The Lightning Catcher (10 page)

“Yeah, and if you've got more than a thousand starlings sitting in your pockets, then you've probably got pirates in your family somewhere!”

Beside him, Angus could see Indigo grinning.

They spent the rest of a very long day with the hailstone helmets, with Catcher Sparks allowing them a mere twenty minutes for lunch, which unfortunately included a sumptuous golden treacle tart.

“Looks a lot like melted earwax, doesn't it?” said Dougal, prodding the sticky pudding warily with his spoon.

 

The following morning, they arrived in the experimental division to find a mountain of muddy rubber boots waiting for them, each of which had to be hosed down, checked for punctures, and rewaxed. On Wednesday, Catcher Sparks left them knee-deep in fluffy blue earmuffs, which had to be shampooed, combed, and set in miniature rollers before being arranged under an enormous hair dryer.

On Thursday morning, however, they were ordered out of the experimental division by the frosty lightning catcher, who informed them that for two hours every week, they would be attending lessons on fog with the rest of the first-year trainees. Fog lessons took place in one of five astonishing weather bubbles. Made entirely of ornate steel and glass, bursting through the outer walls of Perilous like giant soap bubbles, the extraordinary classrooms appeared to float in midair, hundreds of feet above the ground.

“Whatever you do, don't look down!” Dougal warned as they entered the bubble and found two seats together.

Angus stared straight through the glass and steel beneath his feet, and instantly wished he'd taken Dougal's advice. A long way below them, a seagull soared on the breeze. And below the seagull . . . there was nothing but angry gray clouds. Angus gulped, hit by a sudden wave of vertigo.

“What's wrong with using a normal classroom, with a solid stone floor?” he said, trying not to think about the terrifying drop below. After several anxious minutes, however, he was starting to believe that the bubble wasn't about to plummet to the earth with everyone in it. And by the time their fog instructor, Miss DeWinkle, arrived, he had plucked up enough courage to watch a flock of geese flapping past.

Miss DeWinkle was short and stout, with an impressive collection of double chins and ruddy cheeks.

“Fog,” she announced as she came bounding into the bubble with frightening enthusiasm, “is a wonderful enigma, a beautiful, mysterious phenomena; it is also one of the most exciting forms of weather you will ever study at this Exploratorium. And the weather bubble is the perfect place from which to observe its unique qualities. Over the next few months, you will be introduced to all seventeen different types of fog . . .”

“There's seventeen types of fog?” Dougal whispered.

“Yeah, Edmund Croxley told me all about them on my guided tour,” said Angus, glad to know something useful for a change. “There's amusing fog and confusing fog, and waist-high whistling fog or something.”

“Whistling fog?” Dougal stifled a laugh behind his hand. “And I thought all it did was make your socks soggy.”

“Shouldn't we be having lessons on lightning bolts and blizzards and stuff like that too?” Angus asked, hoping someone might also teach them more about Edgar Perilous, Philip Starling, and the exciting history of London's lost lightning towers.

“'Fraid not.” Dougal shook his head. “Looks like we're stuck with fog for the whole year.”

“. . . you will explore the dazzling beauty of the foggy morning,” Miss DeWinkle continued at the front of the class. “You shall observe the hypnotic power of the swirling mists, with the help of your weather watches. In the meantime, however, there are fog lamps and foghorns to come to grips with.”

Despite Miss DeWinkle's obvious enthusiasm, Angus quickly decided that fog was duller than a week of wet Sundays, and as Miss DeWinkle launched herself into a long and tedious lecture on the history of the foghorn, he found his attention drifting.

This was the first time he'd seen the other cubs, apart from the odd glimpse at mealtimes, since they had each been assigned to their own lightning catchers. Nigel Ridgely was sporting a sunburned neck and ears, and Angus guessed that he'd been sent up to the roof, to clean thermometers and empty out slimy buckets of water. Indigo was sitting next to Nigel, and she gave Angus a brief smile before staring down at her notes again.

Millicent Nichols and Jonathon Hake were both looking rather pasty and dazed, and he decided that they must have gone to the research department. He was just wondering if anyone had been unlucky enough to get Gudgeon as their master lightning catcher, when something small and soggy hit him hard on the back of the neck with a splat.

“Ow!”

He spun round in his seat to see Pixie and Percival Vellum doubled over with silent laughter at the very back of the weather bubble, a ruler and a row of paper pellets lined up on the desk in front of them.

“Yes, what is it, Doomsbury?” Miss DeWinkle had stopped talking and was now watching him. “Do you have something interesting to say about the invention of Septimus Scrimshaw's silent foghorn?”

“Er . . . no, miss,” Angus said, turning to face the front again and rubbing the back of his neck.

“Then I suggest you stop gazing around the weather bubble and take some notes,” Miss DeWinkle added tartly. “I will be setting a test on Mr. Scrimshaw's groundbreaking invention in your next lesson, and anyone scoring less than eight out of ten will find himself copying out every single one of Arthur Atkinson's ‘Five Hundred Mistical Thoughts on Fog.'”

Angus reluctantly pulled his workbook and a pen toward him, still smarting as Miss DeWinkle returned to her notes.

“What's up with you?” Dougal mumbled under his breath.

“Vellums.” Angus glared over his shoulder at the smirking twins, and he sincerely hoped that they had both been assigned to the Lightnarium.

The rest of the lesson passed at a snail's pace. Septimus Scrimshaw, it seemed, had taken an exceptionally long time to invent his silent foghorn, especially as he had become hard of hearing toward the end of his life, and Angus was extremely glad when the bell rang and their first fog lecture finally came to an end.

“We shall continue on our journey through the fascinating history of the foghorn next lesson,” Miss DeWinkle shouted above the noisy babble of voices. “Before you go, however, I'd like you each to take a copy of the
McFangus Fog Guide
and study it closely.”

Angus looked up quickly.

“The
McFangus Fog Guide
will be your constant companion during your first year at Perilous,” Miss DeWinkle said, holding up a copy of the book to show them. “It will guide you through your first no-way-out fog, it will shield you from the sudden, clammy dangers of the wet-dog fog, and if you are extremely lucky, it will reveal to you the elusive and sometimes deadly mysteries of the great invisible fog itself!”

Angus took a copy from the pile that was being handed round the room, passed the rest on to Dougal, and studied the front cover with interest. The
McFangus Fog Guide
was bound in smart emerald-green leather with gold lettering across the front. Inside, on the first page, there was a large warning printed in red ink:
Danger! Invisible fogs can be deadly—approach with caution.
On the page opposite, the contents listed such interesting-sounding chapters as “What to Do When Fog Is Following You” and “Fog Mites: Truth or Travesty?”

Angus turned the fog guide over in his hands, wondering if his mum and dad had finished helping Scabious Dankhart over on the other side of the island yet. And when he might be seeing them again. And, more importantly, if they could somehow fix it so that he and Dougal never had to attend another fog lecture.

There were plenty of things that Angus did enjoy about being at the Exploratorium, however. For a start, he had discovered on his first day that Dougal's room was right next door to his, and that they were separated by what appeared to be a tiny hidden room. The room could only be accessed through a narrow door in Angus's bedroom, which had been concealed behind a moth-eaten wall hanging of a violent typhoon, and through an identical door in Dougal's room—behind a tall chest of drawers that had taken them over an hour to move. Due to the fact that the hidden room had been littered with old newspapers and candy wrappers and covered in muddy footprints when they'd first discovered it, they'd quickly nicknamed it the Pigsty.

The room itself was long and narrow and barely wide enough for the two battered armchairs, the small round table, and the copper kettle and chipped mugs that had been left behind by its previous occupants. There was a small fireplace and an even smaller window, and it was extremely enjoyable indeed just to sit there with a hot mug of cocoa after a long day of scraping toenails from the inside of somebody else's rubber boots, discussing everything they'd learned about Perilous so far.

It was common knowledge, for instance, that Catcher Brabble, who worked in the Lightnarium, had been struck by lightning fifteen times. Nobody, however, seemed to know what was hidden behind the door to the Inner Sanctum of Perplexing Mysteries and Secrets.

“There's loads of rumors flying around about top-secret inventions and killer rain clouds,” said Dougal one evening as they discussed the fascinating subject. “Or maybe—hey, maybe it's completely empty, and that's the big secret!”

Angus also enjoyed mealtimes, since they gave him an excellent opportunity to watch the other inhabitants of the Exploratorium. Both he and Dougal had been very surprised to learn from Catcher Sparks, however, that there were just sixty trainees at Perilous in total.

“This is an extremely busy Exploratorium, Doomsbury,” she had explained rather huffily. “We simply haven't got time to tackle wayward blizzards and hurricanes, and train hundreds of cubs, all at the same time.”

Angus had already seen most of the older trainees laughing and joking their way along the stone tunnels and passageways. They also occupied some of the noisier tables at mealtimes and were constantly being shouted at by an irate lightning catcher called Howler.

“I won't tell you again, Grubb, Strumble, Follifoot—put those pet mice away! This is a kitchen, not a zoo!”

Angus was equally surprised to discover that there were over a hundred lightning catchers at Perilous.

“That guy rubbing the wart on his chin is head of the records office,” Dougal told Angus one evening, while they were eating an extremely tasty dinner of mashed potato and juicy Imbur sausages. “His name's Thistle or Fristle or something. The guy sitting next to him is Jasper Heckles, he's friends with my dad, keeps coming round to our house to play cards.”

“The woman pretending to listen to him has something to do with monsoons,” Angus added, waving a forkful of sausage in her direction. “I heard some fourth years talking about her. Apparently everyone at Perilous hates her because she makes you camp out in the weather tunnel for eight whole days during your monsoon training. Her name's Miss Rill.”

“Who's the lightning catcher sitting next to her, though?” Dougal frowned.

Angus almost choked as he realized that Dougal was staring straight at Felix Gudgeon.

“I—er, haven't got a clue,” he answered quickly, looking away before Gudgeon noticed them both staring in his direction.

He'd done his best to avoid the gruff lightning catcher ever since the dramatic events at the ferry port, especially as Gudgeon was often seen around the Exploratorium with Principal Dark-Angel. And he had no desire to spend any more time with either of them.

Angus found the lightning catchers fascinating, especially as they often appeared in the kitchens with singed eyebrows or odd-looking contraptions clamped under their armpits, which tended to explode or burst into flames without warning. And he couldn't help imagining what it must have been like back at the very beginning, when Philip Starling and Edgar Perilous themselves had first come to the island and built the great Exploratorium.

He did not enjoy his trips to the library quite so much, however. Mr. Knurling, the new librarian, chased off any lightning cub who was foolish enough to enter his dusty realm, making it practically impossible to borrow any sort of book at all.

As the days passed, Angus also found it increasingly difficult to keep his promise to Principal Dark-Angel and lie about who he really was. Several times he toyed with the idea of telling Dougal that his real name was Angus McFangus and that both his parents were lightning catchers. He was also tempted, while he was at it, to tell him about the strange appearance of Gudgeon at the Windmill in the middle of the night, along with the trouble they'd had at the pier with the sinister men and the storm globe.

He'd already attempted it twice, in the privacy of the Pigsty, but for some reason the right words refused to come. Private conversations in the kitchens were too at-risk from eavesdroppers. In the experimental division, Indigo sat right beside them, scraping stubborn barnacles off submersible storm detectors or trimming the frayed cuffs off hurricane suits. And in the end, Angus decided he'd just have to wait for the right moment.

It came sooner than he'd expected, one Friday evening after dinner.

They were met just outside the kitchens by a sudden flood of trainees and lightning catchers, all heading in the same direction and talking excitedly.

“What's going on?” Angus said.

Before Dougal could answer, Edmund Croxley cut his way across the tide of people toward them.

“Ah, Angus, I've been meaning to have a quick word with you,” he said, pulling them to one side and lowering his voice. “I hear you've been assigned to Catcher Sparks in the experimental division.”

“Er, yeah. So?” said Angus.

“Well, I was wondering if there was any chance that you could get my fog aficionado badge back for me while you're in there, the one the storm vacuum swallowed. It's no good being a fog expert if you haven't got the badge to prove it, and quite frankly, people are starting to ask some very awkward questions.”