Time-Travel Bath Bomb (15 page)

“Hey, where did everybody go? There was a huge crowd out here yesterday.”

“They followed the cycling circus to its next stop,” Raspa said, peering down the empty street. “Oh, too bad. Did that ruin your plan to sneak away and, thanks to your small stature, disappear in the crowd?”

Nilly didn’t respond.
What, could she read minds too?

Raspa laughed. “Come on, pipsqueak, hop up onto my back.”

“Your back?”

“Do you see a taxi or something instead?”

“No . . .” Nilly said, sounding reluctant.

Raspa bent down. “Hop on. Let’s get down off this damned mountain before it starts pouring.”

Nilly hesitated, but did as she asked. Once Raspa was sure that he was holding on tight enough, she kicked off. The ungreased wheels at the bottom of her wooden leg squealed. They rumbled over the asphalt as they passed under the finishing line that was still up. They started speeding up.

“Hold on tight,” Raspa said over her shoulder. “Full steam ahead.”

She hunched over. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the wind beat against Nilly’s face as they whooshed down the same desolate, extremely steep mountain road that Eddy and Nilly had struggled their way up the day before. Raspa leaned into the turns, causing her rubber roller-skate wheels to shriek.

And Nilly, since he was Nilly, totally forgot what an awkward situation he was in and cheered happily, “Yippee! Faster! Faster!”

He got what he wanted. Ultimately they were moving so fast that the air pressure made their cheeks flap, flipped their eyelids back and flattened their noses against their faces. Nilly suddenly stopped shouting when his tongue disappeared down his throat and he had to shut his mouth so he could cough it back up again.

TWO SHEEP WERE standing next to each other watching the – to put it mildly – peculiar woman with the boy on her back, who was the same boy who had sped past them the day before going the other way.

“Haven’t we seen that red-headed chap before?” one of the cud-chewing sheep said to the other.

“No idea,” the second cud-chewer replied to the first. “We’re sheep, you know. We don’t remember stuff like that.”

RASPA AND NILLY were almost horizontal by the time they reached the final curve before the road flattened out and Nilly spotted the flower-filled meadow. And the feet of the upside-down bath.

That very instant, the clouds opened up. And boy did it rain! It was as if the biggest raindrops in the whole world had gathered over this specific meadow to hold the world championships in The Last Raindrop to the Ground Is a Rotten Egg.

“Perfect,” Raspa shouted, hopping over the fence and starting to limp through the grass towards the bath.

“Pe-rf-ect?” Nilly asked, as he bumped up and down on Raspa’s back and felt the rain streaming down the back of his neck and in under his jersey.

Raspa was heading straight for the bath. She wiggled so Nilly fell off and tumbled down into the grass. Then she grabbed one of the bath’s feet. “Help me right her so we can launch.”

Nilly stood up and did as she asked. They turned the bath over so it was right side up and watched the rain hammering against the enamelled bottom. Raspa took out a jar, which she opened and poured from. A familiar strawberry-red powder sprinkled down into the bath, where the rain frothed up the soap, which starting forming bubbles right away.

“Now we just have to wait until the bath is full,” she said, climbing in and sitting down at one end. Nilly climbed in and sat down at the other end.

“So how did you find us, anyway?” Nilly asked.

“Easy,” Raspa said. “When I noticed that you came in with a stamp from 1888 that looked brand-new and also had traces of white soap around the edges, I had a suspicion. When it tasted like strawberries, too, I knew that that could only mean one thing: that Proctor had got his time-travelling bath to work. And you’re not exactly good at keeping a secret, sailor. When you said you were going to Paris, I realised that you would lead me right to him.”

“You followed us.”

“I did. I stood watch outside the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille, and when I saw the little girl come back with that awful woman—”

“Juliette Margarine, awful?”

“Don’t say that name!” Raspa snarled. “They went up to the room, and I knew that you must be up there, all four of you. So I knocked—”

“Oh, we thought that was the hippos,” said Nilly, who could feel that the water level had risen a little, but even a downpour takes a while to fill a whole time-travelling bath.

“I was trying to knock down the door, but I had to give up. So I ran downstairs, to that little wimp at the reception desk, and politely asked for the room key.”

“And he just gave it to you?” Nilly asked in disbelief.

“I asked
very
politely,” Raspa said. “Plus, I was pointing the pistol at him.”

“Oh,” Nilly said. “Good thinking.”

“But when I got into the room, it was empty,” Raspa sighed. “Proctor wasn’t there and neither was anyone else. I turned the place upside down. Not a living soul. Just a stupid seven-legged spider. Seven legs! If it weren’t for the fact that they don’t exist, you might have thought it was a seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider.”

Nilly didn’t respond.

“So I realised you’d escaped in the time-travelling bath, and I started reading the tracks left in the soap . . .”

“Can you really track people from the soap?”

“Of course,” Raspa sniffed in irritation. The rain was making her make-up run in black rivulets. “I’m the one who invented the soap, I know
everything
there is to know about it. The only problem was that there were multiple tracks. You’d all gone to different places, so I had to pick one of them. And that led me here. I walked over to that café over there and saw you on TV. Nice of you to say exactly where you were. And now you’re going to be just as nice and lead me to wherever Proctor went. Let’s go now, and no funny business. I’ll just follow your tracks no matter where you go. Keep that in mind.”

“But I—” Nilly began, sticking his index finger in his ear and twisting it round.

“It’s time to go!” Raspa said, raising her pistol. Water dripped from the end of the barrel. “Take your finger out of your ear!”

There was another thunderclap, close enough to make the ground shake this time.

“Oooooookay,” Nilly said with a shudder, and a little
plop!
was heard as his index finger quickly exited his ear.

But it hadn’t been the pistol that had made Nilly shudder. Or the cold water. Or the crazy plan that had just formed in his head with a
plop!
Nilly had shuddered because he’d just discovered that the thunder that was making the ground shake wasn’t coming from the sky. But from something heavy that was charging towards them from behind Raspa. An enormous, black, exceptionally enraged bull.

“It’s time to go,” Nilly said, diving down into the bath.

He held his breath and concentrated. He concentrated on what Eddy had told him, because that was the crux of his new plan. He wasn’t sure if it was a particularly
good
plan, but nevertheless he concentrated on a place right next to a bike-repair shop in Belgium. The place was called Waterloo. The date was June 18, 1815. Napoléon Bonaparte’s bedroom, Nilly thought.

When he surfaced again at first he thought he’d messed up somehow, because he could still hear thunder. But then he discovered that it was almost totally dark and that he was in a tent. And he realised that the thunder didn’t have anything to do with lightning or bulls. It was a deep, rumbling snore. It was night-time and Nilly was at the Battle of Waterloo, the most famous military battle in history. And Nilly knew enough history to know that he’d ended up on the side that was going to lose, that was going to be trounced, smashed to smithereens and sent running for their lives.

To summarise: Nilly no longer had any doubt. He was now quite certain that this had
not
been a good plan.

NILLY BLINKED IN the darkness. He was wet, he was scared and he still hadn’t had any breakfast. Basically this day was not starting out the way he would have liked. And now, on top of all that, it was also going to be the worst day in French military history, the day they would be decimated by the wretched English and the at least equally wretched Germans.

Nilly’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw that the thunderous snoring was coming from a bed located in the centre of the tent. Next to the bed there was a chair with a uniform draped neatly over its back. Nilly shivered. Of course the uniform would be way too big, but at least it would be dry. He quietly slipped out of the bath and sneaked over to the chair, pulling off his wet clothes as he went. He put on the uniform, and – what the heck was this? – it actually fitted him! Nilly looked down at the bed, at the man lying on his back and snoring with his mouth wide open. Could this really be the great general and dictator, Napoléon Bonaparte? Why, this guy was just as tiny as Nilly! But, no time to think about that now. Nilly hurriedly buttoned all the shiny buttons on the uniform, buckled the belt with the shiny sabre that only just barely dragged on the ground, and grabbed the strange, three-cornered hat that was sitting on the seat of the chair. How would you even begin to figure out which is the front and which is the back of a hat like this? No time to think about that either, because it wasn’t going to take Raspa long to read the soap and be here. Nilly put the hat on his head and pulled the jar of fartonaut powder out of the pocket of his wet trousers. And then spun round because he heard someone sneeze behind him. But it wasn’t Raspa. The sneeze had come from outside the tent.

“Bless you,” he heard a voice outside the tent say.

Nilly exhaled in relief, opened the bag of fartonaut powder, held it carefully over the snoring general’s gaping mouth and poured. But right then the little man exhaled, making a long, wheezing sound and blowing the powder right back in Nilly’s face. Nilly’s eyes started watering and he got powder in his nose and, before he could stop himself, he sneezed. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the general’s whole face was covered with splotches of wet fartonaut powder. Nilly held his breath.

“And bless you to you too,” he heard another voice outside the tent say.

Then everything was once again drowned out by one of Napoléon’s rattling breathing-in snores, and Nilly hurriedly used the opportunity to pour more powder into his mouth. Suddenly, the breathing-in snore stopped and Nilly’s heart did too. For a few seconds the only thing you could hear was a cricket chirping outside. Then the general’s breathing-in snore started again and so did Nilly’s heart. Now it was just a question of waiting and counting down. Nilly moved to the back of the tent, closed his eyes, covered his ears with his hands and counted down to himself.

Six – five – four – three – two – one . . .

KABOOOM!!!

TWO OF NAPOLÉON Bonaparte’s personal bodyguards were standing just outside the tent. Both were half-asleep and both were half-deaf from all the cannon firings their ears had had to withstand throughout their long careers as soldiers. But both of them jumped to attention when they heard the giant
boom
.

“What in the world was that?” one of the guards asked, taking his rifle off his shoulder and exhaling nervously through his handlebar moustache.

“I thought that was you sneezing again,” the other one said, taking his rifle off his shoulder and exhaling nervously though his Fu Manchu moustache.

“Look,” Handlebar said, pointing at the sky.

And there – silhouetted against the large, yellow moon – they saw something flapping as it flew away, eventually disappearing into the darkness on the other side of the Brussels Road, the side where the English had set up their camp for the night.

“What was that?” Handlebar asked.

“If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a flailing guy in a nightshirt,” said Fu Manchu. “But then again it is only 1815, so people can’t fly yet.”

“True, true. But maybe we’d better go and see if everything’s all right with the Generator.”

They pulled up the tent flap and stepped in. The first thing they saw was that the moon was shining through a hole in the roof of the tent and that tiny, expensive-looking bits of duvet down were wafting around in the moonlight.