The Impossible Boy Read online

  Also by Mark Griffiths

  Geek Inc.: Technoslime Terror!

  Space Lizards Stole My Brain!

  Space Lizards Ate My Sister!

  Find out more about Mark Griffiths online

  www.markgriffithsbooks.co.uk

  @markgriffiths42

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Text copyright © 2014 Mark Griffiths

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 Martin Chatterton

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Mark Griffiths and Martin Chatterton to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  PB ISBN: 978-0-85707-539-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85707-540-6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  www.simonandschuster.com.au

  FOR KATE SHAW – for making it possible.

  With thanks to the Viney Agency, Jane and Kat at Simon & Schuster, Martin Chatterton and Richard and Chloe Aldridge

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  THE ROBIN AND THE ROBOT

  (BLUE HILLS: SATURDAY 7TH AUGUST 1976)

  Shielding her eyes against the intense afternoon sunlight, the young girl stared in astonishment at the mayor and wondered why no one had noticed the ghost standing behind him.

  A crowd of sixty or seventy people – couples with young children, mainly – had gathered in the small park to see the mayor open the new playground. Beside a gleaming set of swings, a tall metal slide and a gaudily painted roundabout, the mayor was reading a long, dreary speech into a microphone in his flat, plodding voice, his amplified words echoing away, dreamlike, into the hazy summer air. And, it seemed, not one person in the crowd was taking the slightest interest in the white, wraithlike form looming over his right shoulder. It was extremely odd, thought the girl.

  The girl was eight years old, with a cascade of bright orange curls, and wore a faded set of tomboyish dungarees. Her name was Fleur Abbott. Wrinkling her freckly nose, she tugged at the sagging sleeve of her mother’s dress. ‘Look, Mum!’ she hissed. ‘There’s a ghost! Can you see it?’

  Mrs Abbott didn’t respond. Her attention was focused entirely on the small silvery object in her hands. She was turning it over repeatedly, feeling every centimetre of its surface for some crack or seam like a hungry monkey trying to prise open a particularly tricky nut. She was frowning intensely, the tip of her tongue poking out through her teeth.

  Fleur tugged at her sleeve again, without success. She let out a frustrated whine.

  Fleur’s father puffed on his pipe and snorted with laughter. Whitish smoke curled from his nostrils. ‘Can’t you put it down for ten seconds, my dear?’ he said to his wife. ‘I do believe our daughter is asking you a question.’

  ‘I’m so close,’ muttered Mrs Abbott, without looking up. ‘I swear I felt the two halves come apart for a second. I bet there’s some very simple trick to the locking mechanism And it’s not like you could ever open it, with your big sausagey fingers.’

  ‘How dare you!’ gasped Mr Abbott in mock horror. ‘I’ll have you know I’ve got the fingers of a watchmaker.’

  ‘Yes, a watchmaker with Cumberland sausages instead of normal fingers.’

  Fleur giggled. Her dad’s clumsy sausagelike fingers were a running joke in the Abbott family.

  ‘I know you’re fond of a puzzle, my sweet,’ said Mr Abbot, ‘but this is turning into an obsession. You’ve been fiddling with that thing non-stop since yesterday. Take a little break. It’ll help clear your mind.’ He took the object – a lozenge-shaped silver locket on a long silver chain – from her hands and slid it into the pocket of his cardigan. Mrs Abbott stuck out her tongue at him but said nothing. ‘And anyway,’ Mr Abbott continued, ‘Fleur’s found us a new mystery to investigate.’ He winked at his daughter. ‘Tell your mother what you’ve found, Fleur.’

  Fleur pointed at the strange figure behind the mayor. ‘Can you see it, Mum? The ghost?’

  Mrs Abbott frowned. She raised her sunglasses and nestled them into her thick auburn hair. The figure was about five feet tall. It was draped in a white sheet and held its arms raised in a threatening stance like some evil phantom in a picture book or cartoon. ‘Ah! I see it!’ she announced ‘But I don’t think we’ll need the services of an exorcist, after all.’

  Fleur wrinkled her nose again. ‘Does that mean it’s not a ghost?’

  ‘Afraid not, dear,’ said Mr Abbott, patting his daughter on the shoulder.

  ‘It’s the statue that’s been built to celebrate the new playground,’ said Mrs Abbott. ‘It’s just covered by a sheet so the mayor can unveil it when he declares the playground open. Do you see now?’

  Fleur looked at the white-draped figure again and pursed her lips. ‘I suppose so,’ she sighed. ‘Pity. I’d like to see a real ghost one day.’

  ‘Maybe you will, dear, one day,’ said Mr Abbott, his pipe clenched between his teeth. ‘The world is full of wonders. Your mother and I know that better than most people.’

  Mrs Abbott nudged her husband. ‘Tell Fleur about the mysterious presence we investigated in that guesthouse in Scotland the year before she was born. That’s our best candidate for a real-life ghost.’

  Mr Abbott chuckled delightedly. ‘The Wandering Knight! Would you like to hear about that, Fleur? Some supernatural goings-on in the Highlands?’

  Fleur’s face brightened. ‘Ooh, yes please! Tell me about a real ghost!’

  Mr Abbott leaned forward and began to whisper into his daughter’s ear. ‘Once, about nine or ten years ago, your mother and I were staying in a guesthouse in a place in Scotland called Dufftown . . .’

  Fleur shivered with pleasure. She loved spooky stories – and Mr Abbott loved to tell them. Mrs Abbott knew this, of course, and while her husband was breathlessly recounting the story of the Wandering Knight to their daughter, she slipped her hand into the pocket of his cardigan and retrieved the locket without him noticing.

  The mayor droned on. He thanked the company that had designed the new swings and slide and roundabout, which were, he assured the crowd, of the very latest and safest design. He thanked the council workers who had concreted over the three patches of grass for them to be placed on. He thanked a man called Bigglesby, who had lent him a pen when he first had the idea of building a new playground in the park and needed to make a note in case he forgot. And finally, he thanked a local artist by the name of Fiona Cress, who
had made the delightful statue that he just knew children would love and which he was now about to unveil, declaring, as he did so, that this new playground was well and truly open.

  With a flourish, he whipped the sheet away from the statue.

  There was a second or two of silence while the crowd, a little numbed by the heat of the day and the length of the mayor’s speech, realised that he had stopped speaking. This was filled promptly by a burst of grateful applause and even a few cheers.

  ‘Look!’ cried Fleur, jabbing an excited finger at the statue. ‘Cluedroid! And that’s Bobby Robin with him! It’s The Robin and the Robot from the TV show!’

  Annoyed at this interruption to his story (he had just been getting to the good bit about the axe), Mr Abbott frowned at the statue. In grey-speckled whitish granite, he saw a roughly human-shaped robot figure dressed in the traditional long overcoat and broad-brimmed hat of a private detective. Both the robot’s arms were raised at shoulder height, its left hand open in a friendly wave. The palm of its right hand was flat and on it sat a plump granite robin, perky, with a mischievous look in its tiny round eyes. The left leg of the robot was raised and resting on a large square sign – the kind that might hang outside a detective’s office and into which the words The Robin and the Robot had been carved in space-age letters.

  ‘I see,’ said Mr Abbott. ‘And what exactly do the Robin and the Robot do on their show? I suppose they solve all sorts of whimsical and unlikely mysteries together, eh?’ grinned Mr Abbott. ‘Am I right?’

  Fleur winced. ‘Well . . . it’s a bit more complicated than that . . .’

  ‘Got it!’ cried Mrs Abbott as the locket in her hands finally came open.

  The sudden flash of white light caught everyone off guard. When the mayor later recalled it, he compared it to the time in 1954 when he had witnessed an atomic bomb test on a remote Pacific island. He had the same feeling then that the entire world was suddenly dissolving into burning whiteness, as if plunged into the heart of the sun. Many said they remembered covering their eyes with their hands and being able to see the bones in their fingers as clear as an X-ray as the savage light blasted through them. For a few brief seconds, it was as if all life, all consciousness, was extinguished in the merciless glare. The only thing that existed was the white light.

  Mr Abbott blinked, a procession of shapeless black after-images jigging before his eyes. What on Earth had just happened? Had a bomb gone off? There had been no sound of an explosion, only the overpowering light. Had he been deafened? No, he realised. He could hear the startled gasps and moans of those around him. In time his vision cleared and he saw his wife before him, openmouthed in utter confusion.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ she groaned. Her voice was hoarse. She adjusted the sunglasses in her hair with trembling fingers.

  Mr Abbott shrugged dumbly. Instinctively he went to place his hands on Fleur’s shoulders. The pipe dropped from his mouth and landed softly on the grass. He looked around, suddenly wild-eyed, his heart thumping, his thick-fingered hands clasping and unclasping anxiously. ‘Where’s Fleur?’ he asked his wife, a tiny tremor in his voice.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE AMAZING CHAS HINTON

  (BLUE HILLS: PRESENT DAY)

  Barney Watkins was quaking with rage.

  He clenched his fists, the skin on his knuckles turning a translucent yellow-white, as he stomped through the open door into classroom U13. Eleven years old, with a snub nose and a flick of shiny black hair, he was the kind of kid, average in seemingly every way, that people instantly forgot the moment he left the room. He sighed long and hard, his breath escaping like steam fizzing from a volcano.

  His friend Gabby Grayling was waiting for him in the room with a girl he didn’t recognise. The girl was about his age, with long dark hair and a pale complexion.

  ‘Barney,’ said Gabby, ‘this is Laura. She—’

  ‘You won’t believe what ridiculous old Mr Jones has done!’ interrupted Barney. ‘Urgh. He makes me . . . So. Flipping. Angry.’

  Gabby blinked at him and adjusted her small round glasses on her nose. She had curly brown hair and big dark eyes that seemed to swallow you whole. A couple of years older than Barney, she often felt a little protective of him. ‘What happened, mate?’

  ‘He just confiscated my EGG!’

  Gabby shrugged. ‘So what? It’s lunchtime. We’ll get some food from the canteen later.’

  Barney moaned as if in pain. ‘Not that sort of egg, Gabby! An E-G-G. Electronic Gaming Globe? It’s a vintage hand-held video game. From the 1970s. I got it from a charity shop in Kent last year. I brought it in to show Lewis and Mr Jones caught us looking at it in maths and now he’s confiscated it, put it in that stupid old safe he has at the back of his classroom! The Black Hole, everyone calls it. Once stuff ends up in there it never sees the light of day again!’

  ‘Tough break, mate,’ said Gabby, trying to look sympathetic and not making a terribly good job of it. ‘A major injustice, I’m sure. We’ll figure out a way to get it back later. But can we get on with some Geek Inc. business? Laura has just told me something that could need further investigation.’

  Geek Inc. was a school club run by Barney and Gabby and devoted to investigating the impossible. That was the idea, anyway. When Barney had first joined the club about two months ago – being new to Blue Hills High School, lonely, and in need of something to do at lunchtimes – Gabby (the club’s only other member, a fact that she’d not mentioned until Barney had already agreed to join) had implied that they would spend all their time chasing ghosts and investigating flying saucers. This had so far, somewhat conspicuously, failed to happen. There had been one genuinely strange incident, shortly after he had joined, involving a secret government formula that brought inanimate objects to life. But since then, nothing.

  Since their first investigation, Barney and Gabby had tried to encourage kids at Blue Hills High to come forward with any reports of strange happenings for Geek Inc. to look into, but all of these had turned out to be much less odd than they first appeared. A ‘sea monster’ in the canal was revealed to be no more than a cardboard cutout of a dinosaur thrown in by the manager of the town’s bookshop to generate publicity for a ‘monster sale’ he was planning. He was fined for littering. A ‘vampire postman’ kids reported seeing on the way to school was just an ordinary, if somewhat paler than normal, postman with a habit of drinking tomato juice on the job. And tales of a werewolf stalking the town’s bowling green every full moon were found to be outright lies spread by a pensioner with too much time on his hands.

  The business with the government formula had briefly shown Barney that the world could be a much weirder and more remarkable place than he had ever imagined. But since then normal life, with its unchanging routine of school, homework, football practice and nagging parents, had quickly reasserted itself and he had started to wonder if anything out of the ordinary would ever happen to him again.

  He raised his eyebrows at Gabby. ‘This had better be really, really good because I’m not in the mood for any more time-wasters.’

  Gabby looked at Laura. ‘Can you tell Barney what you told me?’

  Laura crossed her arms and fixed Barney with a confidential, big-eyed stare. ‘Well,’ she said in a strong Blue Hills accent, ‘there’s this lad in my class, right? He’s new. Only started here two weeks ago. Seems normal, like an ordinary kid, right? But . . .’

  ‘Go on,’ said Barney.

  ‘Get this . . .’ said Laura. She paused dramatically.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s always got a pen on him.’

  Barney blinked. ‘What?’ He frowned and looked at Gabby. She was grinning.

  ‘I mean always,’ said Laura. ‘Absolutely always. It’s well weird.’

  Barney raised a palm to his face. ‘Really? Great. Well done both of you for a great wind-up. Ha ha. How very, very clever. Now if you don’t mind I’m going to go and grovel to Mr Jones to see if there’s anything I c
an do to get my EGG back because, believe it or not, I do actually have better things to do than stand here being treated like some kind of idiot by a pair of smirking girls. He turned on his heel, tie swinging, face prickling with heat.

  ‘Wait!’ called Gabby. There was laughter in her voice. ‘Barney! Stop! This is a real mystery! Honestly!’

  ‘You think?’ said Barney, turning to face her from the doorway. ‘A boy always having a pen counts as a real mystery now, does it? Seems to me like the standard of oddness we’re prepared to investigate in this club has declined a bit, Gabs. What’s our next case going to be? The Strange Affair of the Sausage Roll That When Someone Ate It They Felt Less Hungry? The Mysterious Case of the Grass That Was Green?’

  ‘Please wait,’ said Gabby. ‘There is actually more to this. I promise.’

  Barney shot her a sceptical look. ‘Well?’ he asked, leaning against the doorway and folding his arms.

  Gabby touched Laura’s elbow. ‘Tell him the rest.’

  Laura grinned. ‘OK. Here’s the thing, right? I say he’s always got a pen on him. I mean, really, always. It’s like a magic trick he does. He can produce a pen out of nowhere. Literally. I’ve seen him do it. Like, three or four times in our English class before the teacher arrived. There’s nothing in his hands, nothing. He rolls his sleeves up so you can see he hasn’t got anything hidden up them. Then he flicks a wrist and there’s a pen right there in his hand. A proper biro, not a fake paper biro that he could hide between his fingers or anything. He can make pens appear out of nowhere. I swear. It’s like he’s properly magic.’ She nodded to emphasise this last point.

  Barney scratched his chin slowly. He had calmed down a bit now.

  ‘What do you think?’ Gabby asked him.

  Barney shrugged. ‘So he knows a magic trick? With a bit of practice, I could probably do the same thing.’

  ‘But,’ said Gabby, ‘if this boy is really doing it the way Laura’s describing – nothing up his sleeves, totally empty hands – it sounds pretty impossible to me.’