Lizard's Leap: Chapter Twenty Five: Coats, Hats and Boots

They were in an enormous hall. It was cool and Kerry shivered under her thin cardigan. The hall was the size of a football pitch; it was dark but not gloomy.

It looked ancient, but what they couldn’t understand was the occasional modern convenience that was strewn around the place. As they entered, to the left of them stood an old electric cooker.

It would’ve looked out of place in a castle, anyway, but to find it in the Great Hall was weird.

The floor was inlaid with a spectacular mosaic. Hundreds of thousands of hours work must have gone into creating it.

The walls were hung with luxurious tapestries and stuffed animal heads, instruments and weapons, portraits and a large poster of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo.

A girl of about Emma’s age ran up to them. ‘Hello, I’m Tour Guide Barbie. Who are you?’

They looked at each other and tried not to smirk at the friendly, but odd, girl.‘Action Man, Cindy, Tiny Tears…,’ Emma began, introducing each of them.

‘Stop it, Em,’ Vicki said. She smiled at the girl, I’m Vicki,’ she said. ‘What’s your real name?’

Before she could answer a door flew open at the other side of the room and what could only be described as a wizard came hurtling through it.

‘Amaryllis? Amaryllis?’ he shouted as he bore down on the girl.

‘Ah, there you are, child. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Have you mixed the wasp stripe and the caterpillar curl with the willow wisps yet? You know King Luke has that boil on his-- He’s been in pain with it for three days now and if I don’t mix something soothing he’s going to be declaring war on the Hegots again. You know how much trouble that caused last time. Poor Queen Careela was picking thorns from her cushion for weeks.’

‘Oh, Uncle, do I have to? You know how slimy those caterpillar curls are and it smells really bad.

‘Child, if you want to be a great sorceress one day, then you have to learn the craft now.’

The wizard looked down on his pretty niece with pride and the family resemblance was apparent. He was a kind-looking man with a round face and warm brown eyes that twinkled as he spoke. He wore a kind of purple dress with sun, moon and star pictures on it and the customary pointed hat. He was a fine wizard and looked just like the ones in all the good storybooks. He even had a long white beard.

‘And who have we here?’ he boomed, looking down and smiling on the children. ‘Visitors. How nice, we don’t get many visitors here. I am Simian the wizard,’ he announced, holding out his hand to them.

Kerry stifled a giggle and Mark turned to look at her. ‘Simian means monkey-like,’ she explained. Mark snorted and Simian turned to them grinning. His sharp, pointed ears had caught the conversation.

‘Monkey-like indeed,’ he said. ‘But I’m not the only monkey here. No doubt you’ll meet Mickey in due course. He’s very bright and loves to meet new people. We’re very proud of him. I expect he’s either watching videos or is in the library reading.’

Mark jumped up and down in excitement. ‘Can we go and see him now?’

‘I don’t think you can do that, my friend. Not without solving a puzzle first.’

‘What’s the puzzle, please?’ Mark could hardly contain himself.

‘I don’t know. I expect someone will be along before too long to tell you. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Amaryllis and I have some work to do.’

The wizard and his trainee sorceress walked away, Amaryllis pulled a face behind her uncle’s back but then she grabbed his hand lovingly and went to mix their potions and spells.

They were left alone. They wandered round looking at all of the priceless antiques. Two full suits of armour stood in opposite corners of the room. Mark couldn’t resist lifting the visor on the nearest one to him. It was in his nature. If there was a sign saying “wet paint,” Mark had to run his fingers along it to see if it was really wet. If people were being polite they might call him naturally inquisitive.

He approached the armour and lifted the metal visor.

‘Hello,’ said a gruff voice from within. ‘What can I do for you young man?’ They should’ve been used to things jumping out at them by now, appearing from nowhere and generally popping in, up or out. Nevertheless, Mark sprang into the air. The visor clanged shut, noisily, sending a ghost of echoes reverberating around the hall.

The knight raised a creaky arm and opened it again.

‘I’m Ernest, the white knight and my counterpart, over there, is Adam the black knight.’

Adam raised his arm in greeting.

‘Flipping heck,’ Mark said, recovering from his shock. ‘We’ve got Knights and kings. All we need are some prawns and we can have a game of chess.'

‘Pawns, dear cousin, it’s pawns. If we had prawns we’d have a Chinese takeaway, not a game of chess,’ Emma said. Too late she realised what she’d said.

‘I’m hungry,’ Mark whined.

‘Can you tell us the next puzzle, please, Ernest?’ Vicki asked, shooting mark a look telling him to shut up.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, little Missy. More than my job’s worth. I dare say Lidlia will be along soon. She’d be the best person to ask.’ With that, Ernest cocked his creaky arm and looked at an enormous gold watch on his gauntlet. He signalled to Adam in the far corner and they stiffly pulled themselves away from the wall and walked out towards the courtyard.

So many people were coming and going, but nobody here actually seemed to do very much.

Marcella, the castle crier, came in and took off her three cornered hat, her jacket and her boots. ‘Be a darling,’ she said to Mark, ‘and put these on the coat, hat, and boot stand, would you, please?’

Mark looked around but couldn’t find anywhere to hang the clothes.

‘Oh, Silly me,’ Marcella said. ‘Of course, what with you being visitors here, you won’t be used to our grand ways. You won’t have seen newtiques like what we have here. We have some of the most historic newtiques in the country. Just look at the posh, coat, hat and boot stand, before you. I bet you’ve never seen one of these before, eh?’

She walked across the room and while they stood in open-mouthed astonishment, she explained: ‘You see children, what you do is you put your hat on this darling little curly ring here, and then you open the door and put your boots in here. And you hang your coat on the knobs at the side. You must be careful not to use the proper coat knobs though because there’s something wrong with the stand. He doesn’t like it when you hang your coats on his proper coat knobs, so the castle carpenter had to fix some special ones to the side. Before he fixed it, every time we hung our coats on his knobs he got angry and burned our hats.’

It was no good. They tried. They really, really did try to keep straight faces and not laugh at the nice lady with the loud voice, but it was no good. It was bad enough when she put her hat on the burner, but when she opened the door and put her boots in the oven; it was all too much for them.

By the time she explained about the coat, hat and boot stand getting angry and burning their hats, the children were howling because the coat, hat and boot stand was the electric cooker. How could the people here be so stupid?

Marcella said that there was something very wrong with them. She yelled that they had the, a very serious disease, and ran off to tell Jamar about the terrible sickness that the strangers had brought into the castle.

‘I’m not sick am I,’ Kerry said to Marcella’s retreating back. She worried a lot about getting ill. ‘I don’t want to have the Hysterical Laughing Malady. Will I die from laughing too much? I won’t laugh anymore. I promise, I won’t’

‘Kerry, there are nearly twice as many eyebrows as there are people. So I don’t think you’re going to die from laughing too much.’

As Emma had intended, Kerry couldn’t see the similarity and correlation between laughing too much and how many eyebrows there are in the world and she stopped worrying long enough to think about it.

Mark was still giggling over the cooker and thought about turning the oven on to slow roast Marcella’s boots.Vicki stopped him and they wondered what was going to happened next.