Read Online Monster Mission by Eva Ibbotson - Free Book Online Page A

the hill … He’s coming closer … He’s coming here!’
    Aunt Myrtle came to stand beside her. ‘He’ll be coming to visit Daddy,’ she said.
    ‘They’re good friends,’ explained Coral to the bewildered children. ‘They think alike about the world – you know, that the old days were better.’
    Standing by the open sitting room door, they watched bravely as the stoorworm slithered into the hall, slithered up the first flight of stairs, along the landing, up the second flight … In his bedroom they could hear the Captain shouting, ‘Come along, my dear fellow, come on in,’ and the front end of the worm went through into the Captain’s bedroom while the back end was still in the hall trying to lift its tail over the table.
    Fabio had stopped feeling frightened but he was becoming very suspicious. ‘Is there anything we have to do to the stoorworm?’ he asked. If the mermaids needed scrubbing and the seals had to be given a bottle four times a day, and the boobrie’s food had to be wheelbarrowed up a steep hill, it seemed likely that the stoorworm too would mean hard work.
    And he was quite right. ‘It’s a question of seeing that he doesn’t get tangled up,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘In the water he’s all right but you will see a few trees we’ve stripped of lower branches – those are stoorworm trees and when he’s on land we help him to coil himself round them neatly, otherwise he gets into knots. It’s best to think of him as a kind of rope, or the flex of a Walkman.’
    Fabio didn’t say anything. He had already gathered that when Aunt Etta said ‘we’ she meant him and Minette – and she went on to explain that the worm was a person who liked to think about important things like Where has yesterday gone? or Why hasn’t God made sardines without bones?
    ‘The trouble is he’s so long that his thoughts don’t easily get to the other end, and that upsets him,’ said Etta. ‘He wants to have an operation to make him shorter, but you must make it clear that we will not allow it. Plastic surgery,’ said Aunt Etta, fiercely tapping her nose, ‘is something we could never permit on the Island.’
    ‘If you’re bothered by his breath you can always give him a peppermint,’ said Coral. ‘Though why everyone in the world should smell of toothpaste is something I have never understood. And now you’d better go and fetch the barrows from the hill.’

Chapter Six
    ‘We must start to think seriously about running away,’ said Fabio sleepily.
    ‘Yes, we must,’ agreed Minette, yawning.
    They had gone on saying this each night – it was almost like saying their prayers – but they hadn’t got much further. It wasn’t just that they would have to steal the Peggoty from the boathouse, they would also have to know in which direction to sail her. And of course running away has two parts to it. There is running away from somewhere and there is running away to somewhere.
    ‘It’s all right for you,’ Fabio said. ‘You’ve got two proper parents. All I’ve got in this country is an awful school and awful grandparents.’
    ‘Yes.’ But Minette was doubtful. If she ran away to her father, her mother would be cross and if she ran away to her mother, her father would be cross. ‘I’d just like to wait till the boobrie’s laid her egg.’
    And in the end, before they could make further plans, the children always fell asleep.
    But as the days passed there was one thing that really annoyed Fabio, and that was Lambert.
    Fabio didn’t mind working hard. All the same, he and Minette both had blisters on their hands from trundling the wheelbarrows up and down to the loch; Minette had strained her wrist trying to get a comb through the old mermaid’s tangled hair; and both of them were bruised by the young seals bumping and flopping against them as they gave them their bottles. And there was Lambert doing nothing – absolutely nothing – except kicking and screaming and throwing his food