Jane Blonde: Twice the Spylet Read online

  Just as Janey inhaled, she felt a very strange sensation in her nose, like an insect had been sheltering up there and had just decided to move. She suddenly wanted to sneeze, desperately, but even as she straightened her shoulders and went to put her head back, the odd feeling intensified. With considerable horror, Janey felt something descend from her nose.

  It was a long piece of string. All the way from Janey’s left nostril it ran, unfurling right down to the ground and dangling for a moment or so in the sticky mound at Janey’s feet, before rolling back up and making its way back inside her nostril. ‘That is disgusting,’ said Janey aloud, planning to shout very loudly at G-Mamma the next time she could get a word in edgeways. ‘I don’t ever want to use a SPInal cord again!’

  The gadget was gross but effective, however. As Janey breathed in deeply, trying to force down the bile that was rising in her throat, threatening to add a fresh little pile of Spylet-sick to the other patches of gloop on the ground, she felt a buzzing in the other nostril. The buzzing became more insistent – the beetly insect had now become a bee, wedged inside her nose. To Janey’s revulsion, something else now drooped from her nose, but only as far as her top lip this time. She steeled herself, reached up her Girl-gauntleted hand and pulled.

  To her amazement, a tiny printout had been issued from her nose. Janey moved it across the palm of her glove with her thumb, careful not to touch it, and zoomed in with her Ultra-gogs. The tiny ticker tape had two pieces of information on it. ‘“1. Sheep DNA”,’ read Janey. ‘Makes sense. “2. Jane Blonde DNA”. Right.’ That also made sense. The SPInal cord had identified her own DNA from the inside of her nose (which she tried not to think about too much) and then the DNA of the sheep from their contact with the melted food. It was perfectly logical, but it didn’t help her much.

  There didn’t seem to be much else she could do at this point. Janey had one last Ultra-gog search for sheep, but she was already resolved to going back to the Spylab to confront her father. Why was he keeping her out of things and being so secretive? Why involve Alfie and Chloe but not her? It wasn’t fair, and now she’d calmed down enough to face him she’d ask him outright. Just as she was turning back towards the house, the viewfinder in her Ultra-gogs shifted suddenly. Janey whipped her head around. Sure enough, there were two dark shadows in the next field, and as one of the shadows extended a long, ghostly hand to the other they merged into a distorted and hideous monster with a grotesque bloated head.

  Someone, or something, was climbing out of Janey’s eSPIdrill hole. A bubble of fear bobbed up Janey’s windpipe, and she had to swallow hard to stop a squeak of alarm escaping. Then her spy instincts took over. Ignoring the patches of slimy gloop all over the field, she kept low and started to crawl.

  nosy neighbours

  Janey shuffled forward until her nose touched the bottom rung of the fence. The bubble-headed monster was sliding away from the eSPIdrill hole, dragging its long, lumpy tail behind it. ‘Come on, Blonde,’ said Janey under her breath. ‘You’ve tackled worse than this.’

  Pushing off from the knees, she launched herself under the fence and got to her feet, ready to pounce. But as she propelled herself forward she heard a familiar voice complaining vehemently: ‘I’m just too weak, Maisie! Let me dangle here. Come back and get me later, and bring some food.’

  Then, to Janey’s amazement, Alfie’s mother’s voice boomed out of the bubble head. ‘Rosie, I know you haven’t been fed in a few days, but it still hasn’t made you light enough for me to drag any more! I won’t leave you here. Push!’

  Janey ran forward and grabbed G-Mamma’s other arm. ‘Mrs H! G-Mamma, what are you doing down here in the paddock? Use your feet to jump,’ she said to her SPI:KE, who had flopped on to the ground with only her head and shoulders poking out of the hole.

  ‘W-what?’ said G-Mamma feebly.

  ‘Good idea, Janey.’ Mrs Halliday braced herself at the edge of the tunnel. ‘You’ve been Wowed, Rosie. Goodness knows you spent long enough in the Wower. Bang your feet against the side, and the detonation will push you out.’

  ‘Oh,’ said G-Mamma, sounding very vague. ‘OK, Halo. Watch out then.’

  She thumped her feet against the earthen walls of the tunnel; there was a dull thwump, and suddenly all three of them rocketed across the paddock and careered into a fence post. ‘There! That’s better.’ G-Mamma smiled blearily before her head slumped back on to her arms. ‘Clever shoes.’ She was wearing Janey’s eSPIdrills.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ Janey had never seen her SPI:KE so wishy-washy. ‘And what are you doing here?’

  Mrs Halliday removed the SPIFFInG, looking quite formidable in a deep mauve SPIsuit with military-style decorations, and pulled G-Mamma upright. ‘I found her locked in her Wower,’ she said grimly. ‘I was getting worried that I hadn’t heard from Alfie so I went round to your Spylab to check everything was OK, and finally tracked Rosie down.’

  ‘Someone shoved me in there and stuck a needle in my bottom!’

  ‘They – what?’ Janey herself had locked G-Mamma in the Wower, but this was obviously much more sinister than that. ‘To sedate you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ wailed G-Mamma. ‘I soon passed out with hunger though, I can tell you. Days I was in there. Days!’

  ‘No, you can’t have been.’ Janey shook her head. ‘You’ve been here, and you’ve been eating all day! You’ve done nothing but eat, apart from some really tasteless rapping.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Mrs Halliday sharply.

  ‘She arrived last night, took over the overseer’s rooms, ate all day like a starving woman and went to bed early.’ She turned to her SPI:KE. ‘Did you arrange to meet Mrs H here?’

  G-Mamma shrugged, her lip wobbling tremulously. ‘No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘She may be hallucinating,’ continued Maisie Halliday. ‘She said you were the one who shoved her in the Wower.’

  ‘I really didn’t. Not this time.’

  ‘Then I think we’d better go and investigate.’

  As they walked across the paddocks, half carrying, and half dragging G-Mamma between them, they exchanged information. Having not heard from Alfie since his arrival in Australia, Mrs Halliday had become worried. She got to G-Mamma’s Spylab to find egg wrappings and the bag from her own chocolate cake littered across the lab, then finally found the SPI:KE in the Wower. There’d also been a message from Solomon blinking on the computer screen. ‘Here.’ Mrs Halliday passed a colour printout to Janey.

  ‘A speckly bird and a pair of kneecaps, inside Trouble’s belly like he’s just swallowed them,’ said Janey, thinking quickly.

  ‘I got it instantly.’ Mrs Halliday paused to help G-Mamma over a stile. ‘So did G-Mamma, I suppose.’

  Janey nodded. ‘I do too. The bird’s a jay, with a pair of knees, inside Trouble: Jay. Knees. In Trouble. “Janey’s in trouble.” I’m not though. What does he mean?’

  Mrs Halliday shrugged. ‘Once I’d found Rosie we thought we’d better get here straight away. Of course, it would have been easier to travel by SPIral staircase, but the lift capsule seems to have got stuck at this end.’

  ‘Oh no! I can see why G-Mamma would be so bleary. She must have arrived by SPIral – in fact, she definitely did, because she appeared on that platform behind the Spylab – but then she must have been Satispied back home.’

  ‘Well, the only thing we could think of – or rather, I could think of – was for Rosie to wear the eSPIdrills and for me to sit on her shoulders with the longest SPIFFInG I could find over my head. I just hoped it would cover us both. It did, just about, but that was an extremely hazardous journey. Still, you’re not in any danger, it seems.’

  ‘No, but I’m glad you’re here, Mrs H. I knew Dad was worried about something and wasn’t letting on.’ Janey sighed. ‘He’s being a bit odd. Like he’s more worried about his sheep than he is about me. He doesn’t seem himself.’

  They were approaching the Spylab now,
dragging G-Mamma behind them like a collapsed parachute. Propping her SPI:KE up against the side of the building, Janey beckoned to Mrs Halliday, and the Spylet and spy made their way to the window.

  ‘There’s Alfie!’ His mother was just about to bound into the lab, but Janey held out a restraining hand. Something very peculiar was happening inside.

  Abe, Chloe and Alfie were positioning a small-wheeled cabinet – one of the half-dozen or so that lined the far wall of the lab – beneath the point of the metal cone suspended in the middle of the room. The cabinet had a floor and four sides (one with a small slot in it), but no top, and Janey could just make out the matted woolly head of Maddy inside it. Her heart went out to the poor creature, who was paaaaing madly. Janey put a finger to her lips to silence Mrs Halliday, then zoomed her Ultra-gogs to get a better view of what would happen next.

  Abe had turned away to face the bench top. Now he came back into view, plucking at something as though he were playing a small zither. But it wasn’t an instrument, Janey realized quickly. It was a hairbrush – the very same hairbrush that Chloe had used to brush Janey’s hair as she sat at her dressing table.

  Janey watched as her father extracted a hair from the bristles. ‘That’s my hair,’ she said to Mrs Halliday, puzzled as to why he would clean hairbrushes in the Spylab. In fact, why would he clean her hairbrush at all?

  They both watched as Abe fed the hair carefully through the slit in the side of the cabinet containing Maddy. Then he nodded at Chloe, who was standing by one of the other counters. A crop of levers and pulleys that Janey had never noticed before bristled before Chloe and Alfie. Janey’s twin pushed one of the levers downwards and then snapped on some ear defenders.

  Feeling rather sick, Janey turned to Mrs Halliday. ‘I’ve just realized something!’ she squeaked as loudly as she dared. ‘He’s not using angora – or hare, as G-Mamma said. I knew she’d said human hair, and that’s what he’s using. And it isn’t any old human hair – it’s mine! That’s why the SPInal cord said my DNA and the sheep’s were mixed! Eugh, that is so revolting!’

  ‘What’s he doing?’ gasped Mrs Halliday.

  ‘I don’t know! It’s horrid! What . . . what’s happening now?’

  To Janey’s amazement, the great cone of metal had started to turn. She’d thought it was solid at its tip but could see now that it wasn’t. As the cone spun faster and faster, a great whirlwind of air began to form over it, a vast vortex, sucking in all the surrounding debris, bits of wool, tools that hadn’t been anchored down, even Abe’s mask from the top of his head. Janey and Mrs Halliday clung on to the window sill as the rush of air lifted them off their feet; they streamed out from the wall, hanging on only by the tips of their fingers. The clothes of the people inside the barn were being whipped around furiously, and Chloe’s hair had twisted into a strange pretzel shape on top of her head, knotted around the ear defenders, but Janey could see now that she, Alfie and Abe were weighted to the floor by thick iron bars that held them down like great metal sandals.

  But the strangest thing of all was what was happening to Maddy. Positioned directly under the point of the cone in her little open-top cage, the sheep had been lifted clean off her feet. Strands of the golden hair Abe had fed into the cage now glinted on her pink and otherwise hairless back; then she was rising up through the air, bleating furiously, till an enormous slurping sound signalled that the poor animal was fully suctioned on to the point of the cone. Maddy now dangled several feet in the air, stuck in a little lump to the bottom of the sleek metallic cone, like the gumball in a Screwball. Most of her back had disappeared into the hole, so that Janey could see instantly why she had her peculiar monk-like wool pattern – the wool on her back had just been sucked off and up into the vortex, together with Janey’s own hair – and Maddy’s legs flopped around, buffeted this way and that by the small hurricane in the lab.

  ‘They can’t do that! It’s cruel!” she screamed over the roar of the wind.

  ‘Look, Janey!’ Mrs Halliday, face contorted by the gale, pointed up to the sky above the vortex.

  Janey couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The metal cone was rattling and shaking with such ferocity that it must surely come away at any moment from the delicate wiring that tethered it to the ceiling. The whirlwind above the cone was spiralling insanely, sucking everything in with its grasping, rasping breath . . . and then suddenly there was a deathly pause, the wind changed direction, something popped up, spat out of the top of the cone like bread from a toaster, silhouetted against the starry sky before it shot out of sight behind the barn.

  It was a sheep. A golden straight-haired sheep. Or, at least, it was partly a sheep. Only partly, because the other part, Janey realized with a jolt that made her think she too might part company with the sausages they’d eaten earlier, was something else. Someone else. It was a new sheep, somehow created from Maddy . . . and Jane Blonde’s hair.

  And when the vortex popped out another one, and then another, and another, until a whole stream of silky sheep were flying over the top of the barn like a flock of short-necked swans, Janey finally lost her grip on reality. She passed out, just as a spitting Spycat hurtled past them, fresh from the Wower in the paddock and now equipped with a bright beacon of a tail, yellow go-faster stripes the entire length of his body, blazing emerald eyes and a wickedly sharp hooked claw unfurled from his lion-like paw. ‘Trouble,’ murmured Janey, as her cat jumped into the barn with his sabre-claw poised for a fight.

  the cinderella defect

  Janey came to with a small circle of anxious faces peering down at her. The wind had dropped away completely, and she was able to hear Maddy’s sad bleating once more. She could also hear a hissed argument between Alfie and his mother, along the lines of ‘I never promised!’ and ‘That doesn’t matter – I was worried about you!’ Abe, meanwhile, was holding a squirming Trouble out in front of him, a firm brown hand in the scruff of the cat’s neck. His other hand, Janey noticed quickly, was bleeding.

  ‘Janey! Are you all right?’ he asked.

  She pointed to the deep cut across his wrist. ‘Are you, Dad? Sorry. Trouble’s very protective of me sometimes. He must have thought you had something to do with me fainting.’

  Her father sighed as the others looked at him. ‘Trouble was right. I did have something to do with you fainting! You saw what I’ve been doing. So did you, dear Maisie.’

  ‘I did.’ Mrs Halliday nodded sternly. ‘It looks to me like you’re splicing sheep genes together with your own daughter’s hair. Crossing sheep with humans?’ She shook her head, lips pursed.

  ‘Ah, you don’t approve,’ said Abe with a small smile. ‘I understand. It does seem a terrible use of my own daughter’s genes. But it makes absolute sense. I sell a few hundred of these sheep, and we’re set up for life. We’ll make a killing, and I can give up spying and settle down with my family. All of my family, and my friends,’ he finished, with a dazzling smile at the Spylets and spies looking at him. ‘Anyway, my discovery is a little better than simply mutating sheep genes. Come and look.’

  Janey got to her feet, held up on either side by Alfie and Chloe, just as G-Mamma appeared from around the corner. She looked much perkier than she had earlier, when Mrs Halliday and Janey had left her slumped like an old mattress against a barn wall. ‘Wait for me!’ she carolled chirpily. ‘I want to see this too.’

  ‘You seem better, Rosie,’ said Mrs Halliday. ‘I thought you were too weak to move.’

  G-Mamma rolled her eyes. ‘I just needed food. Good job for me that old Bert’s a bit of a baker. I just cleaned out the cake tin.’

  ‘Speaking of Bert,’ warned Abe, ‘let’s go before he gets up. I don’t want him to know about this.’

  With that, he led the phalanx of spies across the Spylab, past the cabinet containing Maddy (which Janey casually unlatched as she passed so that the sheep could skitter off across the floor) and over to the metal steps leading up to the SPIral staircase door. They followed him up the
stairs – Janey first, then Halo and G-Mamma, with Alfie and Chloe bringing up the rear. Once they were all assembled on the platform, Abe pointed back to the metal cone.

  ‘That, my dear friends, is my latest invention. As usual, I’ve borrowed from some existing technology, enhanced the process somewhat and created something very . . . special and very unusual. Nobody else must ever hear of this, do you understand?’

  Janey nodded along with the others. She reached out to the rail around the platform to steady herself, in case the news was so monumental that she went wobbly again. After all, so far her father had discovered how to create new life from a different life form, and had uncloaked a method for immortality based on a cat’s nine lives. This new development was likely to be something immense. Life-changing, perhaps.

  Abe rubbed blood off the back of his hand. ‘Plenty more where that came from. Now to the matter in hand. Some of you may have heard of Dolly the sheep?’

  Mrs Halliday nodded. ‘The clone?’

  ‘The very same. A sheep that wasn’t born of two parent sheep, but created by man – an exact copy of a sheep, living and breathing and solid, but completely artificial. Well, I’ve perfected the cloning process. I can clone sheep, not once but many, many times over, using the power of wind in a vortex to stir up the gene pool and create new life forms. I call it . . . the SPI-clone.’

  ‘Like “cyclone”!’ G-Mamma beamed. ‘Oh, that is good! I’ll be able to come up with some juicy-licious raps with that one.’

  ‘Later, G-Mamma,’ said Abe shortly. ‘For now, I want you to look at this.’

  He flung open the door behind him, and they all stepped through on to the external platform at the top of the SPIral staircase. Janey gasped. There in the paddock below them were a few dozen long-haired blonde sheep, glowing like pink clouds as the sun seeped over the horizon.