Playschool (10 page)

They talked into the early hours and decided that at first light they would cover the valley from top to bottom to see if they could find The Toad or any way of getting into the dark forest.

When he looked back later, The Toad was never sure which bits of that night had been real and which bits had been a dream. It had been too wonderful to be real, but then it had been too wonderful to be a dream too. The Toad's dreams usually involved hopping across a very, very wide road very, very slowly while a huge truck with fifty massive black tyres hurtled towards him going very, very fast.

The last thing he remembered that he knew was real was tripping over a tree root.

Lots of little arms lifted the sleeping toad gently off the damp leaves and carried him deeper into the forest. He remembered voices like babies talking, voices that seemed to be inside his head, twittering
baby talk that didn't make words, just joyful twittering noises. And he remembered feeling happier than he had ever felt before.

Then he was in a cave on a bed of soft grass and the six baby handbags were curled up around him and their mother was singing softly to send them all to sleep. And the song was there inside The Toad's head, stroking his brain and washing away his sadness. And when the handbags were all asleep with their tiny thumbs stuck in their zips, Narlene beckoned The Toad away to the far side of the cave, where there was food and drink.

‘You have a good heart,' she said to The Toad, though the words seemed to appear inside his head.

‘Can you all speak?' he asked. ‘Even Narled?'

‘Only creatures with kind hearts can hear us,' said Narlene. ‘That evil scheming boy you were with will never hear us.'

The Toad began to pour his heart out to her. He wanted to tell her what Orkward was up to. He wanted to tell her how his parents had rejected him and how big the lonely thing inside him felt, but he hardly said more than a few words before he fell asleep.

When Orkward woke up it was dark. He couldn't believe his luck. Here he was with Winchflat Flood, the one person he needed more than any other. The trouble was, Winchflat knew he hated him and he knew that Winchflat knew he knew. If Orkward was to persuade the boy to give him the tracking device, he would have to come up with a damn good plan.

Winchflat was still sleeping.

Orkward began to cry. Winchflat stirred but did not wake up. Orkward cried a bit louder.

‘Who's that?' said Winchflat in the darkness.

‘Oh, it's nobody,' sobbed Orkward.

I recognise that voice
, thought Winchflat.
It's that vile Orkward Warlock.

‘Is that you, Orkward?' Winchflat asked, and, pretending he didn't know otherwise, he added, ‘No, it can't be. Orkward Warlock would never cry.'

‘Well, of course, the old Orkward Warlock never ever cried,' said Orkward, ‘but things have changed.'

Naturally Winchflat did not believe a word of this. No one would, except maybe the poor innocent Toad, but he decided to pretend he did, to see what the vile boy was up to. He was just glad it was pitch dark so Orkward couldn't see him grinning.

‘Really?' said Winchflat.

‘Yes,' Orkward sobbed. ‘It's my dear little sister Primrose. She keeps wandering away and I'm frightened that something awful in the dark forest might kill her.'

‘Oh dear, that's terrible.'

‘What I need is some sort of tracking device, so I can always tell where she is,' said Orkward.

‘Well,' said Winchflat, ‘by an amazing coincidence, I've got one. I built it when my sister was a toddler. She kept wandering off too.'

‘Really?'

‘Oh, yes. You wouldn't believe how far she'd go sometimes,' said Winchflat. ‘Once we found her right up the top of the Eiffel Tower. Another time she was three hundred feet under the sea in the ladies toilets in the lost city of Atlantis. You know, I've always thought it was very strange that Atlantis was a lost city. I mean, how could anyone lose a whole city, and what on Earth were they doing taking it to the bottom of the sea in the first place? Then another time, we'd looked everywhere and she was right at home inside the fridge eating raspberry and rodent yoghurt. And then –'

‘Yes, well. How interesting,' said Orkward, gritting his teeth to stop himself from saying something sarcastic. ‘So, er, do you still use it?'

‘Oh, no. It's sitting on a shelf in my workshop,' said Winchflat. ‘Would you like to borrow it?'

YES!
said Orkward inside his head.
God, you're dumb. I don't know why anyone would call you a genius.

‘Gosh, could I?' he said out loud.

‘No problem,' said Winchflat. ‘I'll bring it to school on Friday.'

After I've made a few slight modifications
, Winchflat thought.

As soon as the sun rose the next morning and the wizard buses had dropped all the students back at school, groups of teachers and children set out to look for The Toad.

Radius Leg, the sports master and therefore the fittest member of staff, took a team of the older boys to the foot of the White Widowmaker, a sheer cliff of ice at the top of the valley. There was no way The
Toad could have ever climbed the Widowmaker, but Radius Leg was one of those short little people who liked to show off how macho he was.

Of course, any of the boys with him could have flown to the top of the cliff in a few seconds. They were wizards, after all. But Radius Leg said there was to be no magic involved. While he struggled up the deadly ice-face with ropes and climbing equipment, the boys sat under a tree and listened to their iPods. They knew that within fifteen minutes, their teacher would come crashing to the ground and they would have to carry him back to Matron to get mended. It happened all the time. There were enough bits of metal holding Radius together to build a small car.

‘Why don't we just leave him here this time?' Morbid Flood suggested. ‘Every time we carry him back to get fixed up he weighs more and more.'

Silent nodded vigorously.

‘We could always sell him to a scrap metal dealer,' said one of the other boys.

Sure enough, seven minutes later Radius Leg came crashing to the ground. He lay there happily groaning in pain for another seven minutes and then fainted. The valley where Quicklime College lay hidden was the highest valley in Patagonia and the White Widowmaker was at the top end of the valley. Its sheer face sealed them off from the outside world. The air was thin and barely a day passed at that altitude without a serious blizzard.

The boys helped their unconscious teacher by relieving him of his extra weight, taking all the money and caramel toffees out of his pocket. Then they took one last look at him just to make sure he wasn't regaining consciousness, and left.

Within a few hours they were back at school warming themselves in the Grate Hall. They'd
informed Professor Throat of the sports teacher's position, but as winter wasn't that far away and Gristleball wouldn't be played again until next Easter, it was decided to leave him there.

‘He'll thaw out in good time,' said the Professor. ‘He always does, and it'll save the school a bit on food. You did mark his position with a stick, though, didn't you, just in case?'

Up the mountain, Radius Leg, now buried under a fresh fall of snow, began to hibernate. It was not the first time this had happened. Nor would it be the last.

Satanella Flood led a team of small animals down into the drains beneath the school.
²⁵
This was exactly the sort of place you might expect The Toad to go – warm, dark, and dripping with slime. There were a lot of strange creatures down there who were also warm,
dark and dripping with slime. Most of them were the descendants of Doctor Mordant's failed experiments that had been small enough to flush down the lavatory. These creatures had grouped together, fallen in love and given birth to even stranger creatures. Their leader, Scarcely, a cross between a roller-skate, a goblin and a paperclip, was one of the blessed few with the power of speech. He and Satanella were old friends.

‘No, my dear,' said Scarcely. ‘Haven't seen the
little chap down here. Not for a long time. Nice little fellow, he is.'

‘Well, if you hear anything, send me an email,' said Satanella.

‘Can't, I'm afraid,' said Scarcely. ‘Little Scrubby has eaten the modem and my niece has eloped with the mouse.'

Back in his room, Winchflat had made his modifications to the tracking device so it now had a tracking device tracking device. While Orkward Warlock would be able to track Narled once he had fitted the first bit to his straps, Winchflat would also be able to track Orkward with a third bit linked to the second bit Orkward would be using to track Narled.
²⁶

He then began his own search for The Toad.

His search was through cyberspace, through the twenty-seven million chatrooms and five hundred million deadly boring blogs that five hundred million deadly boring people posted every day in the mistaken belief that it would make them any more interesting or somehow help them get a life. The Toad was not in any of these places.

It might seem weird to think the poor creature could have got trapped somewhere in the internet but Winchflat knew only too well that it could happen. Two year earlier his best friend at Quicklime's, Eric Ordinaire, had vanished into a chatroom dedicated to very early computers that could add nine and seventeen at the speed of a dead snail going backwards, and Eric had never been seen again.
²⁷

‘I can safely say,' Winchflat later reported to Professor Throat, ‘that The Toad is not in the internet.'

‘How comforting,' said the Professor. ‘It's a
great relief to know we can cross that off our list. He probably isn't in any of the jam jars in the school kitchens, either.'

‘Would you like me to go and look, sir, eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight?' said Howard Tiny.

‘I don't think that will be necessary, Howard,' said Professor Throat.

‘Well, he could be, sir,' said Howard. ‘I mean, you could get a toad inside a jam jar quite easily, ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five.'

‘You're absolutely right, Howard. Off you go to check. And take your time, just in case he's hiding under a slice of pickled beetroot,' said the Professor, who, like everyone else, preferred it when Howard Tiny was somewhere else.

The Toad was not in any of the jam jars. Other places he was not included the peanut butter jars and the pickled onion jars but, just to make sure, Howard took the top off each jar, stuck his fingers in and poked around in case The Toad was trapped under a large strawberry or an onion. Then, starting on the top shelf, he counted every jar, which made him so
excited he completely forgot why he was there. So he counted all the jar lids, and finally counted all the letters in all the words on all the labels on all the jars.

It was three weeks before anyone saw him again.
²⁸

Merlinmary Flood decided to see if The Toad was up any of the chimneys. Quicklime College
had three hundred and sixty-five chimneys and Merlinmary knew a lot of them like the back of her hand.
²⁹
Some of the chimneys didn't lead up to the outside, and although they were above fireplaces they were definitely not meant to have fires in them. These chimneys were actually tunnels that led to other tunnels that turned and twisted and joined together through the thick stone walls of Quicklime College, ending up in secret places that were so secret no one knew about them. Some tunnels were dead ends. Some were deliberate traps
³⁰
and most of them had not been visited for centuries.

Even the teachers did not know these chimney tunnels existed. They had never felt any desire to crawl around inside dark airless places full of soot, but Merlinmary had. She had discovered the tunnels completely by accident when she had climbed up one for a dare.

While her friends stood and watched, she had crawled into the fireplace in the fourth year common room, reached up and vanished into the darkness. An hour later when she hadn't returned, her friends had begun to get worried, but they had been too scared to tell anyone in case they got into trouble. Seven hours later, Merlinmary came in through the door just as her friends had decided they better report her missing after all.

‘You'll never guess where I've been,' she said.

She went back into the fireplace, but none of her friends was brave enough to follow her.

Merlinmary's tunnel had taken her out of the school, beneath the dark forest – she knew she was beneath the dark forest by the thick roots growing through the tunnel roof, roots that had moved aside to let her pass – and up into the mountains that surrounded the valley. She had been so deep inside the mountains that there was no signal on her mobile and she had been unable to SMS her mother and say she wouldn't be home for dinner.

Finally, there had been a beam of light at the
end of the tunnel and she had come out into a huge cave full of treasure. She had found Narled's legendary treasure store.