Eoin Colfer - The Fowl Twins

So , thought Myles , I should activate the EMP. But before I do …

Myles rooted in the steel rubbish bin until he found some aluminium foil that he had been using for target practice with one of his many lasers. He used it to quickly wrap his spectacles then stuffed them down to the bottom of the bin. This would protect the lite version of NANNI that lived in the eyeglasses in the event that both his safeguards failed.

‘I concur,’ said Myles. ‘Activate the EMP, NANNI. Tight radius, low intensity. No need to knock out the mainland.’

‘Activating EMP,’ said NANNI, and promptly collapsed in a puddle on the floor as her own electronics had not yet been converted to optical cable.

‘See, Beck?’ said Myles, lifting one black loafer from a glistening wet patch. ‘That is what we scientists call a design flaw.’

Lord Bleedham-Drye was doubly miffed and thrice surprised by the developments on Dalkey Island.

Surprise number one: Brother Colman spoke the truth, and trolls did indeed walk the Earth.

Surprise the second: the troll was tiny. Whoever heard of a tiny troll?

Surprise the last (for the moment): flying boys had sequestered his prey.

‘What on earth is going on?’ he asked no one in particular.

The duke muttered to himself, ‘These Fowl people seem prepared for full-scale invasion. They have flare countermeasures. Drones flying off with children. Who knows what else? Anti-tank guns and trained bears, I shouldn’t wonder. Even Churchill couldn’t take that beach.’

It occurred to Lord Teddy that he could blow up the entire island for spite. He was partial to a spot of spite, after all. But, after a moment’s consideration, he dismissed the idea. It was a cheery notion, but the person he would be ultimately spiting was none other than the Duke of Scilly, i.e. his noble self. He would hold his fire for now, but, when those boys re-emerged from their fortified house, he would be ready with his trusty rifle. After all, he was quite excellent with a gun, as his last shot had proven. Off the battlefield, it was unseemly to shoot anything except pheasant, unless one were engaged in a duel. Pistols at dawn, that sort of thing. But he would make an exception for a troll, and for those blooming Fowl boys.

Lord Teddy loaded the rifle with traditional bullets and set it on the balcony floor, muzzle pointed towards the island.

You can’t stay in that blasted house forever, my boys , he thought. And the moment you poke your noses from cover, Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye shall be prepared.

He could wait.

He was prepared to put in the hours. As the duke often said to himself: one must spend time to make time.

Teddy lay sandwiched between a yoga mat and a veil of camouflage that had served as a hide of sorts for almost a month now, and ran a sweep of the island through his night-vision monocular. The whole place was lit up like a fairground with roaming spotlights and massive halogen lamps. There was not a millimetre of space for an intruder to hide.

Clever chappies, these Fowls , thought the duke. The father must have a lot of enemies .

Teddy sat up, fished a boar-bristle brush from his duffel bag, and began his evening ritual of one hundred brushes of his beard. The beard rippled and glistened as he brushed, like the pelt of an otter, and Teddy could not help but congratulate himself. A beard required a lot of maintenance, but, by heaven, it was worth it.

He had only reached stroke seven when the duke’s peripheral vision registered that something had changed. It was suddenly darker. He looked up, expecting to find that the lights had been shut off on Dalkey Island, but the truth was more drastic.

The island itself had disappeared.

Lord Teddy checked all the way to the horizon with his trusty monocular. In the blink of an eye, the entirety of Dalkey Island had vanished with only an abandoned stretch of wooden jetty to hint that the Fowl residence might ever have existed at the end of it.

Lord Bleedham-Drye was surprised to the point of stupefaction, but his manners and breeding would not allow him to show it.

‘I say,’ he said mildly. ‘That’s hardly cricket, is it? What has the world come to when a chap can’t bag himself a troll without entire land masses disappearing?’

Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye’s bottom lip drooped. Quite the sulky expression for a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. But the duke did not allow himself to wallow for long. Instead, he set his mind to the puzzle of the disappearing island.

‘One can’t help but wonder, Teddy old boy,’ mused the duke to the mirror on the flat side of his brush, ‘if all this troll malarkey is indeed true, then is the rest also true? What Brother Colman said vis-à-vis elves, pixies and gnomes all hanging around for centuries? Is there, in fact, magic in the world?’

He would, Lord Teddy decided, proceed under the assumption that magic did exist, and therefore, by logical extension, magical creatures.

‘And so it is only reasonable to assume,’ Teddy said, ‘that these fairy chaps will wish to protect their own, and perhaps send their version of the cavalry to rescue the little troll. Perhaps the cavalry has already arrived, and this disappearing-island trick is actually some class of a magical spell cast by a wizard.’

The duke was right about the cavalry. The fairy cavalry had already arrived.

One fairy, at least.

But he was dead wrong about a wizard casting a spell. The fairy responsible for the disappearing-island trick was a far cry indeed from being a wizard, and could no more cast a spell than a frog could turn itself into a prince. She had made a split-second decision to use the only piece of equipment available to her, and was now pretty certain that her decision was absolutely the wrong one.

THE GNOME PROFESSOR DR JERBAL ARGON ONCE presented a theory, dubbed the Law of Diminishing Probabilities, to the fairy Psych Brotherhood. Argon’s law states that the more unusual the subjects involved in a conflict, the more improbable the resolution to that conflict will be. It is possibly the vaguest behavioural theory ever to make it into a journal, and it is really more of a notion than a law. But, in the case of the Fowl Twins’ first magical adventure, it would certainly prove to be accurate, as we will see from the hugely improbable finale to this tale.

The law’s requirements were certainly fulfilled, as this day was, without doubt, one for unusual individuals:

An immortalist duke …

A miniature troll …

And a set of fraternal human twins: the first a certified genius with a criminal leaning lurking in his prefrontal cortex, and the second possessed of a singular talent that has been hinted at but not fully explored as yet.

There are two additional unusual individuals still to join the tale. The nunterrogator, to whom we have already alluded, will presently make one of her trademark theatrical entrances. But the next unusual individual to join our cast of protagonists is more than simply unusual – she is biologically unique. And she made her appearance from above, hovering ten metres over Dalkey Island.

This unusual individual was Lower Elements Police Specialist Lazuli Heitz, who, five minutes earlier, entered the island’s airspace to complete a training manoeuvre in the Fowl safe zone. Usually such safe zones were in remote areas, but in rare cases where there was a special arrangement with the human occupants, a zone could be closer to civilisation and provide more of a challenge for the specialists. A case in point being Dalkey Island, where Artemis Fowl the Second, friend to the LEP, had guaranteed safe passage for fairies.