Casper Candlewacks in the Time Travelling Toaster (10 page)

But when he looked back, he could see something emerging from the top of Warehouse 3: a steel arm, as big and red as a bus, reaching out into the night sky with searching clawed chrome fingers. It found a sturdy bit of corrugated iron roof and tightened its grip, crumpling the metal like paper. Another arm reached up and grabbed the other side of the roof, and then, like a granny lifting herself from a bathtub, the arms tightened and a demonic steel head rose from the warehouse, its red eyes glinting back at the spotlights. It turned its neck with a screech of gears and stared all the way across the courtyard, over the fence and right at Casper Candlewacks.

And then Casper saw the robot’s pointy, three-metre aluminium nose, and he knew his mission had failed.

Screams rang out from escapees and guards alike. Some started to run, but it was too late. At full height the robot stood twice as high as the tallest tower on Blight Manor. With jet-black spikes down its back in place of hair and the squint of its glowing eyes, not to mention its nose, there was no doubting its similarity to Anemonie Blight. But its voice, well, that was Briar.

“EMPLOYEES OF BLIGHT ENTERPRISES, GET BACK IN YOUR BEDS.”

With one monstrous stomp, the robot had cleared the perimeter fence and was already catching up with the straggling escapees. Casper grabbed the arms of two older ladies and sprinted for the safety of Long Lost Drive. But he looked back in time to see one of the robot’s hands point at an overweight man with short legs. A spurt of breadcrumbs shot from the thumb, covering the man and the grass around him.

As predictably as night following day, the pigeons descended. Clouds of them flocked from every tree, far more than Casper had ever seen before, squawking their hungry cries and flexing their talons.

The robot’s hand swung to the next runner, and the next, scoring perfect hits with each as the seemingly endless supply of bread burst from its hand.

“Just run!” shouted Casper. “They can’t get us all!” But then his watch alarm went
beep beep
, and he was no longer sure that he was right.

All around him, employees buckled to the ground, giggling, as the Tickle Tags began to activate. The two women he’d been guiding were now skidding along on the grass behind him like stubborn puppies, twitching this way and that with tears in their eyes.

The robot stormed forward, blasting every escapee who’d collapsed into tickling fits. With each additional bread-pile, new pigeons swooped down from perches, or old ones popped across from another course, engulfing their targets and pecking away at their bready bits. The two women slipped from Casper’s grasp and moments later were covered in bread, then moments after that, pigeons.

Then the front doors of Blight Manor swung open and guards poured out to lug their tickled escapees back within its walls. The helpless workers cackled and slammed their fists as, one by one, they were dragged back into captivity.

With nothing left to save except his own freedom, Casper sprinted through the cackling crowds, only ever a few paces ahead of the robot’s range. The escapees were a lost cause, he knew. Anyone with a Tickle Tag, no matter how far into town they’d got, would be as easy to recapture as a runaway tortoise.

Casper dashed through the park and its giggling hordes, who were yet to be breaded, but were in no state to run. These ticklees thinned out by Feete Street, and once Casper turned left into Cracklin Crescent he was alone again, the sounds of tickling and pigeons still hot in his ears.

The door was unlocked, the ground floor empty. Who could tell if the others would make it back at all? Casper stomped up the stairs, leapt the length of the landing and burst through his bedroom door.

“You knew!” he shouted, pointing an accusing finger at himself.

Old Casper awoke with a snort, then saw his visitor and nodded solemnly. “I knew, all right.”

“Then why didn’t you stop me? It was a massacre out there! Pigeons and tickling and that GIANT ROBOT! How could you omit to mention the giant robot?”

Old Casper sighed. “Because it happened, Casper. You can’t change what’s already happened.”

“It hadn’t already happened for me! Who did we lose? Is Flanella OK?”

“Miss Flannigan is fine, Casper, as is Miss Blight.”

Just then they heard the sputtering sound of Betty’s wheelchair engine and then a
swish
and a
crack
as she landed in the tree in Casper’s garden. “And Mrs Woons will be all better after a few brandied jelly beans.”

That was half a relief, at least. “And the others?”

“… are lost, for now.”

Old Lamp grinned his toothless grin. “I made the arms out of buses, Casper.”

A shiver rose up Young Casper’s spine. “You did
what
?”

“The chest was made of a bakery,” he said proudly. “Twelve hundred loaves an hour, it could do. I shovelled coal in the belly.”

“That was your invention?” Young Casper didn’t know where to put himself. “You built that robot?”

“Yes,” said Old Lamp. “Did it look good?”

Young Casper’s throat made a
GACK
noise.

“He had to,” interjected Old Casper with a withered nod. “That Briar fellow made you do it, didn’t he, Lamp.”

“Oh yes,” nodded Old Lamp, his eyes going misty. “I wanted to make a rollercoaster for bunnies. Course, I did make that, but twenty years later. And what a hit it was…” Lamp’s gabblings continued, but more quietly and mainly to himself.

Young Casper turned back to face himself and grimaced. “I understand. And I don’t blame him. This sort of thing has happened before. But, please, just tell me how you got out of this one.”

Old Casper shook his head so solemnly. “No; this one you’ll have to work out all by yourself. I really would help, but…” and then his head drooped and he let out a gigantic snore. A crumpled script, just like the one before, dropped from his hand, the last line holding one unfinished sentence. ‘I really would help, but…”

Young Casper was on his own from now on.

Betty was downstairs at the kitchen table, steadying her nerves with a handful of strong-fumed jelly beans from her ‘18s and over’ collection. She’d managed to clamber her way into the spare wheelchair, a boring one made from the same thing you used to make baskets, with no rocket engines or anything cool. Casper joined her at the table, shared a sigh, then had a read through the script he’d have to memorise over the next hundred years.

It was funny to read his own speech written down. All the sentences were quite short and he used fewer clever words than he would’ve liked. Casper decided he’d try to sound cleverer from now on, slipping scorchers like
antiprofrogniloficate
into conversation as often as he could.

When he reached the script’s end, he found a blank sheet of paper, less crumpled than the rest, at the back. He took it and laid it on the table, folding the other sheets back into his pocket.

“Why’s this one here?” he asked, more to himself than to Betty.

“For your thoughts, Cashper.” She leant over and tapped a white finger on Casper’s forehead. “What’sh on yer mind, there?”

One thing in particular was on Casper’s mind. “That stupid Time Toaster. If Lamp had never invented it, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Betty clicked her false teeth. “Yeh’ll feel a lot better once yeh’ve got it out. Write it down, Cashper.”

“Guess I could…” So he picked up a pencil and wrote:

Why the Time Toaster Should
Never Have Been Invented

by Lamp Flannigan

Casper found out the date from Betty, and added that below –

Casper put down his pencil and read it back. Betty was right, he did feel a little better.

Betty read it over his shoulder. “Finished?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Betty. I do feel a little better.”

“Heh, no problem!” Then she picked up the pencil, snatched the paper from the table, rocketed over to the other side of the kitchen and slammed it down into the toaster, before finally pulling the lever and grinning.

Casper looked on, bewildered, as the paper burst into flames. “What on earth was that for?”

Betty popped a jelly bean in her mouth and sucked gleefully. “’Bout a hundred years ago, your friend Lamp’s about to be gettin’ some toasht.”

The old woman had gone barmy. “What’s that got to do with you burning my paper?”

“Cor, do I ’ave to do all the work for yeh? The Time Toashter gets toasht from all acrosh time,” she said dreamily, waving her wrinkly arm above her head. “Jusht so happensh that the piece of toasht it’s about to get ain’t a piece of toasht at all. It’s a piece of paper.
That
piece of paper.”

By the look of Betty’s excited grin, Casper knew he should be remembering something. And then it came to him. “The article,” he said, his brain working overtime, “the one we got from the Time Toaster back in Lamp’s garage. ‘
By Lamp Flannigan
’,
it said. We thought that meant Lamp wrote it. But the paper was burnt, all covered in flecks of ash…” Casper thought back to the title of the note he’d just written.
Why the Time Toaster Should Never Have Been Invented by Lamp Flannigan.
“His name was just part of the title!”

Betty grinned. “And it made yer come ’ere, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. After that message, we knew Lamp was on to something. But…” Casper took a long blink. Time travel wasn’t his best subject. “How did you know to toast that article?”

“It’s all circular, like the wheels of me chair,” sighed Betty.