Time-Travel Bath Bomb (17 page)

Aside from Nilly’s voice and a cricket scratching an itch on its leg, there was total silence in the fields of Waterloo.

“I have a suggestion!” Nilly yelled. “And that’s that we all go home now and eat breakfast!”

“Oui!”
one single soldier shouted somewhere in the middle of the plain.

“You’re crazy!” Grouchy hissed, pulling the reins tight as his horse reared. “I’m relieving you of your command, Generator!”

“I suggest,” Nilly yelled at the confused soldiers. “I mean, I’m not giving this as an order, but I suggest the following. Put down your rifles, march home, give your wives and children a good hug and don’t smoke in bed!”

“Oui!”
a few more men shouted.

“Exercise!” Nilly bellowed. “Vote in free elections and wear your seat belts!”

“Oui!”
even more men shouted.

“And don’t be afraid that the people back home will call us cowards,” Nilly yelled. “Marshal Grouchy here has promised me that he will tell the royal court in Paris that we fought like the idiots we are, but had to concede to superior forces!”

Grouchy’s horse was rearing so wildly that the frightened marshal slid right off and landed on his bottom on the ground.

“So, what do you say?” Nilly bellowed. “Should we all just go HOME?”

This time the answer was so loud and in unison that the sky over Waterloo practically caved in, and the English on the other side of the road thought the French had fired off their first cannon salvo. Or their second, since they had shot that weird little man over earlier wearing just a nightshirt, a man so crazy he claimed he was Napoléon!

“OUI!”
the French soldiers cheered.
“OUI!”

“All right!” Nilly yelled. “But no one tell anyone what actually happened here in Waterloo. Agreed?”

“OUI!”
the approximately seventy thousand soldiers yelled back.

“March home!” Nilly yelled and as he turned his horse round, he heard the rifles hitting the ground behind him. But in front of him he saw Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” growled the marshal, rubbing his tailbone. “Are you
cancelling
the Battle of Waterloo?”

“So what if I am?” Nilly said with a yawn. “So sue me.”

“Sue you? I’ll court-martial you!” Grouchy was so angry that his eyeballs were quivering.

“Fine,” Nilly said, sliding down out of his saddle. “After my morning bath.”

He hurried into the tent, but had just managed to get one foot up onto the edge of the bath when he felt something very sharp poke him in the back. He turned round and found himself face to face with Grouchy, who was holding a rapier. Nilly cursed because he saw that the tip of the deadly blade was pointing right between his eyes, just a few millimetres from his forehead.

“Tell me,” Grouchy said. “
Are
you really Napoléon? Take that thing off your nose so I can see.”

“Ten hut!” Nilly commanded. “Jump!”

But his brisk orders didn’t seem to have any effect on the marshal.

“Guards!” Grouchy hollered without taking his eyes off Nilly. “Guards, get in here now!”

“Did someone call?” Handlebar and Fu Manchu entered the tent and stood behind Grouchy.

“Arrest this imposter!” the marshal screamed. “Tie him up and roast him over a low heat until he admits that he’s an English spy. Then we’ll hang him from the nearest tree.”

“All right,” Handlebar sighed. “Man, nothing but work, work, work.”

“And what’s the point to roasting him first?” sighed Fu Manchu. “Why not just hang him right away? We haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“Snap to it!” Grouchy howled.

“Yes, sir, Marshal.” They sighed and started towards Nilly.

“Wait!” Nilly said. “The marshal is the one who should be bound.”

“Interesting,” Handlebar said, stopping in his tracks. “And what else?”

“Tickle the bottoms of his feet with bird feathers until he promises to be a little nicer. And then send him home to his mother with a note.”

“Tie him up immediately!” Grouchy growled. “Otherwise I’ll hang you too!”

“Oh, you will, will you?” Handlebar asked, swinging his rifle slightly so that it happened to be pointing right at the marshal.

Grouchy paled. “Listen up, my good men,” he said. “I will promote you to lieutenants if you do as I say. Think about that: officers of the French army. And in addition, I will agree to
not
hang you. What do you say?”

Handlebar and Fu Manchu looked at each other. Then at the marshal. And finally at Nilly.

“What do you say, Generator? Do you have a better offer?”

“Yeah,” Nilly said, scratching inside his ear with his left index finger. “Breakfast. Fresh-baked bread with strawberry jam.”

“Fresh-baked bread,” Handlebar repeated, looking at Fu Manchu.

“Strawberry jam?” Fu Manchu repeated, looking at Handlebar.

“Listen up, my good men . . .” Grouchy said. But that was also all he had time to say, because the next instant he had a holey right sock stuffed in his mouth and, after quite a bit of tying, he too had been transformed into a corn on the cob.

“Take him out and tickle him,” Nilly said, and started unbuttoning his uniform. “And it would be great if you guys could hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, because I’m going to take my morning bath now.”

THE ENGLISH AND the Duke of Wellington encountered no opposition that day at Waterloo. They just marched right into the Frenchmen’s deserted camp. There they found countless abandoned rifles and cannons as well as a dungeon containing a half-crazed woman with a wooden leg and a long, black trench coat, plus a tent with a sign on it that said do not disturb in French. The English, who are a very polite people, would not normally have ignored this kind of message, but since they couldn’t read French, they walked right into the tent. But all they found there was a bath where the last of the soap bubbles were just disappearing.

“This is embarrassing!” the Duke of Wellington told his officers, angrily kicking the bath. “And here I was, looking forward to being a hero with huge casualty figures on both sides. And then we win without firing so much as a single shot!”

One of Wellington’s officers whispered something into his ear.

“Jolly good!” Wellington exclaimed. “I’ve just had an idea! Listen, when we get home, we’ll tell the royal court that we fought valiantly and trounced these Frenchmen. We’ll say that it was the biggest battle ever! And that strange little Frenchman in the nightshirt who fell out of the sky and thinks he’s Napoléon, we’ll say he
is
Napoléon!” The duke laughed loudly. “And then we’ll ship him off to a remote island so he can’t expose our deception should he ever regain his senses!” The duke leaned over to his officers in a conspiratorial manner and whispered, “And no one tell anyone what actually happened here in Waterloo. Agreed?”

All of the officers answered in unison, “Agreed!”

NILLY WAS SITTING on a chair next to the bath in the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille. He was wearing a pair of trousers that were far too big and a shirt that he’d borrowed from Madame Trottoir at the reception desk. But at least these clothes were dry, unlike the sopping wet blue uniform he’d arrived in, which was now hanging over the back of the chair dripping. Nilly rested his head on his hands and stared sorrowfully down into the dark water. The others weren’t here! He was totally alone. Apart from a seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider named Perry who was sitting inside a toothbrush glass next to a tube of Doctor Proctor’s Fast Acting Superglue on the shelf under the mirror. Perry listened quietly and seemingly sympathetically, while Nilly went on and on in despair:

“What do I do now? I can’t take this anymore. You know what I want to do? Go back to when we moved to Cannon Avenue and make sure I never meet Lisa or Doctor Proctor! I can make different friends who would be way less trouble!”

Nilly reflected on this.

“All right, maybe I wouldn’t have made any other friends. But I would have rather been alone than . . . well, alone, like I am now. I’m sorry to say this, Perry, but you actually aren’t much company.”

Nilly kicked the side of the bath so it made a deep rumbling, submarine-like sound.

Then he hopped down off the chair, left the bathroom and crawled into his bed.

The last thought he had before he fell asleep was that at least tomorrow he would get to have breakfast.

Nilly was in the middle of a dream about a sunny-side-up egg the size of a manhole cover and slices of bacon so fresh that they were still oinking when he suddenly woke up.

He’d heard something.

Something from the bathroom.

Bubbles . . . as if something were coming up from the depths . . . the depths of water, space and time . . . as if something had arrived . . . in the time-travelling bath? Nilly sat up in bed and stared through the darkness at the bathroom door, listening with his heart pounding. But there weren’t any other noises.

He called out cautiously, “Lisa?”

His voice sounded so naked and lonely in the dark. Especially since there was no response from the bathroom.

“Doctor Proctor?”

Still no response.

“Juliette?”

Still nothing.

Nilly curled up under the covers. He had no desire to call out the fourth name, didn’t even want to think it. Because even his thoughts stuttered at the thought of R-R-Raspa.

He lay like that for a few minutes. Nothing happened. And for guys like Nilly there’s only one thing worse than when really scary things happen and that’s when nothing happens. So he jumped out of bed, crept still half-undressed over to the chair where the wet uniform was hanging, pulled the sabre from the belt, tiptoed over to the bathroom door and yanked it open while screaming:

“Banzai, Englisher Schweinhund!”

Nilly stormed in swinging his sabre and slicing the darkness into three, four, yes, maybe even five pieces. It wasn’t until he was sure that the darkness and everything in it had been thoroughly carved up that he flipped on the light switch. From the toothbrush glass on the shelf under the mirror, Perry stared at him in terror with his black compound eyes. But otherwise there was nothing there, at least nothing that hadn’t been there before he’d gone to bed.

Wrong.

An empty wine bottle with a cork was floating in the motionless water in the bath.

He looked at it more closely. Wrong again: it wasn’t empty at all.

Nilly fished the bottle out, sank his teeth into the cork and pulled until it went
plop
. Then he turned the bottle upside down and shook it. A slip of paper fell out onto the bathroom floor.

He unfolded and read it. His eyes skipped down to the bottom. The smile on his face kept growing.

It was from Lisa.

“Well, well, Perry, my old friend,” he said, folding up the letter and checking his parting in the mirror. “We’re in business again. Sorry to deprive you of my company, but new adventures call. Tell me, what do you know about the French Revolution and beheadings?”

A MAN WITH an enormous handlebar moustache, an even more enormous potbelly and a pipe bet ween his lips was staring at the girl who had so unexpectedly appeared in his office. Not to mention the bath in which she had arrived. He squeezed his eye around his monocle, emitted a surprised “pff!” from his lips, and a cloud of tobacco smoke rose into the air between the bookshelves.

Lisa looked around. The walls were hung with drawings of buildings, bridges, breweries and other enormous things that start with
B
that you couldn’t fit in a normal piece of luggage. There were two drawings on the desk under the window, two empty bottles of red wine and a pouch of tobacco. The window faced a large, open and rather empty public square. Strikingly empty, actually. Apart from all the people with parasols and top hats strolling across it. There was something strangely familiar about this square, Lisa thought.

“Who are you?” the man asked. “And where did you come from?”

“I’m Lisa,” Lisa said, wringing out the sleeve of her sweater. “I come from Cannon Avenue in Norway. From sometime in the next millennium. You must be Gustave Eiffel?”

The man nodded and then had a coughing fit.

“I understand that you’re afraid, Mr Eiffel,” Lisa said as she climbed out of the bath.

The man waved this away dismissively, coughing, and then in a voice that was scarcely a hiss whispered, “Not at all.”

His face was now as red as a peony and he was clearly struggling to get air. When he finally did manage to breathe, his throat squeaked and his lungs gurgled. Then he stuck the pipe back into his mouth, inhaled, and said with a satisfied smile:

“Nothing serious, just a touch of asthma.”

It occurred to Lisa that Mr Eiffel didn’t seem quite as afraid as you would expect given that an unexpected bath and a girl who said she came from the future had just appeared in his office. And a second later, she knew why.

“The professor said there would be two of you,” Mr Eiffel said. “A certain Mr Nilly appears to be missing.”

“You talked to Doctor Proctor?” Lisa exclaimed. “Where is he?”

Mr Eiffel stuck a thoughtful finger in between two buttons on his shirt and scratched his stomach. “Unfortunately I am not exactly sure,
moan amee
. We had a very brief meeting, right here in this very room. And then he left. But, like you, he came in a bath. A time-travelling bath, as he explained to me.”