Time-Travel Bath Bomb (11 page)

But you won’t be finding out any of that until the next chapter.

JULIETTE FLUNG OPEN the door to the bathroom and pointed dramatically to the bath. It was filled to the rim with water and soap bubbles, even though the bubble layer had diminished quite a bit since Nilly had done his cannonball into it.

“This,” said Juliette, her voice quivering, “is a time-travelling bath. You can go anywhere you want in terms of time or space in this bath. All you have to do is fill it with water, get the soap to make bubbles and then submerse yourself. You concentrate on where and when – the date and the time – you want to go. After seven seconds, you can come up again and, voilà, you’re there! You can go anywhere you want, but you can’t go to the same place more than once. In other words, you get only one chance to change the past at that specific location.”

“Cool!” Nilly exclaimed. “When did Doctor Proctor invent this doohickey?”

“While he was living here in Paris, just before he met me. Which is to say, Victor—”

“Victor?”

“Doctor Proctor,” Lisa said. “Doctor Victor Proctor, that is.”

“
Victor
Proctor?” Nilly spluttered in disbelief.

“Well, he has to have a first name, doesn’t he? Just like everyone else,” Lisa said.

“Sure,” Nilly said. “Doctor, for example. That’s a great first name.”

“Anyway,” Juliette said patiently. “Victor was the one who invented the actual time-travelling bath and his assistant invented the time soap bath bomb.”

“Remarkable,” Lisa whispered.

“Ha!” Nilly said, folding his arms across his chest. “Now do you believe me? I was lying there on the bottom of the bath thinking about the Moulin Rouge in around 1909, wasn’t I? And, voilà—”

“You were there,” Lisa said. “Wow, I’m sorry I doubted you, Nilly. You always do tell the truth.”

Nilly closed his eyes halfway and gave Lisa a gracious look. “I’m not the kind of person to hold a grudge, my dear Lisa. If you tie my shoelaces for the next week, we’ll call it even.”

Lisa gave him a warning look.

“Well, well, get into the bath, kids,” Juliette said. “Cliché is on his way.”

“Are you sure it will work now that there’s more than one of us in there?” Lisa asked sceptically, climbing cautiously into the water after Nilly.

“Yes,” Juliette said. “Victor and his assistant tested it thoroughly.”

“How weird,” Lisa said. “If he’s had this amazing invention for all these years, why hasn’t the rest of the world ever found out about it?”

“Exactly!” Nilly said. “He could have been rich and famous.”

“Because the time-travelling bath only works with the time soap bath bomb,” Juliette said. “And his assistant was the only person who knew how to make that. They had a falling out, and without the soap Victor didn’t have a patentable invention. All Victor had left of the soap was that little jar he brought back to Norway with him when he was expelled from France.”

“The jar that was in his basement in Cannon Avenue,” Lisa said.

Juliette nodded and held up the jar containing the strawberry-red powder. “He brought a little of the soap from this jar with him when he came back to Paris two months ago, and that’s what he used three weeks ago when he stood exactly where you are standing now, said goodbye to me, and travelled back to July 3, 1969, to the village of Innebrède in the Provence mountains to change history.”

“To change history?” Nilly and Lisa gasped in unison.

“Nothing less,” said Juliette. “The plan was to travel back to Innebrède and be standing there waiting at the petrol station when we pulled in on the motorcycle. He’d hold up a big sign written in Norwegian so that only we could read it, warning us not to stop so we would keep driving all the way to Italy and get petrol there. Even if petrol costs more in Italy.”

“Of course!” Lisa said. “Because that would keep all the stuff that happened from happening.”

“Exactly,” Juliette said. “The hippos would never have noticed us, Victor and I would have got married in Rome, Cliché would have given up trying to become a barometer and Victor and his assistant would have made up again and patented the time-travelling bath and the time soap bath bomb together and become world famous and so rich that Victor could pay off the mortgage on my family’s castle.”

“But if everything had gone the way it was supposed to with his time travelling, Proctor would have been back by now, wouldn’t he?” Lisa asked. “So what could have happened?”

“Elementary,” Nilly said. “Doctor Proctor ran out of time soap bath bomb and couldn’t get back. That’s why he sent us that message on that postcard. Although how he managed to send that . . .”

“I was the one who sent it,” Juliette said, pouring a little of the soap powder into the tub.

“You?” Nilly said.

“Well, actually, I forwarded it. I sneaked into the hotel room every day to see if Victor was back yet. I sat in the bath and waited, but nothing happened. Until one day suddenly a postcard floated up to the surface. It was addressed to Lisa, whom I’d heard so much about.”

“And Nilly,” Nilly said.

“And Nilly,” Juliette agreed.

“So, that’s how the postcard got wet! Some of the writing was washed off and there were traces of soap on the stamp,” Lisa said.

“Hm, if you ask me,” Nilly said, “that’s how the postcard got wet. Some of the writing was washed off and there were traces of soap on the stamp.”

Juliette poured a little more soap powder into the water. “Stir it up and make some bubbles. Quick, the hippos will be here any minute.”

Nilly churned his arms like a whisk in the water.

“Why couldn’t the doctor just get in touch with that assistant and get more soap?” he asked.

Juliette sighed. “Victor’s assistant was a very peculiar person. Right after Victor and I started seeing each other, they had a falling out. I’m not sure why, but after Victor disappeared, his assistant tried to steal the whole time-travelling bath invention. Luckily Victor hadn’t left any sketches behind. He kept everything in his head, and Victor himself was the only one who knew how to configure the bath so it would work. And—”

Juliette suddenly stopped talking because they all heard a definite creaking sound from the hallway outside.

“Wha-what’s that sound?” Nilly asked.

Juliette held out her hand. It held the two blue nose clips. “Quick, put these on and dive.”

“Don’t need to,” Lisa said, demonstrating how she could pinch her nose shut with her thumb and index finger.

Juliette opened one of the blue nose clips and released it so that it clipped over Lisa’s nostrils with a little
pop!

“Ouch!” Lisa protested.

Juliette gave Nilly the other nose clip. “Keep them on and a lot will become clear to you.”

There was a loud knock on the door.

“Under the water, now!” Juliette whispered, screwing the lid of the soap jar back on and passing it to Lisa.

“But you have to come too,” Lisa urged.

“No, I have to stay here.”

“What?” Lisa whispered. “Cliché is just going to lock you up again! And we’ll never find Doctor Proctor without your help!”

There was another knock on the door, louder this time.

Juliette bent down and kissed first Lisa and then Nilly on the forehead. “Victor said you were two smart kids. And I can already see that he’s right. Hurry up. Find him and come back.”

They heard an angry shout from the hallway and rapid footsteps. The next second the door bulged into the room as if someone had just flung themselves against it. The door stopped bulging and they heard the creaking of the floorboards again, as if someone were taking another running start.

Lisa and Nilly took deep breaths and dived under the bubbles.

Then they were in a watery twilight where there was total silence.

Nilly could feel Lisa’s hand holding on to his own as he concentrated. Naturally what he wanted to do most of all was travel back to the Moulin Rouge to that girl who had thought he was so cute, but you couldn’t travel back to the same time and place more than once. So instead he had to think about . . . about . . . where were they supposed to be going again? That’s right, the Provence mountains. July . . . 3, 1969! More specifically Inn . . . Inn . . . what was that place that Juliette had said again? Darn it, it started with Inn! Inn . . . Inn . . .

Soon he couldn’t hold his breath anymore.

Inn . . . Inn . . .

Must have air!

Inn . . . DARN IT!

Nilly stood up in the bath, gasping for air.

He was standing in a bath in the middle of a meadow full of colourful flowers. The sun was shining, bees were buzzing and birds were chirping all around him, and there were extremely tall mountains in every direction. At the other end of the meadow he saw a group of people sitting along the edge of a road in folding chairs waving French flags as they said cheers and clinked their wineglasses together and cheered on bicyclists as they passed. It was a wonderfully beautiful summer’s day out in the countryside. There were really only two things that concerned Nilly. One was that Lisa wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The second was that a bull with horns the size of a Congolese tse-tse elephant’s tusks was heading towards him at full speed.

THE BULL WAS the size of a small tractor but had a significantly faster maximum speed. Nilly realised that even if he ran as fast as his tiny legs could carry him, the bull was still going to overtake him. The ground beneath Nilly shook and he could hear the animal’s terrible snorting. Bees and butterflies darted out of the bull’s path in fear as Nilly raced through the flower-filled meadow that just seconds ago had seemed so idyllic and peaceful.

“Help,” Nilly cried, but only very softly, because he knew that no one could help him, and that he should save his breath. He would need it if he was going to reach the fence before that beast of muscles and horns that was rapidly approaching him from behind. So, he very quietly called “help” one more time, before he accepted that no matter how much air he had left, he was not going to reach the fence first, that very soon he would be dangling from one of those massive barbecue skewer horns. Nilly prepared himself and then leaped up into the air, tucked his legs up, wrapped his arms round them, curled himself into a ball and screamed (without saving any breath): “Cannonball!”

With that, the tiny little boy disappeared. The bull stopped and stared down at the hillside that was covered with tall Bermuda grass, wild begonias, lily of the valley and other stuff that grows in French meadows and that the bull didn’t even know the name of. The bull rummaged around in this salad with one of his horns, all the while realising that he was feeling even madder. Where the cow buttocks had that unbelievably irritating little chap gone?

Nilly wriggled through the grass, and he didn’t stand up again until he was sure that he had crawled under the fence and past it. He turned towards the bull, who was still standing out there in the meadow sniffing the ground.

“Hey, yoo-hoo! Hey, Mr Beef, Medium Well!”

The bull raised his head and stared at Nilly, who put a thumb in each ear and wiggled his fingers and said “nyah, nyah” as he stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry. The bull responded by blowing hot steaming air out of his splayed nostrils, positioning his legs on the ground and lowering his head.
What an insufferable, poorly behaved, rude young man
, he thought. Then he came barrelling. But he never made it to the red-haired boy. Seconds later, his enormous bull horns struck that idiotic bath that for some reason or other had suddenly appeared in the meadow. The bath was lifted up into the air, whirled round and then came down to land upside down so that all the water and soap bubbles ran out.