Saturday 28 July 2012

Chapter 3.5

“Whisk, Duke, whisk!” cried Toby Ron Ken O’Bee.
  “Mmph mph mmmph mmph!” Duke replied.
  Toby Ron shook his head in despair, showering his kitchen lightly with self-raising flour. Duke, his sheepdog, was obviously not a Pavlova dog; he was strong with the fork but had not yet mastered full control of a rotary whisking action.
  “This meringue must be perfect if we are to triumph over Garth in the W.I. cake competition," enthused Toby Ron. "His cakes are unnatural – he is some kind of Dark Lord of the Sieve.”
  Duke spat the fork out of his mouth into the bowl and panted heavily. “I can’t do it. It’s too big!”
  “Always with you it cannot be done,” chided Toby Ron Ken O’Bee. “Hear you nothing that I say?”
  “Master, making rock cakes is one thing. But this… this is totally different!”
  “No!” Toby rebuked. “Only different in your mind.”
  “But even the base had caught around the edges.”
  “Then you must unburn what you have burnt.”
  “You’re impossible!”
  A scrabbling at the kitchen window interrupted the duo. Cyril the squirrel vaulted in through the open upper pane, performed a perfect summersault mid-air, and landed lightly on the worktop, where he promptly skidded on the abundance of flour and shot straight off the edge.
  “Eh, Eh! Calm down, calm down!” he said from his resting-place in a heap on the floor.
  “Cyril!” cried Duke, his quarrel with Toby put aside. “What brings you here?”
  “I’ve come to ask for some help, actually.”
  Duke looked guarded. “Not suffering another invasion by marauding vegetables from another dimension, I hope.”
  “Thankfully not.”
  “Megalomaniac midgets from a parallel universe?”
  “Not this time. I’m concerned with matters closer to home. Closer to your home, that is.”
  Toby gave Cyril his full attention. “Go on.”
  “Mystic Mog’s worried.” He told them. “She had a premonition that there’s going to be a bombing somewhere round these parts.”
  Toby nodded. “She was right. There was an explosion near here this morning.”
  Cyril was visibly disappointed. After all that he had been through, he had not made it in time.
  “I’m too late,” he said quietly. “Do you have any details?”
  Toby shook his head. “Sadly not. It wasn’t on my land, thankfully. The Police are keeping it fairly hush-hush until they’ve identified the victims.”
  Cyril nodded sadly. “Mog thought there were going to be casualties. She has a very bad feeling about this one. You will tell me if you find anything out, won’t you?”
  “Of course. The W.I. cake competition is in the morning. I will listen out for anything unusual.”
  “Umm, there is one thing,” said Duke. “It’s probably nothing, but I had to fetch one of the young goats from the fields this morning.”
  “Is that not the natural place for a goat?” Cyril asked.
  “Not at night, no.” Duke answered. “But that’s not the weird part, anyway. The weird part is that he had absolutely no recollection of how he got there.”
  “Really?” Now Toby Ron was intrigued. “That is unusual. Goats never forget.”
  “Isn’t that elephants?” said Cyril.
  Duke smiled. “I don’t think any of us would forget an elephant.”
  “Goats generally have a very good memory,” Toby told Cyril, ignoring Duke’s comment. “Mine do, anyway. You said Mog was worried. How serious does she think this is?”
  “On a scale of macaroni cheese to spaghetti carbonara? We’re talking spicy meatballs with mama’s own tomato sauce.”
  “In that case,” said Toby Ron, “I suggest you take the kids to Mystic Mog for a reading at once.”

Chapter 3.6 ☛

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