The Great Brain Robbery Read online

  Dr Gore saw that the doors to one of the waste containers stood ajar. Quick as a bobcat, he hurled himself inside and slammed the doors shut behind him. Frankie saw his chance. No sooner had the doors closed than he lunged towards the large steel bolt and shoved it across.

  ‘Bleeeeewittt!’ shrieked the scientist, immediately realising that he was locked in. ‘Banerjeeeeee!’

  ‘Look out!’ Neet shouted. Frankie heard a loud whirring of gears and clanking of chains. A crane dangled its giant mechanical claw overhead. Frankie dived out of the way as it grasped hold of the steel box containing Dr Gore, winched it high up in the air and swung it out over the water towards the waiting ship.

  ‘Wooooooooh!’ Dr Gore yelled from inside the container. ‘Let me out! Let me out! I’ll be nice! I promise! I’ll be good! Oooooh, it’s dark in here!’

  . . . But only the seagulls could hear him.

  As the ship raised its anchor, Frankie read the letters painted along its broad white side: The Polar Princess. He smiled drily. Santa would be getting an unexpected visitor this year. The ship pulled slowly out of the harbour and the Mechanimals, still pursuing their target, started marching off the end of the dock. Frankie watched as dozens and dozens of them splashed into the sea where they buzzed and crackled for a moment before sinking like brightly-coloured pebbles. As the ship steamed towards the horizon, Timmy started to jump for joy. ‘We did it! ’ he cheered. ‘We did it! Wowee! Ha ha! It was soooo cool what you did with those Mechanimals, Wes!’

  Wes turned pink with pride. ‘Oh, it was a piece of cake really,’ he said. ‘I can do much cleverer things with computers.’

  ‘Really?’ said Timmy, impressed. ‘Could you teach me?’

  ‘Sure!’ grinned Wes. ‘What do you want to know?’

  While the new friends chatted together, Frankie and Neet sat on the edge of the dock, watching the Mechanimals topple into the water below.

  ‘We did a good job, Frankie,’ said Neet, squeezing his shoulder. But Frankie didn’t reply. He just watched, pale and silent, as a shiny blue Gadget the Rabbit sank beneath the surface of the water and disappeared from sight. Neet knew there was only one thing on his mind: what had happened to Alphonsine, Eddie and Colette?

  Later that morning, when the children of Britain rubbed the sleep from their eyes, they felt as if they had just awoken from a very long, very eerie dream. They couldn’t remember exactly what the dream had been about, but they all had the same, strange feeling that they had not quite been themselves. Some felt as if they had been turned into giant puppets whose strings had been pulled by an invisible hand, while others imagined that they had been transformed into remote-controlled cars or robots. Either way, they were all very glad that it was over. They sat up, looked at their feet, legs and arms and gave themselves a little pinch. Their dads were getting breakfast ready downstairs; their brothers were yelling in the next room. Yes, everything was back to normal.

  Except for one thing. Their bedrooms were chock-a-block full of toys. The children rubbed their eyes and looked around in amazement as they struggled to remember how they had all got there. Toy boxes were spilling over, wardrobes were stuffed full to bursting and there were bags and bags of unopened packages littered around their bedrooms. Some of the children noticed that their Mechanimal was missing, but most were simply astounded at the mountains of stuff that was piled all around them. Most of it wasn’t even stuff they actually wanted. Little Alice Hinton was baffled by her twenty fluffy unicorns, while Felix Saunders wondered what he was doing with a huge toy battleship. Over the road, Beate Lübecker was mystified by her bumper-bucket of goo, while her classmate, Isabel Stone, was not at all pleased to find a dozen new teddies in her bed while her beloved old rabbit was in the dustbin outside.

  What’s more, when the children looked at these piles of shopping bags, they began to feel sick, as if they had eaten a whole truckload of marshmallows. They didn’t know why, but they could no longer stand the sight of the Marvella logo and even the slightest mention of the toyshop made them feel quite dizzy. Indeed, whenever they saw the grinning face of Teddy Manywishes leering at them from a billboard or the side of a bus, they felt an awful lurch in their stomachs as if they were about to throw up. Parents up and down the country scratched their heads in astonishment. They couldn’t work out why their children who, just days ago, had begged and grovelled for the very latest gizmo or gadget, were now turning green at the sight of them. The staff at Marvella’s toyshops couldn’t believe it either. Only the day before, the cash registers had been ringing non-stop. But that morning there were no crowds pushing against the doors at opening-time, no mobs of squabbling parents and no money going into the tills. Except for the odd whirr of a mechanical toy and the occasional bleep of a video game, the enormous shops were completely silent.

  ‘What happened?’ a worried shop assistant asked her friend.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the friend replied, ‘but I don’t want to be here when the boss finds out.’

  Meanwhile, Frankie and his friends had retraced their steps to the bridge from which Alphonsine’s bike had plummeted. Frankie peered anxiously down towards the water as cars and lorries sped close behind him. The bridge was higher than Frankie had imagined. It was at least five times as high as the highest diving board at the swimming pool and the water below looked as solid as steel. Frankie’s eyes scanned the surface for any sign of Alfie, Eddie or Colette. Then he saw something that made him freeze inside.

  Floating a little way downstream, was the tyre of a motorbike. Neet gasped. ‘Oh no, Frankie,’ she said, clutching her friend’s arm. The motorbike was in pieces. It had broken up as it hit the water and bits of fender, exhaust and engine were scattered across a wide area, glinting cruelly in the cold winter sunshine. Nobody could have survived that fall.

  Frankie felt the tears streaming uncontrollably down his cheeks. He ran to the end of the bridge, down the steps and towards the water’s edge, hoping with all his heart that he would find something, anything, that would reunite him with his old friends. Neet, Wes and Timmy followed him down and helped him search the river banks. A few bits of bike had washed up on the shore but apart from that there was nothing. Eventually, Frankie slumped down on the shore and sobbed. His friends gathered quietly around him. They didn’t know what to say. Timmy saw that Frankie was shivering. He took off his jumper and wrapped it around Frankie’s shoulders like a shawl.

  Suddenly, Frankie’s sobbing spluttered to a halt. He looked up.

  ‘Do you remember what Alphonsine was wearing?’ he asked Neet, his eyes wide with hope.

  Neet paused to think.

  ‘Not really, Frankie,’ she said gently, ‘why do you ask?’

  Then, all of a sudden, she realised what Frankie was thinking. They both sprang to their feet. They had been searching for Alphonsine down on the ground, when they should have been looking up in the trees. Frankie’s eyes roved over the treetops. There was nothing there. He charged into the nearby woodland.

  ‘Alfiiiiiiiiiiiiie! Eddiiiiiiiiiiiie!’ he hollered up into the branches. But only his echo replied. His heart was beginning to sink back down into his socks, when he heard a faint barking.

  Frankie ran through the trees with Neet alongside him. He sprang over roots and charged through brambles, not even feeling the scratches on his legs.

  A voice rang through the woodlands. ‘Yoooohooooo! Little cabbages!’

  Frankie looked up and saw Alphonsine, Eddie and Colette high up in a large chestnut tree, suspended by Alphonsine’s trusty para-shawl.

  ‘Ooh-la-la!’ smiled Alphonsine, who was holding Colette in her arms while Eddie clung on to her ankle. ‘At last! We’ve been dangling here for ages, have we not, Eddie?’

  ‘No, no,’ Eddie wheezed politely. ‘No trouble at all.’ Frankie felt so happy. Happier than he had ever been. Happier than all the Christmas mornings in the world.

  Alfie and Eddie chortled with glee as Frankie and his friends told them how the dastar
dly Dr Gore had ended up on a slow boat to the Arctic Circle.

  ‘Well done, little cabbages!’ grinned Alphonsine, thumping the kitchen table with her fist. ‘I knew you could do it! You are all such smartycloggs!’

  ‘Smartypants,’ Timmy corrected her.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Alphonsine. ‘Smartycloggs, Cleverpants, same thing! Who wants pancakes?’

  Everybody wanted pancakes. The friends all chattered happily as they settled down to fill their growling bellies. Well, almost all of them. Frankie noticed that Wes was strangely quiet.

  ‘Are you all right, Wes?’ Frankie asked.

  Wes shook his head and pushed his plate away. ‘We have to go back for the Elves, Frankie,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave them there a moment longer.’

  ‘Of course,’ Frankie nodded, putting down his knife and fork. ‘You’re right. We’ll go back straight away.’

  But Wes still looked flustered. ‘Only I don’t see how we’re going to get them out,’ he said. ‘The flying-machine is in splinters and they’ll have tightened up security since our escape.’

  Frankie chewed slowly on a blueberry – Wes had a point. But Neet didn’t seem worried at all.

  ‘We don’t need a flying-machine,’ she said. ‘Look.’ She rolled up her sleeve to reveal the watcher strapped around her wrist.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Wes.

  ‘It’s a secret camera,’ said Neet, winking at Alphonsine. ‘For spying. While we were in the factory I took a whole bunch of photos.’ She opened the back of the device and took out the film. ‘All we need to do now is get this to the newspapers. As soon as people realise what’s going on in that place, it’ll be shut down for good!’

  ‘Clever, clever Neety!’ smiled Alphonsine, tapping Neet on the forehead with her bony old finger. ‘You have the makings of a master-spy, no doubts about it!’

  That afternoon, Frankie and his friends got on the phone to newspapers, TV channels and radio stations and, within half an hour, a thick buzz of journalists and photographers was swarming excitedly up the driveway.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ grinned Neet.

  The friends opened the front door to a dazzle of flash-bulbs and, as Alphonsine chased photographers out of her flowerbeds with wide swipes of her broom, the children told the crowd exactly what had happened. They told them how Dr Gore and Marvella Brand had plotted to invade the brains of the world’s children and turn them into unthinking, unstoppable toy-monsters. They told them about the Mechanimals and the mind-sweepers and the morse code. And of course they told them about the poor Elves, working their fingers to the bone and running round and round on enormous hamster wheels till they collapsed with exhaustion. The journalists were listening so intently Frankie thought he could see their ears sizzling.

  ‘And here’s the proof!’ cried Neet triumphantly, holding the roll of film in the air.

  A keen-eyed journalist snatched it out of her hands like a hungry dog and scampered off to get the photos developed, ‘We’ve got a scoop!’ he yelped excitedly down the phone to his editor, ‘the scoop of the century!’

  Just as Neet predicted, the story quickly ballooned into a national outcry. By six o’clock that evening, Marvella’s Elves had been closed and dazed-looking children wrapped in blankets were being led out into the fresh air. Frankie and his friends were glued to the TV screen as the story unfolded before their eyes.

  ‘There’s Martha!’ said Wes, tapping the screen with his finger. ‘And there’s Eric!’ Wes’s friends were so pale they were almost transparent.

  ‘What’s going to happen to them now?’ asked Frankie.

  ‘The reporter said they’d be looked after,’ Wes replied. ‘She said they’d be sent to proper homes.’

  ‘That’s great news, Wes!’ smiled Frankie, putting his arm around his friend. ‘And it’s all thanks to you! If you hadn’t got that message out . . .’ But Wes was only half listening. His eyes were fixed to the screen and he was fiddling nervously with the buttons of his cardigan. Suddenly Frankie realised what was on his mind. How could he have forgotten?

  ‘You can come and live with us, Wes,’ said Frankie. ‘Isn’t that right, Alphonsine?’

  Wes looked at his friend with wide eyes. ‘Really?’ he stammered. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘But of course!’ cried Alphonsine. ‘We is needing a brainbox like you to teach us all about the interweb, isn’t we, Eddie?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Eddie. ‘This old dog is planning to learn a few new tricks!’

  ‘Well,’ blushed Wes, smiling, ‘I can definitely help you there.’

  ‘Hey, look!’ Neet exclaimed, pointing at the TV. The screen showed long queues of people lining up outside Marvella Brand’s Happyland. Frankie’s heart sank.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t believe people still want to shop there.’

  ‘No, Frankie,’ said Neet. ‘They’re waiting to take stuff back, look!’

  Neet was right. What was good news for the journalists was very, very bad news for the Marvella Brand corporation. Not only were children not buying any more Marvella toys, they were marching them straight to the shops and demanding their money back. For the second time in the space of a week, Marvella shop assistants were run off their feet, but rather than putting money in the till, they were handing it back to thousands of unhappy customers. Indeed, Marvella Brand’s Happyland was losing business faster than you could flush fifty-pound notes down the toilet. The TV showed dozens of charts with plunging red lines while clench-jawed people in suits spat with fury. Frankie thought he recognised the woman with the pointy shoes. She was talking about ‘shares’, and ‘investments’, and saying a lot of words that did not make much sense to Frankie. But he understood one thing loud and clear. Marvella Brand’s evil emporium was no more. It was finished, finito, kaputt. It would close its golden doors for the last time that very day and would never again go poking around in the heads of the nation’s children.

  But Frankie and his friends were not the only ones who had seen the news. In a pink, sugar-cube house on top of a hill, a snowy-haired old lady was simply bouncing off the walls with rage. ‘Get me Dr Calus Gore, right this minute!’ she screeched down her pink plastic phone. ‘The children are out of control! It’s as if they have minds of their own!’

  But Dr Gore was nowhere to be found. Marvella could rant and rave till the sun fell out of the sky but nothing would change the children’s minds. They’d had enough. They didn’t want any more. They had had all they could take of Marvella Brand and her sinister playthings, and that was the end of that.

  As she watched her evil emporium fall to pieces, Marvella’s smile began to crack like an ancient glacier. Then, all of a sudden, as if somebody had pushed a detonator, she exploded into the most colossal tantrum. She stamped and howled and snapped her magic wand in two. She kicked and yelled and beat her fists on the carpet. And she was still bawling and hollering like an oversize toddler when, at four o’clock that afternoon, a cream-coloured envelope dropped through her letterbox.

  Eddie spread the Cramley Chronicle on the breakfast table for everyone to see. The front cover showed a huge colour photograph of Frankie, Neet, Wes and Timmy.

  ‘Cooooo!’ said Neet, as she spotted the headline: YOUNG HEROES STOP MARVELLA MADNESS. ‘Do you see that? We’re heroes!’

  Frankie smiled with pride and turned the page. The whole newspaper was devoted to their story. TERROR IN TOY TOWN blared another headline next to a picture of a giant Mechanimal swivelling its robotic eyes. WHERE’S CALUS GORE? demanded another above the holiday snap of Dr Gore wearing his duck-shaped rubber ring. Frankie chuckled with glee and turned to the back page.

  On the reverse cover was a large picture of Marvella Brand standing outside a police car and speaking to a scrum of reporters. Frankie narrowed his eyes as he studied the picture. There was something odd about it. Something about Marvella had changed.

  ‘She’s not smiling,’ said Neet. And indeed she wasn�
��t. Marvella’s famous smile had gone, melted away. Frankie thought she looked like an old snowman slumped in the sun. But it wasn’t just her smile that had changed. Her eyes also looked different. Frankie couldn’t be sure but he thought he could see the traces of the little girl he had seen in the photograph, sitting on her uncle’s knee. Only much, much older and much, much sadder.

  ‘Listen to this,’ said Wes, who had been reading the article. ‘Marvella Brand’s Happyland will close immediately,’ he read aloud. ‘But in its place, Miss Brand will open a workshop in memory of her uncle, the legendary toymaker, Mr Crispin Whittle.’

  Eddie raised his bristly eyebrows. ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what it says here,’ Wes replied, ‘and that’s not all, listen: Before starting her stint in jail, Miss Brand insisted that her workshop would be open to everyone. “All children shall be included,” she said. “No child shall be left out.”’

  ‘Well knock me down with a dandelion!’ said Alphonsine, reading over Frankie’s shoulder. ‘And tickle me with a feather.’

  Frankie looked back at the picture. He noticed that Marvella was clutching something in her dry, old hands. But it was not a fairy wand. It was a smooth, cream-coloured envelope.

  ‘What was in her uncle’s letter, Eddie?’ asked Frankie.

  Eddie smiled and buttered his toast. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, taking a bite. ‘I never read other people’s mail.’

  After such a turbulent term, Frankie just wanted life to get back to normal. He wanted to watch cartoons, go to football practice, and make his volcano model for Geography class. But getting back to normal wasn’t all that easy. Whether he liked it or not, Frankie Blewitt was now an international superstar. Every day, the poor old postman would struggle up the driveway with a sack full of mail, and Frankie would spend at least an hour sifting through admiring letters, postcards and party invitations from children all round the world. One day Frankie shook his head in astonishment as he opened a smart-looking envelope and pulled out a stiff white card. It was an invitation from the royal princes asking Frankie to come and spend Christmas in one of their castles. He could hardly believe it. Just weeks before, he had spent his lunchbreaks alone on his bench and now even royalty wanted to be friends. Frankie chuckled to himself and slipped the invitation back in the envelope. All the attention was nice for a while, but he knew who his friends were, and that’s who he wanted to spend Christmas with.