Where Is Clyde?

…

Remember the noise I heard? The one that caused me to abruptly stop blogging? Well, it was nothing. The wind.

Not that that matters, not now.

We were ready. We had our plan, we had our kit, we were all ready. The Dark Citadel was less than a mile away.

We took a deep breath.

We stormed towards it…

And there was no-one there.

Nope.

No-one.

Just a note.

I really don’t know what to say.

Breather!

Finally we can rest. And there’s Wi-Fi here! I can’t believe our good luck. Timmy has informed me that ‘Fortune is smiling upon us.’

Hmm.

So we arrived in this weird other dimension, whose name we can’t pronounce, late Friday night (or early Saturday morning) and quickly realised that we weren’t anywhere near where the Hunchmen have taken Clyde. Our guide Sqknnnnnwg, who we met shortly afterwards, said we probably didn’t let the music play for long enough before we stepped through the doorway (which was bright and purple and flashy and pretty darn cool). Where you end up when you arrive depends on the duration of the music.

Anyway. We materialised in a blue field, with no landmarks for miles, although luckily we could see pretty well because this world has SIX MOONS.

Yes. Which means that it’s bright as you like during the day, and not much dimmer at night. Everyone wears sunglasses to bed.

The second thing we realised when we arrived (the first being “we’re not supposed to be here”) was that although we had come through the gateway, none of our stuff had. So we were in a field, in an alien universe, with no stuff. Not even the Vimto. I started to panic, I’m not ashamed to admit, but Timmy kept a cool head and immediately said ‘let’s go this way’. There was no reason that we should be going that way, but Timmy said it and I agreed, because there was nothing else to do.

After a while we came across Sqknnnnnwg, whose species, the Numkumberbumpwins, are indigenous to this world. He looks kind of like one of those trolls you used to get with the brightly coloured hair, except fatter and covered in brown jam. He doesn’t speak much English, just enough to get by. Apparently he visited our world once, and is not keen to return. Timmy eventually worked out that he’d visited Scunthorpe, which explains why he didn’t want to come back.

He knew of the Hunchmen, but not of Clyde. He explained that he was a farmer, but that a mysterious plague had killed all of his livestock. It was the same all the way across the country (it’s a really, really, really big country, by the way, hence us walking pretty much solidly for five days). He’s been trying to make a living harvesting the slime that occasionally pops up from blisters beneath the blue grass in the fields, but nobody really wants it because it’s useless. So he was just wandering around and happened to find us, and we explained our predicament and he made some calls.

When I say calls, I mean literally. He has a kind of a mouth organ / trumpet contraption which he uses to shout to people far away. They pick up on the specific frequency of his call and then reply. After a lot of really tuneless shouting he managed to tell us that the Hunchmen took Clyde to The Dark Citadel, home of some extremely evil, extremely mysterious creatures that no-one really knows anything about. Nobody goes near them, and I was fully expecting Sqknnnnnwg to tell us to hop it, but he’s pretty happy go lucky, and said he was bored.

So he helped us gather some supplies, and we started to walk. Miles and miles of blue fields. Blue trees as tall as the sky. Weird blisters that pop when you walk on them, covering your shoes in a purple gunk which smells like brown sauce. And occasionally a six-trunked elephant so big I couldn’t see its top. They just amble around the place not doing very much. Every now and then they crush a village.

Timmy loves it here. I can’t wait to go home.

A couple of times we came across bandits, other members of Sqknnnnnwg’s species who’ve taken up lives of crime. Each time, Sqknnnnnwg fought them off, not with weapons but with a technique he calls Psy Expulsion. Basically, it’s a hallucinogenic burp. He burps in their faces, and something in the expelled air gets into their brains and makes them hallucinate wildly, giving us time to run away.

Timmy loves Sqknnnnnwg. He’s starting to grow on me, to be honest, although he has accidentally burped in my face a couple of times. The first time I thought I was being eaten alive by shoes. The second time was so terrifying I’ve actually repressed it. I don’t have a clue what happened. I’m sure it’ll come back to haunt me.

So nearly five days of walking, with the occasional stop for food and to try and find Wi-Fi. Patches of Wi-Fi just occur naturally in this world, and they’re the only concrete (for want of a better word) link back to our world. This is the first time we’ve been able to stop for long enough to do a proper blog post. I’m using Sqknnnnnwg’s computer, which is kind of like a toy piano and a typewriter that have had an accident and become fused together. It’s quite hard to use.

So that’s the story so far. We’re doing OK, although I spent most of the time being terrified for my life. Even when there’s nothing there.

Don’t worry, Clyde.

We’re coming for you…

Hold on…

What was that noise…

The Plot Thickens… Again

Another post from the mysterious blogger. This time there was a picture of Clyde. Have a look - http://qoooqoooq.blogspot.com/2011/11/blog-post.html

It’s got Timmy pretty worried. Me too, to be honest. At least this person seems like they’re a friend, but it’s somewhat on the cryptic side. They say we only have until Saturday… what does that mean?

They haven’t hurt Clyde… yet. What does that mean?

‘Well,’ said Timmy, as if talking to someone very young, old or stupid, or all three, ‘obviously it means they’re going to hurt him. But they haven’t yet.’

Thinking about it, that was pretty obvious, I suppose.

Timmy still hasn’t managed to glean any clues from the songs. He’s learned to play them all on the piano - his Minute Waltz is particularly impressive - and learned all the lyrics off by heart. But there’s still nothing to connect them. And if Timmy can’t work it out, I certainly can’t. I’m barely hanging on to my sanity as it is. Dad’s started talking with a Scottish accent and he’s filled the whole kitchen with what he’s calling The Great Edinburgh Gateaux, and I’ve been living off old cereal for the last couple of days. There was a moth in my Weetabix this morning.

‘I’m going to figure this out,’ said Timmy, after reading the new blog post for the umpteenth time, ‘and then we’re going to go and rescue Clyde.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Get back to your sword,’ he added, and then went and shut himself in his office again.

I suppose I’d better be getting back to my sword, then.

The Last Song

Song number four of four is up at http://qoooqoooq.blogspot.com/

Once again, I am baffled. Timmy keeps stroking his chin like some bearded child genius, and he nodded as though the new song made some kind of sense. However, he wouldn’t explain it to me and went and locked himself back in his room.

So. We have Magic Moments, My Patch, Chopin’s Minute Waltz and now Unsquare Dance. Not much links them. The first two are similar-ish. The latter two both feature the piano. Don’t think any of them are in the same key, although I don’t know anything about keys (my dad smashed my trombone because he said the sound made him want to give me up for adoption). I don’t want to say this to Timmy, but I can’t help but think that maybe this whole blog is some kind of red herring.

We’ll see, I suppose…

The Plot Thickens…

This morning a card arrived for Timmy in the post. It had this on the front.

I wondered if it was just some mean person rubbing salt in the wound, but then Timmy showed me that there was something written inside.

Just this - “http://qoooqoooq.blogspot.com”

We followed the link, and it worked, but we’re none the wiser. Timmy has returned to his office to mull it over, and he’s left me with a load of cardboard and parcel tape. Apparently I have to make my own sword now.

The Plan That Cannot Fail

Timmy just marched into my room and gave me this.

The masterplan involves our little sister (aged 5) going around the back of the evil castle on a skateboard, with a ghetto blaster pumping out Justin Bieber songs as a distraction. While this is going on, Timmy goes round the front of the castle with a ladder attached to a pogo stick and retrieves Clyde from the top of the tower.

I pointed out to Timmy that this plan entirely hinges on Clyde actually being kept in an evil castle of this exact design. He replied ‘Well yes, obviously,’ as if I were a complete idiot. ‘I’m making sure we have all our bases covered.’

‘What happens to our sister when you’re retrieved Clyde?’ I asked.

‘Once I’m clear with Clyde, you rescue her with a sword,’ replied Timmy. ‘That’s part of the plan, but I ran out of room on the paper.’

‘I don’t have a sword,’ I said.

‘I’ll make you one,’ said Timmy. ‘Now I have to go. The lightbulb needs further study.’

And off he went.

The Case of the Black Marker Pen, and Where It Led Us

Timmy woke me up at seven, desperate to start investigating. I told him I definitely, one hundred per cent could not be seen to get up before ten, otherwise Mum and Dad would start making me do chores early in the morning. He dutifully went back to his room and carried on devising his master plan, and came back at five to ten. This time he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

There are three different shops in town where one could purchase a black marker pen. The first, the newsagent at the end of our road, hadn’t sold one in weeks, so Timmy crossed them off his clipboard (the kid loves clipboards). We then went to the supermarket. They hadn’t had any in stock for a few days, so Timmy gave them a question mark.

Then we went to the other newsagent at the top of the town. The small, smelly man who talks like Rod Stewart coughing said he had in fact sold a black marker pen the day before yesterday. ‘To whom?’ asked Timmy. Kid loves saying “whom”.

‘It was over that newfangled Internets,’ replied the small, smelly man. ‘Had to have it delivered to the woods on the other side of the town. No name or nothin’.’

‘To the woods!’ cried Timmy. I suggested that we ask the small, smelly man for more details, but Timmy was adamant, and just kept on crying ‘To the woods!’

So we went to the woods, to the spot where the black marker pen had been delivered. And this is what we found.

‘A lightbulb?!’ cried Timmy. ‘How devillishly incongruous!’

‘Mm,’ I said.

We looked around a bit more but could find nothing else out of the ordinary. So, suitably confused, we took the lightbulb home to add it to the evidence pile. Which currently consists of one lightbulb. Then Timmy retired to his bedroom (or his office, as he insists we refer to it) to “speculate on the lightbulb’s origin” and I went to have a sandwich.