The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop (8 page)

“Keep quiet,” a voice hissed in his ear, “and I’ll let you live.”

He was picked up again and dropped on another floor. Oz guessed he was in a truck or van. He could feel the engine throbbing around him, and the van lurching as it sped through the darkened streets.

Why wasn’t anybody chasing them? Was Lily all right? How were they going to explain this to his poor parents?

The van lurched to a halt. Oz strained his ears for clues to where they were. He heard the door open and felt rough hands pulling him out. He was then flung over someone’s shoulder.

After a lot of jolting he was dropped again, this time onto a carpet.

“I’m out of condition!” The voice was breathless. “That’s what happens when you spend too much time in the lab.”

Oz was untied, and his gag and blindfold removed. He struggled into a sitting position, shivering in his wetsuit and blinking in the light.

This was amazing. He was in a cavern, its roof hidden by thick black shadows. The desert of darkness was punctuated by little puddles of lamplight, showing groups of furniture like rooms in an invisible house. At the far end of the space Oz saw a laboratory gleaming with glass tubes and jars. One pool of light contained a carved wooden bed covered with a faded green quilt; another contained a white bathtub like a boat, half hidden behind a screen covered with pictures of castles.

The man he knew to be Isadore Spoffard sat in an armchair nearby, pouring himself a glass of whisky. Oz stared at the face he’d seen in the SMU mugshots, with its shifty dark eyes and thin black mustache. He looked about the same age as Oz’s dad, but he had
stopped getting older in 1938; how must it feel to be that ancient?

“Hello,” Isadore said. “You’re my great-great-nephew Oscar; how do you do. I’m sorry I had to kidnap you, but since I didn’t get the mold I had no choice. I won’t hurt you because I can’t be bothered—unless, of course, you try to escape.”

Oz found that he was a little less scared. “Where is this?”

“I call it The Grotto,” Isadore said. “It’s an old subway station—West Piccadilly—that fell out of use in the early 1930s. I came to live here after my official death.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“You’re a hostage,” Isadore said. “I’m going to swap you for the golden molds.”

“Oh.”

“This has been the most infuriating night. You have no idea how much time I’ve spent trying to get my hands on those molds! I knew perfectly well where they were—so near, and yet so far! Somehow their magic defeated me and I couldn’t touch them. Tonight, I held Marcel’s star, only to have it snatched away at the very moment of victory—” He broke off to sneeze violently. “I must get out of these wet clothes—and I suppose I’d better find something for you.”

Isadore gulped the rest of his whisky and vanished
into the shadows. A few minutes later he emerged, wearing an identical—but dry—white suit. He handed Oz a small heap of clothes.

“Put these on and come out into the kitchen area, where I can make us some hot tea.”

He vanished again, and Oz looked at the clothes. There was a pair of white linen trousers and a white linen shirt with long sleeves, both yellowed with age and far too big. He peeled off his wetsuit and made the dry clothes fit as best he could, rolling up the legs and sleeves. Isadore had also provided a striped tie, which he used to hold up the trousers. He was sure he looked ridiculous, but the clothes were soft and very comfortable.

To find the “kitchen area,” he followed the sound of the old-fashioned whistling kettle, echoing off the tiled walls of the old tube station. In another puddle of lamplight was a glowing stove, a table and chairs and a wall covered with pictures—Isadore had made himself a surprisingly cozy home down here. Oz was interested to see, underneath the big lamp, a violin in an open case. He wondered if he’d be allowed to play it.

“I apologize for the oily smell,” Isadore said. “I can’t get electricity down here without being discovered. I make do with fires and oil lamps. Do sit down.”

Oz sat down at the table and Isadore gave him a mug of tea, milky and sweet and delicious. It was not
drugged; neither were the ginger biscuits. As his bravery increased, so did Oz’s curiosity. In his imagination, evil Uncle Isadore had been a kind of monster, like a Bond villain or an ogre in a fairy tale. In real life he was an ordinary, sour-faced man, with a seedy air of loneliness and defeat.

“How long will you keep me here?” he dared to ask.

“I don’t know. It all depends upon the man known as ‘J.’ ”

“I’ve met him.”

“He has to give me my molds—so that I can at last make my chocolate, and live out the rest of eternity as the richest man on earth.” Isadore poured more whisky into his tea. “I’ll fetch some food in a minute. There are these very tasty newfangled things called ‘pizza’ that I’ve recently discovered.”

“Great,” said Oz. He liked takeout pizzas and his mother never let him have them.

“And there’s a spare sofa you can use as a bed. Frankly, I haven’t really thought this through.” Isadore was gloomy. “I just grabbed you when I lost the mold. I lost my head.”

“They’ll never let you make your chocolate,” Oz said boldly. “You might as well let me go.”

“Certainly not. You’re my bargaining chip.”

It was depressing to be a “bargaining chip,” and horrible to think of spending any time in this ghostly
old tube station—but at least Isadore wasn’t planning to kill him. Oz drank his tea and ate the biscuits. As he grew less scared, he began to pay more attention to the objects around him. Isadore’s “Grotto” was crammed with antique furniture, old clocks, paintings and statues that made a net of weird shadows. Isadore shifted the oil lamp, and a face leapt out of one of the framed photographs on the wall—Lily’s face.

A second later, Oz saw that it wasn’t his sister, but a young woman who looked very much like her. She had the same bright black eyes, the same untidy heap of curly hair, the same dark freckles.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Isadore followed his gaze. “That’s Daisy. She was your great-great-grandmother.”

“Oh. I’ve only seen a picture of her when she was old. She looks just like my sister.”

Isadore let out a long sigh. “Ah, my sweet Daisy!”

“You were in love with her.” Oz remembered the long story Demerara had told them. “But your magic love chocolate didn’t work.”

“Yes, it did,” snapped Isadore. “It worked perfectly.”

“But not with Daisy.”

“No—I was too late.”

“She was already in love with your brother Marcel.”

“All right! Don’t rub it in!” All these years later,
Isadore was still in the agonies of jealousy. “If only—but she refused to eat the damned chocolate, and I was doomed to spend the rest of eternity ALONE.”

Oz was interested. “Did you try to make Daisy immortal?”

“That was part of my plan.” Isadore poured another slug of whisky into his tea. “But they poisoned her sweet mind against me, and she wouldn’t trust me.”

“Well, fair enough,” said Oz. “You did kill her husband.”

“She wouldn’t have fallen in love with Marcel if she’d met me first.”

“You don’t know that.”

Isadore winced as if Oz had stabbed him. “I DO! Daisy and I are destined to be together!”

“But she’s dead,” Oz pointed out. “She died before I was born.”

“Daisy!” wailed Isadore.

To Oz’s enormous embarrassment, Isadore began to cry. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and sobbed into it wretchedly. Very unwillingly, Oz found himself feeling slightly sorry for his wicked great-great-uncle. His wickedness had only made him lonely.

Isadore blew his nose, with a trumpeting that echoed forlornly through the empty station. “I haven’t given up, you know.”

“You—you haven’t?” This was just plain crazy.

“Oz, I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone.” Isadore leaned across the table toward him, a hungry look on his thin face. “I have a dream—the only thing that has kept me from despair since my Daisy grew old and died!”

“You did tell me,” Oz said uneasily. “You want to be the richest man in the world.”

“But why do I need the money? Because my dream involves a very expensive spell. One day, I’m going to make a blend of magic chocolate that turns back time!”

“Oh.”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“Well, yes, I do a bit.”

“If I had my way,” Isadore said fiercely, “you and your sister and father would never have existed. My dream is that I turn back time to just before Daisy came to work at our shop in Piccadilly—so that I can kill my brother before she even meets him! Then we’ll eat the immortality chocolate together, and live happily ever—EVER—after!”

“Oh.” It wasn’t going to be much fun, living with a man who wished you didn’t exist. Oz would have been more worried, however, if he hadn’t had a strange feeling that Isadore was rather glad to have his company. Maybe his best chance lay in being nice to him. “Is that your violin?”

“Yes.” Isadore dried his eyes. “It’s my only companion
in the long evenings. And it helps me to think. I play it when I’m studying, like Sherlock Holmes—you’ve heard of him, I suppose.”

“The detective.”

“I’m glad he’s still famous. The modern world is a mystery to me.” Isadore ate a ginger biscuit. “But I was forgetting, you play the violin. Please feel free to play mine.”

“Thanks.” This was a relief; Oz went nowhere without his violin, and he hated the idea of not being able to make music. He thought it a bit odd that Isadore knew he played. He knew an awful lot about the people he wished didn’t exist.

“I can’t force you,” Isadore said. “Like the ancient Israelites, you may be unable to play your songs in a strange land. But it would bring me great pleasure to hear something now.”

He was so hungry and sour and sad that Oz didn’t have the heart to refuse. He went over to the violin and carefully lifted it out of its case. It was old and battered, the varnish covered with scratches, but it was perfectly in tune, and the tone was beautiful.

Oz played the andante of a Mozart sonata, and the music echoed plaintively in the great underground chamber.

Isadore wept again, and muttered, “Daisy—what other hope is there for me?”

Suddenly, Oz was more hopeful. The other voice that he and Lily had heard when they were little was weaving in and out of the music, telling him to be of good cheer. The magic had been with them all along.

The house was spookily quiet without Oz and his music, and the day after the adventure in the river was as flat as a pancake. Lily tried not to mope too much, in case her parents started asking awkward questions. They were totally convinced that Oz was at music camp and having the time of his life—there were even two postcards from him on the kitchen bulletin board.

It would have helped to talk to Demerara, but there was no sign of her. Lily wandered from room to room, waiting for the appearance of the portly golden cat. She looked behind the metal cylinder in the workshop, hoping to see the magic door to the “flat,” but the wall remained stubbornly blank.

“I’m sorry you miss Oz so much,” Mum said. “But it might be good for both of you. Why don’t you do something with Caydon? You got on so well at that diving course.”

Lily didn’t really want to do anything with Caydon. By the second day, however, she was so restless and
bored—and so anxious to talk about what was really going on—that she went out into the street, where Caydon sat yawning on the wall.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” said Caydon. “Any news?”

“Nothing.” Lily sat down beside him. “I think Demerara’s up to something—I haven’t seen her since we got home. She didn’t even show up for her manicure.”

“I suppose we’ll hear if something happens,” Caydon said. “I hope Oz is OK and not being tortured or anything.”

“Thanks for cheering me up,” Lily snapped.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it worse. Do you want to do something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” Caydon said. “Do you like computer games?”

“No.”

“Swimming?”

“I’ve had enough of the water, thanks.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Caydon thought for a moment. “What about skateboarding?”

“No!”

“Well, have you ever tried?”

“No.”

“I’ll teach you.” Caydon said. “Come on—there’s nothing else to do.”

Lily sighed. “OK.”

She fetched Oz’s skateboard and began her lessons on the sloping path outside the flats. She kept falling off, but she was wearing jeans and not going fast enough to be hurt. After a surprisingly short time she began to enjoy herself.

“You’re not bad,” said Caydon. “Actually, you’re already a bit better than Oz.”

“Good,” Lily said. “It’s my turn to be better at something.”

Caydon flipped his skateboard with his foot. “It must be hard work, having a genius brother. Are you jealous?”

“Not exactly—I don’t want to play the violin. But I do get sick of always being the stupid one. At our old school they called us Pinky and the Brain—like the cartoon.”

“Oh, I know,” Caydon said. “One is a genius, the other’s insane.”

“That’s the one.”

“Look, you’re always going on about being stupid.” Caydon was serious. “But I think that must mean you’re quite clever.”

“Really?”

“My dear Lily, of course you are!” a yowling voice said.

“Demerara!” Lily cried joyfully. She bent down to stroke her fur. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been studying Pierre’s magic books in my flat. I’ve found a spell that will help Oz.”

“Oh—that’s wonderful! When can we do it?”

“Does J know?” Caydon asked.

For a moment, the furry face was shifty. “J doesn’t need to know—I don’t have to tell him every little thing!”

Lily was impatient. “Let’s do it now—whatever it is.”

“I don’t want to get too technical,” Demerara said, “but it’s a divining spell—that means I will receive a signal that will lead me to Oz.”

“Hang on,” Caydon said. “If it’s that easy, why didn’t you do it when Oz disappeared?”

“Because it’s COMPLICATED!” Demerara hissed. “I had to turn over my flat to find a certain magic cacao bean—it took me ages and my claws are RUINED! But I found it, and now I’m ready to do the spell.” She opened her mouth wide, and they saw a long brown bean on her tongue. “I’m keeping it safe in my cheek. Come along, we’ve wasted enough time.” She whisked round and trotted across the road.