16
Thought She Was Supposed to Be the Dim One
Edwin sat at the bottom of the shaft, curled into a ball to stave off the chill that seeped through the dank walls and floor.
He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. Befriending Maddy, following her around the manor like some dumb puppy dog, letting her dupe him into pulling that lever, and then handing her the Tome Terriblis, his only chance of escape.
He should have known better. Friends were a waste of time, he was much better off on his own.
So why did he feel so anxious?
It was dark down here. But the dark didn’t scare him anymore, not since he’d faced down the Dark One himself.
No, it wasn’t the dark; it was the thought of being down here on his own that made Edwin’s stomach knot with fear.
Being on your own had certain advantages, sure. You could get on better with revision. You could pick your nose when you wanted to. You didn’t have to make an effort to talk about boring stuff. But now Edwin found himself yearning for someone to talk to, someone to give him hope.
Someone.
Anyone.
Suddenly Edwin heard a strange whooshing noise. He looked up and saw a swirl of pale light above him. Then a shape formed in the light, and in the blink of an eye there was a figure standing in front of him.
A very familiar figure.
“Bryony!” A relieved Edwin jumped up and gave his stepsister a bear hug. “Oh Bryony, am I glad to see you. I’ve had the most terrible day!”
“You have?” Bryony pushed Edwin away. “I’ve become the laughing stock of the school. Now Saffy and Jaz hate me, and everyone thinks I’m a girl.”
“You are a girl,” said Edwin.
“Well, yeah.” Bryony nodded. “Actually, everyone thinks you’re a girl.”
“I’m a girl?” Edwin snorted. “Why would anyone think that?”
“Beats me.” Bryony eyed Edwin up and down. “You look so macho, what with that wig and bin liner skirt.”
“It’s a disguise,” explained Edwin, hurriedly adjusting his wig. “I didn’t want to take any chance with the magic not working properly. And I think it’s a good likeness.”
“My hair doesn’t look like that,” snapped Bryony.
“It does too,” answered Edwin. “But only on a good day.”
“You’re pathetic.” Bryony jabbed a finger at Edwin. “You’ve pulled some low down tricks in the past, but this has to be the lowest.”
“You used that spell book first,” countered Edwin. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t cheated at your exams.”
Bryony bit her bottom lip. “Maybe I did. But I just wanted to be in the same class as Saffy and Jaz. I found a letter from the teachers saying I’d be split up from them if I didn’t pass my exams. I didn’t want to come to this special brainy posh school.”
“This is not my idea of a posh school.” Stubby poked his head out of Bryony’s blazer pocket. “I thought at least they’d have carpets.”
“This place isn’t really a school,” said Edwin. “There’s this mad professor, and a woman with zombie eyes who sleeps in a coffin and runs on electricity. Seems they brought us here to conduct some nasty experiment.”
“That explains the lack of carpets,” mused Stubby. “Nasty experiments can leave stubborn stains.”
“The whole school thing was just a ruse,” continued Edwin. “A way of getting kids here to be used as guinea pigs.”
Bryony giggled. “Always thought you should be locked in a hutch at the bottom of the garden.”
“I’m serious,” said Edwin. “Believe me, there’s something weird going on at the Schrunkopf Institute, and the sooner we get out of this place the better. I guess Inglenook brought you here, right?”
“Of course.” Bryony held up the Wychetts Key.
Edwin smiled when he glimpsed Inglenook’s miniature metal face. “Thanks for coming to rescue me.”
“We didn’t come to get you,” said Bryony. “It’s that spell book we wanted.”
“It is imperative the Tome does not fall into the wrong hands,” said Inglenook.
“So give it here.” Bryony held out her free hand. “Then we can reverse your spell so people stop thinking I’m you.”
Edwin shifted uneasily. “Um…”
“Unless you want to carry on being me?” Bryony laughed. “Feel comfy in that bin liner skirt, huh?”
“It isn’t that.” Edwin grimaced. This was going to be hard to say. “It’s just…”
Bryony looked at Edwin, and noticed he wasn’t carrying anything.
“You don’t have it, do you?”
“No.” Edwin smiled sheepishly. “I lent it to a friend.”
“But you don’t have any friends,” said Bryony.
“I do now,” argued Edwin. “Her name is Maddy. I met her on the bus this morning. We spent most of the day together.”
“So what’s she like?” Bryony was surprised, both at the fact that Edwin had a friend, and that she felt a teeny bit jealous. “Is she pretty?”
“I don’t know.” Edwin felt his cheeks blush a little. “She has green hair.”
“Green hair?” Bryony pulled a disapproving face. “You befriended someone with green hair?”
“And freckles,” added Edwin. “Green freckles. She’s fun, though. A real laugh.”
“Can’t wait to meet her.” Bryony peered past her stepbrother. “So where is she?”
“She, er…” Edwin chewed his bottom lip. He didn’t want to let on how easily he’d been duped. “She went to get help after I got stuck in this trap.”
“Trap?” Up to now Bryony hadn’t noticed they were at the bottom of a deep shaft. “So why didn’t you use the Tome to magic yourself out of here?”
“I just told you,” explained Edwin. “I lent it to Maddy.”
“But you said this Maddy went to find help after you fell into this shaft,” said Stubby. “So she must have taken the book with her?”
“That’s right,” said Edwin. “She doesn’t know it’s a spell book, and I didn’t want to tell her in case she thought I was some sort of idiot.”
“I’m sure she’d already worked that out for herself,” reflected Stubby. “But if you didn’t tell her it’s a spell book, why lend it to her in the first place?”
“Um…” Edwin wasn’t sure how to answer that. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just find the Tome and get out of here. Inglenook, can you take care of that?”
“If it were possible I would already have done so,” said Inglenook. “Unfortunately the electrical storm is disrupting the magic signal from Wychetts.”
“How come?” said Edwin.
“Wychetts’ magic works through the balance of natural elements,” explained the Keeper of the Ancient Wisdom. “When that elemental balance is disrupted, the magic is not as effective. The directional field of the transportation spell was distorted by the storm, and I was lucky to bring the five of us here in one piece.”
“But there are only three of us,” said Bryony. “You, Stubby and me.”
“And your two young friends,” said Inglenook.
Bryony’s eyes narrowed. “What two young friends?”
“I refer to the two girls standing near you when I cast the transportation spell.”
“Saffy and Jaz!” Bryony put a hand to her mouth. “But you weren’t supposed to zap them as well.”
“I did not intend to,” said Inglenook. “Because of disruption caused by the elemental imbalance, they were sucked into the magic vortex and transported with us. But fear not, they arrived unharmed somewhere in this building. Although I am currently unable to pinpoint their precise location.”
“This gets worse by the second,” whined Bryony. “Saffy and Jaz will never speak to me again after this.”
Edwin smiled. “Every cloud has a silver lining.”
“The Young Mistress is right to be concerned,” said Inglenook. “But not just for her friends. Now the Tome is out of our hands, the whole world is under threat from its power. We must devise a means of escaping this pit so we can retrieve the Tome and search for your friends.”
“But the walls are too high to climb,” groaned Edwin. “There’s no way to get out of here.”
“There is always a way if you put your mind to it,” said Stubby. “It merely requires a bit of lateral thinking.”
“What’s that?” said Bryony.
“He means we need to think outside the box,” explained Edwin.
“But we’re not in a box,” said Bryony. “It’s more like a shaft.”
Edwin groaned. “Leave the thinking to me, dumbo.”
“The answer is obvious.” Stubby twitched his whiskers impatiently. “Thought of anything yet?”
“Give me time.” Edwin screwed his face up as he tried to think of an answer. “It’ll come to me eventually.”
“Then we’ll wait,” said Stubby. “Only you’ll have to excuse me if you don’t get a Christmas card this year, but I suspect I’ll still be stuck down a pit for the duration of the festive season.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Bryony. “Edwin, how did you get trapped down here in the first place?”
“I pulled that lever up.” Edwin pointed at the wooden stick projecting from the wall at the top of the pit. “That’s what made the floor go down.”
“Well done,” said Stubby. “You have now solved the problem of escaping this trap.”
“We have?” Edwin wasn’t so sure about that.
Stubby sighed. “If pulling the lever up made the floor go down, all you need to do to raise the floor is manoeuver the said lever back to its previous level of alignment.”
Edwin and Bryony looked blankly at each other.
“He means you have to pull the lever down,” explained Inglenook.
“Very clever,” sneered Edwin. “But you might have noticed our arms aren’t long enough.”
“There is a way of reaching the lever without using your arms,” said Stubby. “All that is required is for you to obtain something, such as rope or string, and loop it over the lever so it can be pulled downwards to activate the floor elevation mechanism.”
“But we don’t have any rope,” said Edwin. “Or string, for that matter.”
“Yes we do.” Bryony pointed at Edwin’s head. “Your wig is made of string.”
“Of course!” Edwin removed his wig and inspected it. “Only, it’s made of lots of little bits of string that are too short to reach the lever.”
“We could tie them together,” said Bryony. “To make a longer piece of string.”
“Very good.” Stubby glanced at Edwin. “I thought she was supposed to be the dim one.”
“But it would take ages to tie all that string,” grumbled Edwin.
“Not if we all work together.” Bryony took Edwin’s wig and started pulling it apart. “We’ll do it in half the time. Come on, take some strands and start tying.”
Despite thinking it was a dumb idea, Edwin worked with Bryony tying the loose strands of wig together. It didn’t take as long as he expected, and within a few minutes they had a single piece of knotted string that he reckoned would be long enough to reach the lever.
“That should be sufficient,” agreed Stubby. “Now tie a loop in one end, like a lasso.”
Bryony did as instructed, and presented her handiwork for inspection.
“Very good,” said Stubby. “Now try looping it around the lever.”
“Here goes.” Bryony tossed the looped string at the lever, but it fell way short of its target.
“You throw like a typical girl,” scoffed Edwin.
Bryony smiled. “Says the person wearing a skirt.”
Edwin tried throwing the string, but missed the lever by an even greater distance than Bryony.
“It’s no use,” he sighed. “The string won’t reach.”
“The string is of adequate length,” said Stubby. “But it is not of sufficient mass. What you require is a weight at the end of the string to increase momentum and throwing distance.”
“But we don’t have anything to use as a weight,” said Edwin.
“I know what we could use,” said Bryony.
“Be quiet,” muttered Edwin, pacing round the shaft. “I’m trying to think of something.”
“What about this?” Bryony held up the Wychetts Key.
Edwin ignored her. “Maybe something made of metal.”
“Like this?” Bryony waved the Key around, but Edwin was too deep in thought to notice.
“Yet something portable enough to throw…”
Bryony pointed at the Key. “You mean like…”
“That’s it!” Edwin slapped the palm of his hand against his forehead. “A small ship’s anchor!”
“An interesting solution,” said Stubby. “And do you know of any ships docked in the vicinity? We are, after all, over twenty miles from the coast.”
“Um, er…” Edwin hadn’t thought about that. “Well, if it carries on raining for a while…”
“Or we could use the Wychetts Key?” said Bryony.
“Haven’t you been listening?” Edwin shook his head at Bryony. “Inglenook said he can’t use his magic because of the elemental imbalance. That’s why we’ve spent the past ten minutes playing about with string.”
“I don’t mean use his magic, I mean use him.” Bryony waved the Key again. “He’s made of metal, yet light enough to throw.”
“But Inglenook is the Keeper of the Ancient Wisdom,” protested Edwin. “We can’t go chucking him around like a weight on a fishing line.”
“I am glad to be of service in any way I can,” said Inglenook. “And will gladly offer my services to assist.”
Bryony took the string back from Edwin, and tied the Key to the end of it. Then, after a few adjustments to the loop, she took aim and threw again.
Carried higher by the Key’s weight, the string found its target and looped around the lever. Bryony pulled, and the lever clicked downwards. There was a low rumble as the floor started rising.
“Well done,” said Stubby. “Bryony, go to the top of the class. Edwin, go stand in the corner with a bucket on your head.”
“That’s a bit of a harsh punishment,” giggled Bryony.
“It’s not punishment,” said Stubby. “More fashion advice.”
The floor of the pit drew level with the tunnel. Edwin glowered at Stubby, whilst Bryony untied the Wychetts Key from the lever.
“That was most pleasurable,” said Inglenook. “I’d forgotten how much I enjoy extreme sports. But harder challenges lie ahead. Retrieving the Tome from Maddy will require more than a bit of string.”
Bryony was about to ask what Inglenook meant, when a strange feeling came over her; it was gone in a heartbeat, but it left her feeling dizzy.
“What was that?” she murmured. “For a second I thought I might pass out.”
“Me too,” said Edwin, pressing a hand to his forehead. “What happened?”
“The illusionary spell has been cancelled,” said Inglenook.
“You mean we don’t look like each other any more?” Bryony heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief. “Means you can take that skirt off now, Edwin.”
“No it doesn’t.” Edwin angled his gaze to the floor. “I haven’t got any spare trousers.”
Bryony laughed, but Inglenook interrupted her.
“That is not altogether good news. The fact that the illusion spell has been cancelled can only mean one thing: someone else is using the Tome!”