’you want?”
“It’s all lies, Candlewacks!” shrieked Anemonie, her oh-so-noble pointy nose red with shame. “How many times do I have to punch you before you understand that?”
Casper shuffled back further as Anemonie advanced, fists clenched. “Look, I don’t care how much money you have.”
“Lots of money!” she shouted. She had long dark hair and a threatening squint. “Rooms full of it, in fact. An’ if you say we don’t, I’ll bite you.”
“OK!” Casper held up his hands. “I believe you! You’re still rich.”
Anemonie stopped and smirked, but her eyes stayed steely cold. “Good. Make sure you tell everyone.” As she turned to leave, she spotted a two-pence piece on the ground and bent down to snatch it like a pigeon to a breadcrumb. She straightened up and looked around to check nobody had seen.
Casper pretended to watch a tree.
Once Anemonie had stomped round the corner, Casper gave a sigh. However much he despised the little bully and her pointy nose, watching Anemonie’s downfall was a pitiful sight. A few generations back, a Blight’s packed lunch would contain caviar sandwiches and cartons of alcohol-free champagne. But now Anemonie was eating free school lunches and getting caught stealing cabbages from Mrs Trimble’s shop.
The crowd from the ceremony was filtering away gradually, although many villagers had formed a long line stretching from the bus shelter and away down the road. As old Betty Woons trundled by, she gave Casper a knowing wink. She always did. It was unnerving.
“Casper! Casper!” A sooty-haired, lumpy chap in a blue boiler suit and sponge shoes came galumphing out of a garage at the end of the street. He spotted Casper, gasped, and galumphed in his direction. He only fell over twice on the way, which was a new record. “Casper, I did it! I really did it!”
“What did you do, Lamp?”
Lamp Flannigan, Casper’s best and only friend, was red-faced and puffing from his run. He was eleven, the same age as Casper, with a dongle of a nose, wide, round eyes and a funny way of standing that always made him look as if he was about to sit down. He also had toes that glowed in the dark ever since he let a small family of fireflies live in his shoes, and the world’s first elephant-repellent boiler suit. Lamp was an inventor by trade… but we’ll get to that.
“I did my Time Toaster! Look…”
Lamp crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue with concentration as he fumbled around in the pocket of his boiler suit. Finally his eyes lit up and he pulled out a blackened, crumbling piece of toast.
Casper waited for the toast to do something amazing.
It didn’t.
“So…” Casper shrugged. “It’s just toast.”
“Not just toast, Casper,” Lamp grinned, relishing the words on the tip of his tongue. “This is toast from the future.”
Casper was a good fifteen centimetres taller than Lamp – and a good fifteen centimetres better at spelling, for what it’s worth. Casper was a dab hand at sums, a keen reader and he could list the kings and queens from 1066 to the present. Lamp could just about list the numbers from one to two, but he struggled to open books the right way up and he didn’t even know when history was. Casper’s clothes were scruffy hand-me-downs from his dad’s rock-band phase, while Lamp only wore his boiler suit. When it got dirty, he wore it backwards to save on washing. The two made an unlikely pair, but because they’d saved the village three times since June, and it was only a quarter past eleven on the sixth of October, nobody was complaining.
Lamp’s one and only strong point was inventing, but, boy, was he good at it. He’d invented just-add-water moustaches, hind wheels for donkeys and a torch that glowed dark in the day. The thing is, when Lamp Flannigan says a piece of toast is from the future, you’d do well to believe him. He’s not normally wrong about that sort of thing.
Lamp’s house sat at number 1 Corne Approach, a charming two-bedroom property, just a stone’s throw from the new bus stop, complete with a garage, good access to the town centre and stunning views into the window of the house across the road.
But who’d want to look outside when the interior held such wonders? Lamp’s garage was dark, gloomy and absolutely wicked. Here, amongst piles of scrap metal and buckets of leftover doorknobs, Lamp let his inventions take form. Today, at centre stage on the workbench, sat a brushed-steel, four-slot toaster with a dozen metal springs boinging outwards at jaunty angles, each with a watch face glued to the end. Most of the watches were cracked, bent or missing vital numbers, like three etc. The hands weren’t turning, either, so Casper guessed they were just for decoration. Multicoloured wires sprouted from inside the toaster and wound about in scruffy coils, meeting again as they stuffed inside a digital alarm clock strapped on to the toaster’s front face. A series of buttons ripped from Lamp’s mum’s cardigans had been installed in a long line below, each labelled with things like SEKUND, MINIT, and MUMF.“It’s my Time Toaster.” Lamp proudly patted it, making the little watch faces wobble. “It steals a piece of toast from any toaster through time and space.”
“Oh…” Casper let that flow over him. “But why would you want toast from anywhere through time and space?”
“If you’re hungry, of course.”
“Couldn’t you just make some real toast?”
Lamp blinked. “Didn’t think of that. But listen, this is way better.” He pulled out the crumbling slice he’d shown Casper earlier. “Sniff this.”
He did. It smelt of toast.
“See?” grinned Lamp. He took a bite. “Mm, futurey.”
Casper waited patiently while Lamp invented a jam magnet.
When the toast was finished and the jam wiped off the walls, Lamp licked his lips and said, “So. Fancy a slice?”
“I... er…”
“Me too!” Lamp bounced across the garage to his Time Toaster and twizzled some buttons. “Ready?”
Casper took a few steps back and shoved on a motorcycle helmet that was lying on its side. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Then Let’s TIME!” Lamp did a heroic pose involving pointing one finger at the ceiling.
“Wait!” shouted Casper. “Can we think of a better catchphrase first?” He was worried that Let’s Time would stick.
“Erm…” Lamp chewed on his tongue. “How about ‘Let’s Hope We Don’t Get Sucked into the Time Vortex and End Up Getting Trampled On by a TRICERATOPS!!’”
Casper shuddered. That was a hope that he too shared, but he didn’t want to think about it every time Lamp made toast. “Shall we stick to the first one, then?”
Lamp nodded. “In that case, Casper, there’s no time to lose. Let’s TIME!” He pushed the toaster’s lever down with a geeky flourish and the alarm clock went off. A dim, pulsing buzz came from the toaster’s bowels. The watches began to tick round now, slowly at first, but speeding up and up, until the springs shook and the hands were a blur of minutes and hours.
Smoke poured from the machine, and Casper smelt toast. A lick of flame danced from the top of the slot, then a crackle and hundreds of little clangs as the whole machine shuddered and the watches clashed into each other.
The cloud of smoke engulfed Lamp and his Time Toaster. Casper coughed into his shirt, his eyes stung, the smoke plumed across the garage and surrounded him too.
“Lamp!” he coughed. “Has it gone wrong?”
Through the smoke Casper saw somebody stumbling about inventing a fire extinguisher, but there was no response.
“Turn it off!” Casper shouted. “Turn–” but his lungs filled with smoke and he bent double, coughing. He longed for fresh air, for a cool breeze, for a friend who didn’t burn things down all the time.
Then… SPRUNGG!
Something popped up. The cacophony ceased, the flames died and the smoke began to thin. Through Casper’s watery eyes he could see Lamp plucking something from the toaster’s tray and blowing it out with sharp puffs. Little cinders still burnt at the corners, so he threw it to the floor and gave it a good stamp.
“You can have that slice,” said Casper, straightening up and rubbing the ash from his eyes. “Not a big fan of stamped toast.”
Lamp picked it up and gasped. “But, Casper, this isn’t toast!”
“More like charcoal.”
“No, no, look. This is writing! It says…” He scratched his nose, leaving a black smudge. “Casper, can I read?”
“Not often, no. Give it here.”
The oily boy was right. He held out a charred strip of paper, yellow and curled and peppered with cinder holes. Most of the blackened bottom half melted away into ash as Casper took it, but some words at the top were still visible through the soot. A title, an author and a date.
Casper’s brain twisted the wrong way up. “What? But…” He read the paper again. And again. He rubbed his eyes. He looked at the date, and the name, and the title. Then he pinched himself. He asked Lamp to pinch him. He asked Lamp to punch him. He asked Lamp to stop punching him now, because six times was quite enough.
“What’s it say, then?”
Whichever way Casper read the paper, the words written on it were impossible. Firstly, it seemed to be an article written… written… by Lamp. This in itself was beyond belief. Only once in his life had Lamp spelt a word correctly. (He wrote ‘fish’, which is more of an achievement when you don’t know that it took him a week and he was trying to spell the word ‘the’.)
But more importantly, the date said 18 November 2112. That would make Lamp 111 years old when he wrote it. Now, Betty Woons was 107 and going strong, but she didn’t get blown up nearly as often as Lamp. And anyway, Betty was probably lying about her age. She’d been 107 for as long as Casper had known her. Sure, she was old, but in all likelihood she’d lost count at around 80 and just picked her favourite number.
And even if Lamp had grown to 111 years old and learnt to write, why would he discredit his own time machine, of all things? It was Lamp’s ultimate goal! With this toaster he was halfway there! Why ever would he criticise something like that?
“I think your machine’s broken, Lamp.”
“Can’t be. If it was broken then this light would come on.” He pointed to a green bottle cap on the top of the alarm clock marked BROKKIN.
“But this is written by you, in the future, and it says the Time Toaster should never have been invented.”
“Don’t be silly,” chuckled Lamp. “I can’t write.”
“Well, that’s what I thought.”
“So what’s that writing mean, then?”
“I haven’t a clue.” Casper chewed his lip, but that didn’t help at all.
Lamp thought for a minute, then snorted. “We should go and find out!”
“To the future?” Casper’s heart beat faster. “But how?”
“All we’ve got to do is climb into the Time Toaster. Then the me in the future will pull the switch.” Lamp was already trying to force his foot into the tray. “Gimme a push, Casper.”
“Lamp, you’ll never fit!” Casper gave his friend a shove, but his toes barely passed the lip of the toaster. “You’re just not toast-shaped.”
“I could be,” Lamp piped up. “As long as I bring some glue with me, I could travel in slices.”
“Not sure that’s wise.”
“But I want to go time travelling, Casper! I could be a knight, and a spaceman, and – ooh! – I could be a postman!”
“You could be a postman now.”
“Not a proper postman, Casper. In the olden days they rode horses and fired guns at deserts.”
“That’s a cowboy.”
A gasp came from the garage doorway.
Both boys spun round and one squeaked. There stood Anemonie Blight, her greedy eyes wide. She pointed a black-nailed finger at the Time Toaster. “Wassat, then?”
“Nothing,” snapped Casper. “Go away.”
“Not until you tell me what it does,” the girl smirked. “Fly, does it? Will it do yer homework?”
“It’s not finished,” lied Casper, “and even if it was, it still wouldn’t do anything.”
“Actually –” Lamp stepped forward proudly, clasping his hands together and closing his eyes like a museum curator describing Picasso’s bogey – “it’s a time machine.”
Anemonie’s ears pricked up.
Casper’s heart leapt.
Lamp’s tummy rumbled, so he took a bite of toast.
“Time machine, is it?” Anemonie’s body had tensed, her eyebrows raised.
“No!” cried Casper. “You heard him wrong. He said… erm… prime gravel. That’s it! It makes gravel for your garden path, that’s all.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Lamp frowned. “It makes time travel.”
Casper winced. He jabbed his friend twice with an elbow, to the rhythm of Shut up, but by the look on Anemonie’s face, he knew it was too late.
“The things I could do with a time machine,” the girl murmured, inching forward with a wild look in her eyes. “Go back and buy last week’s winning lottery tickets; take a telly back in time and pretend I invented it…” She giggled. “Or I could just sell the time machine. Reckon it’s worth a hundred pounds at least.”
“A hundred pounds?” chuckled Lamp, shaking his head. “Not likely. My Time Toaster’s more valuable than all the money in all the piggy banks in all the world.”
That was enough. Pound signs flashed in Anemonie’s eyes and she launched at the boys, fingernails first.
Lamp spun protectively and grabbed the Time Toaster while Casper stepped forward to block Anemonie’s path. She deftly dodged him, leaping to one side and bouncing at Lamp. Turning away just in time, Lamp found himself holding the Time Toaster at arm’s length as Anemonie pushed into him, screaming with envy.
“Lamp! Over here!” Casper was unmarked at the entrance to the garage, and he’d played enough rugby to know this was a good thing. “Chuck it!”
Anemonie lunged, but not in time to deflect Lamp’s mighty lob as the Time Toaster soared into the air…
…and landed with a CRASH! about fifty centimetres in front of Lamp’s feet.
“You broke it.” Anemonie sneered with disdain at the crumpled heap on the floor. “How’m I gonna sell a big lump of broken metal?” With a huff, she stomped from the garage, spitting on the floor as she left.
Once Anemonie’s steel-toed footsteps had faded far into the distance, Casper began to pick up the shattered pieces of what used to be Lamp’s Time Toaster, and place them on the central workbench. “So… how bad is it?”
Lamp hadn’t spoken yet. In fact, he hadn’t even moved. He was still in the same stretched position as he had been when he threw the Time Toaster, like a statue of the world’s worst ballerina. Slowly, he let his arms drop and his gaze fix on the pile of scrap. At the top of the pile, a single green light was flashing: the bottle cap marked BROKKIN.
Lamp smiled weakly. “At least that bit’s still working.”
And so the boys began the painstaking task of fitting the Time Toaster’s pieces back together. Casper had to pop over to Mrs Trimble’s shop to buy two more pots of glue and a yo-yo. By the time he came back, the queue at the bus stop had mostly filtered away. Sandy Landscape, the village gardener, who’d joined at the very back, was now taking his turn to sniff the brand-new seats and knock on the glass walls. Happy all was in order, he murmured some words of approval and strolled back up the street.
Casper smiled as the muddy man passed.
“Mornin’, Casper.” Sandy Landscape doffed his floppy hat. “You ent seen me goat, ’ave yer?”
“Have you checked your goat pen?”
Sandy looked impressed. “Now that I ain’t. But I shall check there next. Thankee, Casper.” And he trotted off to look in the place where he always found his goat.
Back in the garage, Casper found Lamp doing a little jig. “What’s going on?”
“I did a clever!” Lamp wiggled his hips and waved a spanner around. “Remind me to thank Anenemy for breaking my Time Toaster.”
“Why on earth would you want to thank her?”
“I think I put it back together wrong. Now it sends stuff rather than receives it.”
“That’s good!” said Casper. “I guess. Still just toast, though…”