Fleeced (22 page)

This time, the hooves of the third phalanx slammed Nelson over backwards, snapping him in two over his cannon. From the grass, the Admiral waved his good arm helplessly in the air, bewildered by falling plastic body parts.

“Nelly Nelly!” roared Fred. He leaped down off the cannon and poked the Admiral's crumpled head. Looking up, he glared at Alex. Slowly he unfastened Nelson's starburst medal and pinned it to his own chest.

“Fred Fred kill Alex and scummy scummy woollies!”

Smiling nastily
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, he looked at the boy and reached into his pocket, drawing out a long match. He dragged it down the side of the cannon and lit the fuse.

“Oh no you don't!” shouted Alex.

Leaping around the side of the phalanx, he threw his weight behind the the breech
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of the cannon and spun it round to face the lines of approaching mannequins. There was a resounding boom as the cannon ball tore through them and when the black cloud of smoke cleared, Alex saw twenty or more of them, smashed to pieces, jerking on the grass.

His heart soared.

The plan was working!

“What what?” squealed Fred.

Stumbling towards Alex, soot-faced and dazed from the cannon blast, he flung out his arms to grab him. At which Aries exchanged a rapid glance with Olaf and together they charged, each hooking a horn each through Fred's belt to carry him over to the snapping dolphin. With a single coordinated toss of their heads, they launched the Cyclops into the dolphin's mouth. Squeaking with delight, the dolphin began swinging him from side to side, boxing the Cyclops's ears with his stone flippers and making a sound like a cauliflower being repeatedly thumped.

“Well done!” shouted Alex.

He scanned the garden to see that more than half 
of the mannequins now lay groaning on the lawn.

Commanding the sheep to kick again, Alex glanced over at the gate to see three mannequins guarding it wearing padded orange suits, what appeared to be fishbowls on their heads and silver boots, who we'd recognise to be astronauts.

As the squeals of plastic rang through the garden again, Alex gently unwound the snake from his shoulders.

“Hex,” he said. “I need you to open those gates.”

The snake nodded and slithered through the stomping feet to the safety of the tulip borders that lined the drive to the gate. In a flash of silver, he was gone and Alex turned back to the fray, hoping the snake would be all right. After all, venom has no effect on a mannequin and for once in his snakey life, Hex was vulnerable.

Again and again, the sheep phalanxes bucked and moved forwards. Olaf and Aries joined the front of the third phalanx, adding their formidable kicks to the others, bleating furiously.

Alex laughed as a blizzard of snow-booted legs fell around him. It was going to be all right.

Which was when he heard a yelp, and, panicked, he turned to see one of the spacemen pointing to something, or rather someone, in the bushes.

“Aries,” he shouted. “Hex needs help!”

Peeling away from the group, Aries saw all three spacemen peering into the border. One of them twitched his silver-gloved fingers, reaching for the small hammer on his belt as he bent down for a closer look. Seconds later Aries' head made contact with the shiny target and launched the rocket man into a new orbit. Then, swinging round, he gave the other two their own personal ‘lift-offs' over the wall.

Whereupon Hex shot up the gatepost, nodded his thanks to Aries and began tapping buttons with his nose.

Aries turned back, ready to attack again and stopped.

Because there wasn't a single mannequin standing.

Instead, the lawn looked like a massacre in a doll factory. Every patch of grass was strewn with crumpled body parts. Fingers fluttered uselessly. Legs kicked their feet in the air. Wigs floated in the swimming pool like furry water lilies.

“We did it!” yelled Alex.

He leaped up and punched the air.

All at once, the sheep surged round him, cheering. They stamped their hooves and licked him with rough tongues, bustling against him in delight. Aries galloped back to Olaf and the rams
knocked horns in a victory clash. And Hex, swaying and curling in a mamba-samba, rode the top of the ironwork gate as it slowly opened to freedom.

As Alex looked over the scene of triumph, he was oddly reminded of his father at
the Battle of Marathon
and of how he'd beaten thousands of Persians with only a few hundred Greeks. And although it was true that the Athenians hadn't celebrated by eating roses, rolling around on clumps of dahlias and jumping up and down on plastic body parts, Alex finally knew how his father must have felt to fight even when logic told him the odds were against him – to fight and win.

A moment later he'd scooped Toby up from the garden room and walked back out into the sunshine.

Aries trotted up to him, wreathed in smiles.

“Well done, Alex!” he said. He looked up into the boy's face and nudged him gently in the ribs. “Alexander the Great!” he added.

Alex smiled, and for once he didn't even feel silly at blushing because inside he was glowing with pride.

But there was no time to lose.

Stepping deftly over the muddle of body parts he led the flock to the gate and lifted up his arm for Hex to slither down.

The open road lay ahead of them.

Alex turned and looked into Hex's sparkling eyes. “Which way?”

XXVII

S
HOWSTOPPER
!

Medea stood draped in the darkness of the wings of the Leicester Square Luxe, watching Hazel rehearse her welcome speech one last time. The stage in front of the cinema screen had been dressed to look like a rodeo with stacks of hay bales, hung ropes and saddles. Dwarfed by a neon sign of a silhouetted rider on a bucking bronco, and talking in whispers to the closed theatre curtains, the young singer looked deliciously vulnerable and just thinking about what was to happen later on released a swarm of butterflies
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behind Medea’s ribs. As usual she had no idea of how her curse would work or how Hazel would actually die, but as she looked around the stage, her mind popped with exquisite possibilities.

That tangle of electrical cables looped along the front of the stage looked promising. So did the buckets of water ready for the star’s bouquets, which had been left far too close to the panel of lighting controls. Overhead, a galaxy of glittering mirrors twisted on wires, ready to be spotlit and send splashes of light dancing around the stage, while just in front of that gloriously deep drop into the orchestra pit, the stage shone, smooth and slippery. A cold tingle
of pleasure wrapped itself around the sorceress’s heart like an octopus tentacle and she clasped her hands gleefully to her chest, knowing that the young star’s performance would be truly unforgettable.

Unforgettable
was one word that Rose might have used to describe her day.

However, it wouldn’t have been top of her list. Words like unbelievable, mind-twisting and heart-stoppingly terrifying
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would all have been much higher up.

After bursting in on Medea and Hazel that morning, Rose felt sure that she would be in serious trouble. And yet, the sorceress had carried on as if nothing had happened, simply promising Rose a ‘little chat’ over their post-show meal together, all about how important it was to follow her instructions.

Rose shivered.

Perhaps the sorceress intended to convince her that she’d imagined the whole thing?

Or, bewitch her into forgetting anything
inconvenient
?

Either way, Rose didn’t intend to stick around to find out. But for Hazel she wouldn’t even be sitting in the theatre now. Yet despite the clammy fear that had made her skin freeze back at the hotel, she’d
known that she couldn’t simply abandon her new friend to whatever horrible fate Medea had planned. And even if she’d felt like running away, she couldn’t have, because she’d been immediately escorted out of the hotel here by Pandemic, which was why she was now here, pinned down by his bony elbow, in one of the red velvet seats of the VIP section.

Around her, famous actors chatted with pop stars, laughing and hugging each other. People that she’d only ever seen in magazines and on television were standing right in front of her. But Rose didn’t feel remotely star-struck. Instead, as Hazel’s band took their places in the orchestra pit, all she felt was a clawing sicklike fear in the pit of her stomach, knowing that something horrible was going to happen.

Clutching the arms of her cinema seat, her mind flicked back to the terrible image of the pink coffin she’d seen projected behind the singer on the wall at the hotel. And of Medea crouched at the singer’s feet, frantically stitching. Something about the pink dress, her mind insisted, something about that wonderful dress would harm Hazel.

Hazel’s three bodyguards, each dressed in black suits and pink cummerbunds, lined up in front of
the stage and for one ridiculous, fleeting moment Rose wondered whether she ought to just go up there and tell them straight. She looked from one to the other, at their stern, unsmiling faces and wondered which man might be most likely to listen. The first, thickset and muscled, with his big bumpy nose that looked like a clump of broccoli? The next, tall and lean, with a military buzz cut? Or the last? With his broad shoulders, thin neck and bald head, he looked like a skittle. And a bad-tempered one, at that.

“Excuse me,” she imagined herself saying. “I have to tell you that Hazel’s dress is dangerous.” She sank back in her seat and sighed heavily. Even to her, it sounded completely nuts.

Sinking further still into her whirl of worry she didn’t notice the lights dimming above her, or the curtains swish back. In fact, it was only when Hazel’s band started to play the opening bars of the film’s title song and everyone around her began clapping that she looked up to see Steven Speedbug, the film’s director, striding across the stage. And, as he stopped to take a bow, the altogether more shadowy figure stalking up the aisle.

A moment later Medea took the seat beside her.

There are many wonderful sights in our capital city
of London but a flock of sheep hurtling behind a boy draped in a venomous snake down Piccadilly is not traditionally one of them. However, far too excited to settle for a lunch of even the juiciest roses, the sheep had insisted on coming with Alex and Aries to help find Rose and save Hazel. Knowing that the best chance they had to do this was to disrupt and stop the show, Alex had quickly come up with a plan, a simple one: act like sheep and don’t talk. Now, with Hex whispering in Alex’s ear like a GPS
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, they surged as a furious grey tide through the centre of town.

Office workers stared open-mouthed from their glass-fronted buildings as the flock poured over traffic islands and spilled across pavements, bringing buses to wheezing standstills and sending shoppers sprinting down stairwells to the Underground. With a deafening cacophony of blaring horns and sheep-related insults rising behind them, the sheep streamed past the swanky Ritz Hotel, snatching mouthfuls of red geraniums from its window boxes and alarming diners who dropped teacups on the black-and-white tiles floor of the Palm Court. They thundered on past the jewellers, causing a goldsmith to bite into a dazzling tiara instead of his custard cream biscuit, whilst at Fortnum & Mason’s the
manager did a spectacular war dance in his highly polished shoes, just thinking about all that dung on his prestigious entrance carpet.

On an unstoppable river of hooves, snorts and woolly bottoms, the sheep pounded past the statue of Eros, beneath the flashing neon advertisements wrapped around the tall buildings of Piccadilly Circus and finally swung towards Leicester Square.

“There it isss!” shouted Hex.

Alex looked to see a tall cream-stone building with an ornate ironwork canopy above which the word ‘LUXE’ was spelt out in pink light bulbs. Huge banners of a pretty girl in a white, wide-brimmed hat hung down from its roof. Life-sized cut-outs of the same girl dressed in pink-chequered shirts, jeans and leather boots stood at the top of the steps up to a row of doors above.

“That’s her?” said Alex.

The snake nodded.

Ahead of them a crowd of Hazel’s fans stood chatting in front of the theatre, milling over the swathe of pink carpet, which today had replaced the traditional red one. But not for long. At the sound of muffled hooves, they spun round. Wide-eyed, their yelps of surprise quickly turned into shrieks of panic as they fled squealing, flinging fan rosettes
and cowboy hats into the air behind them.

On seeing the chaos outside, theatre staff lunged for the row of doors, trying desperately to slam them closed against the onslaught. But they were too late. Seconds later the sheep stormed the foyer, scattering the staff like human skittles.

“This way!” shouted Alex, spotting a sign which read ‘
Rodeo Love
Premiere: Screen Six’.

The sheep swirled after him, flying across the foyer like a giant woolly arrow. Sending kiosks of Hazel Praline T-shirts and DVDs flying and journalists diving behind the popcorn counters, they flooded after him through the archway leading to the screens. At the far end of the poster-lined hallway, the number six glowed over a set of doors and, snatching up a life-sized cut-out of Hazel, Alex led the sheep towards it.

Hazel Praline walked on stage to a cheering crowd. Dappled with swirling dots of mirror light, she glittered like a pink diamond.

“Hello, London!”

As the twang of country guitars rang out, Rose squirmed furiously beneath Pandemic’s grip, desperate to do something, anything, to stop the show. But the more she tried to twist free, the tighter his fingers clenched around her arm.

Hazel walked to the front of the stage, gracefully stepping over a rather untidy cluster of electrical cables, and began singing.

Suddenly the doors at the back of the theatre slammed open. Shocked, Hazel dropped her microphone and, squinting against the spotlights, tried to see what was happening. As her band strummed to a stop, a pounding drone of hooves filled the darkness. Rose gasped to see both aisles filled with moving shadowy bulks. A second later the lights snapped on and the bulks became sheep. Some had Hazel Praline banners shredded in their horns; others had pink rosettes stuck to their rumps; all had their heads down as they stormed towards the stage.

Either side, people clambered up onto their seats, clutching one another, squealing as the odd curious sheep broke off from the flock, stuck its nose into an open handbag or snatched an expensive coat to chew.

And yet as Rose watched the chaos, she had the weirdest feeling that the sheep were somehow organised into two groups: the ones in the right aisle following an ivory-coloured ram with rippled horns, the ones in the left a tight-fleeced ewe with a bumpy-faced lamb beside her.

Beside her, the sorceress leaped to her feet, and startled, two small grey-faced sheep squealed in alarm and ran faster. Almost, Rose thought, as if they recognised her.

“How in Hades did they get free?” growled Medea.

Get free?
Rose sat bolt upright in her seat, her mind spinning, realising that the disruption was no freaky coincidence.

Medea turned back, pausing briefly to smile at the people in the row ahead who were now giving her strange looks, and glared at Pandemic. “The pipes, you fool!”

As Pandemic frantically patted each pocket in turn, the first sheep reached the area in front of the stage and began milling around wildly. Bustling into the rows of seats, they nuzzled the audience and stuffed their muzzles into bags of wine gums. All round, the theatre rang with shrieks and yelps and the soft thud of rolled up programmes walloping woolly rumps.

Stopping the show!

Two rows further down, Rose saw Mitch Praline leap into the thundering sheep and run with them, his arms spread wide
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. “It’s okay, honey!” he shouted, glancing up at Hazel, who stood watching him round-eyed from the stage.

Waving his hat in the air, he began cornering some sheep by the fire doors at the front of the theatre. Of course, back before her rise to stardom, Hazel had loved helping her dad out on the ranch and now, seeing what he was trying to do, she unhooked one of the looped white ropes from the stage dressing and threw it to him.

“You guys!” she called her bodyguards over quickly. “Go help m’daddy!”

Immediately, the men ran to join Mitch, standing behind him with their arms linked like a human fence, stepping towards the five or six sheep he’d split off from the others.

Of course, as the Pralines might have told you, handling awkward animals is much easier on a Texan ranch. Women there rarely scream because their sparkly shoes have squelched into something warm and wet. And there are no action-hero actors making nuisances of themselves by wielding evening jackets like matadors’ capes. Consequently, despite
Mitch’s efforts, the theatre now descended into utter bedlam.

In fact, it was just like that film about the great white shark when someone spots a dorsal fin in the water and the swimmers go bananas, charging onto the beach for safety and tripping over one another in the surf.

Apart from the beach, of course.

And the surf.

Oh, all right, and the shark.

People flew out of their seats, squealing and flapping into the aisles, making for the exits.

“Finally!” snarled Medea, as Pandemic plucked a wooden arch of pipes from his coat. She scowled as a flurry of ice-cream pots and programmes rained down on her head, discarded by the audience members sprinting past the end of the row and fixed him with a vicious stare. “Freeze the flock!”

Freeze them
, thought Rose, fleetingly wondering how they might possibly stop a herd of sheep in their tracks. Smiling coldly, Pandemic brought the pipes to his lips.

With both hands.

Seizing her chance, she leaped to her feet and
kicked his shin hard. As he buckled over, she swept the pipes out of his hand, sending them spinning into the path of the running sheep where they smashed under thundering hooves. Swiftly ducking out of Medea’s reach, she grabbed her rucksack and scrambled over the back of her seat, stepping onto the empty seat of the row behind, and then over again, leaving Medea lunging hopelessly after her. Then, quickly apologising to the few people remaining whom she trod on, squashed or tripped over, she reached the other aisle.