Read Online Charlie and the War Against the Grannies by Alan Brough - Free Book Online Page B

finding secret wigs and secret doors.
    â€˜Here it is,’ said Hils. ‘The wig.’
    There it was. The wig. A ladies’ wig. It looked like it used to be blonde coloured. Now it was alley coloured.
    But it was definitely a wig.
    The wig was right in front of a wall that had so many plants growing out of it that it looked like a garden had stood up and not been able to work out what to do next so had decided to lean against the wall.
    Hils looked at the map. She then started pushing bits of wall-plant out of the way.
    â€˜The secret door must be here somewhere,’ she said. ‘Come and help me look.’
    Hils was excited. She was right to be excited. This was an exciting double-secret situation. I was trying hard not to be excited. I didn’t want to get excited over anything The Lurker had anything to do with.
    The next thing I knew I was standing next to Hils, pushing wall-plants out of the way.
    â€˜This is so exciting,’ I said.
    â€˜Affirmative.’
    Hils dug both her hands into a big clump of grass halfway up the wall.
    â€˜Owww!’
    â€˜What?’ I said.
    â€˜I just hit something hard,’ said Hils.
    We both started grabbing handfuls of grass and tearing them off the wall.
    A few handfuls later there it was.
    A doorknob.
    A secret doorknob.
    A secret doorknob on a secret door.

    The secret doorknob was really old and rusty and didn’t look all that exciting or special but I knew that it was definitely a secret doorknob.
    Even though I had never seen a real secret doorknob before I had read about a lot of secret doorknobs and I knew that secret doorknobs never look that exciting or special. They never look like they’re the way of opening a portal to a secret world. They don’t glow. They don’t glitter. They don’t
suddenly grow teeth and try to chew your hand off
. Secret doorknobs are always really ordinary looking.
    â€˜We’ve found it,’ I said. ‘We’ve found the secret door.’
    Being able to say ‘We’ve found the secret door’ is a really, very, super cool thing to be able to say.
    â€˜You should open it,’ said Hils.
    I grabbed hold of the secret doorknob and pulled.
    Nothing happened.
    The secret door didn’t open.
    â€˜It doesn’t work,’ I said. ‘It’s not the secret door. See! I told you The Lurker didn’t know anything and couldn’t find secret doors. The Lurker is stupid. Dumb The Lurker.’
    â€˜Charlie,’ said Hils. ‘Why don’t you try pushing the secret door, not pulling it?’
    I grabbed hold of the secret doorknob and pushed.
    The secret door opened.

    The Lurker was still dumb though.

26
THE HOUSE
    Hils and I walked through the secret door.
    It led into an old house.
    It was the untidiest house I had ever seen. Bits of everything were lying everywhere.
    You know when your parents say, ‘Go and clean up your room this instant it’s a disgusting mess’? Well, imagine they were right. Imagine that even you had to admit that your room was a ‘disgusting mess’.
    Times your actually-disgustingly-messy room by a million and that’s what the house we were standing in was like.
    Only slightly messier.
    And more disgusting.
    There were big, jagged holes in all the walls.
    The ceilings were brown and saggy.
    A broken toilet lay on an old rotted couch. The broken toilet had a cracked aluminium cooking pot sticking out of the bowl. In the cracked cooking pot was a pigeon. The pigeon gave Hils and me an angry stare.
MESSY THING IN THE DISGUSTINGLY MESSY HOUSE
MOST LIKELY EXPLANATION FOR THE MESSY THING
Big, jagged holes in all the walls.
A giant robot – with a nose that sneezes cannonballs – caught a cold in the house.
Ceilings all brown and saggy.
A giant mum ran out of giant nappies for her giant baby. So she used the house as a nappy.
Broken toilet – with a pigeon-filled cooking pot in the bowl – lying on a