Jungledrop Page 9

  She and Fibber dismounted their unicycles and climbed down the tantrum tree the map had paused at, muttering ‘excuse me’ all the way. Then they resumed their quest for the Forever Fern on foot. They hurried along by the river, now and again catching sight of some strange fish or eel gliding through the water. But, when they came to a purple plant on the riverbank in the shape of an umbrella with dozens of newspapers hanging down from inside it, Fox slowed a fraction. These seemed to be newspapers recalling events in her own world!

  She read the headline of the newspaper closest to her aloud: ‘DROUGHTS, DEATH AND DOOM!’ Then beneath this: ‘No hope for the Faraway unless rain falls imminently.’

  Fox’s stomach twisted as she let the map pull her on. This time she couldn’t seem to shake the guilt off. Her world was in chaos, Jungledrop was dying, and she might be able to do something about it… But her chances of being loved by her parents depended on finding the Forever Fern and she couldn’t, no matter how guilty she felt, let go of that hope.

  Burying her doubts as best she could, Fox ran on and on. She’d had no idea that being a successful businesswoman would involve so much rushing about. Perhaps she’d need to factor in hiring a secretary when she got home.

  The river widened into a little pool, surrounded by trees, so that the sunlight that fell through the gaps in the branches dappled the water – a pocket of the rainforest not yet claimed by the Midnights. And here the map stopped pulling. Fox looked around for a person or a building, but there was just the river, drifting aimlessly on, and the crowded trees bordering it.

  Fox frowned. ‘The map must’ve stopped here for a reason.’

  ‘There!’ Fibber cried. ‘In the river!’

  Fox squinted into the sunlight to see that Fibber was pointing at something small, blue-skinned and pointy-eared that appeared to be swimming through the water towards them. Fox staggered backwards as the creature emerged onto the banks of the river and then darted, on webbed feet, behind a plant. It looked very much like a trunklet, only it was blue not green.

  ‘Bash it with your boot!’ Fox hissed at Fibber. ‘Or biff it with your briefcase!’

  The creature peeked out from behind the plant it was hiding behind, then scuttled back into its leaves again. It did this three more times.

  Heckle flapped down from a branch and squawked, ‘Heckle thinks that the boglet is trying to tell us something.’

  ‘Well, why doesn’t it just spit it out?’ Fox barked.

  ‘Remember what Iggy said,’ Fibber told her. ‘Magical creatures can’t speak.’

  And, to Fox’s surprise, her brother bent down, almost gently, in front of the boglet. He didn’t say anything to the little creature. He just crouched before it – and watched.

  Fox drummed her boot on the ground. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  ‘The boglet is feeling terribly overwhelmed by the arrival of the Faraway heroes,’ Heckle explained, ‘so picking out its thoughts is proving quite difficult.’

  The boglet stood, looking at Fibber, water dripping from its pointed ears, then it scurried back behind the plant. It popped out seconds later and then hid once more. Again and again it did this. The more it repeated the action, the more Fox wondered whether it was, in fact, trying to communicate with them, as Heckle had said.

  ‘Do you know something about the Constant Whinge?’ Fibber said quietly, tentatively, in a voice that showed he hadn’t had much practice at being gentle, but was keen to try all the same.

  The boglet peeped out from behind the plant and nodded. Then it hid again.

  Heckle parked herself on the ground beside Fibber. ‘The boglet’s thoughts are less of a jumble now and Heckle believes it wants you to know that you have arrived at the Constant Whinge.’

  Fox threw her hands up in the air. ‘We haven’t arrived at our destination! Look – there’s nothing here!’

  Fibber looked around, frowning. But he didn’t raise his voice at the boglet. He spoke calmly, quietly, so as not to frighten it away, in a manner so unlike him that Fox had to rub her own ears to make sure that it really was her brother speaking. Why was he being nice again?

  Fibber watched the boglet a while longer, then his eyes lit up. ‘The Constant Whinge is invisible,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s what you were trying to tell us by hiding one minute, then appearing the next, wasn’t it?’

  The boglet nodded.

  Fox frowned. She had always been told by her parents that being nice was a waste of time and yet here was Fibber being nice and getting the information they needed. She tried to follow his example and threw the boglet a grateful smile, if only to urge it to reveal a little more, but her face wasn’t used to such an expression and she ended up grimacing at the creature instead. The boglet shrieked under Fox’s scowl and she felt embarrassed and cross and jealous all at the same time. Fibber was better than her at everything! Even communicating with magical creatures…

  ‘How are we meant to find something if it’s invisible?’ she grumbled.

  Fibber turned to her. ‘I don’t know, but I think we’ve got to trust the magical creatures here. We won’t survive otherwise.’

  Fox snorted. ‘You’re a fine one to be talking about trust. You’re always tricking people and telling lies.’

  Fibber seemed about to say something, then he noticed that the boglet was shuffling away towards the river again. ‘Hey!’ he called.

  The boglet turned.

  ‘I just –’ he paused – ‘wanted to… thank you for your help.’

  The boglet grinned at Fibber’s words, as if it knew something the twins and Heckle didn’t. Then it hopped back into the river and vanished from sight, but, as it did so, a very strange thing happened. The sunshine streaming down between the branches hanging over the river seemed to shiver and blur. It was almost like watching a mirage, only eventually mirages give way to obvious, predictable things. But there was nothing obvious or predictable about what was left in the wake of this one.

  A ramshackle wooden hut appeared out of thin air, balanced on stilts over the water. There were wooden steps leading up from the riverbank towards it and a sign over the closed front door, which read:

  THE CONSTANT WHINGE JUNGLE APOTHECARY

  Fox gazed at the window beside the door. Behind the glass she could see a row of bottles, all shapes and sizes, filled with berries, leaves and powdered bark. She couldn’t believe that she was moments away from victory! But, just as she was about to rush up the steps to claim the fern, there was a short, sharp bang and something green and glittery exploded out of the window, sending shards of glass flying.

  ‘I thought I had been quite clear on this, boglets,’ a voice inside the hut muttered. ‘I do not wish to be disturbed.’

  Ignoring this outburst, Heckle fluttered onto the doorstep before the door. The twins followed carefully, watchfully, their eyes glued to the window in case the owner of the voice should step into view.

  But their eyes were not the only ones fixed on the Constant Whinge. There were others watching from the surrounding trees, too. And, had Heckle and the twins not been so excited by the appearance of the shack, they might have noticed that the jungle had fallen quiet and there was a strange ticking noise eating into the hush.

  Three monkeys looked on from the shelter of the understorey. But they had nothing in common with the silvermonkeys Fox and Fibber had seen leaping through the branches the day before. These monkeys were blacker than night and their orange eyes, which moved eerily from Fox to Fibber and back again, gleamed with terrible menace.

  ‘Fox is wishing Fibber would do the knocking,’ Heckle declared, ‘and Fibber is wishing Fox would do it.’

  ‘Fox is wishing the parrot would keep other people’s thoughts to itself,’ Fox muttered.

  That said, as they halted before the door of the Constant Whinge, Fox was surprised that Fibber – usually so confident – wasn’t striding ahead into the shack to claim the fern for himself. In fact, he looked very much as he had done up
on first setting foot in Jungledrop: scared.

  ‘Fine,’ Fox said. ‘I’ll do it.’ She reached out a shaking hand (for deep down she was frightened, too) and knocked on the door. She waited, heart thudding. Whoever was inside the hut hadn’t sounded pleased to be disturbed.

  ‘If you’ve come about a runny nose,’ the voice snapped, ‘I’m all out of neverdrip salts.’ It was a male voice and it sounded old and tired. ‘If it’s earache you’re worried about, then you’ll have to wait until November to be cured: I can only make eavesdrops when the eaves plants are in season. And, if you’re here with gout, maybe it’s time you stopped drinking so much junglejuice.’

  ‘We – we don’t have runny noses or earache or, um, gout,’ Fibber said. ‘We—’

  ‘We,’ the voice groaned. ‘There’s more than one of you?’

  ‘Three, if you include the parrot,’ Fibber said nervously.

  ‘How incredibly tiresome.’

  There was a shuffling inside the hut. The twins waited hopefully for the person behind the voice to appear, but instead there came a clank of bottles, a fizzing noise and another short, sharp bang followed by more green glitter bursting out of the window.

  ‘Bother,’ the voice mumbled. ‘It looks like the Constant Whinge is here to stay for a while…’

  There was a pause and then footsteps, slow and shuffling, advanced towards the door.

  Fox held her breath. Fibber clutched his briefcase to his chest. Heckle muttered something about universal fear. The door opened.

  In its frame stood a very old man. From his feather waistcoat, patchwork-leaf shorts and the raindrop tattoos on his ears, Fox supposed he was an Unmapper. But he looked far wilder, older and grumpier than the others she had seen. For a start, there were short tufts of weeds sprouting out of his ears and his long white beard was intertwined with leaves and twigs. There were even clumps of moss growing between his bare toes.

  ‘What do you wa—’ he began, but stopped short as he took in the two children who stood before him. ‘So the candletree prophecy has finally come true. The Faraway folk have arrived…’

  Heckle cocked her head. ‘The old man had thought, after what happened to Ethel some years ago, that his work as an apothecary was finished, but now—’

  ‘Careful, parrot,’ the apothecary said. ‘I have a buttonshut potion in here that permanently closes all manners of things: doors, hearts, mouths and beaks.’

  Heckle shut hers immediately.

  The old man turned to the twins. ‘Eight years ago, I cast a charm on the Constant Whinge to make it invisible. I vowed that this shack should only reappear if the boglets who live along the riverbank felt it absolutely necessary. Over the years, the boglets have summoned it for several distinctly unimportant things. Like when the youngest of their kind got incurable hiccups and then when his grandmother started burping bubbles. And each time I successfully conjured a junglespit explosion to make the Constant Whinge invisible again.’

  He eyed the broken glass outside his window. ‘Until today.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You are the Faraway folk the prophecy promised – here, I presume, to rid the kingdom of Morg. So why, may I ask, are you skulking round my shack?’

  ‘The Forever Fern,’ Fox said eagerly. ‘Do you have it inside?’

  ‘Goldpaw gave us a flickertug map,’ Fibber explained, ‘and when we asked where the Forever Fern was it led us to you.’

  The old man was silent for a moment. ‘There was a time when I collected plants, ferns and berries from across the kingdom to cure almost every imaginable ailment.’ He paused. ‘But I have never come across the Forever Fern.’

  Fox felt her hopes clatter down and she scowled at the apothecary. ‘Then the map’s stupid and the fern’s stupid and you’re probably stupi—’

  Fibber cut in. ‘The map must have led us here for a reason. Maybe you’ve got something else inside that can help us?’

  The man sighed. ‘I don’t dish out potions any more. Not since…’ His voice trailed off. ‘You’re wasting your time here.’

  He went to close the door, but Fox stuck out her boot to prevent it shutting. ‘Listen up, moss-foot. We’re on a very important quest here and we’re not leaving until you cough up some leads on this fern.’ She barged past the old man into his shack. ‘So, what can you give us that might help, hmmmmm?’

  ‘Are all Faraway folk this rude?’ the old man muttered to Fibber. ‘Or just the under-eighteens?’

  ‘My sister’s not so much rude as –’ Fibber paused – ‘keen. There’s a lot at stake. We have to find the fern, you see.’

  The apothecary sighed. ‘Since the fate of the world is hanging in the balance, I suppose you’d better come in. Not that I harbour any sort of hope that I’ll be able to help you.’

  As Fibber and Heckle followed the man inside, Fox scoured the shack, looking for anything that might be of use to her. There were shelves and glass-fronted cabinets lining the walls and every single one held row upon row of glass bottles, pots, goblets and jars, all with strange-looking contents and labels:

  SIFTED SUNBLOSSOM: CURES BALDNESS (APPLY DAILY)

  GOBBLEQUICK RESIN: CURES FUSSY EATERS (CONSUME BEFORE MEALTIMES)

  MUDDLED STINKHORN: RADICALLY REDUCES LATENESS (APPLY IMMEDIATELY BEFORE TRAVELLING)

  DRIED MILKWEED: CURES BAD DREAMS (PLACE UNDER PILLOW BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP)

  WRIGGLEWORT LEAVES: CURES STIFF JOINTS (MASSAGE INTO FEET AFTER STRENUOUS EXERCISE)

  ‘Got anything to summon up lost things?’ Fox asked.

  The apothecary closed the door, then sat down at the table in the middle of the shack. And it was only then that Fox noticed the state of the objects strewn across the table’s surface: crusty test tubes, a broken magnifying glass, weighing scales clogged with cobwebs. It was as if the apothecary had started an experiment years ago, then abandoned it halfway through and left it to rot.

  Fibber looked around. ‘Or maybe you have something in here to kill a harpy?’

  ‘Even if I did, I couldn’t promise it would work,’ the old man said gloomily. ‘I used to be legendary. Unmappers and magical creatures would come from across the kingdom for cures from the Constant Whinge. “Doogie Herbalsneeze will sort you out,” they’d say. “He’s the best there is.” But what’s the use of helping everybody else when you can’t help the one you love?’

  The old man held two wrinkled hands over his face and, to Fox’s horror, she realised that he was crying. She watched, aghast. She’d never seen a grown-up cry before and she found it deeply unnerving, like watching the edges of the universe break apart.

  ‘Make him stop,’ she hissed to Fibber. ‘Immediately.’

  But, when Fibber reached out a hand towards the apothecary, he only sobbed louder.

  At which point, Heckle took it upon herself to reveal some innermost thoughts. ‘The old man is feeling both pain and relief in crying and—’

  The apothecary wailed even louder.

  ‘Thank you, Heckle,’ Fibber said firmly. ‘That’s enough for now.’

  When Doogie Herbalsneeze’s words did come, they tumbled out in a rush of tears. ‘I searched the kingdom for the most powerful plants and mixed thousands of potions when my dear wife, Ethel, fell ill eight years ago after trying to protect a thunderberry bush from Morg’s Midnights.’

  The old man wiped his nose with a handkerchief. ‘But the dark magic of those monkeys had already seeped into her and nothing made any difference in the end.’ He looked up at the twins. ‘I couldn’t save her, so there’s no way I can help you rescue the whole kingdom.’

  Fox drew out the flickertug map from her satchel and looked at the silver words, The Constant Whinge, glumly. It had brought them all the way here. For nothing. She held the map out now in case it wanted to tug her on again, but it lay limp in her hands.

  She turned to Fibber. ‘Now what?’

  Fibber sat down at the table; it seemed he wasn’t ready to give up quite yet. ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ he said
to the apothecary. And then, after a pause: ‘Sometimes, no matter how hard you try at something, it just doesn’t work out. But I don’t think that makes you a failure. Maybe it means that all the trying is leading towards something else.’

  Fox stared at her brother. She could just about cope with Fibber being nice to the boglet. That behaviour had, after all, made the Constant Whinge appear. But apologising for another person’s pain was a step too far. What on earth was he up to?

  ‘You may have closed yourself off from the rest of the kingdom,’ Fibber went on, ‘but if the map led us to you it has to be for a reason. It must think that somehow something here can help us in our quest for the Forever Fern. Jungledrop needs you, Doogie Herbalsneeze. You have a part to play in defeating Morg.’

  The apothecary was silent for a while and then he let out a loud sniff. ‘This is the problem with letting children into your workplace: they start teaching you to hope all over again.’

  Fox looked around at the shelves. ‘But how can a bunch of useless plants help?’

  Doogie wiped his eyes. ‘Plants are never useless,’ he told Fox firmly. ‘They can regrow even after they’ve been eaten. They can sprout up in pockets of the jungle where it’s too dark to see. They can live off air and mist. They can reproduce without moving. They possess more than twenty senses. They absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen from their leaves, which people and animals need to breathe.’ There was an energy to the old man’s voice now that hadn’t been there before. ‘Plants are not just decorative furniture; they keep your world and mine alive.’