Phredde’s mum shook her head slowly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t magic something I don’t understand. And I certainly don’t understand this computer network thing. And it’s my virus, so I’m the only one who can undo it.’
Phredde and I looked at each other. I mean, what can you say when it looks like the whole of civilisation’s going to crash?
We’d be okay, of course, living in magic castles and all that. But what about everyone else? Food would stop arriving at the supermarkets and water would stop coming out of the taps, and there’d be no more TV…
No more TV! I mean this was really serious.
‘Maybe you magicked the cold away before it got emailed to any other computers,’ said Phredde hopefully.
‘Yeah. Maybe,’ I said doubtfully. ‘We could always check my computer.’
Phredde went PING!, and suddenly my computer was on the desk beside Phredde’s.
There was another PING! and all the school computers were hovering above mine.
‘Well, go on,’ I urged. ‘Turn them on.’
‘I’m scared to,’ whispered Phredde. ‘I mean at least now we don’t KNOW they’re infected.’
‘All this fuss about a tiny little virus,’ said Phredde’s mum again.
‘Mum…’ said Phredde. She glanced at me, then shrugged.
I crossed my fingers, and my toes too. Or at least my big toes and the ones next to them…do you know how hard it is to cross your toes?
The room went PING! again
I crossed my fingers even harder.
‘Bzzzzoooom,’ said the computers, as they started up.
‘See,’ said Phredde’s mum, relieved, ‘there’s nothing wrong with them! All that fuss…’
‘Ahhhtchoooo…’
I looked around, just in case it was Phredde who’d sneezed, or her mum, or maybe someone with a cold had just come through the door.
But of course it wasn’t.
It was my computer.
‘Ahhhtchoooo!’ sneezed my computer again. Then suddenly the one above it started sneezing too, and the one next to that and the one after that…
‘Ahtchooooo! Ahhhtchooo! Ahhhhhchooooo!’
Have you ever heard fourteen computers sneeze at once? I found myself automatically reaching for my hanky (yeah, my mum’s one of THOSE).
But before I could start wiping the noses computers don’t have, Phredde PING!ed, and they were gone again. Only the echoes of their sneezes remained.
‘See, Mum,’ said Phredde reproachfully.
‘But…but…’ said the Phaery Splendifera.
‘There must be something we can do!’ I demanded, stuffing my hanky back in my pocket and hoping no one had noticed I’d been about to wipe a computer’s nose. ‘We can’t let the world’s computers crash and not do ANYTHING!’
‘But what?’ cried Phredde’s mum helplessly.
‘I don’t know.’ I glanced at Phredde, and she looked back at me.
Phredde shrugged. ‘Neither of us knows enough about computer viruses or the worldwide web. If we knew how it all worked we could explain it to you, then maybe you could undo the spell.’
‘Well who does know about all that stuff?’ demanded Phredde’s mum.
‘I don’t know…Miss Richards maybe. She’s the librarian at school.’
‘Then we’ll ask her!’ cried Phredde’s mum.
‘But Mum, she’s not at school today. It’s Saturday,’ Phredde pointed out.
‘Then we’ll go to her home!’
‘Mum, I don’t know where she lives!’
‘Then we’ll find her!’ insisted Phredde’s mum. You could see she was starting to get a bit worried about civilisation collapsing.
And that was how I found myself on a magic carpet three minutes later, with two phaeries clinging on beside me, speeding down the castle stairs to find Miss Richards and save the world.
It wasn’t really a magic carpet. It was just the mat in the study magicked for the occasion because I don’t have any wings and Phredde’s mum said they’d have to rearrange my shoulders to give me some, which I wasn’t too keen on, as it sounded a bit like major surgery, even if she did put me back the way I was later.
Or maybe all carpets in phaery castles are really magic ones.
‘Whoopee!’ yelled the Phaery Splendifera, as we zipped down the stairs and out the castle door.
‘Mum!’ yelled Phredde, over the sound of rushing air. ‘How long since you’ve driven one of these?’
‘Not since I was a teenager!’ the Phaery Splendifera yelled back. ‘Aren’t they fun!’
The flying carpet zapped down the castle road like it was the last roll on a roller coaster.
‘Eeerrrp.’ I said.
‘What’s wrong?’ yelled Phredde.
‘I feel carsick!’
‘But this isn’t a car!’ yelled Phredde.
‘Carpet-sick then! Er…could you stop for a minute?’
‘No time!’ yelled Phredde’s mum. ‘We have to save civilisation!’
I gulped, then gulped again. ‘Er…Could you sort of magic up some carsickness…I mean carpet-sickness tablets?’
‘No worries!’ yelled Phredde. And suddenly there they were in my hand, with a glass of water in the other.
So I swallowed them, then had to drop the glass of water and grasp the side of the carpet really quickly, because we’d zapped around a corner. Don’t EVER try to stay on a magic carpet with no hands when the Phaery Splendifera is driving!
The carsickness…sorry, carpet-sickness…tablets must have been magic ones, because suddenly I felt fine. Well, worried of course, in case the world’s computer system and everything else was collapsing already.
But at least my stomach was okay.
I gazed around. The street flashed past—the post office, the video store…
Everything looked normal. I wondered how long it’d take before things really started to go wrong…
‘There’s the milkbar,’ yelled Phredde. ‘Slow down Mum! Maybe Miss Richards has dropped in for a bucket of chips.’
The magic carpet slowed down infinitesimally.
‘I’ll just duck inside!’ called the Phaery Splendifera.
‘Mum, no, there isn’t room…’
‘Of course there’s room!’
The carpet zapped into the milkbar doorway, leapt over the head of the bloke trying to shove some chips into a bag, and hovered over the drinks machine.
‘Any sign of her?’ demanded the Phaery Splendifera.
‘No!’ I yelled back. The smell of hot chips was doing funny things to my stomach again.
‘Gloop,’ said the guy at the counter. His mouth hung open, and his eyes looked like Bruce’s, sort of googly from shock.
The customers were staring too. I gave them a sort of reassuring wave, then ZAP! the carpet was reversing out into the street.
‘Where next?’ yelled Phredde’s mum.
‘How about the supermarket? She might be doing her weekend shopping!’
‘Good thinking! No point going house to house unless we have to!’
The carpet lurched down the street again, screamed round the corner and galloped over the car park towards the supermarket.
‘Hey Mum! People are staring at us!’ yelled Phredde.
Staring at us? One poor guy dropped his groceries and this fat little corgi tried to run under a car in
terror, which was okay because it was a parked car, except the corgi dragged its owner along with it.
‘Can’t you make us invisible or something!’ screamed Phredde.
The Phaery Splendifera shook her head. ‘If we go invisible we won’t go so fast!’ she yelled. ‘Remember the Law of Conservation of Magic?’
‘Oh sure,’ said Phredde. ‘For every magic there has to be an equal and opposite magic. But can’t you…’
The rest of what she said was swallowed up by the noise of people screaming as we zapped through the supermarket door and down the aisle marked
JAMS AND CEREALS.
I mean I know we looked a bit unusual, but that was no reason for people to stress out. It was just a magic carpet and a couple of phaeries. And me, of course.
‘Is she here?’ yelled the Phaery Splendifera.
‘Can’t see her,’ I screamed back, over the noise of falling baked bean tins (Phredde’s mum had taken the last corner a bit fast). ‘Hey, look out for the bananas!’
‘What bananas! Oh, those…’ Phredde’s mum glanced back at the mess on the floor. ‘Never mind. I’ll magic them up again.’
There was a gentle PING! behind us, and someone fainted over by the cheese.
‘I don’t think she’s here!’ cried Phredde, as we zoomed over the tomato display. (We only knocked a few over. They hardly squashed at all.)
‘A house to house search then,’ decided the Phaery Splendifera, neatly avoiding a baby sitting in a trolley.
‘Big bee!’ cried the baby. (Boy, some kids are dumb.) Its mother just stared at us.
‘But that’ll take ages, Mum! We have to hurry! Planes’ll be crashing and the banks won’t work and…’
‘Then we’ll just have to go faster…we’ll start at the school then go in circles around it. Look out for the sliced salami!’
Well, we got out of the supermarket sort of safely. (I hope that old guy who fell into the lamingtons was okay.)
We did accidentally pick up a few apples and a whole roast chicken, which made me feel a bit guilty, as we hadn’t paid for them, but Phredde’s mum said she’d magic some money into the till.
I was glad to see the tills were still working. That meant that the world hadn’t collapsed yet.
And suddenly the school was below us—the library and the lab and the volcano in the playground, and a crowd down at the oval watching the junior soccer.
‘Better check down there!’ I yelled. ‘Maybe she’s watching the game.’
Then I grabbed the edge of the carpet again, as we dived down.
There was no sign of Miss Richards, but we helped our school team score a goal, because everyone at our school is used to strange things happening, what with Phredde and the volcano, not to mention the ogre and the dragon, while the other side got a bit distracted by a magic carpet flying all over the place.
Finally we started to do what we’d known we’d have to do all along—zoom along each street, peering into every house we passed, in case Miss Richards was in one of them.
‘What sort of house does Miss Richards live in?’ yelled the Phaery Splendifera.
‘I don’t know!’ I yelled back. ‘But I bet it’s all neat like the library and really quiet.’
One house…two houses…three houses…I was starting to imagine all the prison doors opening as the computer security systems failed…maybe power systems were failing and no one could turn on the lights or cook dinner…and traffic lights would stop and…
‘Mum, it’ll take forever at this rate!’ yelled Phredde. ‘We have to go faster!’
So we did.
One minute we were zooming along next to the houses and hoping the edges of the carpet weren’t going to get tangled in the rose bushes, and the next the world was this blue and red blur, and then there was this giant CRACK! as we broke the sound barrier (at least I guess that’s what happened, I’ll have to ask Mrs Gridly our science teacher on Monday) and the world was even more blurry…
‘Slow down Mum!’ screamed Phredde.
‘But you said…’ began the Phaery Splendifera.
‘This is TOO fast! We can’t see anything!’
‘Oh, all right…’ The carpet slowed down…and down…and down…
‘How’s this?’ asked Phredde’s mum.
‘Er…okay.’ I said. I looked around.
Something just didn’t seem right.
‘Hey Phredde, do you know what that bird is?’ I asked as casually as I could. I mean I didn’t want to panic anyone.
Phredde looked down. ‘Which one?’
‘The fat black and white one.’
Phredde considered. ‘I think it’s a penguin,’ she decided. ‘I think all the rest of them are penguins too.’
‘That’s what I thought it was,’ I agreed. ‘You know, I didn’t think there were any penguins near our school.’
‘Maybe they escaped from the zoo and got lost,’ said Phredde hopefully.
‘Er…maybe,’ I said doubtfully. ‘But what about that iceberg? Do you think it got lost too?’
Phredde stared down at the iceberg. It was big and blueish white and there were seals sliding down its edges.
‘I SAID you went too fast Mum,’ she said reproachfully. ‘You’ve gone and landed us in Antarctica.’
I thought it’d got pretty cold.
‘Bother,’ said Phredde’s mum. ‘We’ll have to reverse.’
There was another CRACK! and the world went blurry again. Suddenly the air got warmer…and warmer…and then there was a faint PING! and we slowed down again.
No one said anything for a moment.
‘I always wondered how elephants went to the toilet,’ I said at last.
‘Well, now you know,’ said Phredde, sort of sourly. ‘Mum, you’ve gone too far again.’
The Phaery Splendifera was gazing at the giant steaming piles on the ground. ‘I bet Cousin Pinkerbelle would just love those for her roses,’ she said. ‘Elephant dung is said to be wonderful fertiliser. Wait a second…I’ll just magic them off to her.’
‘Mum, we don’t have time to send Cousin Pinkerbelle elephant doo for her roses!’ wailed Phredde. ‘The world’s coming to an end and we’re just mucking about in Africa.’
‘Er…that lion looks awfully close,’ I said.
Phredde’s mum frowned. ‘Well you don’t have to be so critical, Ethereal. I’m doing my best.’
‘I SAID you were going too fast, Mum!’
‘Er…the lion…’
‘I’ll have you know I was driving magic carpets before you were born young lady.’
‘Mum if you’d just CONCENTRATE!’
‘Grrroooooooowl!’ said the lion.
‘I think it’s going to leap…’ I began
The next second we were half a kilometre high, and I had a vulture on my lap.
‘Get off, you stupid creature!’ I yelled.
‘Graaark,’ cried the vulture. It gave me a dirty look and flew off.
‘See,’ said the Phaery Splendifera, ‘I’m quite capable of driving…’
‘Mum…Miss Richards and the end of the world!’ Phredde reminded her.
So we were off again.
I guess this time Phredde’s mum was concentrating, because when we slowed down the school was to our right and there were all these normal suburban houses—no icebergs or lions or even whales (no one else had noticed the whale, and I didn’t point it out to them in case it slowed us down even more).
We started peering into windows again, trying to find Miss Richards.
I felt a bit guilty invading people’s privacy, but of course the whole of civilisation (or at least the bit that depended on computers) was at stake.