Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

‘I can see how that might not go down too well,’ he conceded, ‘but don’t worry: I won’t let you or Kazam down.’

There was quiet for a moment as we motored down the road.

‘Jenny?’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you considered my offer to go and see the Jimmy Nuttjob Stunt Show?’

I looked across at him.

‘Is this a date?’

‘Might be,’ he said, staring at his feet.

I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘I’m only sixteen. I’m too young for you.’

‘There’s only two years between us. And let’s be honest, you don’t act much like a sixteen-year-old, what with the responsibility and dealing with Blix and matters of ethics and whatnot.’

‘It’s a foundling thing,’ I told him. ‘You grow up quick when you have to fight every night with forty other girls for the only handkerchief in the orphanage.’

‘To blow your nose?’

‘To use as a pillow. I’m sorry to have to mention this but you’re going to have to be careful with . . . personal relationships. Rejected partners can sometimes get sniffy and wonder what they saw in you, and this can lead to accusations of beguiling . It’s not a custodial offence as it’s not provable, but the negative publicity is harmful, and there always remains the faint possibility of being hunted down by a crowd of angry and ignorant villagers, all holding torches aloft and eventually imprisoning you in a disused windmill which they set on fire.’

‘Worst-case scenario?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think I’m beguiling you?’

I looked across at him and smiled.

‘If you are, you’re not that good at it.’

‘Ah,’ he said, and lapsed into silence.

Holme Lacy was less than ten miles away, and we pulled into the imposing front entrance of the colonel’s residence a quarter of an hour later. Perkins looked nervously out of the window. It was his first gig. Up until now it had just been practice spells at Zambini Towers and a lot of classroom theory, and none of it to deal with surges.

I parked the car outside the colonel’s imposing eighteen-room mansionette. Lieutenant Colonel Sir Reginald George Stamford Bloch-Draine had been one of King Snodd’s most faithful military leaders, and had personally led a squadron of landships during the Fourth Troll Wars twelve years before.

The point of the Fourth War had been pretty much the same as in the first three: to push the Trolls back into the far north and teach them a lesson ‘once and for all’. To this end, the Ununited Kingdoms had put aside their differences and assembled one hundred and forty-seven landships and sent them on a frontal assault to ‘soften up’ the Trolls before the infantry invaded the following week. The landships had breached the first Troll wall at Stirling and arrived at the second Troll wall eighteen hours later. They reportedly opened the Troll gates, and then – nothing. All the radios went dead. Faced with uncertainty and the possible loss of the landships, the generals decided to instigate the ever popular ‘let’s panic’ plan and ordered the infantry to attack.

Of the quarter of a million men and women who were lost or eaten during the twenty-six-minute war that followed, there had been only nine survivors. Colonel Bloch-Draine was one of them, saved by an unavoidable dentists’ appointment that had him away from his landship at the crucial moment of advance. He retired soon after to devote his time to killing and mounting rare creatures before they went extinct. He had recently started collecting trees and saw no reason why it shouldn’t be exactly the same as collecting stuffed animals: lots of swapping and putting them in alphabetical groups. Clearly, moving trees around his estate was not something he could do on his own, and that was the reason Kazam had been employed.

Patrick of Ludlow was waiting for us outside the colonel’s mansionette.

‘Apologies for calling you out, Miss Strange,’ he said, wringing his hands nervously as we got out of the car, ‘but things aren’t as they should be.’

‘No problem,’ I said soothingly, ‘you and me and Perkins will sort it out.’

Patrick was our Heavy Lifter. He could levitate up to seven tons when humidity was low and he was feeling good, which was more often these days as his six-ounce-a-day marzipan habit was now well behind him. He was a simple soul, but kindly and gentle despite his large size and misshapen appearance. Like most Heavy Lifters he had muscles where he shouldn’t – grouped around his ankles, wrists, toes, fingers and the back of his head. His hand looked like a boiled ham with fingertips stuck on randomly, and the muscles on the back of his head gave him a fearful apearance. He generally stayed hidden when not working in case he was mistaken for an infant Troll.

‘So, what’s the problem, Pat?’ I asked.

‘Problem?’ came a voice behind us. ‘Problem? I expect no problems, only solutions!’

We turned to find the colonel, who, despite being retired, still wore a military uniform, with his chest an impressive array of brightly coloured ribbons, each representing a military campaign he had somehow missed owing to some unforeseen prior engagement.

‘Gadzooks!’ he said when he saw me. ‘A girlie. Bit young for this sort of work eh?’

I ignored his comment and stared at his florid features. He had a large moustache, and his eyes were wide and very blue. Oddly, they seemed to have no real life to them – looking into them was like staring at a creepily lifelike waxwork.

‘Mr Perkins and I are here to ensure the oak-moving goes as planned. It goes without saying that this is all within the price we quoted.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘right. Do you take tea?’

I thanked him and said that we did, to which he replied that he was only asking me, and after persuading him that tea for all of us would get the job completed that much more quickly, he trotted off indoors.

‘So,’ I said, turning back to Patrick, ‘what’s the problem?’

Patrick beckoned me across to the colonel’s arboretum, a small spinney of trees surrounding a lake. He indicated two large circular holes in the ground fifty yards apart. One presumably from where the oak had been, and another where it was meant to end up.

‘Everything was going as planned,’ said Patrick, indicating the half-done job, ‘but just as I’d got the oak halfway from one place to the other, I had a surge and . . . well, can you see over there?’

He pointed to the far shore of the lake. Sitting on the lakeside was the oak tree, roots and all.

‘That’s about half a mile away,’ said Perkins.

‘I surged,’ said Patrick simply, ‘and then every time I tried to move the oak closer, the power just leapt and I dumped it even farther away.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘this is what we’ll do: Patrick, I want you to walk around the lake, lift the oak and bring it back. If you get another oversurge, I want Perkins to channel the excess into anything he wants. Questions?’

‘What should I channel the oversurge into?’

‘See how many fish you can lift out of the lake.’

Perkins looked at the lake, then at his fingers. Levitation was something he could do. There were no more questions and they began to walk off around the lake. I stood and watched them for a moment, then heard a noise on the wind. Something odd and familiar that I couldn’t quite place. I walked across the lawn and towards a rusty battle tank that the colonel had transformed into a tasteless garden feature by the addition of several pot plants and a Virginia creeper on the gun barrel.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked, and heard a rustling.

I pushed aside the azaleas and walked behind the armoured vehicle, where I found a pile of grass clippings and a compost heap. Nothing looked even remotely unusual, but as I was leaving I noticed that one of the tank’s heavy tracks had been chewed, and recently. I peered closer at the toothmarks on the torn section of track, then searched the soft earth near my feet. I soon found what I was looking for: several dullish metal ball bearings of varying size. I picked them up and moved farther into the scrubby woodland, but after searching for five minutes and finding nothing more, I returned to wait for Patrick and Perkins to bring the oak back, which they did without any problems at all. The oak fitted snugly in its new hole, and the earth was soon moved in.