Skeleton Island Read online

  “Shut up, yourself,” Wanda snapped. And then she said, “This is all your fault, Araminta. If you hadn’t brought Nora and Cora here and tried to scare them, this would never have happened.”

  “No,” I told her. “If Nora hadn’t taken away the ladder this would never have happened.”

  We didn’t say anything to each other for quite a while after that. It is boring enough being stuck in a pit full of bat poo even with someone to talk to, but if you have decided never to talk to that person ever again—which I had—then it is totally boring. So I was really pleased when after a while, Wanda said, “Do you want to look at the fairy, Araminta?”

  Wanda has a watch with a pink fairy on it. It is very silly. The fairy’s wings are the hands of the watch showing the hours and minutes and the fairy’s wand does the seconds.

  “OK,” I said.

  So we watched the fairy for a while, and after we had watched the wand going around at least five times, Wanda said, “We have been in here a whole hour now.”

  And then, suddenly, she grabbed my arm. “Araminta! Did you hear that?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Shh … listen.”

  So I did. And then I heard a faint ting-ting, ting-ting in the distance. Miss Gargoyle was ringing her bell.

  “Brilliant!” I said. “The boat’s going soon.”

  Wanda looked very upset. “It’s not brilliant at all,” she said. “They’ll be going without us.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I told her. “Miss Gargoyle or Bossy Bella will see we are not there and so they will ask Nora and Cora where we are. And they will have to tell them. And then everyone will come and rescue us.”

  Wanda did not look convinced. “Suppose Nora and Cora don’t tell them?” she said.

  “Not even Nora would be that nasty,” I said.

  But I was wrong.

  No one came at all. Once we thought we heard footsteps and we yelled, “We’re here!” and then, “Help! Help!” But nothing happened. Nothing at all.

  But a good chief detective does not give up. “I’ve got a plan,” I told Wanda.

  “What kind of plan?” Wanda said a little suspiciously.

  I took my ball of string from my pocket. “If I tie something heavy around the string, I might be able to throw it over the end of the ladder,” I said. “And then we could pull the ladder down and climb out.”

  Wanda looked surprised. “That is a very clever plan, Araminta,” she said. And then she added, “It’s a pity you didn’t think of it before.”

  There is no pleasing Wanda sometimes. I set about scuffling through the horrible bat poo, looking for a stone I could tie the string to. And that is when I found some real pirate treasure.

  “Hey, look!” I held up a lot of blobs with a big fat blob on the end of it.

  Wanda did not look impressed. “Yuck. It’s a lot of yucky lumps of bat poo.”

  But I knew it wasn’t. I rubbed the fat blob on my jacket and I didn’t care one bit that even more poo ended up on it because I knew that I had something very exciting. A huge white pearl shone in the light of my torch and when I rubbed the other blobs, lots of smaller pearls appeared. “This,” I told Wanda, “is real pirate treasure.”

  Wanda looked puzzled. “That must be Nosy Nora’s necklace,” she said.

  “Nosy Nora said she lost a necklace,” I said. “But I think it was really what Uncle Drac calls a ruse.”

  “She lost a ruse?” said Wanda. “What does a ruse look like?”

  “A ruse doesn’t look like anything,” I told her in my trying-hard-to-be-very-patient voice. “A ruse is a trick. Nosy Nora said that she had lost a necklace but she hadn’t. It was a mean trick just to get us to go into the bat-poo pit. Just think, Wanda, did you ever see Nosy Nora wearing this necklace?”

  Wanda shook her head.

  “You can bet she would have showed it to everyone if it really was hers,” I said, and I could see that Chief Detective Spook had made her point.

  “Yes,” Wanda agreed. “She would have shown everyone. Over and over again.”

  “Precisely,” I said in my chief detective voice.

  It is surprising how discovering pirate treasure can make everything feel better. We soon found the perfect stone to tie on the end of my string and I threw it at the end of the ladder poking over the edge of the pit, but it bounced off the side of the pit, woke up a load of bats and fell back down.

  And that happened over and over again.

  “It’s never going to work,” Wanda said.

  “We’ll have to keep trying. Like that spider,” I said.

  Wanda is not a fan of spiders. “What spider?” she whispered, looking around as if she expected to see a huge spider lurking and listening to us.

  “Oh, it was a Scottish spider,” I said. “A king was in a cave and was having a lot of trouble with king stuff. He was about to give up when he saw a spider trying to make a web. It kept falling off the wall, but every time it fell off, the spider climbed back up again. So he decided to be like the spider.”

  “What, make a web?” Wanda asked.

  “No, Wanda. He decided not to give up.”

  “Oh,” Wanda said. “Well, that’s a good story, Araminta, but I wish it could have been about a nicer animal, like a rabbit or something.”

  “But rabbits don’t make webs,” I told her. “Or climb walls.”

  Sometimes I have a conversation with Wanda that makes me feel as though she is living in a different world from the rest of us. I call this Wanda World. It looks the same, feels the same and everything that happens in it is the same—except there is some tiny part of it that is oddly different. Wanda World is one of the reasons I like Wanda; she makes me think about things in a different way. Another reason I like Wanda is that she knows some very strange things. After I had thrown the stone and missed again, she said, “Let me have a go, Araminta.”

  So I did.

  Wanda didn’t hold the stone—she held the string. She whirled the stone around her head three or four times like a lasso, let go and sent it flying upwards. The string caught on the bottom rung of the ladder, the stone spun around it and it dangled, swinging far above us.

  “Wow!” I said. “Good shot.”

  Wanda looked pleased. “Thank you, Araminta. I used to do this when I helped Dad with his conjuring tricks. I lassoed lots of things.”

  You see what I mean? Wanda is a very surprising person.

  Very carefully, we both pulled on the string and the ladder came down with it. It was easy after that. We put the ladder up against the side and climbed out of the horrible, stinky bat-poo pit and grabbed our rucksacks.

  “They’ve taken our hats!” Wanda said. “That’s stealing.”

  But I was relieved they hadn’t taken our rucksacks. I opened mine to check that Baby Bat’s bat box was still there. It was. We squeezed up through the gulley and the mist swirled around us. I shivered. I was looking forward to getting on to the boat and giving Nosy Nora and Creepy Cora a nasty surprise, but most of all I wanted to get back to Gargoyle Hall. I thought of the fire that is always lit in the hallway to welcome girls back from school trips. I was so looking forward to us sitting around the fire drinking hot chocolate and talking about the things we had found. I reckoned that a genuine pirate necklace trumped any number of boring rocks and grasses.

  Wanda was way ahead of me and I was still scrambling up through the gulley when I heard her yell, “No! No! Come back, come back!”

  I ran as fast as I could and I very nearly fell over Wanda. She was blocking the path and staring out to sea. I had a really bad feeling. “Wanda, what’s the matter?”

  “They’ve gone without us,” Wanda said.

  I didn’t believe her. I knew that Miss Gargoyle would never leave any of her girls behind. But when I looked, I saw that Wanda was right. There was the Fat Seagull chugging away from Skeleton Island.

  “Wait for us!” I yelled. I jumped up and down and Wanda waved her yellow jack
et above her head. “Come back! Come back!”

  But the Fat Seagull was disappearing fast around the headland—and then she was gone, heading off home without us.

  Wanda looked at me. “We’ve been marooned,” she said.

  We couldn’t believe it.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would Miss Gargoyle go without us?”

  “I bet it is something to do with Nosy Nora and Creepy Cora,” Wanda said as we walked slowly back down the path.

  “They can’t be that horrible, can they?” I said.

  “They left us in that stinky bat pit for hours,” Wanda said. “That was pretty horrible.”

  Shipwreck Beach was empty. The tide was right out now and the sand shelved gently down to the water, where the eerie shape of the shipwreck loomed up, and on the horizon out to sea where the Fat Seagull had headed, a massive black cloud was lurking. The dark cliffs rising above the empty beach made everything feel very gloomy.

  The wind was beginning to blow and it was getting quite cold now, so we decided to go and sit in the big hut where we had eaten our packed lunches. I was sure we would feel better once we were inside the hut. Then all we would have to do was to wait for the Fat Seagull to come back and pick us up—which I knew Miss Gargoyle would do as soon as she discovered we were missing.

  We climbed up the steps and crossed the jetty, the sound of our footsteps echoing off the cliffs. I noticed Wanda was tiptoeing, but I decided to walk properly—after all, who was going to hear us? There was no one on Skeleton Island but us. Somehow that thought didn’t make me feel any better and by the time we reached the door of the hut I was walking on tiptoe too.

  The door was locked. Not only that, but there were metal shutters on the windows, pulled down and padlocked.

  “What are we going to dooooo?” Wanda said in a weird, waily whisper.

  There wasn’t much we could do. “We need to find some kind of shelter,” I said.

  “I know we do,” Wanda said. “But where?”

  “Well … we have to stay by the jetty so they can see us when they come back for us,” I said. “So I reckon the best thing to do is to make a camp in that fallen-down hut on Shipwreck Beach.”

  So that is what we did. It would have been quite fun if we had been playing at making the camp, but because it was real it wasn’t fun at all. Luckily Wanda had her pink fairy fleece blanket in her rucksack and we spread that on the ground beneath the tiny bit of the roof that was still there and then we put our yellow Gargoyle Hall school-trip jackets over the little bit of roof. We stood back and looked at it. It wasn’t the best shelter ever, but it would have to do.

  “I suppose we are a bit like Robinson Crusoe,” Wanda said.

  Now, I know all about Robinson Crusoe. It is a book about someone in the olden days who got stranded on a desert island for years and years. “But we are not going to be stuck here for ever, like he was,” I said.

  Wanda got picky again. “Actually, Araminta, he wasn’t there for ever,” she said. “Robinson Crusoe was only on the island for twenty-seven years.”

  “Twenty-seven years!” I said. “We will be ancient by then.”

  “I know,” Wanda said gloomily. “We will have to go straight from boarding school into an old people’s home.”

  I tried to imagine living on Skeleton Island for twenty-seven years and it was a horrible thought. And then Wanda piped up, “But Robinson Crusoe was rescued by pirates. And that would be fun, wouldn’t it, if we were rescued by pirates too?”

  “Personally,” I said, “I would rather be rescued by Miss Gargoyle coming back in the Fat Seagull. And right now, not in twenty-seven years’ time.”

  Wanda sighed. “Actually, so would I,” she said.

  We sat in the shelter to test it and it seemed quite cosy really.

  “I’m hungry,” Wanda said.

  I was hungry too, but I had been trying not to think about it because I had eaten all my lunch in the hut. But when Wanda pulled the rest of the stuff out of her rucksack and laid it out on the pink fairy blanket I felt much better. She had brought six whole packets of gummy bears with her.

  “Wow!” I said. “You kept those a secret.”

  Wanda looked smug. “Of course I did,” she said. “There was no way I was going to share them with Nosy Nora and Creepy Cora.” She looked at the packets and said, “I suppose we ought to count the bears.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, we will have to ration them, won’t we? There are about sixty in each packet, so let’s say …” Wanda began to count on her fingers “… let’s say we have three hundred and sixty bears, then that is almost one a day for a whole year … so for twenty-seven years that is one gummy bear every twenty-seven days. So if you count the missing six days it is almost exactly one gummy bear a month.”

  “You mean half a gummy bear a month,” I told her. “Because as we are best friends, we will be sharing them.”

  Wanda sighed. “Yes, I suppose we will.” She looked at me. “But, Araminta, no one can survive on half a gummy bear a month!”

  “Wanda, we are not going to be here for twenty-seven years, OK? Because we are not Robinson Crusoe. It was only a silly story anyway.”

  “It wasn’t silly,” Wanda said, snappily. And she took the gummy bear packets and piled them up beside her like they were all hers.

  I decided to unpack my rucksack. I took everything out of my pockets too and I laid it all out on the pink fairy rug. I had:

  One torch.

  One ball of string.

  One bat box containing: one Baby Bat.

  One empty lunch box.

  One long squiggly piece of satsuma peel.

  Two broken pencils.

  A two-pence coin covered in sticky stuff.

  One damp toffee covered in fluff and grit.

  And …

  One whole bag of pink shrimps that I had totally forgotten about!

  Wanda loves pink shrimps as much as I do. She looked at the bag and her eyes widened. Then kind of casually, as though she was just tidying things up, she moved the gummy bears back into the middle of the rug. “Actually, Araminta,” she said, “I think we should share everything out. Then we can decide for ourselves whether to eat half a gummy bear a month or eat them all at once.”

  “OK,” I agreed. And we divided all the food—even the satsuma peel and the fluffy toffee—into two piles.

  Wanda looked at the two piles of gummy bears and pink shrimps. Then she said, “You are right, Araminta, Robinson Crusoe was only a story.” And she picked up a pink shrimp and three gummy bears and stuffed them into her mouth.

  We had got through about half our pile of sweets when a rustle from the bat box told me that Baby Bat was waking up. That scared me a little because Baby Bat does not wake up until the sun is setting and I wasn’t looking forward to being on Skeleton Island in the dark. I didn’t want to frighten Wanda, so I just said, “Bother. Baby Bat will be expecting to be let out for her evening fly around our room, but I can’t let her out here. She’ll fly away.”

  Wanda looked at me with her eyes wide. She looked just like a hamster with its cheeks full. “Urrsernt Burrby Burr a hurrmer burr?”

  And because I had just put six gummy bears and a pink shrimp in my mouth to try to forget about the sun nearly setting, all I could say was, “Urr!”

  Gummy bears and pink shrimps mixed together are hard to prise off your teeth, so I jumped up and flapped my arms to show Wanda that I was very excited—because what she had just said was, “Isn’t Baby Bat a homing bat?”

  Wanda was right. Uncle Drac had given Baby Bat to me so that I could always send a message to him from school if I wanted to. He had trained Baby Bat and even given me a little message clip to put around Baby Bat’s leg. At last I said, “Wanda, you are really, really clever!”

  Wanda looked very surprised. “Am I, Araminta?” she said.

  I sat down and began scrabbling in the front pocket of my rucksack, which I had for
gotten to empty. Right at the bottom, in a little plastic pouch, were three message rings and a pencil. The message ring was really thin and tiny—just like Baby Bat’s little legs—so there wasn’t much space to write.

  “You could write, ‘Help!’” Wanda suggested.

  “That’s not much use,” I said. “We have to say where we are.”

  “How about: ‘Dear Uncle Drac, help, we are stuck on Skeleton Island on our own and it is nearly dark, love from Araminta and Wanda’?” asked Wanda.

  “Don’t be silly, there isn’t space for all that,” I said.

  “Well, what is there space for?” Wanda asked snappily.

  “About five short words or four long ones if I write them small,” I said. And then I wrote: Marooned Skeleton Is. Araminta.

  Wanda looked at it and frowned. “Marooned skeleton is Araminta …” she said. “That’s creepy. Why have you put that?”

  I sighed. “I haven’t put that. It says Skeleton Island. You can write island like that, just I-S.”

  Wanda looked cross. “Well, that’s just stupid,” she said. “And you haven’t put me on it either.”

  In the end we settled on: Help! Marooned Skeleton Island. A+W. I wrote it in my tiniest, neatest writing and then very carefully, I got Baby Bat out of her box and, holding her gently, just like Uncle Drac had showed me, I clipped the message around her leg. Then I whispered, “Baby Bat, go home to Uncle Drac,” and I threw her up into the air.

  Baby Bat looked really surprised. I suppose it was a shock to be in the open air and not in our little room at Gargoyle Hall. She flapped around our heads in a zigzaggy, batty kind of way and I was afraid that she didn’t understand about going home after all. We jumped up and down, waved our arms and yelled, “Go home! Go home!” until Baby Bat flew one last big circle, flapped down the beach and headed out to sea. As she disappeared into the twilight, we heard a distant rumble of thunder.

  “I hope she will be all right,” I said. “It sounds like there’s a thunderstorm out there.”

  “I hope she will too,” Wanda said gloomily.