Excerpt
from
Heir of Mystery:
The Second Unlikely Exploit
Chapter One
First and foremost, this is a book about
death. Okay, so it doesn't start with an actual death like the Unlikely
Exploit that precedes it (with young Fergal McNally hurtling out of an
open window, the wind whistling past his sticky-out ears), but you'll
find a lot of it about. Life's like that, though, I'm afraid. Then
again, if we didn't have death, this little planet that we call home
would be a very overcrowded place. Not only that, most buildings would
be old people's homes and entire continents would be taken up with
retirement village after retirement village, populated by some very old
and very wrinkled people indeed. On your birthday, you wouldn't only get
a card from your grandparents but also your great-grandparents and
great-great-grandparents and so on and so on, all the way back to some
couple (looking suspiciously like close relatives of apes, if Charlie
Darwin is to be believed) whose idea of a fun day out is hunting and
gathering and whose idea of a card might be a particularly interesting
leaf, folded in half, with a sooty smudge on the front. If you thought
your gran's mustache tickled, just imagine one of them trying to plant a
slobbering kiss on you. So death is not only the opposite of life, it's
also an important part of it . . . or, to be more accurate, an important
part of the circle of life, which is more than just a theme in Walt
Disney's The Lion King. People are born. People grow up. People
have children. People grow old. People die. People's children grow up
and have children and they die, and so the big wheel keeps on turning.
The sad part is when the circle is interrupted. Fergal McNally didn't
even finish the growing-up stage, which understandably upset his
sisters, Jackie and Le Fay, and his brothers,
Albion and Joshua (a.k.a. Albie and Josh, or the twins) . . ., and a
significant number of people in this exploit don't reach the
growing-old stage. I'm sorry, but there it is. As I began by saying,
some three hundred and fifty-one words ago, first and foremost this book
is about death.
In addition to death, you're also about to
encounter a lot of rain. Like death, rain has its uses. Without rain,
most -- if not all -- plant life would die, there'd be one long drought,
and eventually all the animals and humans would die too, so we should be
offering a great big cheery THANK-YOU to our local rain gods or to the
God of Everything or to Mother Nature (or whichever, if any, deity
handles these things). That doesn't mean to say we have to like rain.
(I'm glad we have electricity -- it's very useful -- but I don't
particularly want to hug it. Hug a big piece of electricity and it'll
burn you to a crisp.) I like the different seasons. I like summer to be
sunny and winter to be snowy. I like the crispy golden leaves of autumn
and fresh green shoots of spring. I feel sorry for people who live in
brilliant sunshine all year round. B-0-R-I-N-G! Rain plays its part in
making the seasons individual. But the rain in this book is a merciless
rain. It's torrential -- which is why it comes down in torrents -- and
it's cold and seemingly never ending.
The night this particular Unlikely Exploit
began, it was raining in Fishbone Forest, a forest that gets its name
from the shape of its trees. Huge, pineless firs, they look like the
skeletons of long-dead fishes, their noses to the ground. Wrought-iron
railings run all the way around the huge forest, with four great
gateways, one at each of the four main points of the compass. The gates
are always locked. These have always been a puzzle to the local people,
who believe that no one in their right mind would want to go into the
forest anyway. What they don't realize is that they're there to keep
things in, not people out.
And the rain? This was the kind of rain
that would have to be painted with great slashes across a canvas with
lashings of paint. This was the kind of rain that soaked your clothes
into a soggy mass in under a minute and then continued to beat down on
you. This was the kind of rain that made you think that it had something
personal against you!
It was through this downpour that an old
van, the color of English mustard, was driving up to the West Gate of
Fishbone Forest. At the wheel was a small man. He was a very small man.
In fact, he was as small as the small masked burglar at the end of the
first Unlikely Exploit. Okay, okay, so he was the small masked burglar
at the end of the first Unlikely Exploit, which means the first time we
met him he was stealing a human brain in a jar of pickling vinegar from
Sacred Heart Hospital.
The small masked burglar was no longer
masked, but he was still small and did have a name. That name was Stefan
Multachan, which sounds rather grand, but because he wasn't, everyone
who knew him called him "Mulch." The only time he was ever addressed as
Mr. Multachan was when he was sent junk mail -- Dear Mr. Multachan:
You're already halfway toward winning the vacation of a lifetime; You're
a guaranteed winner -- or when he was caught doing a burglary:
"Stefan Multachan, we find you guilty of stealing the bag of newts from
Wilf's Fish Emporium and sentence you to two weeks' hard labor and ban
you from keeping amphibians for six months . . ." You get the picture.
The human brain Mulch had stolen was still
in its jar of pickling vinegar, now wrapped up in brown parcel paper --
the good thick stuff -- and was sitting on the passenger seat beside
him. Brains weren't usually kept in pickling vinegar at Sacred Heart.
They were usually kept in formaldehyde or a formaldehyde solution, but
for reasons far too time-consuming to relate now, this particular brain
ended up in pickling vinegar from nearby Ma's Pickling Store. (The "Ma"
in question was actually one Mrs. Edna Bloinstein and, unusually for a
"ma," I'd say, she'd never had any children.) This particular brain
belonged to Fergal McNally, whom I mentioned earlier.
Well, the brain couldn't really belong to
Fergal McNally because Fergal McNally was dead. What I meant to say was
that it had been Fergal's brain. It was the brain of the dead Fergal. If
you could see through the darkness, through the rain, through the side
of the English-mustard-colored van, and through the brown parcel paper
-- the good thick stuff -- you would see the word JUVENILE written on
the label beneath Fergal's name. That's because Fergal was just a little
kid when he fell out of a fourteenth-story window and landed splat on
the pavement below.
Copyright © 2004 Philip Ardagh
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