“Yeah,” agreed Anemonie, “so stop being such a wimp, Casper.” But she looked no happier. She kept looking over her shoulder and she wouldn’t stop fiddling with her gold signet ring.
Lamp tugged open the rusty door to his garage and breathed in a gulp of the familiar air inside. “Home sweet home!” he cheered. “Who’s for— Oh. I think someone’s got angry in my garage.”
“What?” Casper dashed over to join him by the garage entrance. “Oh my. What a mess.” Clutter and broken gadgets littered the floor around Lamp’s upturned fridge, its door hanging open and a swarm of flies buzzing about inside. The workbenches round the walls had lost legs or given way in the middle, tipping their smashed contents on to the floor. Dust covered every surface, dank water dripped from a hole in the ceiling and the cheese piano and lobster tank, which had taken up most of the floor space last time Casper looked, were nowhere to be seen.
Lamp sniffed at the chaos with a bewildered nose. “It’s a bit messy. I’d better invent a big hoover.”
“Hah!” cackled Anemonie as she caught the others up. “Couldn’t have wrecked it better myself. Just look at that destruction! I should learn some tips from this job.” She poked her pointy shoes around in the rubble, scratching her chin and occasionally nodding.
But in Casper’s mind something didn’t add up. “But we just left here a minute ago,” he said. “It was fine. How could somebody cause so much havoc in so little time?”
VRMMMMMSKREEECH!
Casper spun round in time to see a sleek black convertible scream round the corner, brake violently, spin a shrieking circle with its front wheels locked and slam side-on into a lamp-post. Casper jumped backwards and Anemonie leapt for cover behind a pile of used doorknobs.
From the smoking car, a door was thrown open and two figures strutted out, both in smart suits.
“Are you guys all right?” shouted Casper.
A wirily built young man with a pointy nose laughed back. “Cracking piece of parking, Chrys,” he announced. “Lucky we’ve got a dozen more in the garage.”
The other stranger snarled – a girl, younger than her partner; she had short dark hair and a similarly pointy nose. She drew a black hairdryer from a holster on her belt and aimed it at Casper. “Stay where you are,” she grunted. “This thing’s loaded.”
“What with?” chuckled Casper. “Hot air?”
The girl cocked her head, confused. “Don’t joke with me. You know what this does.”
“Course I do. My mum’s got one. She uses it after a shower.” Casper felt a little bolder now. Two kids with a crashed car and a hairdryer weren’t much of a threat, however you looked at them.
“She uses it after a shower? On herself?” The girl’s frown got frownier. “How odd…”
“Chrys!” roared the taller stranger. “How many times? Rule one – never turn your back on the enemy. Rule two – never engage them in small talk!” He rounded on the girl, turning his back on Casper in order to discipline her further.
Casper tapped the lad on the shoulder. “Can I help you at all?”
He whipped round, enraged. “DO NOT TOUCH ME!” Reaching for his own belt, the lad snapped a matching hairdryer from its holster and pointed it at Casper’s head. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Not… exactly…” By this time, Lamp and Anemonie had emerged from the garage and were watching the situation keenly. “Are you from… around these parts?” asked Casper.
“Around these parts?” The lad chuckled softly to the girl called Chrys, lowering his aim with the hairdryer. “I AM THESE PARTS!” The hairdryer was up again, closer this time, the end almost touching Casper’s nose, and the lad’s face shook with rage. “State your name and business or FEEL MY WRATH!”
Something about the way the lad held his hairdryer, how smartly he was dressed, the fact that he’d just crashed a sports car into a lamp-post, hinted to Casper that it might be best to tell this madman what he needed to know.
“I’m Casper Candlewacks.”
A dirty smirk appeared on the lad’s face. “And I guess that makes the fat lump Lamp Flannigan, does it?” He tilted his hairdryer at Lamp.
Lamp checked the name label on his boiler suit and nodded.
“You think this is funny?” The lad swooshed his hairdryer to the left and pulled hard on the trigger. A WHOOSH of hot air sent a slew of breadcrumbs blowing from the bell, zooming to the left of Lamp and scattering on the grass behind him. Casper only had a second to snigger at the hopelessness of the lad’s weapon before a tearing screech from the sky froze the laugh in his throat.
Dark shadows stretched from the trees and lifted into the air with ragged wings. One screech became one hundred as the air grew thick with the flapping of feathers. Casper lifted his eyes just in time to see clouds of shrieking birds blocking out the sun as they soared and circled, screaming, then plummeted down towards the patch of grass to snap at the breadcrumbs.
Lamp screamed, spun and jumped for the comfort of Anemonie’s arms, but missed and flew headfirst past her into the garage. Anemonie paid no attention to Lamp, watching the birds with her hateful eyes as if weighing up an opportunity, while the two smartly clad strangers chuckled to each other.
“Not laughing now, are we, Candlewacks?” laughed the lad, putting too much emphasis on the word ‘Candlewacks’ and doing bunny ears with his fingers. “You see, the local wildlife’s got a little hungry recently. Fewer people around to feed them bread. And then we came along with these little things.” He rattled the hairdryer to show there was plenty of bread left inside. “Just imagine, a smattering of bread over that little round face of yours.” He smirked. “Dinnertime! And those beaks are ever so sharp, you know. So… you want to tell me your real name now?”
“What?” Casper’s mouth was full of feathers and his mind was full of claws and beaks. (Not literally, of course. That would be bird-brained.) “I… er…” But he’d forgotten his name. All he could think about were the vulture-like abominations fighting for bread on the lawn. With savage beaks and dark wiry talons, the birds clawed for the breadcrumbs, pecking, scratching, cooing… Cooing?
Casper gasped. “Those are just pigeons?” The bread was long gone, as was the grass, but the birds still clawed away at the mud as if they’d not had a square meal, or a circular meal, or triangular, or any shape of meal at all, in years. Either that or they were digging for Australia. “But they’re so… savage,” said Casper, disgusted. “And look at the state of their feathers. What’s happened to them?”
The lad laughed bitterly. “Times are tough for all of us, not least the pigeons. When they sniff bread they get a little… frantic.”
“What do you mean ‘times are tough’? Times have never been better. Why, trade’s booming at my dad’s restaurant, Mrs Trimble has started stocking milk again and the mayor just opened our first bus shelter! Look, I don’t know who you are, but—”
The hairdryer was pointing at Casper’s head again, and this time he knew to shut up.
“What mayor? Which restaurant?” The lad’s lip quivered. “You’d better stop lying, sir, cos my trigger finger’s getting awfully itchy. So tell me again… who are you?’”
“I’m Casper!” Casper cried. “How can I make that any clearer?”
The lad looked like he was finding it tough not to explode. But then the girl called Chrys gasped, leant over and whispered something into the lad’s ear. His face changed, softened, and he cocked his head to one side, blinking. His eyes flicked to Anemonie, and then to