Miles Byfar

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Miles Byfar and the Christmas Spirit

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Miles Byfar

by RS Harding

Monster Books

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The Creake Castle series is dedicated to Major Francis Budd, otherwise known as ‘Grandpa’

Miles Byfar and the Christmas Spirit (LA&CS Ltd 3233613. Monster Books) Originally published in Great Britain by Monster Books The Old Smithy, Henley-on-Thames, OXON RG9 2AR All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

The right of RS Harding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Text copyright RS Harding Illustrations copyright Rob Rayevsky This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN 0-9532261-4-6 soft cover A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Printed in Great Britain by Anthony Rowe

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Late afternoon in the library ‘I’m not always in the middle of things,’ said Fred, quite suddenly and for no real reason. It was coming up to Christmas, and he was sitting with Kit, his best friend, Polly, who was Kit’s Spaniel puppy, and Wellington; a cat of No Known Origin.

‘Really, you surprise me,’ said Kit, keeping her nose firmly pointed at the large book she was reading, on Garden Fairies (illustrated with 504 plates, by the Very Reverend A. Gibbon).

At that point in time, her nose could reasonably be described as red. She had a bad cold, and Fred was sitting with her in the library in front of a roaring fire – to keep her companyor so he said. Kit suspected that he had only come for the large cake that Mrs Bee, the housekeeper at Creake Castle, had made, and the fact that he had a captive audience. Her. ‘Did I ever tell you about my second cousin, Miles?’ he said.

‘Here we go,’ she thought. ‘Fred, how many relatives do you actually have?’ She looked up to see Fred pouring another cup of Kit’s cocoa into Kit’s mug and taking a big gulp.

‘Hundreds,’ he said, absentmindedly wiping the chocolaty

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froth off his mouth. ‘Maybe thousands. We Longshanks are anything but impudent.’

‘I really don’t think you mean that.’

‘Probably not. Anyway, do you want to hear about my cousin Miles, or don’t you?’ Outside, the pale winter sun was slipping below the trees at the end of the park, and frost was beginning to gather on the tips of the grass. Kit glanced around the library, at the roaring fire, the comfy cushions stacked on the ancient sofa and at Fred’s bright face. She closed her book and smiled at him.

‘Why not?’

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Chapter One

Wendover Backwoods Now quite a number of years ago, Miles Byfar, my second cousin, lived in a modern bungalow, near a town called Wendover Backwoods. It is the sort of place that has a multistorey car park, a bus station, one large roundabout and about a million hairdressers.

A bungalow isn’t a bad place to live for a number of reasons, although all very different from Creake, I would imagine. First of all, there is no chance of falling down the stairs on dark nights by mistake, and secondly a bungalow can be useful for getting places quickly. In fact, Miles very rarely used the front door. He just climbed out of his window, straight into the back garden, and went to school.

This upset Miles’s grandparents, Dot and Reg, who both lived in the bungalow with him. His father had moved out when he was very young, and his mother refused to talk about him or even say where he was living. Sometimes this made Miles so angry that he felt almost dizzy; other times he just felt grateful that his mother hadn’t left him too, and that just made him feel pathetic. His mother worked for a computer firm, selling software, and she was away nearly all the time, driving up and down the country from one large 1

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town to the next. Miles’s knowledge of towns in Britain was probably better than his Geography teacher’s, Ms Geelong, from ‘Sunny Australia’ as she was found of saying on less than sunny days in England.

When Miles’ mother did come home, it was only for a few days at a time, and it was usually to bring Miles presents and take him to McDonalds, followed by a walk around the zoo.

To be honest, Miles was fed up with the zoo, but he never quite had the courage to say anything, in case his mother got her feelings hurt and stopped taking him, and then he would have even less time with her to himself.

All things considered, though, Miles’s life was generally okay. Dot and Reg were always very kind to him, although they were quite quiet and a bit boring. Home was all right, if you didn’t mind gnomes and plastic flowers all over the place. Even school wasn’t so bad – it was only about ten minutes’ walk away, and although he didn’t like the majority of his lessons, he had roughly the right amount of friends, and most of the time the teachers just about remembered his name and left it at that.

One thing that he had to admit was pretty good, though, was the presents his mother got him.

Out of all the kids at his school, St Dunstone’s, he got the best computer-related presents by a long, long way. Last Christmas, his mother had bought him a computer from her company that was incredibly fast, so powerful he could store 2

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his whole games collection on the hard drive, and had more than enough gadgets for Miles not to have to leave the house for a year. He honestly wouldn’t have minded if there was a nuclear war and he was stuck underground for months, just as long as no-one turned the electricity off. His mother had even got him a broadband connection.

Of course, Miles knew the expensive presents were to make up for the fact that she was never exactly there to spend quality time with him, and what’s more he knew that his mum knew this too. He wasn’t stupid and nor was she – but when he thought about it for a bit, he came to the conclusion that it was sort of a secret that they both shared and, in a way, Miles quite liked that. He sometimes thought that the presents and the unspoken secret about the presents were the only things that he had in common with his mother anymore, or at least the only things he shared with her that no-one else did.

I mention all this because it is important. Miles was basically a normal kid but one who was a bit lonely perhaps and who missed his parents, certainly.

Everything usually happens for a reason. If Miles had had a mum to shout at him more and give him pointless jobs to do, and a proper dad who went to work and came home every day, probably grumpy – and, what’s more, if Miles himself had spent less time looking pointless things up on Google, and more time reading mind-improving books, then 3

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none of the strange and incredible things I am about to tell you would have happened.

Anyway, he didn’t, so they did. So here goes.

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Chapter Two

You’ve got Mail It was mid-December. Pretty much Christmas.

The trees had finally completely given up on looking nice, and now stood about the park in little groups, looking leafless, damp and sad. The local shopping centre had put its decorations up in late August, but Dot had only just bought hers. As usual, it was just a circle of holly sprayed silver and gold, which Reg was busy nailing to the front door when Miles arrived home from school.

‘Mello Miles,’ he said through a mouthful of nails. ‘Mood mday gat schoom?’

‘What?’ said Miles, stopping his bike and getting off.

‘Snorry. I mean, sorry,’ said Reg, finally getting rid of the last one and banging it in with a thump that made next door’s dog bark under the fence, ‘…had mouthful of nails.’

‘So I saw,’ said Miles. Reg had a habit of stating the obvious. Things like: ‘I went to the shops today and got soaked to the skin. It was raining,’ as if you might have thought that someone at the checkout had chucked a bucket of water over him.

Miles inspected the silver wreath that now hung from the door. He didn’t much see the point of decorations. They didn’t 5

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generally come with software. ‘Do you want a hand putting up anything else, Granddad?’ he asked, turning around. But Reg already had his back to him, busy bending down polishing one of the gnomes next to the ornamental pond.

‘No, son, that’s all right. I shan’t be a minute, your grandmother has made a pie and she won’t want it getting cold.’

‘All right,’ said Miles, noticing for the first time that Reg was actually using an old pair of Miles’s underpants to polish the gnome. ‘See you in a bit then.’ It seemed somehow wrong to him, using underpants for that.

As Miles pushed the bike around the back, he smiled as he remembered how ever since a film came out where someone had their gnomes stolen and taken on holiday, people had started taking the gnomes out of the back garden at night.

The whole lot sometimes. Even the one with the fishing rod that stood by the ornamental pond in the middle of the front garden and looked like he was peeing if you squinted. Dot and Reg were horrified that someone would nick them and for a while every time they went for a walk, Reg would spend most of it peering suspiciously over people’s hedges and fences to see if he could find his missing gnomes.

Later, when they had given up hope of ever getting them back, postcards would arrive and Reg would read them over breakfast.

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‘Having a smashing holiday,’ they usually said.

‘Wish you were here. Back soon, luv, G. Nome and Company.’

The best bit was when there were pictures with the letters of Dot and Reg’s gnomes sitting in the sand at the beach or in front of well known monuments. But it was typical of the people in his neighbourhood that nobody went anywhere more exciting than Blackpool with the Gnomes.

Reg never generally found out who stole his Gnomes and took them on holiday. But a few weeks later they would get up to find them all back in their old places in the garden, looking a trifle sandy but otherwise all right. It had become a sort of neighbourhood hobby.

To that day, Reg had never been able to see the funny side.

‘Gnomes just don’t do that sort of thing,’ he would say, managing admirably to look cross and hurt at the same time.

Miles waved at his grandmother thorough the kitchen window and sloped into his bedroom through the back door.

He hated this time of day, when there wasn’t enough time to do his homework before supper and it wasn’t worth getting too involved with anything very much. Instead he spent a few minutes fiddling around with a couple of simple little games he had got for free out of one of his computer magazines. They were all rather lifeless and boring. He stopped when he heard his grandmother taking the plates out of the bottom cupboard.

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As he was washing his hands in the bathroom sink, he felt the tips of his fingers give a strange tingle. He took them out from under the stream of water and looked at them. Funny, they had been doing that a few times recently. Especially when he had been playing on the PC. With his fingers still itching a bit, he dried his hands and wandered down the corridor to the kitchen, where his grandmother was fussing about amongst clouds of steam from the potatoes.

‘Oh, there you are, dear. Have you washed your hands?’

‘Yes, Gran.’

‘There’s a good boy. Well, I’ve made you and your Granddad a lovely pie. Sit yourself down and I won’t be a tick.’ Dot was nice enough, but she still talked to Miles as if he was two.

‘Gran?’

‘Yes dear?’

‘What makes your fingers tingle?’

‘Well, I really don’t know. Why don’t you ask Granddad?

He’ll know. He’s obsessed with his health these days.’ Just at that moment, Reg walked in from the garden. ‘Oh, here he is,’ she said through a cloud of steam, as she tipped the vegetables into a strainer.

‘What’s that?’ said Reg, scraping his chair back and sitting down with a surprisingly loud squeak. He half stood up again, and removed one of Snow White’s plastic mice from 8

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the seat. Snow White was the cat, who was now very old, and very forgetful. A bit like Miles’s grandparents.

‘Well, the garland’s up, dear,’ said Reg, forgetting about Miles’s question and turning around to watch Dot carefully lift something burnt out of the oven just after he had sat down again.

‘Oh, lovely. After tea, I’ll go out and have a look. Woollies were doing them 20% off after the 15th but I thought, well, Christmas only comes once a year as they say, and we haven’t had a new garland since Mrs Batch’s guinea pig got into the garage and ate the plastic berries off the last one. Do you know, she had the nerve to complain afterwards? ‘Fleur has never been right after that,’ she said, as if it were our fault her guinea pig is nothing but a common thief. ‘Well,’ I said, not giving an inch, ‘nor has our rosette, so I suppose that makes us about even.’ That sent her off with a bee in her bonnet, I can tell you. She cut me dead at the Church Bring and Buy last week. More fool her. More carrots, Miles?’

‘No thank you, Gran.’

And so supper went on. A couple of times, Miles tried to bring up the question of tingling hands, but each time it seemed that something more interesting cropped up in the conversation, and Miles and Miles’s fingers were gradually forgotten. Eventually even by him.

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much attention to what was going on in his life. He had been over at friends’ houses enough times to know that sort of thing happened in most families. It was just that lately he’d started taking it more personally and he didn’t really know why.

After supper he helped Dot do the washing up for a bit, until she shooed him away. So he went into the lounge, to find his grandfather watching the golf highlights on BBC2.

It couldn’t have been in England, because it looked hot and sunny. Probably America. ‘I wonder what Christmas must be like over there,’ thought Miles. He then thought about the chances of waiting until Reg fell asleep, which he was bound to do soon, and then turning over to see the film on ITV that came on at 9. But he thought better of it. Past experience had shown him that the second he turned over, Reg always woke up, yawned and said something like: ‘I was watching the golf,’ in a hurt way. Miles had even tried pretending the programme was over and that his grandfather had slept until the end. But Reg, who had been retired for a couple of years now, knew the TV guide almost as well as Miles did and would always turn back, and then Miles would feel bad that he had told a completely stupid lie. Instead Miles went back to the kitchen. ‘Gran,’ he said, leaning over the Formica tabletop, ‘I think I’ll go up to bed. I’m feeling quite tired, actually.’ His grandmother looked up from where she was stowing away the saucepans and frowned.

‘Are you sure that you are feeling all right? Old Mrs 10

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Taplow said she saw you coming back from school today and she said that you looked a bit peaky. You might be coming down with something.’

This time he just shrugged. ‘No, I’m feeling okay, Gran, just a bit tired. I think I’ll just get an early night. Goodnight.’

‘Oh all right then,’ said Dot polishing another saucepan energetically. ‘Goodnight Miles, sleep tight. And don’t go spending too much time in front of that computer of yours.

Or go falling asleep in your clothes again.’

‘No, Gran.’

In fact this was just what Miles was planning to do. But he promised himself no more than half an hour on-line and then a quick game of MecCommander 5 or Total Annihilation 10, and then he’d be off to bed. He would get up early and do his homework in the morning.

Ten minutes later he was sitting at his desk, punching in the password on the computer. That was when he felt the tingling again in his fingers; but he ignored it as the Home Page came up.

‘YOU’VE GOT MAIL,’ said the computer, in the American voice they always give them, and at the same time a strange icon came up on the screen in front of him.

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CHRISTMAS IS COMING………………… flashed up on the screen in red letters, capped with what was meant to be white snow, and with a couple of bits of holly stuck at the end. ‘Junk mail,’ thought Miles as he prepared to bin it. But just then the banner melted and changed.

BEWARE it said. Miles paused. ‘Funny thing to say,’ he thought. He waited a moment, his hand on the mouse hovering near the screen close ‘x’.

The screen blinked again and started to change once more. Abruptly Miles felt the tingling in his fingers intensify.

Far more uncomfortable than it ever had been before, like a series of small electric shocks, gradually getting worse. And then he felt a sudden icy blast of wind brush across his face, as if it had come straight from the computer itself. Miles looked at the window to see if it was open. It wasn’t. There was a sort of chuckle, and the groan of cold air down a chimney.

GO BACK the screen flashed.

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DON’T UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CLICK DOWNLOAD So of course Miles blinked and clicked ‘Download’.

The sound and the feel of the wind increased around his bedroom, until Miles was sure it was coming straight at him from the monitor. The screen showed that the download was almost complete, as the computer seemed to open up before him and the wind blew some sheets of paper off the desk.

Then, quite suddenly, the bedroom lights went on.

It was his grandfather. ‘Hello son,’ he said, the light in the hall framing his head like a halo. ‘Your grandmother sent me up to check you weren’t spending too long on the computer.’

Quickly Miles hit the cancel button on the download and turned the monitor off. He was still a little stunned by what he had just seen, but he managed to fake a fairly believable yawn. ‘No Granddad, just off to bed.’

‘Right you are then. Goodnight, my boy.’

‘Goodnight.’

The bedroom light went off again and Miles was back in almost darkness, except for the small bedside light in the corner.

He really didn’t know what had just happened to his computer. He sneaked a look around the back, just in case there was something there, where all the cold wind had suddenly come from. He didn’t perhaps want to know what 13

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had happened for the time being, he had to admit. His hand was even shaking a bit. Instead he dived into bed and pulled the covers over his head and tried not to think about it.

Miles didn’t go to sleep for ages that night, but when he did, just as he was dropping off, he thought he heard the distant sound of sleigh bells and the howl of wind, far, far away.

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Chapter Three

School The day started at about 7 o’clock in the morning, and showed the world that it had tried to snow during the night, but had given up sometime around 6 o’clock and then decided, rather spitefully, to rain instead.

Miles walked to school head down, stamping through puddles of slush and trying to ignore the cold air that swirled around him. All he could think about still were his tingling fingers, hearing bells in his room before he went to sleep and the strange, un-computer-like behaviour of his computer.

Without having to think about it too hard, he knew that they were all related. He hadn’t dared turn the monitor on that morning, but he was determined to get to the bottom of it tonight.

‘CHRIIIIST-A-MUS!’ yelled Miss Geelong at the top of her voice as the class sat down for their first lesson. She was one of those teachers who emphasised everything but writing what she’d just said, and so, predictably, she wrote ‘Christams’ on the whiteboard, and added two large question marks for good measure. ‘WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US?!’

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‘Miss?’ said Thomas Cunningham from the back, as the class started to giggle. ‘………….WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?’ Miss Geelong continued, ignoring Thomas. She was shouting so loudly that the big windows at the back rattled.

‘Miss!’ said Thomas a little more loudly, as the rest of the class caught on and started to giggle too.

‘OH YES, WE ALL LIKE THE PRESENTS AND THE FOOD AND THE DECORATIONS…..!’ Miss Geelong was obviously in a world of her own.

‘MISS!’ By now there was a group of giggling and laughing pupils at the back, all pointing at the board and waving their arms about as if they were trying to get the attention of a passing helicopter. Miss Geelong, who, as we know, came from Australia, finally got the message and stopped.

‘Yes, what is it, Tom?’ she said in a commendably normal voice. By now Thomas could hardly speak, he was laughing so much, and it took him some moments before he could blurt out: ‘You’ve spelt Christmas wrong,’ as if it was the funniest thing that had ever happened in the history of the whole world. At this the whole class collapsed into fits, and it was nearly ten minutes before everything quietened down again.

Eventually Miss Geelong got cross and made them copy out the lesson from the board, as a punishment. It was all about 16

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The History of Christmas, and Miles sat there resting his head on his arm, writing automatically and waiting for the morning bell to go. Occasionally bits of what he was writing filtered through to him.

‘St Nicholas was a 3rd century saint from Asia who was famous for giving presents to people by putting them down the chimney, Father Christmas never existed…….Christmas was really invented by the Victorians or possibly Coke…

Charles Dickens as Christmas Carroll, plum pudding, holly, people would open their presents the evening before Christmas, hence Christmas Eve……… turkey from America….back home we eat kangaroo…’

Miles fell into a sort of bored daydream and started thinking about his Christmas Day. If he was lucky, his mum would arrive early on Christmas Eve, carrying loads of presents. He wondered what he would get: maybe a mobile phone if he was really lucky. On Christmas morning they would go to church down the road where some of his classmates would go too, their hair neatly brushed and their shoes polished for the first and last time that year. Miles would sit through the service with steam practically coming out of his ears with impatience to get back and see what was in the parcels.

After church they would all go back home, Miles, Dot, Reg and Miles’s mum, and open their presents around the tree. Reg would pour a large sherry for himself, and a small 17

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one for Dot, who would be rushing around trying to get the turkey sorted, and Miles would fire a constant stream of questions at his mother about anything that popped into his head, and his mother would smile and answer patiently.

Miles didn’t much enjoy the rest of Christmas Day. There was never enough time to play with the new presents after lunch, and then there would be a walk down the street to the swings in the park and back, and then the Queen’s speech on the TV and everyone asleep on the settee and then some film on BBC1 that they never seemed to catch the beginning of.

Boxing Day was better. His mum would take the car and take him to his aunt and uncle, who lived in the country, and they would have champagne with orange juice in it and a go on his cousin’s death slide that his uncle had built for them in the woods. And on the way back he would have a great chat with his mother in the car, before falling asleep, exhausted.

The school bell went, and Miles lifted his head with a start, suddenly remembering where he was.

And so the day went on in its usual sort of way and ended in its usual sort of rush as the kids streamed out, pushing past teachers, unlocking bikes and cycling off, or giving each other dead legs on the way to the bus stop.

Miles walked out of school with his head down, with one thing on his mind. His e-mail message.

When he got back home he walked around the back, so as 18

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to avoid bumping into his grandfather, and crawled through the bedroom window. Once inside his room he looked around and noticed that it was very cold. Much colder than it should have been, especially since, as usual, Dot had had the central heating on full blast all day. He went over to the computer and turned it on. It clicked and whirred a few times and said something about checking for viruses. Miles sat down and typed in the password, ‘Kennyisdead’, when he was ready, and watched quietly as the windows flicked up.

His face was thoughtful as he signed on, clicked the Explorer button and looked at his fingers. Waiting for something.

Nothing happened.

He checked his Hotmail.

Nothing was there. His fingers did start to tingle; but then he realised that it was probably his imagination, or his hands had been cold and now they were beginning to warm up. No post, nothing about Christmas. Nothing about anything.

Nothing.

Scary though last night had been, he did feel a little disappointed, and so he sat for a while staring at the screen, flicking the mouse to and fro, waiting for something to happen. Eventually though, he got bored of this and wrote a quick e-mail to his mother about nothing much, and one to his friend Danny down the road about homework. ‘See you at school, you owe me a quid,’ he typed and signed off, to go and do his homework in front of the TV. 19

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Over the hills and across the sea, a lonely robin flitted and flicked itself from one air current to another, eventually landing on a distant shore, where it rested. After a while, it gathered its strength and turned and headed into the dark and very sinister forest behind it, soaring over the snowcapped firs, with the cold air stinging its lungs.

By nightfall the robin had reached its destination: a hut in a clearing in the forest, standing alone in a small pool of light, in the middle of a very, very large pool of darkness. Someone inside the hut was singing: ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS WE WISH YOU A M-E-R-R-Y CHRIST-MAS AND- A- HAPPY NEW YEAR! There was a loud burp and a crash of broken glass, as a bottle came through the window of the hut and landed in the snow, just missing the robin, who was perched nearby. The robin blinked in the frozen air and looked down at the bottle, which had ‘Christmas Sherry’ written on the label. The small brown and red bird shrugged. ‘Typical,’ it thought in its own birdy way.

‘Two weeks before Christmas and already on the sherry. Must have been one of the millions left out for him last year.’ Inside, the singing had started again. The robin looked at the window and caught a glimpse of a red sleeve as it bunged something on the fire. ‘Probably an elf,’ it thought, and turned back into the forest to find somewhere quieter to spend the night.

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Chapter Four

One million quid That night Miles sat up with his grandfather watching television after supper. TV got boring, and anyway it was hot in the lounge, so he went into the kitchen to talk to his grandmother.

‘Gran, can I have a glass of milk and some chocolate biscuits to take to bed, please?’ His grandmother looked up from the knitting magazine she was reading at the kitchen table, and smiled at him in a vague sort of way.

‘Yes, of course, if you like dear. But didn’t you have enough for supper? You’re growing up so fast, you’ll be eating almost as much as your grandfather soon. I don’t know.’

Miles, who liked Dot’s cooking, especially after what he had had to eat at other people’s houses, agreed with her. He took some Jaffa Cakes out of the cupboard, some milk from the fridge, and left the room with a mumbled goodnight.

A few minutes later he was brushing his teeth in the bathroom mirror when he thought he heard something break, what seemed like very far away, but strangely, at the same time, very close by. It sounded very much like glass, so he turned around sharply, but there was nothing there. At 21

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that moment, he felt his fingers start to tingle again. He looked at them: all across the tips he felt tiny prickles, like electric shocks. This time something really was happening.

But, then, almost as suddenly as it started, the tingling stopped.

Miles went back to his bedroom, a little disappointed, and sat on the corner of his bed. I must be going bonkers, he decided. There was no other explanation. Stark staring bananas. Doolally. Cloud Cuckoo. He still had the certain sense of something big about to happen. ‘I wish whatever is going to happen would just happen all at once,’ he thought glumly to himself, ‘and then I wouldn’t have to put up with the suspense. I could be quietly locked away and let out only on weekends for good behaviour.’ He looked at the computer for a bit and then turned out the light and rolled over, still fully clothed, as usual.

Gradually the lights in the street all went out as people packed themselves off to bed, and bit by bit the street was plunged into almost total darkness, apart from the orange glow of the street lamp in the frosty night air.

In Miles’s room the computer clicked a few times and turned itself on, as Miles rolled over in his sleep.

Ghostly hands played over the keyboard and a ghostly member signed itself up to one of the chat rooms.

WIN A MILLION!!!

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flicked the banner at the top of the screen.

Ghwerufkgheruwfih..///// JUST ENTER OUR CHATROOM AND ANSWER A FEW SIMPLE QUESTIONS!!!

Hu2llihfewui’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’ The banner flashed red and then white.

Red and white Off And on Off And…..on Miles’s eyes flickered and then opened. He looked up with a start and rubbed his face. He looked at his watch. It showed 11.55 pm. Then he looked over at the computer. For an instant part of him hesitated. From where he was sitting he could read the banner easily. Then he read it again. This was incredibly weird. But a million quid was a million quid, and anything like that was worth a shot, even if his computer was acting as if it was possessed.

Maybe, with all that money, Miles’s mum wouldn’t have to work away anymore, and she could afford to come back and live with them. Or maybe it would just be nice to be the richest kid in Wendover Backwoods.

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He rolled off the bed and sat down in front of the PC. There was a box saying ‘enter’ to the left of the site, so he clicked on it. The screen flashed and he read: SPECIAL CHRISTMAS CHAT SITE. PLEASE WAIT……………………..

By now he was fully awake. Miles’s hands tapped the mouse gently, as he wondered vaguely why all the best sites took the longest to come up.

The logo stopped spinning and all of a sudden the screen went blank.

‘HELLO, MILES,’ it said. Miles’s mouth dropped open.

He sat there frozen.

‘HELLO, MILES BYFAR,’ the screen repeated, as if Miles was incredibly stupid and needed to have it spelt out that it was actually talking to him.

The cursor flicked. Miles’s hand reached over to the keyboard and typed: ‘ER, HI.’ ‘‘ER, HI’? WHAT SORT OF AN ANSWER IS THAT?’ It came back in an instant. ‘DON’T THEY TEACH KIDS ANY MANNERS AT SCHOOL THESE DAYS?’ Miles sat up straighter and blinked.

‘SORRY,’ he typed. ‘HELLO,’ and then ‘HOW ARE YOU?’ after he had thought about it for a bit.

‘THAT’S BETTER,’ said his computer. ‘VERY BAD, 24

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SINCE YOU ASK. MY SINUSES ARE PLAYING UP SOMETHING CHRONIC.’ Miles didn’t know what to say, so he typed: ‘SORRY TO HEAR THAT. I DIDN’T THINK COMPUTERS COULD GET ILL.’ The monitor glowed red. ‘HE THINKS HE’S TALKING TO A COMPUTER. ARE YOU SURE THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? I MYSELF DON’T KNOW. HE SEEMS PRETTY DUMB TO ME.’ Although the words were coming up on the screen, whatever or whoever it was seemed to be having a conversation with someone else, so Miles remained quiet. After a bit the screen went from red to pink, and then back to its normal colour.

‘ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, BUT THIS IS HIS LAST CHANCE, I’M A PROFESSIONAL, YOU KNOW. NEVER WORK WITH CHILDREN OR ANIMALS, YOU KNOW THE STORY………… OKAY, MILES BYFAR – ARE YOU STILL THERE?’ ‘YES,’ typed Miles simply.

‘GOOD.

I’M

AN

EMPLOYEE

OF

A

VERY

IMPORTANT PERSON. THAT’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW FOR THE MOMENT, KIDDO. SO LET’S GET THIS OVER WITH. HERE GOES- WOULD YOU, MILES BYFAR, LIKE TO WIN ONE MILLION, IT’S THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME, A VERY LIMITED OFFER, RIGHT? YES OR NO, QUICKLY.’ 25

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Miles paused for a split second. ‘Seems simple enough,’ he thought to himself. ‘YES,’ he typed.

‘WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO TO LAPLAND?’ ‘NO,’ Miles typed; it sounded cold.

‘LOOK KID, DON’T GET CUTE. YOU WANNA WIN A MILLION, YOU GOTTA GO TO LAPLAND, ALL RIGHT?’ ‘Keep your hair on,’ thought Miles. ‘ALL RIGHT. WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?’ The screen didn’t do anything for a moment. Miles tapped the desk. Somehow he had forgotten he was talking to a stranger in the middle of the night on a computer that had turned itself on. The cursor started to move; it all seemed very natural.

‘E-MAIL YOURSELF.’ ‘WHAT?’ typed Miles. Chat rooms were nearly always full of crackpots; he avoided them in general, and this was getting silly.

‘YOU HEARD ME, KID. IT’S SIMPLE. E-MAIL YOURSELF.’ Miles frowned at the computer screen for a moment.

‘HOW DO I DO THAT?’ ‘JEESSUSS! IT’S AS EASY AS THIS. GO TO ‘E-MAIL’ ON THIS SITE ONLY, ‘ATTACH’, TYPE IN ‘MILES BYFAR’ AND HIT ‘SEND’. YOU’LL SEE.’ Miles had never heard anything so stupid in his life, and 26

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didn’t believe for a minute that it was actually possible.

This was his first big mistake.

But, then again, this was probably why he went into the ‘compose mail’ screen ‘attach’ and typed his name and hit ‘send’. A million was a million, after all, and he was fully awake now and not doing anything else. Oddly, as he was doing it, although he didn’t believe for one second anything would happen, he felt his heart beat faster, thumping in his chest so loud now that Miles thought he could hear it.

Then the screen went blank and Miles sat there looking at it. He had heard that there were a lot of strange people in America, if that’s where the person at the other end was speaking from. Then again, it might have been someone trying to sound American. He had to admit, they’d had him going for a mom…

And at that instant Miles’s world exploded into a million pieces of sound and light.

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Chapter Five

North Pole Time revolved.

Miles felt himself floating, turning very slowly one way, and then very fast in another direction, rather like a bottle caught in a strong current of water, twisting along the path of a river. When he looked at his hands they seemed to have grown to ten times their normal length and his feet, he was shocked to discover, were spiralling away in the distance. He looked like a long piece of string, with his head at one end and his feet getting smaller as they got further away at the other.

Miles was worried that he might snap for a moment, like one of those rubber dolls you could twist and pull and turn into strange shapes, until one day the rubber got dry and brittle and they came apart, and you had to buy a new one from the newsagent’s.

Then, just as suddenly as it had all started, it stopped.

Miles’s world came slowly into focus and he found himself standing, quite unexpectedly, in a clearing in a forest, surrounded by snow and a howling gale. It was also very dark.

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He looked at his feet, peeping out of his pyjama bottoms, and was glad to see that they had returned to their normal size without any obvious damage, but shocked to discover that they were already turning light blue with cold.

Going from the warm comfort of his bedroom to appearing here via e-mail was so unexpected he could hardly begin to think about it. He had already forgotten all about the million pounds. Normally he liked snow. Quite a lot, actually. But there was altogether too much of the stuff out here for his liking. And in his pyjamas, with no dressing gown or slippers, he had to admit that he wasn’t exactly dressed for the occasion.

‘Godda ged ouda da cold,’ he muttered to himself, his teeth chattering like a couple of demented castanets. It was then that he noticed, not far off, a cottage, nestling in the corner of the clearing. Smoke was coming out of the chimney, and from one of the windows there came rather an inviting orange glow, all warm and homey. Without pausing to think of the consequences, Miles began to hop gingerly through the snow towards the side of the hut, where he could just make out a door. ‘Where on earth am I?’ he asked himself, wrapping his arms tighter around his body to keep out the cold. ‘Oh please God, let this be a dream. It must be the cheese I had before going to bed. They say that gives you nightmares. I’ll never touch the stuff again, I promise.’

As he got nearer the hut he heard the sound of singing 30

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coming from inside. ‘Well, at least whoever is inside is in a good mood,’ he thought as he finally got to the door.

Carefully, Miles stretched out a hand and tapped on the wooden planks.

Almost immediately the singing stopped, and Miles heard the sound of something glass being dropped on the floor.

‘Who’s there?’ boomed a man’s voice. Through the door, it sounded more scared than angry. Miles felt a bit of his courage come seeping back into his frozen limbs. If whoever it was was scared of a knock at the door, then he didn’t have too much to worry about.

‘Er, it’s Miles,’ said Miles rather stupidly.

There was a pause. ‘Miles what?’

‘Miles Byfar.’

There was a slightly longer pause this time. ‘What’s miles by far? That isn’t even a sentence. Unless it’s a riddle. Or one of those ‘knock knock’ jokes. Is it a ‘knock knock’ joke? I like those.’

Outside in the snow, Miles couldn’t even feel his head anymore, he was so cold. ‘No, it’s my name, Miles, and my surname is Byfar. And I’m very cold. Can I come in?’

‘No.’ Miles stood there in the snow feeling as if he was about to burst into tears. He was freezing and it was a school day tomorrow and he wasn’t even wearing his warm pyjamas, the ones with the faded Bart Simpson on the front, and he had 31

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no clue where he was. Then he straightened up. He hadn’t cried, well, not properly, since he was seven, and at ten he wasn’t about to now. At least, so he hoped.

The fact still remained, he was desperate to get out of the cold. Without knocking again or anything, he put his hand on the cabin door and pushed as hard as he could. As luck would have it, the door wasn’t even properly shut, and it swung open with a creak. Miles felt a blast of deliciously warm air hit him. He looked into the room and this is what he saw…

Two chairs and a table in the corner of a room, not much bigger than his own bedroom at home, with an armchair by a roaring fire and something roasting on a metal rod hanging over the fire. In the middle of the room, with a glass of what looked suspiciously like his granny’s sherry in his hand, wearing large black boots and a red jacket, stood none other than someone who looked like Father Christmas himself. He was swaying very gently to and fro and, as far as Miles could tell, he was very drunk.

For a moment Miles was too shocked to speak or to move.

He forgot about the cold and where he was and just gaped, as somebody he had given up believing in when he was five turned out to be very much real, there, large as life and absolutely stinking of cheap alcohol. Miles half expected the Easter Bunny to appear, followed by Spiderman.

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Father Christmas stood there for a moment without saying anything either, and glared balefully at Miles. Miles noticed, for the first time, just how large he was. About double a normal man’s height and size. Easily the tallest human being he had ever seen. If he was a human being, which he probably wasn’t. And all these thoughts ran through Miles’s head rapidly as he was trying to lap up all the strange things that kept happening to him in quick succession, so it came as quite a surprise when Father Christmas opened his mouth and said: ‘Urgh, a boy! Who let you in, you disgusting little brat?’

Miles thought for a minute that he was about to throw him back out into the snow. He looked around frantically for a place to escape to and saw a bedroom door leading to an unmade bed across the other side of the room. If he made a run for it now he could just get there in time to hide under the bed. He doubted whether Father Christmas, in his present state, could bend down enough to get at him without falling over. But nothing happened, so Miles decided that politeness was probably best.

‘Erhem,’ he cleared his throat, ‘you wouldn’t happen to be Father Christmas would you?’ The door slammed shut and Father Christmas went bright red.

‘IS THIS SOME SORT OF JOKE? OF COURSE I’M RUDDY FATHER CHRISTMAS. WHO ELSE DID YOU FINK WOZ GOING TO BE DRESSED UP LIKE THIS, 33

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THE BLOOMING SUGAR PLUM FAIRY!?’ He roared, louder than Miss Geelong could probably have managed, even on a very good day.

Miles took all this in quite calmly and said: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr. Christmas. Did you know, you’ve always been a hero of mine? I was wondering, if it’s not too much trouble,’ he patted his pockets as if looking for a pen, ‘whether I might have your autograph, and then I’ll be on my way. If it’s not too much trouble?’

Slowly the colour drained from Father Christmas’s cheeks and he seemed to relax a bit. He picked up another empty glass and poured himself a very large sherry, the sherry glass looking tiny in his huge hand.

‘Yeah wewl, I suppose so,’ he began to mutter, ‘not that I like visitors, especially not kids. I suppose you can stay for five minutes and then you’re out,’ he said taking a large gulp and pointing to Miles.

Outside the wind began to howl all the more. To Miles it seemed the coldest, most inhospitable place he had ever been, including Wendover Backwoods Bus Depot. Then, slowly, a sort of cunning, sneaky look stole over Father Christmas’s face, as if something had just occurred to him.

‘Tell you wot, seeing’s you’re here,’ he said turned to Miles with a sickly, greedy look on his face, ‘do you wanna buy a Game Boy?’ ‘Er, no thanks, I’ve already got one,’ said Miles as politely 34

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as possible.

‘Oh go on, son,’ said Father Christmas, staggering horribly towards Miles, ‘they’re goin’ cheap this month, straight from China. Black-market, but just as good as the real thing. Even comes with batteries and the new colour screen, ‘ave a look, son, quality stuff or I’m a monkey’s uncle, every boy should ‘ave one.’

‘Er, really no,’ replied Miles backing away as politely as he could. ‘I couldn’t possibly. You’ve been too kind already.’

Father Christmas’s face went dark again. ‘Look, didn’t your parents tell you that it was rude to refuse things from strangers?’

‘Er, actually, no,’ replied Miles. ‘Just the opposite, in fact.’

He was gradually edging around towards the door of the bedroom. ‘Anyway, aren’t you meant to give presents away or something, not try and sell them to people?’

Like a fat spider, Father Christmas’s hand shot out and grabbed Miles by the scruff of his neck. Much faster than Miles had expected. ‘Tell yer what, I’ll throw in a reindeer burger.

‘Ow’s

that

for

an

offer

a

growing

boy

can’t refuse?’

‘Reindeer burger?’ squeaked Miles – Father Christmas’s huge hand was cutting off the air supply and he could hardly breathe, let alone speak. ‘I thought that the reindeer were your friends?’ He couldn’t believe that Father Christmas, whom he hadn’t believed in until a few minutes ago, could 35

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turn out to be such a horrible person, who even ate reindeer.

He had an idea. ‘What happened to Rudolph?’

‘He woz the first to go!’ cried Father Christmas with a nasty laugh.

‘This is it,’ thought Miles. ‘I’m going to end up dead in a made-up land, in a made-up stew, all because a made-up person is peckish.’ But even as he thought this, something unusual seemed to be happening to Father Christmas’s face, which was pressing close up against his. His nose seemed to start to melt and his eyes faded. Miles thought he was going to faint, until he realised what was happening. The familiar feeling of his arms and legs stretching into infinity started again, and Miles felt the pressure of that great big hand disappear bit by bit from around his neck.

Moments later he was back in his bedroom, sitting in front of a switched-off computer, with a pile of snow quickly melting in the top pocket of his pyjamas.

All around there was darkness. Nothing came and nothing went. Not even a breeze; not a breath of air. Not even, as they say, a mouse.

Then came the sound of someone lighting a match in the darkness. The match flared and lit the face of a man. Bleary, red-eyed and bad-tempered-looking. The candle he was lighting flickered and nearly blew itself out, as if it was trying to avoid the man and his breath, which you just knew was smelly. There was a pause as the man coughed and spat 36

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onto the floor. Briefly, he lowered the candle to look at whatever it was had come out of his mouth. He pulled a face and straightened up to shuffle across the room. He farted – easily loud enough for the sound to echo off the stony walls.

‘Oh really – must you!’ came another voice, from someone sitting at the far end.

‘Sorry Baws,’ said the shuffling figure, ‘it’s dem toikey sandwiches. They repeats on me sumt’ing rotten.’

There was a slight pause. ‘Did you get him to do it?’ drawled the voice at the far end, as if he really didn’t care to carry on the conversation about turkey sandwiches and what they did to the man carrying the candle.

‘Yes Baws, hook, line and sinker – the boy’s a natural.’ ‘ You mean, greedy and selfish.’

‘Heh heh, yeah, he fell for it, like a... like er...’ there was a pause, ‘like a man falling over a cliff.’

‘Yes, Globule. I don’t claim to be impressed by the comparison, but he sounds just like any other 10-year-old I’ve ever met; let’s hope he is suitably disgusted by our Mr. Christmas, so we can enter phase two of the plan. We’ll be contacting him tonight.’

‘Don’t you tink we should wait a bit? Let him cool off ?’

‘No! Time is of the essence, you idiot, we’ve only got a few weeks until D-Day.’ ‘‘The’-what?’

‘You know. D-Day. The big one.’

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‘Big what?’ Globule’s bottom lip began to drip saliva, just as it probably always did when he concentrated.

‘The Big Day! The one we’ve been working towards.’

‘Oh you means Christmas Day. Oh goody, I love Christmas Day. Presents and holly and mistletoe for kissing…!’

‘DON’T SAY THAT WORD!’ The figure leapt up, casting a huge shadow across the whole of the room. ‘ Uhr, sorry Baws.’

‘YOU KNOW HOW SENSITIVE I AM! All I hear is Christmas Day this, Christmas Day that. But who ever remembers the 26th? Eh? Eh? Oh! But they will regret it.

They will rue the day. Ten miserable centuries of a hangover and unwanted presents, of clearing up and relatives you don’t like – don’t even know half the time! Oh yes, Father Flipping Christmas thought he was sooo clever, with his sleigh bells and his poncey dinga-linging. But he’s having a bit of a hard time now, keeping up with cheap imports, isn’t he? Ha! But I, Boxing Day, will rise from the ashes of commercialism and trample the old man Christmas, until the whole world will be alight, shouting my name. Boxing Day, Boxing Day! Hooray……..Hooray………..aaaaaaarggghh!’

Boxing Day had put his long sleeve into the candle by mistake. The cavern walls were lit up as the figure danced around, looking for the water siphon that had never been there.

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Chapter Six

Same snow, different place Dawn came and found Miles still sitting at his computer, head on the desk, fast asleep. He awoke with a fairly revolting stream of dribble on his sleeve, rubbed his eyes and looked out of the window, where a carpet of snow had settled in the garden and all along his window ledge. ‘Urgh, yuk!’ was his first thought. After the events of the night before, which came flooding back to him now, the way a bad report comes back to haunt you late at night, he had had enough of snow to last a lifetime.

He scratched the back of his head, stretched and wandered into the hallway, down towards the kitchen on his way to get a drink. Drifting down the corridor, Miles looked out of the window into the front garden and onto the street.

Funny, there didn’t seem to be much snow there. Perhaps the council had sent a team of street sweepers out early. He looked at his watch. It said 7.30 a.m. Very early for street sweepers to be around.

As he stood by the kitchen sink, pouring himself a glass of water, he glanced once more out of the back window and noticed that there wasn’t even much snow in the rest of the 39

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back garden, just a huge chunk of it, for about twenty or so feet around his bedroom window. Dry, powdery snow, the sort that you only get when the weather is really cold. Real snow really, not the usual watery slush that’s turned by midday into muddy piles at the side of the road.

Powder snow, just around his room; only around his room.

Without having to think too hard, Miles had a pretty fair idea where it had all come from. Somehow, it must have followed him from the North Pole the night before. If he had been thinking that he could pass the events of last night off as a dream, even a really nasty, realistic one, then now was when he realised that he couldn’t.

His first thought was to get rid of all the snow. But how was he going to get rid of half a ton of frozen water before his grandparents got up? It was impossible. Miles’s head began to spin. Strangely, his first thought was of his mother.

‘What’s Mum going to say when she finds out that her son has gone loopy?’

At that moment his grandmother chose to come in, positively gasping. ‘Miles, Miles! Have you seen what’s been going on outside your bedroom window?!’

Miles stared at her for a moment. ‘I don’t feel very well,’ he said- really not feeling very well at all.

The morning shot by, after the discovery of the strange 40

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snow. As Miles wasn’t feeling well, Dot excused him from going to school, after much tutting and I-told-you-so-ing and this-is-what-comes-of-staying-up-late-ing.

But that didn’t stop the school coming to him, nor did it stop the local press and half the street turning up in his back garden. Mrs. Taplow, the nosey neighbour, had met Dot at the local mini-mart and before the morning was over, Miles had become a local celebrity. A crowd of people gathered at the back of the garden, including Miles’s headmaster, who told everybody that he had just popped round to wish the dear boy well and that he had had no idea at all about the snow, the big liar.

‘Christmas comes early for local boy!’ exclaimed the Wendover Backwoods Evening News. The Wendover Backwoods and Ditton Enquirer, which Dot wouldn’t get on account of it being trashy, went one better.

‘I’m dreaming of a White Christmas’ it said, showing a picture of Miles in his pyjamas, looking out of his bedroom window. ‘Christmas wish comes true for Miles.’ They had even hired a ‘specialist’ from London, who was quoted as saying that ‘extreme localisation in snowfall remains inexplicable in the modern field of science and 41

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meteorology,’ which basically meant he didn’t have a clue either.

Only Miles knew how it all got there. And he was staying put in his room.

Eventually, though, round about lunchtime, the crowd began to slope off. The photographers had got their pictures and the snow was beginning to melt. As soon as they had gone, Reg got a shovel and heaped the remainder of the snow onto the grass, where it wouldn’t damage his crazy paving.

When he was sure they had all gone, Miles got up and drifted into the kitchen and told Dot that he was feeling much better. Dot frowned and took his temperature and then his pulse and finally declared him fit to help her put up last year’s Christmas decorations.

Miles nodded. Anything was better than staying in his room. Besides, he felt like doing something normal and putting up decorations was about as normal as it got. They always did it at school before the last week of term. So this, in a way, was practice.

Every year Miles asked for a real Christmas tree. And every year they put up the plastic silver one, which Reg and Dot both agreed was better for the carpet. One year, Miles had offered to do all the clearing up himself, if, just once, they could have a real tree. But Dot had read somewhere that children could be allergic to the sap in fir trees and had said 42

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no, for health reasons, which was her way of saying that that was the end of all further discussion. Anyway, this year, Miles didn’t mind a bit, and besides, he had other things to worry about.

Whilst putting up the decorations, Miles started to feel more himself, and even wondered what that night would bring. He had been doing some thinking, and had decided that what had happened hadn’t been so bad. Just unexpected. Something was going on and he was very curious to get to the bottom of it.

There was also the matter of a million pounds, which he hadn’t forgotten about. He very much wanted to get to the bottom of that as well. He had already started making plans for the money despite his scare.

That evening he found it very easy to take an early night.

Reg was still on the phone when Miles said goodnight. He was giving quotes to the press and anyone who wanted to hear a quote of any description. As he slipped off to his room, Miles heard him explaining to a local reporter how best to plant out strawberries, something he felt sure the reporter hadn’t asked for a quote on, but was getting nonetheless. He made sure he took some bread and cheese from the kitchen, just in case he needed to spend some time anywhere where bread and cheese were in short supply.

Outside it was pitch dark. Miles locked the window and 43

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drew the curtains. By now he was beginning to feel the first signs of excitement, so he hurried to his room, and got changed into a pair of tracksuit bottoms, training boots and a thick fleece. Then he sat down at his computer.

His hands moved quickly and expertly across the keyboard. As he heard the motherboard beep and squeak, his fingertips gave a now-familiar tingle. He opened his mail site but nothing was there. Miles went in to Compose Mail and typed his name into the attachment box and pressed ‘Send’. Nothing happened, just a slight gust of air. He tried it again and even went into a couple of chat rooms. Nothing, once more. He was beginning to get the feeling that whatever it was at the other end of the computer sending him to The North Pole, it controlled him; he didn’t control it.

Miles leant back in his chair and scratched the end of his nose, something he always did when he was concentrating, and that’s when he heard a noise coming from behind him.

Just a slight rustle and a gentle thump. Slowly he turned around in his swivel chair. There, in the corner of his room, stood a man about his father’s age, or so he would have said if he knew his father, wearing a jumper and a pair of baggy green corduroy trousers.

‘Hello, Miles,’ he said pleasantly, taking a pipe out of his trouser pocket and tapping it on his hand. ‘I’m absolutely delighted to meet you at last. Really I am.’

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Light years away, Father Christmas was just waking up with a terrible hangover and a nasty cold coming on.

‘Oh, my poor head,’ he burbled quietly to himself, sitting on the side of the bed with his head in his hands. ‘I’ve got to pull myself together. I really can’t go on like this.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said a familiar voice. He looked up to see a robin perched on his windowsill, shaking the last lumps of snow off its ruffled feathers.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Father Christmas. ‘Wot do YOU want?’

‘I mean just look at you, you’re a mess,’ continued the robin, speaking directly into his head, as if Father Christmas hadn’t said a thing. ‘You do know what time of year it is, don’t you? Or am I going to have to start pinning the date to your shirt? Speaking of which, when was the last time you cleaned yours?’

‘Oh leave me alone, pleeaaase, my ‘ead feels like it’s about to explode into goo and bits an’ all you can do is bang on about the laundry.’

The robin absentmindedly inspected the ground for worms.

Actually he felt quite sorry for the Big FC, as he was known in the trade. He really hadn’t been himself for the last couple of hundred years, but this time he really seemed to have lost it.

However enough was enough. Everybody had their responsibilities. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he chirped out loud.

FC just shook his head sadly and looked at his hands. ‘How can I? There’s no place for me at Christmas anymore. It’s all 45

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foreign imports and batteries not included, software, hardware, ‘Plug and Play’ – I don’t even really know what a fax machine is, to be honest. Let’s face it, I’m outmoded. According to the Tooth fairy, who was round for dinner last week, I need a new hard drive, whatever that is. Even the elves think I’m an antique. People laugh at me, even the kids – especially the kids.

They just think I’m a fat man, with a beard, who doesn’t even exist. It’s terrible.’

‘There, there,’ said the robin, trying to look sympathetic, which isn’t an easy thing to do when you’ve only got a beak to work with. ‘At least you’ve still got your Christmas Spirit.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ murmured FC, reaching under his bed and taking out an old brown bottle, labelled ‘Christmas Spirit, 100% proof ….of everything you never thought you believed in,’ written in smaller letters at the foot of the label. He polished the bottle with his sleeve. ‘I suppose so. But even that’s not much good. Did you know that there’s something called ‘EBay’? Its means you can buy stuff, practically anything from anywhere around the world, far faster than I can get things to kids. Supply and Demand. I just can’t compete anymore. And now I’m getting visits from hit squads of kids.’ His memory of the night before was hazy. The way FC remembered it, Miles had broken the door down and attacked him, which just goes to show what a dangerous thing cheap sherry can be.

The robin looked at FC through the glass and shook his head. There was no point in talking to him when he was feeling 46

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this sorry for himself. He felt an easterly wind lift the tip of one of his wings. ‘I’m off to talk to the one person who may be able to help,’ he said in his head to no one in particular. ‘Let’s just hope I can get there in time.’

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Chapter Seven

Peter and the Plan Now back in Wendover Backwoods, things were going brilliantly. For the first time in ages, Miles felt that he was really being listened to. Peter – that was how the man introduced himself – was like every slightly weird but kind uncle that Miles had always wanted. What’s more, he was the guy with the million ‘bucks’, as he had put it to Miles in a fake jokey American accent, which had made Miles smile and relax even more.

‘Aren’t bucks less than pounds, though?’ Miles had asked.

Peter had looked slightly cross and guilty for a split second, as if he had just been caught out and wasn’t too pleased. His eyes flashed in a way that made Miles shiver, but just for a moment, and then he had smiled and said in a way that made him sound incredibly impressed: ‘Clever. I do so like that in a boy of your age. Rare, very rare.’ And Miles had immediately forgotten about the look.

In fact, talking to Peter, who had told him he was working on behalf of clients from another dimension, you tended to forget everything. Or at least, everything you thought you had remembered but had unfortunately forgotten, because all that seemed important was ‘what Peter had to say’ and ‘what Peter 49

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thought’, when you were talking to kindly old Peter.

It was all so delightfully simple. As they talked, soon Miles stopped wishing Peter was his uncle, and started wishing Peter was his dad instead. He felt a bit guilty about thinking this at first, then thought: ‘Well, at least Peter takes the trouble to visit me all the way from another dimension.

Dad just left and never came back.’ Which was a bit unfair, and Miles knew it; he had no idea if his Dad even knew where he was anymore, or if his mum would even let him visit.

‘So you see, that’s just the way it is,’ Peter had been explaining about Father Christmas. ‘Of course he is a mortal just like you. And just like you, he sometimes gets a little tired and perhaps depressed-’ Miles nodded intelligently ‘and a little fretful. My superiors have decided, and quite rightly, I might say, that it’s time for retirement. But FC is getting old and he’s a little stubborn. Like a lot of old people.’

Miles nodded again. He understood. He’d been living with Dot and Reg for long enough to know that.

‘The fact is, my dear boy, he just won’t go. And due to ahm…technical difficulties, it’s rather hard to get rid of him.

I mean, it’s not like we can just waltz in and shoot the old codger, right? Ha ha!’

Miles thought that was going a bit far, even for a joke.

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on, patting Miles on the back in a sort of ‘good on you son’ sort of way, ‘and that’s where you come in.’

‘How?’ Miles knew this had been coming, and was desperate to show Peter that he could be useful and grown up and, above all, brave.

‘Ah, I just knew you would be eager to help. ‘Keen as mustard, that’s what that boy is,’ I told my lot downst – I mean….upstairs – ‘and with a heart of gold, ideal for the job.’’

‘Of course I would love to help. As long as it doesn’t involve shooting Mr. Christmas.’

‘Ha ha ha,’ laughed Peter without really laughing, and Miles noticed again, just for a split second, how only his mouth moved when he laughed and the eyes stayed the same.

‘Of course not! We’re all just as fond of him as you are.

Fonder, if that’s possible. But, like I said, your heart is in the right place and that’s the main thing. No, Miles my boy, we only need to hand the job over to someone better suited. But to do that, we need his Christmas Spirit.’

‘His what?’ asked Miles.

‘It’s a bottle-brown-under his bed-can’t miss it,’ rapped out the reply like Morse code, before Miles had had time to blink.

‘Why do you need that? Mr. Christmas has got masses of bottles in his house. For some reason he seems to really like all of them, why’s that one so special?’

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‘Well, Miles, I won’t beat about the bush with you. You’re too sharp for that,’ said Peter, getting off the bed and beginning to pace up and down the room like an eccentric schoolmaster. ‘Without it he can’t do his job. It’s what allows him to deliver all the presents in one night, it’s like a bottle of magic potion. When he realises it has gone, he will finally see, we hope, that he can’t do his job, I mean really can’t do his job, and hopefully he will retire of his own free will without things having to get too nasty. Really, it’s for the best,’ continued Peter, turning to face Miles, ‘sort of letting him down gently.’

‘This may seem like silly question,’ said Miles, still a bit doubtfully, ‘but why me? Surely, you’d be much better at this than me? I mean you actually know him. He probably likes you. The last time he saw me he threatened me with a burger.’

Peter stopped pacing. ‘Quite right, my boy, quite right.

But, you see, he lives in a special part of the North Pole. A sort of protected area and I, I mean we, can’t go there – only children and elves. Something to do with the tenancy agreement with the Land Lord.’ He paused and smiled at Miles cheerfully. ‘Don’t forget too that we will be paying you handsomely for your services.’

Miles hadn’t forgotten, not in the least. ‘But why me, then, why not any other boy my age – or girl?’

‘What, how could you say that?’ Peter looked amazed.

‘After you’ve done so splendidly so far? You’re perfect for the 52

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job. No-one else would do, quite simply. No-one else.’

And that was it. That decided Miles. He’d always known that he was special. And finally there was someone there, an adult, to tell him so, and pay him a million pounds or whatever for it.

‘Okay,’ he said, grinning as though he had suddenly grown twice the number of teeth in his mouth, ‘how do I do it?’

The plan was simple, actually. ‘A quick in and out job,’ Peter explained smoothly. ‘A piece of cake, Guv.’ Miles found a pair of woolly gloves, a baseball cap and he was ready to go. Peter shook him warmly by the hand, saying that Miles had just over half an hour to get the job done, and then he would be immediately transported back to his room, where Peter would still be waiting. ‘Good luck, my boy!’ he said, looking over his shoulder, as Miles typed out his name and hit ‘Send’.

Miles felt a brief surge of pride at the importance of the job he was doing as he hit the send key and then, all of a sudden, came the feeling of floating and then stretching, the rushing of air and the familiar sound of sleigh bells in his head.

‘Whoosh,’ went the freezing air around his ears, as he got to the other end, and ‘FLUMP,’ went Miles, as he landed head first in a snowdrift that hadn’t been there the night before.

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After about five minutes of waving his legs and flapping his arms like a demented sparrow, he managed to get himself free of the snowdrift and start looking around for Father Christmas’s hut. Of course, it was easy enough to find. In fact it hadn’t moved a bit since the night before.

As Miles trudged across the frozen glade in the forest, towards his target, he was watched by a small, beady pair of eyes; glinting at him in the moonlight through the dark foliage of the pine trees.

Properly dressed, by the time Miles eventually reached the door, he had warmed up considerably. Tramping about in snow was a tiring business. He paused for a bit to catch his breath, keeping a sharp eye out all the time for flying bottles and angry men with beards. Funny, though, there didn’t seem to be any sign of any activity in the cottage. No smoke coming from the roof and no lights on.

He took a peek through a crack in the door.

Nobody home.

‘Where on earth could he be at this time of night?’ he wondered. Still, it meant that Miles’s job was easier. So, pushing the door open a crack and keeping nice and low, he slipped into the cottage via the front door. The fire in the grate was nearly out and the remains of last night’s supper sat, un-washed-up and gooey, on the table. An old pair of 54

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socks was hanging by the window and a large box stood in the corner. ‘MADE IN KOREA’ it had stamped on the top.

‘THIS WEE UP’. Miles smirked and tip toed across the room, avoiding the empty bottles, which seemed to be everywhere, until he got to the door of the bedroom.

It was half-open and, through it, Miles could see the corner of a brass bed that he had glimpsed the night before.

‘That’s where it is,’ he thought as he went down on all fours and crawled towards the bed, the blood pounding in his head. And all the time he kept thinking he was about to be discovered at any moment. Once he got to the bed he lay down and, pushing the bedclothes to one side with one arm, he used the other to search blindly under the bed, like a spider looking for dead flies.

Almost immediately, his fingers encountered a cold, round object, which rolled away from his grasping fingers.

‘THAT’S IT!’ he thought and dug his whole arm deeper under the old bed. He pulled the bottle out and read the words ‘CHRISTMAS SPIRIT. PROPERTY OF F. CHRISTMAS, Esq. Keep your feeving hands off!’ someone had written underneath in felt tip. ‘Yeah, I bet I know who,’ said Miles under his breath, just as he heard the front door slam open and shut, and the sound of a heavy footstep in the other room.

Up until now, Miles had been fairly calm, reminding himself every few minutes that he was on an important 55

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mission and that Peter was counting on him. Now, suddenly, he felt his heart jump into his mouth, as he gripped the bottle and wriggled quickly under the bed. The thought of ending up like the reindeer, as part of some fast food dish in a sesame bun, filled Miles with dread. ‘Oh, please don’t let me be caught, please don’t let me be caught,’ he whispered to himself, like a mantra, as he crawled deeper under the bed.

All of a sudden this didn’t seem like such a good idea. Even for a million pounds.

He looked at his watch. He had been there, wherever ‘there’ was, for just over twenty minutes. Another nine minutes and twenty-two seconds to go.

The footsteps circled around the room and he heard the sound of a cork being pulled out of a bottle, then a sort of glug, glug, glug. ‘That’s right,’ he heard Father Christmas say to someone, hopefully himself. ‘Just a wee drop before bed.’

‘Oh no!!’ thought Miles, ‘Not bed!’

‘And I’ll sleep like a baby.’

Miles heard a loud slurp and Father Christmas sit down heavily in his armchair. Then, after a few minutes he heard a loud snore and a quiet burp. ‘Phew,’ he thought, ‘he’s fallen asleep.’ Miles began to relax again. Actually, it wasn’t at all bad under the bed – warm and comfy. He could do with a bit of a snooze himself. Miles grinned: it had been a difficult few days, nevertheless he would soon be a millionaire and he wouldn’t have to go to school anymore. He’d probably buy a submarine 56

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and take it with his mum around the world before retiring in America. But right now he could do with forty winks.

Then, like the worst sort of surprise, the bedroom door opened ever so slowly. Within a split second Miles was wideawake again. ‘It can’t be him,’ he thought; and sure enough Father Christmas let out a great big snore from the other room as if to prove it. Even so, who was it? The sound of soft footsteps approached the bed. Very slowly and very quietly, almost as if the owner of the footsteps knew that Miles was there and was hoping to catch him unawares.

Miles blood ran hot, then very cold as he turned his head to see who it was. From just beneath the bedclothes, hanging down in an untidy mess, Miles saw four black paws padding across the room. ‘Miaow,’ went the four black paws. ‘Miaow, miaow.’ Miles looked at his digital watch. He had set the timer on it. Now it showed he had barely two minutes to go before he was automatically transported back to his bedroom and into safety. ‘I should be all right,’ he thought, ‘as long as that horrible cat keeps away.’

Suddenly, the snoring stopped in the next-door room.

‘Miaow, miaow,’ went the cat on cue; but not, Miles noticed to his horror, making a normal cat noise. It actually said ‘miaow’ like you or I would, in a human voice, as it nudged its way under the bed and looked at Miles with jet-black eyes.

‘Purr, purr,’ it added as an afterthought.

There was a cough and a snort from the armchair. ‘Wot’s 57

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that, Tiddles? Wot ‘ave you found?’

The cat turned around and arched its back, slowly. It looked at Miles, then licked its paw. The cat actually smiled.

A sort of horrible, smug smile, straight at Miles. Miles had never seen a cat smile before, not properly; not a ‘real’ human smile, and it was very, very unnerving. ‘Not much,’ Tiddles suddenly said, in a very human voice, ‘just a boy under your bed. The same one that was here last night, I think. He’s got your bottle of Christmas Spirit.’

‘Oh, I’ll just go back to sleep again…’ There was a pause, whilst what the cat had said sunk in... ‘WHAAT!?’ roared FC. Miles felt like saying the same thing. A talking cat. Now he had seen everything. But he didn’t have time to think about it for too long. With a scrape of the chair and the sound of something flying across the room that had no business flying at all, let alone indoors, Father Christmas burst into the room. A large hand came shooting under the bed, feeling for Miles, who pushed himself out of the way just in time.

‘WHERE’S MY GUN?’ he roared again.

‘Behind the door,’ said the ghastly Tiddles helpfully, and winked at Miles, as if they were best mates.

Miles felt his insides turn to water as FC lumbered towards the door. ‘This is it,’ thought Miles, ‘this is when I die horribly.’ ‘Thanks a bunch,’ he hissed at the cat, who looked at him calmly and scratched its ear.

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‘Sorry,’ it said. ‘Just doing my job. Anyway, he might miss first time. Take off an arm or a leg. Should be interesting at any rate.’

‘Interesting is not the word I’d use,’ thought Miles grimly to himself as Father Christmas burst back into the room like an angry red baboon. Miles saw the shiny end of a shotgun poke itself under the bed. ‘Stew tonight, Tiddles!’ cried Father Christmas, and pulled the trigger. Miles shut his eyes.

He heard a loud bang and the rush of an approaching wind.

Strangely, the last thought that went through his head was of how much he had enjoyed the raspberry and apple crumble at lunch that day.

Time passed.

Miles opened his eyes again.

He was still lying down, but this time there was a draught and it was dark all around him. Pitch black. Darker, it seemed, than anywhere he had ever been in his life. Carefully he felt his body. He couldn’t see it, but it everything still seemed to be in the right place, and bits of him didn’t seem to be missing.

‘I must have done the jump at the exact minute that the shotgun went off. That was lucky.’ Miles could feel his hands shaking, but he also felt tingly and amazingly alive. Like he could run for miles and not get tired. Very lucky. He didn’t think he had had such a close shave in his life. ‘Where on earth, or not on earth, am I?’ he wondered.

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Complete darkness, if you have ever been in a room or any other sort of place with no light, makes you feel dizzy, aswell as rather scared. He was just feeling the floor, which felt like it was some type of stone, when he heard voices, coming from what sounded like the next-door room and saw an orange glow appear- like that of a candle far off down several twists and turns of corridor.

Slowly, being very careful not to make a sound, Miles lifted himself up onto his feet and crept over towards where the light was coming from. As he got closer, the voices got clearer until he could almost make out the words from the low murmuring.

It sounded like two men talking.

Suddenly the voices got much louder, as if the two men had moved across the room, across towards where Miles was hiding.

Miles shrank back against the wall. Most of the things that had happened to him in the last couple of days had taught him to be careful about dashing into dark rooms.

‘Well, Globule, the snivelling, money-grubbing little brat should be back by now.’ Miles’s jaw dropped open. He nearly jumped up and shouted with joy. It was Peter! But it didn’t sound like the Peter he knew at all. The voice was harsh, like nails being drawn down a blackboard – still the same person, just not in the same mood.

‘Yes Baws. I beamed him up about five minutes ago. The server on the PC has been temperimental recently, but it told me he had been sent okay.’

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‘Good,’ came back Peter’s reply. ‘When I get The Bottle off the greedy fool, he’ll be in for a surprise.’

Miles stiffened. They were definitely talking about him. But using words like ‘brat’ and ‘fool’, which he didn’t like the sound of at all. They always said that you never overheard anything good about yourself, but this was terrible. Peter was going to steal The Bottle and get rid of him in some messy way. He couldn’t believe he had been so stupid. He had thought Peter was his friend. And whatever the surprise was, it didn’t sound like it was going to be the sort of one that he would enjoy much.

‘What you going to do with him Baws?’ the American voice said.

‘What?’ said Peter (if that was really his name), offhandedly. ‘Oh, get rid of him somehow.’ Miles’s blood froze in his veins; he’d half hoped he’d been wrong the first time. ‘That Beelzebub fellow always needs people to work the gates and sweep up corpses, that sort of thing, I’m sure he’ll have him for a bit. Kids his age are always going missing. His mother’s never around, I believe, so I doubt that there will be much fuss about it. Still, best be running along. Can’t keep the boy waiting, now can we? Nor my destiny. When I return, Christmas will be mine, along with all the film rights! It’s time we took this holiday into the next century! Ha ha ha!’

Within thirty seconds Miles felt his whole life come apart. It had obviously been a trick all along, and now he was going to turn up dead – or something worse! He suddenly felt dizzy.

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Without thinking he took a step backwards to steady himself.

Something hit the back of his leg and tipped over. By the sounds of things it was something tall and heavy, like a statue.

He heard it rock back and forwards a couple of times as he vainly tried to grab hold of whatever it was to stop it from falling. But he couldn’t see a thing, and the object gave one final tip and crashed to the ground.

‘KAABOOOOM, CRASH!!’ The sound echoed off the stone walls, like fireworks going off all at once in a tin box.

‘What was that?’ came Peter the Cheater’s voice through the door.

‘No idea Baws.’

‘Quick, there shouldn’t be anyone there, you go and investigate.’

But obviously Globule didn’t find the idea of going into the dark room on his own that good. ‘Why me, Baws? Why don’t you go? I’ve got dese bad eyes. Can’t see a ting in the dark.’

Miles looked around the darkness, frantically searching for somewhere to escape to. He had to think of something quick; sooner or later one or both of them were going to make up their minds and come in with the candle to find him.

And indeed, just at that moment, Globule stuck the candle around the door. Miles blew it out.

‘Baws, Baws! Someone’s blown da candle out.’

‘Well of course they have, you idiot! You go sticking your big hand in there like an inquisitive ape. They’re probably 62

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making off with the silver right now. Come on, hurry, we’ll both go in.’

‘This is it,’ thought Miles. ‘Now I am going to die.’ It was then that he remembered The Bottle. Later Miles would tell people that it was instinct, that he just knew that the contents of the bottle he had stolen from under the bed would do something to help get him out of the situation. The plain fact was, though, that he was desperate. At that moment Miles would have eaten, drunk, said, not said, and done anything to get out of that dark room in one piece, and if drinking from a bottle he had no idea what the contents of were might help, then he was prepared to give it a go.

The strange thing was, it was exactly the right thing to do.

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Chapter Eight

Christmas Spirit He tipped the bottle towards his lips and held the liquid in his mouth for an instant before Globule burst into the room and thumped him in the chest. The punch made him swallow instinctively.

The feeling was instantly amazing. More fabulous a feeling than Miles had ever felt before.

In the time it takes to click your fingers, Miles was out of the dark room and floating somewhere white, suspended, as if he was being held in space by invisible but rather expensive cushions. All about him were lumps of cloud, no wind, and delicious warm sunlight, like that of the best day in August.

He tucked The Bottle into the zip-up pocket of his fleece and had a leisurely look around.

He was high up, that was for sure. Surrounded by blue. To move he need only kick his legs and he was propelled forwards or backwards, just as he liked. Funny, it wasn’t cold at all; and when he looked down through the clouds and saw the sea shimmering like ripples of silver foil below, he didn’t feel the least bit scared. It was like floating in an invisible bubble, but one that allowed him to move wherever he wanted, with lazy movements of his arms and legs.

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Miles looked at his watch and noticed that it had stopped.

It might be broken, but he doubted it and anyway, for the first time in weeks, he didn’t care. In fact nothing up here mattered at all. He just felt marvellously relaxed, as if it had all been a bad dream that was well and truly over now.

So he had a short snooze, just to catch up on a bit of sleep.

That, too, was marvellous and very restful. And when he woke and looked down through the clouds he saw what looked like the shape of England far below, just like he had seen it on maps at school.

‘I’ll just pop down and have a look,’ he thought to himself dreamily, having a good stretch.

Down he went, in a graceful kind of swoop. As he got closer, he noticed that all around there were patches of snow on the hilltops, like sugar icing on the tops of cakes. It all looked so perfect and Christmassy, and there he was, warm and snug and protected in his bubble, high up in the atmosphere.

Miles kicked a foot once more and slightly changed direction as he slowly headed downwards and along, further inland. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the long snake of a river, and decided to follow the wriggling path it made through the patchworked countryside. As the river got wider, Miles noticed a town start to form around its banks. ‘That must be London,’ he thought to himself, ‘and that then must be the River Thames.’ And indeed it was. As he flew along the path of the river, it gradually took on the colour of the 66

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morning sunrise, turning from gentle grey to a colourful shade of pink, with tiny flashes of silver, as miniature waves broke against the Embankment. In minutes he was flying good-naturedly over the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Miles was unsurprisingly very pleased with himself and did a couple of midair somersaults and back flips to celebrate. He’d been to London once with his mum, although he hadn’t had the chance to do half the things he wanted to.

But now, he suspected, was his big chance to make up for lost time.

Another

landmark

he

recognised,

Harrods

Department Store, appeared underneath him, draped in bright lights and gold tassels that sparkled and shone in the clear Christmas air.

Slowly he sank to street level. The first thing that he noticed was how quiet it all was. Then he noticed that all the cars and all the people weren’t moving. Not at all. Not one centimetre in fact. It was like they had been frozen in time, he thought to himself, and then realized that it was because that’s exactly what had happened. Miles took out the bottle of Christmas Spirit and examined it. What was this stuff ? He was beginning to suspect he had nicked something quite powerful indeed, and very important for Christmas. If drinking the stuff helped you fly, and also seemed to stop time, then the hard part for Father Christmas, delivering presents every year, was already taken care of. Peter had at least been telling the truth about that. ‘I always wondered 67

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how he did it,’ Miles murmured half to himself. All he would then need were all the presents to deliver.

Speaking of which... Miles gazed at the shop windows in front of him, piled up with Christmas gifts. ‘It’s about time I did some Christmas shopping, I think,’ he said out loud.

First stop, Harrods. It was like a dream come true. Miles went a bit mad from the moment he went in there. Looking around the ground floor at the people frozen in time, he realised that he could do more or less anything that he wanted to. He waved his hand experimentally across the faces of a few rigid shoppers and, when they didn’t move, he went on the rampage.

First stop, computer games, where he stocked up on all the best titles for the PC, a proper joystick and an X-Box for luck, with all the trimmings. He piled them in a heap on the floor and went off to the food hall to fetch a trolley. When he got it all in, he went off to look at hi-fis. The choice was enormous; so he took two, one portable and a midi-system for mini disks and an iPod. At one point he noticed he was getting quite tired, so he went to the top floor café and ate half a tub of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and drank two large Cokes. He was finishing the ice-cream off with a long spoon and the ends of his fingers wiped round the sides of the glass, and just beginning to feel a bit sick, when out of the corner of his eye he noticed one of the waitresses start to move ever so slowly.

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Outside the window, in the busy street below, cars started to crawl forwards and a traffic light flicked from red to green.

Miles looked at his watch and noticed that it had started again. He took The Bottle out and opened the cap. This time he took a slightly larger gulp and closed his eyes. Immediately there came the tremendous feeling of lightness again, as if nothing mattered, and slowly the world about Miles seemed to change. He opened his eyes again and looked out of the window. He didn’t feel querezy anymore and, down below at street level, everything had stopped again. ‘Blimey!’ he thought to himself, ‘that was close.’ He made a mental note to take a sip about once every hour or so. The stuff was strong, but it obviously wore off eventually. He wouldn’t want to be flying about above England if that happened.

After the refreshments he raced down to the Stationery Department and got himself a gold Mont Blanc pen and some heavy cream-coloured letter writing paper. He sat on the counter, next to an assistant who was halfway through wrapping something for a very snooty woman in a big purple hat, and wrote himself out a list.

It went something like this: For Presents Mum Makeup Perfume 69

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Miles sucked his new pen and continued, wondering what else his mother might want.

Pen Gold Watch New shoes Shopping with his mother was so completely boring, he’d only just realised he had no idea what she liked. This depressed him for some reason, so he moved onto his grandmother who seemed easier to please.

Granny Chocolates Jewels Photograph album Granddad Sherry Gnomes Binoculars New Reading Glasses For me Ice cream maker Mountain Bike with suspension 70

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3-D card for PC Comic Books Reeboks Tennis Racket Man U football gear Divers watch Mobile phone That’s it, he thought. He jumped off the counter and folded the list into the back pocket of his jeans. Just before he left, he stopped in front of the old lady. She looked dead bad tempered, just like she had a mouthful of wasps: just the sort of person, in fact, who was always telling him off in department stores whenever he went shopping with Dot and Reg. Miles paused and took a large felt tip marker pen from the counter. Carefully, he drew a large black moustache on her crabby old face and gave her a pair of goofy glasses. ‘There,’ thought Miles, with a smile of immense satisfaction. ‘That’ll give you a shock when you wake up.’

Far far away, Father Christmas looked out over the bleak snow horizon with tears in his eyes. This time he had really messed up. St Nicholas was really going to have his guts for garters. He knew he was wrong and he knew he had behaved very badly over the past few years. Sometimes the job just got too much but he was going to mend his ways from now on, try 71

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to be more positive. He hoped he wasn’t too late! He’d lost his precious Bottle. Perhaps he might as well just give it all up now.

He looked at his feet forlornly, then looked up when he heard a noise.

It was the robin back again. ‘Not him!’ he thought. ’Why does he keep turning up?’

‘Quick,’ said the robin, landing on a log outside the cottage, ‘get inside and tidy up. Look lively. You’ve got important visitors.’

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Chapter Nine

Conversations with Fish Meanwhile, Miles hadn’t got a care in the world.

He was now sitting back home in his bedroom, after a short easy flight across London, with a pile of goodies heaped over the bed, rolling onto the carpet and blocking up the door. He took a sip from the bottle and wandered into the living room, where he put everything he had got for his family under the Christmas tree. Then he went back into his bedroom and tried his new football top on.

After he had left Harrods Stationery Department, he had swiped a pair of roller blades from Sporting Goods to save time. His Christmas shopping spree was over pretty quickly: getting everything you wanted got dull more quickly than he’d expected, he realised. Searching around for something else to do, he had spied a mountain bike with suspension and 25 spanking bright gears in one of the window displays.

Miles had often wondered what it was like to ride a bike indoors, after seeing the same thing done in a film once. Now he was about to find out. The walkways were huge on the ground floor and very wide, with just enough people on them so that Miles could practice slalom and skid stops. A couple of times he accidentally hit a display. The first time it happened, he was horrified at the sound of smashing glass 73

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and perfume bottles exploding in all directions on the marble floor. Then he thought, ‘What the hell,’ and went about smashing into the displays, the bigger the better, on purpose.

He was exhausted by the time he got up to the roof with all his loot, and beginning to feel a little guilty. But once up there, he found that he could float, presents and all, just by thinking about it with no effort at all. ‘This is marvellous,’ he thought as he drifted, once again, high over London. Just then, it started to snow. Wonderful, huge, powdery flakes.

Miles didn’t mind snow any more; in fact he positively loved it. He loved everything. Lazily, he stretched out his arm and caught a few flakes on the palm of his hand, where he watched them melt slowly into droplets of water, like tears next to his skin.

Then he yawned, stretched and had another snooze.

When he woke, he was just hovering above the shopping centre on the outskirts of Wendover Backwoods. And now here he was home, looking in the mirror at his new shirt and i-pod. He looked out of the window and watched the grey clouds for a bit. ‘What I need is a holiday,’ he said out loud to no-one in particular.

And so he went to the Caribbean.

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hour’s flight from Wendover Backwoods and he was relaxing in the hot sun, lying by a bright blue pool and sipping a bright pink cocktail he had made himself from the bar. He looked around at the people and tried to guess what they had been doing before he had arrived and frozen them all to the spot. A lot of them looked as if they had been doing much the same thing that he was doing now, just sitting around and relaxing, taking in the holiday atmosphere away from the cold and the damp in England, and going for the occasional swim.

The beach looked brilliant. Just like in the magazines and brochures he had seen in the window of the travel agents back home. Not a cloud in the sky, and palm trees everywhere. He got out of the sun lounger and wandered down the steps to the private beach owned by the hotel, passing some palm trees and a big black man with a kind wrinkly face, in the middle of selling some coconuts to a couple wearing identical flip flops.

Once on the beach, he stopped, and inspected the sand beneath his bare toes. It was fine. Fine and well, very sandy, actually: but it was also very white, white as cooking flour and very hot. He hopped carefully over to a patch of shade under an overhanging palm tree, feeling the soles of his feet beginning to burn. When he got there, he sat down and blew on his feet, and then he looked out towards the sea, shielding his eyes against the glare. He took a sharp breath, and took 75

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off his top, placing The Bottle, carefully wrapped in his Tshirt, under the tree. He took off his jeans, gave a huge shout of joy and ran and skipped towards the water.

It was incredibly warm. Miles, of course, had heard stories about the sea in the Caribbean being warm, but somehow he had never really believed them. Miles was used to dipping a toe slowly in and then a foot, followed by a leg and, if he was feeling very brave, the rest of his body by tiny increments, inch by freezing inch. This was like heaven, the water was like a bath. And a warm one at that. He ploughed out to sea energetically, doing the crawl, and then looked about him. The water was like looking through glass. It was crystal clear; not only could he see his legs and feet, moving through the water just beneath him, but he could also see the sea bed, all shiny and pebbled.

He looked up at the deep blue sky and laughed delightedly, almost with relief. All the awful things that had happened to Miles in the past few days seemed to have been forgotten in the gentle slap of the waves. He had never felt so happy in his life, so warm and so alive. He practiced a bit of backstroke, looking up at the sun through squinty eyes. Then he looked down again. All about him were fish. Small blue ones, in groups of what seemed like hundreds, darted to and fro amongst the underwater coral and rocks. Miles wondered how they managed to all know when to turn at exactly the same time as the others. ‘One of the first things they must 76

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learn is left and right,’ he thought. ‘Probably one of the only things they know.’ He had read somewhere that most fish had brains no bigger than a pea. And that was if they were lucky. He watched a shoal of fish swim by. Bands of blue and green and orange shot down their bodies. They looked just like they had been coloured in. Another, who was much less brightly coloured than the rest, seemed to be staring at Miles.

Miles ducked down, to see what the fish wanted. After all the weirdness, it seemed like the most natural and normal thing to do in the world. The fish bobbed about a bit and winked at him. When the fish spoke and when Miles understood perfectly, well, even that seemed normal. The strange thing is, if you have spent a few days having strange and unusual things done and happen to you, then you are not only more or less prepared for anything, but you actually expect the unexpected.

In fact, Miles was quickly learning that practically anything in life was possible, and that the really hard thing about life was going about believing everything was too hard, so why bother. At the moment Miles thought he could do anything, which for anyone is as much a bad thing as it is a good thing.

Anyway – back to our fish.

They stared at each other for a bit. ‘’Ello, mate,’ said the fish eventually, bobbing off a little underwater bow.

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‘Er, hello,’ said Miles as politely as he could. ‘Nice day,’ he added.

The fish let a small bubble escape from its mouth. ‘You on yer ‘olidays too?’

‘Yes,’ said Miles. ‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’

‘Too right old son. Too right. I’m semi-retired now, of course. Made a pile in krill, like to take the missus here once a year, nah that we can afford it likes. Beats Margate any day.

Still go there on Bank Holidays mind yew, with the grandchildren. Not really my cuppa tea now that we’ve gawn up in the world. But it gets the little nippers ou’a their parents’ tentacles for a bit.’

Miles, who had no idea what the fish was talking about, searched around for something to say. ‘How many grandchildren have you got?’

‘Oh, about five million,’ replied the fish, nibbling absentmindedly on a bit of blue coral.

‘Gosh,’ said Miles.

‘Anyway, best be off. You wouldn’t know who won the footy last night, down at White Hart Lane?’

‘No,’ said Miles. ‘Sorry. I support Man U, by the way.’

‘More fool you,’ said the fish. ‘See yer.’ He darted off and then turned back. ‘’Ere, you’re one o’ the Beautiful People, ain’t yer? Shouldn’t you be delivering stuff and whatnot at this time of year, you know, for the Youmans an’ stuff ?’

Miles had never been called beautiful in his life before, but 78

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he supposed that that was the name for people who could fly and talk to fish. ‘Er, yes,’ said Miles, ‘but I’ve got a few places I’d like to see first.’

‘Oh right. You should go to New York. It’s great this time of year. Really Christmassy an’ all. Ta for now son. Take care of yerself.’

‘I will,’ said Miles as he waved goodbye, ‘ta, yourself.’

He had enjoyed his chat with the fish, so he decided to see what the other inhabitants underwater had to say for themselves. Miles spent the afternoon with a snorkel and a pair of flippers he had borrowed off someone on the beach, splashing around by the rocks. Clams, he found, were pretty friendly, although they always wanted to know what was going on in the next-door rock pool. Miles assured all of them that the one they were in was the best, with the most water and the thickest seaweed. He met an oyster, who complained about getting headaches, and a puffer fish who could quote Shakespeare. Most of the fish were obviously bored of tourists though, and once they knew that Miles wasn’t going to eat them or have them stuffed and taken home on the plane, they lost interest. A couple of squid even told him to buzz off, but a passing eel told him not to worry because squid were always a bit spiky like that. ‘It comes of never knowing whether you are going forwards or backwards,’ said the eel, busy hiding down a hole.

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of questions, like what was the biggest thing it had ever eaten, and what was a feeding frenzy like, and was it true that a shark drowned if it stopped moving, and if so what happened when it went to sleep and accidentally bumped into things? And wasn’t that embarrassing? And did they like the movie, ‘Jaws’? Miles thought it was rubbish, not a bit scary, with really terrible special effects.

So, after a long day on the beach, Miles was watching the sun go down by the pool back at the hotel. He was just in the middle of a triple-chilli-and-tomato-ketchup hamburger he had made for himself, straight off the outdoor barbecue when, out of the blue, a robin landed on his shoulder. Miles’s first thought was that you didn’t get robins in the Caribbean, least of all ones that talked in an irritating sing-song way.

‘Hadn’t you better give The Bottle back?’ it chirped in his ear.

‘No,’ said Miles, quite definitely, and made himself disappear, chilli burger and all.

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Chapter Ten

Hags New York had been on his mind, and so New York was where he appeared, quite suddenly, with both feet planted in a rubbish bin. The Christmas Spirit must have been wearing off, otherwise he would have landed somewhere a little less smelly. Nothing, in fact, smells like a New York dustbin. Not even a rhino’s behind, although that’s the closest thing.

Anyway, he took another swig, checking The Bottle to see how much was left. The liquid shimmered under the streetlight as Miles turned The Bottle the right way up. It was just under half full. He’d have to go carefully with the precious liquid, or else he was going to have to go home early. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew that certain things he’d done in the last few days weren’t going to go down too well with certain people, least of all his grandparents, if they ever found out.

In the city it was early evening by the looks of it, and Christmas shoppers were scattered everywhere. As was snow, and yellow taxicabs. All frozen in time, like a Polaroid snapshot.

The bird had given Miles quite a shock and when he 81

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arrived he had ketchup all down the front of his T-shirt. He was also freezing cold, so Miles looked about for a bit and then disappeared into the nearest sports shop. Ten minutes later, he came out wearing his fleece with The Bottle in it, a brand new skiing jacket and a sort of woolly baseball cap with earflaps, like he’d seen rappers wearing on TV. ‘Yo dude!’ he said to himself, looking at his reflection in a shop window. Then he felt stupid and tossed a snowball at his reflection where it landed with a splat, making the glass shake and turning his reflection wobbly.

Just then, something caught his eye. Something red. Miles turned slowly. A Ferrari. The car shone and it gleamed in every way, as brightly and coolly as it did in pictures. Miles looked at it, there on the kerb, and started to wonder. He could do anything, right? This was his time to enjoy himself, was it or was it not? He was master of The Christmas Spirit and that made him master of New York, and, for the time being, everything in it, right? And that included brand spanking new red Ferraris, sitting there, just waiting for someone to take notice and appreciate them. And surely – Miles’s thoughts raced ahead – the best way to appreciate a work of art, like a car, for example, was not to stand there and gawp at it – oh no! That would be insulting – but to actually take it out for a spin. Why ever not?

Miles, in fact, didn’t need much persuading. Five minutes later, he was sitting behind the controls of the Ferrari. He 82

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didn’t need keys. The moment he got in, the engine purred into life like a contented lion. He didn’t seem to need to know how to drive either. The thing practically drove itself!

It was as if some unseen hand was taking care of all the hard bits, just letting Miles get on with the business of actually enjoying himself. That is, going fast around corners and accelerating when he really should have been slowing down.

No wonder it was so much fun being a grown-up sometimes.

That was the thing about The Bottle. It was like being grownup with just the easy bits.

Half an hour later, he was really beginning to get to grips with this monster of a machine. Up and down the road he went, at full speed, until the shops became just a blur, and then he would pull a skid by giving the handbrake a good yank and end up facing the other way, sweat running down his face, laughing like he’d never laughed before. He tried doing jumps over the speed bumps in the road, and almost felt as though he was flying again.

Then he saw a park on his right. ‘That must be Central Park,’ he said to himself. ‘It’s supposed to be quite dangerous. Not in this thing though.’ He gave a laugh and shot through the gates, straight over the grass. He turned the headlights off and tried driving in the moonlight. It was quite hard, but it made things rush up at him more quickly than in any arcade game he had ever played. This was the real thing.

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After a bit he was tired out, so he drove to the edge of the park, back onto the road to where he had found it. He planned to come back later and drive it around some more.

After London, Miles was bored with shopping, so he looked around the streets for a bit, jumping on shop front mats, making the automatic doors open and shut. He looked up deep into the sky and caught the first flakes of the first snowfall that evening on the end of his tongue. Really, everything that was cool about New York was up. At street level, it was just the same as everywhere else: dirty pavements, brightly lit shops – just like Wendover Backwoods, really, but bigger. Up seemed the place to be.

The skyscrapers were all around him; he’d never been in such a tall place in all his life. It was as though all the castles in Europe had been put in one place.

Without really realising it, the magic started again and Miles’s feet began to slowly lift off from the pavement as his loitering steps turned into a graceful soar that took him up and along 5th Avenue in a sort of long swoop through the air, and he was flying again. What looked normal and boring on the ground suddenly looked bright and interesting from above: the Christmas tree lights lining the road, the piles of snow on the street corners and the holes in the pavement, covered with metal grilles that poured out hot steam. It all looked just like the opening shot of a film, as the camera 84

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raced over skyscrapers and music blasted the audience practically deaf.

Miles went higher and higher, feeling perfectly warm, as his breath billowed out like a dragon’s over the sleeping city that he, all on his own, had frozen in time just so that he could enjoy it.

By now he was up to the roof level of most of the taller buildings and Miles found himself quite suddenly in a completely different world from the one he had just left spiralling below him. Up here, the New York skyscrapers were even more like medieval castle towers, dominating the city. Nearly every one had a pointed roof, ornate arches topped off with copper gutters and old-fashioned round windows. Snow lay thickly on ledges lit up by roof lights that Miles supposed were there to stop planes crashing into them.

It was very different from the Caribbean. And all the world was peaceful, almost as though it was empty. From one of the windows came the sound of music. It was a carol, one that he recognised.

‘Silent Night, Holy Night, All is calm, All is bright…’

He flew over to investigate and saw that it came from an 85

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attic window, high up in one of the towers. Someone had left the radio on and for some reason, whatever the magic was that flowed in his veins from the liquid in The Bottle, at that moment, it had chosen to keep just that song playing, whilst everything about him remained silent and still, like the music said. It was probably because it was a Christmas song, he thought vaguely to himself as he swooped and dived amongst the snowy outcrops of stone and lead.

Miles’s world seemed to close in until he wasn’t aware of anything else going on down below, or of any other thoughts in his head, except how it was to be up there in that other world of towers and arches and silence. For the first time in his life, he hadn’t thought once about his grandparents or even his mother in the last 12 hours.

Something moved in the corner of his eye and he went down to inspect it.

Lined up, in a row, at the top of one of the taller buildings in the block were four stone statues. All were of girls, who didn’t look a lot older than Miles. They were very beautiful and they looked, to Miles, unlike any statues he had ever seen, for a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on. One carried a book, the second seemed to be writing something, the third one held a sort of miniature violin and the last one didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, just sitting there looking pretty. The stone they were made of was purest white, like marble, whereas the rest of the building had gone 86

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a sort of dirty grey over the years. Miles wasn’t very interested in the statues, however pretty. At first he thought it was a bird that he had seen up there, and he was going to ask it directions to the Statue of Liberty, until one of the statues moved ever so slightly to the left and winked at him.

This gave him quite a shock.

‘Well, hello Miles,’ she said, in a sweet voice that seemed to be made of syrup and double cream. Miles went bright red, enough that the snow around him seemed to melt. He wasn’t used to girls doing anything but ignoring him, and he would have fallen clean off the ledge if he hadn’t been floating about three feet above it.

‘Hello there,’ he said, trying to sound cool, but beginning to wish he hadn’t stolen that hat with the stupid earflaps.

‘We’ve been expecting you,’ she said, putting her book down and resting her head in her hand.

‘Have you?’ said Miles.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting up here for ages. I’ve been so excited I’ve hardly been able to concentrate on my book.’ And then she even managed to blush a little, too.

‘But who are you?’ said Miles, asking a question he seemed to ask a lot. With practically everyone he met these days, really.

She laughed, and it was a sound like water flowing over rocks on a sunny day; Miles had never heard anything so wonderful, and he very much hoped that she did it again 87

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soon. ‘We’re the Muses,’ she said when she had finished laughing. ‘We’re here for you Miles – at your service,’ and she gave a little mock bow and giggled again.

‘At my service?’

‘It means that we are here to inspire you,’ said another Muse quite suddenly. The one carrying the violin. Miles turned and looked at her. She was prettier even than the other one, if that was possible, and he found himself falling in love all over again.

‘Inspire….?’ He repeated blankly.

‘Yes,’ said the third, suddenly waking and flashing a smile so radiant that it made a passing pigeon lose concentration and fly straight into a TV mast. Miles, at whom the smile had been directed, felt as if steam was going to come out of his ears at any moment, the way it did in cartoons.

‘We are here to help you,’ said the fourth, in a more matter-of-fact voice.

‘Help me do what?’ asked Miles.

‘We are here to help you do anything you want to do, Miles. You have superhuman powers. You are now one of the Beautiful People. You can do practically anything now. And Miles,’ said the first girl, ‘we are happy for you, and it’s our job to make you happy too. Isn’t it girls?’ she said, turning to the rest with a bright laugh.

‘Oh yes,’ they chorused and directed smiles at him again that seemed to light up the whole of New York. Miles, who 88

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had never been in love before, suddenly found himself in love with four girls, all at the same time – like buses, his granddad would have probably said, never one not to mix a metaphor or five. But despite all this, in the last few minutes he’d begun to experience a strange feeling around his forehead, a sort of low humming noise, and a pressure: something telling him that this was too good to be true. Even superhumans weren’t that lucky. And it seemed at bit fishy that they were waiting for him here, on top of a building in New York, and that they were being so nice to him. He then did something that, unknown to him then, probably saved his life. He moved back from them, just a few inches, really without thinking.

The Muses looked at each other.

Miles took out The Bottle and gave a quick sip. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed four pairs of eyes light up at the sight of The Bottle. It reminded him oddly of kittens looking at a bowl of cream.

‘Come over here,’ said the youngest and prettiest, patting a spot beside here on the ledge, ‘and be seaten.’

‘Seaten?’ said Miles, very much looking forward to sitting down next to her, but still not moving, ‘that’s a funny way of putting it.’

‘Seaten?’ Her voice changed subtly in tone, almost to a growl, and Miles noticed something change about her, and the air abruptly got much colder. ‘Oh no! We meant EATEN!’ and with that she sprang forward.

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Her whole face seemed to grow larger, her eyes turned from blue to an unnatural dark green, as four long sharp teeth appeared under her blackened gums. Miles shot a glance at the other three, only to see, to his terror, their hair shooting straight up and turning into serpents, and their nails curling like claws. ‘MILES!’ they all hissed at once and lunged forward, their hideous claws grabbing for his face.

‘YOU ARE OURS!’ Luckily Miles had stopped in his tracks at the first hint of trouble, listening, perhaps for the first but not the last time in his life, to the small voice we sometimes get at the back of our minds to beware when strangers are being too nice. He was not quite close enough for them. With a shout that nearly made him drop The Bottle, he turned and shot through the air, down amongst the buildings, at full speed.

When he turned his head he was shocked to see them still following, their faces changed now into those of old hags, their black claws grabbing for his legs and their black gums hissing: ‘MILES, MILES, COME BACK, WE ONLY WANT TO EAT YOU! IT’S NOT MUCH TO ASK! WE’RE BEAUTIFUL, CAN’T YOU SEE?’ ‘This is terrible!’ thought Miles as he flew round a corner so fast he could hear the wind make little skidding noises.

‘Really terrible.’ He felt a hand grab for his trainer, which came off and fell to the ground far below him. The thought of the hags’ pitted broken teeth biting into the tender flesh 90

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on the backs of his legs made him put an extra spurt on. For a moment it seemed as though he was just about losing them.

And then, with a terrible screech, they doubled their efforts and began to catch up.

‘Give us The Bottle, Miles, and we will let you go, we promise, yes we do. On our beauty.’

‘Not bleeding likely,’ thought Miles and shot up in the air, like a rocket. He closed his eyes, as he had done before to make himself disappear to another place. Any place right now. But it didn’t work. Not even a tingle. ‘They must have magic of their own,’ he thought. The Hags had followed him upwards and then split off into four different directions. In a few moments Miles would be trapped and he knew it. In desperation he took out The Bottle. There were about two inches of liquid left in the bottom. Miles looked around and saw they were almost upon him, so he pulled the cork off The Bottle and took a huge swig.

‘Har har. Got you!’ They cried, but just too soon, as Miles, with the extra potion inside him, disappeared from between their fingers. At that, all four Muses immediately turned to stone and fell to the New York sidewalk far below, where they broke into a thousand pieces amongst the snow and the mud.

Miles stood in the dark for a bit. For a minute he thought he was back in the cave with Boxing Day and his American 91

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assistant, Burp or Puke or whatever his name was. But it wasn’t as cold and it wasn’t really even dark: just grey and a bit musty. The floor felt sticky and there was a smell of old cigarettes and stale coffee that would hang in the air, however long you left the window open.

For some reason it all seemed very familiar.

After the chase high above the New York streets, it took Miles a while to get his breath back and stop shaking. Nothing seemed to be happening, so Miles stood and waited, and then he stood a bit more and waited a bit more. Then he sat down and waited and waited and waited and finally, he waited. Just when he thought that he was going to get up and explore – something that he had promised himself all along he wouldn’t do, because it might be dangerous – he had an idea, brilliant in its simplicity: ‘Hello,’ he called out, ‘is there anybody there?’

Almost at once, a light went on in front of his face and an invisible voice said: ‘What do you want?’ rather rudely.

‘I’m bored,’ said Miles. ‘I’m really bored, actually. Really bored of waiting.’ There was a long sigh.

‘You’re bohhred?!’ said the invisible voice in a fake posh accent that his grandmother sometimes used when she was on the phone to people like the electrician, ‘of waiting,’ continued the voice eventually, ‘ in a WAITING room? How absurd!’ as if this was the most ridiculous thing he or she (Miles hadn’t quite made up his mind on that yet) had ever heard of. ‘Why would 92

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you come to The Waiting Room if you didn’t want to wait? It’s a bit like going to the lavatory and expecting a haircut. Ha hahahahah!’ The voice laughed, a rather shrill sharp little laugh, like a pony whinnying, and Miles involuntarily pictured the sort of person who wore their glasses on a chain around their neck and worked in a library. ‘I mean, that’s what you are supposed to do here. So sit down and keep quiet, I’m very busy.’

‘Yes, but what happens if I want to leave? And if I didn’t want to come here in the first place even?’ asked Miles.

‘Well, that’s simple, young man. You simply LEAVE!’ and with that the light went out. Miles squinted through the dark: now he really couldn’t see a thing and the person behind the Voice seemed to have left or disappeared.

‘Hello,’ Miles called out in a small voice, ‘are you still there Mr. Whatever Your Name Is? Hello? Hello? I want to leave now. Really, I do. But I don’t know how. Can you help me?’

There was a long silence, then Miles heard the Voice, much further away this time, and saw the light go on dimly, from hundreds of feet away.

‘You can’t leave.’

‘What was that? I can’t hear you.’ ‘ I SAID YOU CAN’T LEAVE! Deaf as well as dense,’ it added, under its breath, and the light flashed brightly for an instant so that it stung Miles’s eyes before going off again.

‘Why not?’ asked Miles, beginning to get a little frustrated and angry, but at the same time not wanting to upset the Voice 93

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too much.

‘Christmas hold-ups. Always get them at this time of year.

Can’t do anything about them. Fact of Life. Well fact of the Afterlife actually.’

‘Afterlife!’ cried Miles, ‘does that mean I’m dead?’ He was horrified at the thought. Honestly, nobody told him anything these days.

‘Well, you should know!’ said the voice tartly.

‘How?’ ‘Look, did you die or didn’t you?’

‘Er, yes. No! I mean…..what’s the right answer?’ The light flashed white and glared into his eyes ‘There isn’t a right answer, you foolish boy. There is only the Rrrea-li-ty. Do you remember dying or not? Really, if you can’t get a better class of corpse these days I’m requesting a transfer,’ the Voice added, just loud enough for Miles to hear.

Miles searched around in his memory. He was sure those terrible Hags hadn’t got their claws on him. Anyway, if they had, how come he still had The Bottle? He pinched himself just to make sure it hurt, and it did. Also, dead people weren’t meant to be hungry and he was starving, so he must be alive. ‘No, I’m not dead,’ he said matter-of-factly.

There was a long pause, followed by the rustling of paper.

The light went pink, with a hint of red. ‘Christmas!’ wailed the Voice. ‘Christmas, ruddy Christmas! It’ll be the end of me, you mark my words, every year worse and now with my sinuses 94

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acting up! As usual, they send everything to the wrong place and a week late and who has to sort it out? I’ll tell you who: Muggins. That’s who.’

‘Who’s Muggins?’ asked Miles politely.

‘Me, I’m Muggins of course!’

‘That’s a strange name.’

‘No, you idiotic pipsqueak numbskull, I’m not really Muggins!’

‘Then why did you say you were? That’s lying, my Granny says you shouldn’t lie or your tongue goes black.’

‘No! I’m just Muggins for the moment.’

‘What, until the real Muggins gets back?’

‘No, it’s…… it’s AN EXPRESSION! OH, THERE’S OBVIOUSLY BEEN A MISTAKE, GET OUT OF HERE!’ The light went out and Miles felt the familiar whooshing as he shot off to his next destination.

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Chapter Eleven

Sea of Sorrows Cold ground, cold air, cold sky. Cold. Cold. Cold.

The next destination, in fact, was a bit of a disappointment.

When Miles landed, the very first thing that he realised was that he was still missing his trainer. The realisation that made him realise this was that he was standing halfway in and halfway out of a lake. And the side that happened to be in the lake was the shoeless portion.

If he was back on Earth, and if time had stopped for him as it had before, then where he was wouldn’t make the slightest difference. He looked around. The sky was dark blue on blue, but it was freezing cold. He was surrounded by the tallest mountains that he had ever seen in his life, even in pictures, and there wasn’t a single soul in sight.

No people, no plants: just flat, grey rocks. At a guess Miles would say he wasn’t in Wendover, or anywhere near it for that matter. He had seen a documentary about Tibet once on the Discovery Channel, and the landscape around him reminded him of that. Tibet was the tallest country in the world, according to the programme, and had Mount Everest in it, the tallest mountain. It was one of the smallest countries as well. Miles supposed that was the only way they 97

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could fit it in on top of all the sharp mountains. Any bigger, and Tibet would probably fall off. The people there ate special leaves to help them climb up into high places and they drank yak’s milk, which looked like cow’s milk but tasted a lot worse. They also believed that God was born every few years and he came to live with them until he died, and then he was born again, somewhere else in Tibet, so off they all went to find him. No sillier than believing in Father Christmas, thought Miles, and he was certainly real enough.

Miles hopped out of the water and sat on a rock to massage his freezing foot back to life. Gradually, as the feeling began to return to his toes, he felt another patch of wetness, spreading somewhere near his chest. Like lightning he leapt up, stuck a hand into his fleece and pulled out The Bottle. Somewhere on the journey from wherever he had come from to wherever he was now, the cork had come out of The Bottle, and the contents, what little was left of them, seeped into the lining of his clothes. NONE OF THE LIQUID WAS LEFT. Just a few drops sticking miserably to the sides.

Without The Bottle, suddenly Miles felt very small in the middle of the tall mountains, very alone, and very sorry he had got into this mess in the first place. He sat back down on the rock and, because there was nothing else he could do, he began to cry. Great, fat tears that dripped onto his one remaining shoe and froze instantly in the unusually cold air.

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Then a very peculiar thing started to happen.

He found he couldn’t stop crying. The more he cried, the more he felt like crying, until the tears were flowing like water, soaking into his clothes and freezing, only to be replaced by more tears that froze too, until his clothes got stiffer and heavier. Miles concentrated on stopping crying after a bit, but he found that he couldn’t: the tears just kept flowing out of him, running down his face in two thick streams. Soon the ice from the frozin tears was up to his legs, and then his chest, but Miles continued to cry in that lonely place and the ice continued to slowly creep over him, bit by bit. So Miles sat there on the rock, alone and without a way of getting back to his bungalow, Wendover Backwoods, his school and his friends.

He cried for hours and hours, until the ice covered him from head to foot and his soul drifted.

Far away, someone else was crying too – but tears of joy.

Father Christmas felt much better. Better, in fact, than he had done in centuries. The robin had brought the Special Visitor and after a few minutes of conversation FC had felt a change come over him. Suddenly it all seemed to make sense again: Christmas and giving and all that. It was so simple really; it was just about making people happy.

Something he knew he was good at. After a bit, he thought about Miles and felt really bad again. But at least this time 99

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he knew what he was going to do.

He got up and put his hat on, pausing to look at himself in the mirror, and went outside to where his guests were waiting patiently for him.

Miles didn’t know how long he slept for. It was a strange sort of sleep. Part of him still felt frozen by the lake, high up in the mountains, thousands of miles from anywhere remotely useful, such as a McDonalds or a payphone. But another part of his mind drifted around the world. He had strange dreams that he was back in the Caribbean talking to the fish again, except this time he was a fish too; one of the blue ones with yellow stripes. The fish asked if he had done his homework, and Miles got quite cross because he didn’t have a pen. Then he was back in Wendover Backwoods, having his hair cut in the multi-storey car park. ‘How odd,’ he thought in his sleep and tried to scratch his nose, which was tickling as bits of hair were cut off his fringe. Finally he let out a huge sneeze in his sleep and dreamt that he was in the front garden with Reg painting the gnomes. ‘There’s no place like gnome,’ his grandfather was saying over and over, ‘there’s no place like gnome.’ Then he picked up a large green and red gnome carrying a fishing rod; it was alive and wriggling a lot in his hands. ‘This one’s a beaut!’ he declared.

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‘Let’s take it inside, your grandmother can cook it for tea!’

Miles’s eyes sprung open. Everything seemed white for a bit.

Like this.

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He fell asleep once more and dreamt he had died. In his reverie days passed, which turned into weeks, then months and finally years.

Miles stirred. Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, he felt he was coming to. He was no longer by the lake, that was for sure: in fact he was quite warm again, lying in a bed. He looked up and just made out what looked like an oil lamp above his head; it was out, and the room was quite dark. He closed his eyes and drifted off again. This time there were no dreams, just a relaxing feeling of bobbing and floating ever so gently on a warm breeze. Wind chimes, moving like shadows, sounded far off, in the corner of his mind.

When Miles awoke again, the first thing he noticed was bright sunlight streaming through the gaps in the wood in his room. He seemed to be wrapped up in some sort of animal skin that kept him feeling warm and snug. The next thing that he saw was a big round face staring over him, ‘You awrigh’ mate?’ the face said cheerfully through a mouthful of teeth.

Miles lifted himself onto one elbow and squinted. He was relieved to see that the face had a body attached to it, dressed in robes that looked as though they were made of silk. Miles had seen clothes a bit like that when he had gone to a Chinese restaurant with his mother once. All the waiters had 102

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worn them. The person standing in front of him seemed to also be oriental. He was grinning from ear to ear, with an expectant look on his face, as if Miles was about to tell him some huge joke. Miles swallowed, and found his voice eventually. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think I’m okay.’

‘Shoor you are Squire. You been sleeping long time, big kip. Four day! We thought you karked it. Where you from?’

‘Er, England. Wendover Backwoods actually, it’s just outside London. Do you know England?’

‘Do I know England!? Ha ha ha!’ The small man burst out laughing. ‘Shoor I know England. That’s where I was brought up, mate. Drove big cab in Croydon – four year!

‘Very goo’ mate,’ ‘You pay now!’ ‘Shut your face!’ see? Come here after. Go back on holidays though, when High Priest let me. See?’ Miles scratched his head; he really had no idea what this bloke was talking about.

‘Yes, I think I see,’ he said eventually. ‘Where am I exactly?’

‘Where am I? Ha ha ha, mate! Very goo’ joke, very funny, ha ha ha!’

‘No, really, Mr Whatever your name is, I was lost, that’s why I had stopped by the lake.’ He paused. Miles didn’t want to tell anyone too much about anything. Least of all The Bottle. There were still a few drops left in it. Miles felt sure that if he concentrated very hard on where he was now and where he wanted to go, he might just be able to make it back.

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But he needed to know where he was first.

‘Name’s Qualin, but you can call me Mike, my Engrish name.’ He stopped laughing suddenly and looked serious.

‘You not joking; you really don’ know where you are, do you?’

‘No,’ Miles agreed.

‘High Priest say you magic, you flew here in ball of ice.

Me, I think you small boy, big time lost, with only one shoe.

Maybe we both right, eh, know what I mean?’

‘I did fly here,’ said Miles, ‘but not in a ball of ice. Things went weird and I started crying and the tears froze me.’

‘Ha! That’s easy one, you found near Sea of Sorrows. Very sad place, makes even me cry. Ha ha ha!’

‘Yes,’ said Miles, not really convinced. ‘Anyway, I am lost.

If you can tell me where I am then perhaps I can get back.

Thanks for the bed and lending me your animal skins. They were very comfortable.’

Mike looked at Miles in a shrewd way for a bit and then said: ‘No need to tell you where you are, small boy, mate.

Mike thinks you already know that. And High Priest want to see you anyway. He help you out. You can come with me when you’ve had some grub.’ He patted Miles’s head in a rough but kind way. ‘These things tend to turn out ok, you see, SEE?’ Miles swung his feet out of the bed. He didn’t feel sleepy anymore but he did feel a little stiff. As he stood on the floor he looked down at his clothes: in New York they had 104

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been brand new but by now they were in a terrible state, with gashes from the Hags’ claws and mud marks from the Lake.

Within seconds Miles was surrounded by four or five little old ladies, who barely reached to his shoulder. Before he knew it, he was stripped down to his underpants and someone pulled a brightly coloured tunic over his head, and a pair of very baggy black trousers were yanked up his legs.

Then they all stood back and laughed and clapped and pointed at him. Miles felt a bit silly standing in front of them like that, and funny wearing a tunic and a leather pair of sandals they had given him to wear on his bare feet. But he had to admit that it was a big improvement on his old clothes, which were filthy, ripped and soaking wet. Then one of them handed him a bowl of something. He took a sip. It was absolutely revolting. ‘This must be yak’s milk,’ he thought to himself and gamely finished it in one go. It made him feel momentarily sick, followed by feeling slightly better now that he had something in his stomach for the first time in days.

He then wandered out of the door and was greeted with the sight of the Himalayas spread out before him.

His hut was on the side of a very narrow track, no more than a few feet away from a sharp drop that disappeared into a gorge that led down to the foot of the mountain far away.

From where he was standing one mountain ended and so another one appeared. It looked never-ending, as if the 105

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whole world had sprouted up overnight into huge peaks and valleys. Most of the mountains had snow on the top, but further down below, where he was, it was green and sunny.

The air was sharp and clean but still very cold, and Miles was glad that the tunic he was wearing was a good thick one.

A short while later, Mike had come back to collect him.

‘You had good breakfast?’ he said with another trade-mark huge grin and Miles thought it best to be polite.

‘Oh yes, very good. Thanks.’

‘Ha ha, you joking. Very bad liar. Yaks milk, yuurrk!’ He made sick noises and smiled. ‘Make me throw up first time.

Give me bacon sandwich any day! Anyway Squire, High Priest ready to see you now. I will come and translate.’

‘Doesn’t he speak English?’ asked Miles.

‘No, he speak very goo’ English. But you must not speak to him direct. You are a foreigner. Not good for him. Not good for you ha ha! Know wha I mean?’

‘Oh,’ said Miles, a little bit upset at being considered dangerous, just because he was from England.

‘Don’t worry,’ added Mike, seeing the look on Miles’s face.

‘He’s pretty nice bloke. Just don’t mention football.’

‘Why not?’ asked Miles, thinking that there must be some weird religious reason why football was bad for you if you were a High Priest.

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recently. Not win much ever, actually, ha ha.’

So together with Mike, he set off up the hill to where he could see an important-looking building with a pointed roof, cut into the mountain rock. It looked as though it had been there forever. As he walked he felt the cobwebs from four days’ sleep being blown away and he started to feel himself again. So much had happened to him in the last few days that had been fantastic, terrible or just downright weird that he had trouble remembering exactly what the old Miles had been like.

He also knew that people were probably still after him for The Bottle: if it wasn’t Hags with claws and sharp teeth, it was Boxing Day or that strange robin or even Father Christmas himself. He knew that The Bottle with nothing much left inside it was probably worthless, but something told him to hold on to it for the time being.

As the got to the door of the High Priest’s house or church or whatever it was, Mike stopped smiling for once. He made a strange sign across his forehead and rang a small bell. After a few moments wait, the bell was answered with another bell coming from deep within. Mike signalled to Miles to follow.

The air inside was thick with a sort of perfumy smoke Miles had never smelt before. It smelt funny and exotic and it made his nose wrinkle, and he tried not to sneeze. From inside, he heard the swishing sound of heavy robes.

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‘Welcome Miles,’ came a voice from deep within the layers of smoke, ‘we have been expecting you.’ Miles turned and looked at Mike who was bowed down low.

‘Don’ worry,’ he whispered at Miles, from out of the corner of his mouth. ‘He always say that. Too many James Bond movies.’

Slowly, the High Priest appeared from a doorway at the back of the Temple. He was not much taller than the women who had dressed Miles that morning and his face was very brown and creased-up, like an old purse. He shuffled forward and paused. He had a very stern look on his face, and piercing black eyes that bored holes into Miles, as if looking for his deepest thoughts and darkest secrets. He stroked his long white moustache for a while and glared, whilst Miles fidgeted about nervously. ‘Do you,’ he said eventually, ‘support Manchester United?’

‘No,’ said Miles, indignantly, as if the High Priest had just asked him if he could borrow all his pocket money, and pay him back in a year or two, ‘certainly not.’ This was not true.

Mike translated.

The High Priest glared Miles for some time, whilst stroking his beard and muttering to himself. He approached Miles and looked deep into his eyes. Miles felt the back of his head begin to burn as if two lasers were pointed straight at him. ‘Velly goo’!’ he announced suddenly, and laughed and ruffled Miles’s hair. ‘Velly goo’ boy.’

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Everyone, including Miles, started laughing, as much with relief as anything else. Suddenly the High Priest’s face went serious again.

‘Show me The Bottle!’ he ordered.

‘How did he know about The Bottle, and what’s more, how did he know it was important?’ Miles hesitated for a second and then slipped his hand into his tunic and pulled The Bottle out.

The High Priest kept his hand held out, like a headmaster who was confiscating sweets. Miles hesitated for another second and then decided two things: Firstly, there were only a few drops left in it, so actually he was just handing over an empty bottle. And secondly, the High Priest didn’t have that greedy look on his face like he had seen on Boxing Day or The Hags. More to the point, as he had only just realised, up there in the clear mountain air, it was the same greedy look he had seen on his own face, as he remembered it reflected in the shop window in downtown New York. He was probably just as bad as the lot of them. He sighed and handed The Bottle over.

Mike looked confused, but The High Priest seemed to know what he was doing. He took it by the neck and held it up to the light of a small candle. ‘Hoar! Haor haoor hoor!

Yeauk!’

‘What’s he doing?’ whispered Miles to his new friend.

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‘comes from too much smoking.’

‘THE BOTTLE IS NEARLY EMPTY!’ pronounced the High Priest after a five-minute wait.

‘The man’s a genius,’ thought Miles.

‘Few drops left, magic only last short time, not enough for Land of Black Cabs and Premiership!’

‘Er, Mr High Priest, what are we going to do?’ Miles paused and let Mike translate. After an few seconds reflection, the Priest raised his hand to the sky and declared: ‘Dongangsoya!’

‘What’s that?’ hissed Miles and Mike turned to him and put his hand gravely on the boy’s shoulder.

‘High Priest say: ‘Only one thing for it! Dance of the Seven Souls!’‘ Ten minutes later, Miles found himself outside, surrounded by the village folk, the elders seated on small red cushions at the front and the younger ones standing behind.

Everyone was looking deadly serious. A man with a small hollow drum was beating out a hollow tune whilst the people clapped dully in time with the beat.

And Miles, standing in the middle of the circle, wearing only his underpants, with a flower stuck up his nose, hopped in a circle, as he had been told to do, chanting, ‘Yom, yom, yom, yom yom……’ He waited for something to change, for his fingers to tingle and for that old rushing feeling. But nothing happened. He chanted ‘Yom, yom,’ a bit louder and 111

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the village elders smiled and nodded encouragement at him.

But after half an hour Miles was tired out and couldn’t hop anymore. It was then that Mike came forward from the crowd. Miles was surprised to see that he was carrying a video camera. ‘It’s not working,’ whispered Miles through his teeth.

Mike looked confused. ‘What’s not working, little friend, mate? Seems to be going pretty goo’ to me. Villagers, they love it. You’re a big star!’ Miles stopped what he was doing, and glared at Mike suspiciously.

‘Star?’ The people, seeing that he had stopped, started clapping and whistling. ‘What do you mean, star?’

‘Got it all here on the ol’ camcorder!’ said Mike proudly.

‘Dance of the Seven Souls, very popular Party routine. Gets boring up here in the winter. You were natural. Keep us laughing until March. Mrs Wong here,’ he pointed at one of the older women in the audience, who gave him a huge toothless grin, ‘she wan’ buy you! Ha ha, absolutely funny, no? Ha ha ha!’

‘Absolutely side-splitting,’ said Miles, removing the flower from his nose. ‘Now you’ve had a good laugh,’ he continued crossly, ‘do you mind telling me how I get back?’

‘That’s easy,’ said Mike. ‘High Priest give me money for your flight this morning. Your plane leaves from Kathmandu tonight. You can pay us back when you get home.’

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Five hours later, in his normal clothes, which had all been washed and repaired as best they could, Mike found himself at the airport, ticket in hand. He was very relieved and had just about forgiven them for the ‘Yom yom’ trick. He supposed it was quite funny after all. Mrs. Wong had cried when he left and had even given him a small white mountain flower as a souvenir.

‘Nice guys, but that priest was a complete fake,’ thought Miles as he waited in the departure lounge. ‘I bet he wasn’t a High Priest at all, just someone put there for the tourists,’ Miles thought. Then Miles remembered that just before he left Mike had come running down the hill after him. ‘Oi Squire, little fella, High Priest, he say give you this!’ and with that Mike had handed him a small yellow paper envelope.

Then he had wished Miles good luck and promised to look him up when he next got back to England. Anyway, with nothing better to do whilst waiting for his flight to be called, he put his hand in his ski-jacket pocket and pulled out the letter Mike had given him from the High Priest. ‘It’s probably just a fortune cookie or something swiped from a cracker,’ he thought.

When Miles did open the letter he sat there for a long time thinking about what he had found. He had the funny feeling he had been wrong about the High Priest all along. He didn’t know precisely what the the High Priest’s package meant but he knew it meant something.

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‘What’s that?’ said a friendly voice behind him. Miles turned to see one of the stewardesses kneeling down to his left.

Without a word, he lifted up the red robin’s feather that he had found carefully placed in the envelope and showed it to her.

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Chapter Twelve

Home So that’s how Miles got back. Arriving 15 hours later at Heathrow airport, he took out The Bottle and guzzled down the last remaining drops. As Mike had said, they were probably enough to get him home without anybody suspecting anything.

What he was going to do about all the presents he had stolen from Harrods was another big problem. He knew that he couldn’t very well hide them, and his Grandparents were sure to think that he had been shoplifting. Which was exactly what he had been doing, really.

He walked out through customs and out of the airport into a quiet spot in the car park, where he closed his eyes and let the last remaining bits of precious magic from The Bottle of Christmas Spirit take over.

The journey home was uneventful, but it was amazing how quickly one could get used to being able to fly. He didn’t enjoy his last flight home that much anyway. After all that had happened, it didn’t seem the same and he realized, with relief, he wouldn’t miss The Bottle one bit. He could feel the effects wearing off just as he got to Wendover Backwoods, so he landed in town and walked the rest of the way, looking 115

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around with interest as people came back to life. It really was an amazing potion, even if it was a bunch of trouble. He looked at his watch: Mike was right, with all the stopping of time Miles had done, barely a day had passed. It was only the morning after he had first left, when he had first got his paws on the Christmas Spirit. No-one was going to have missed him, which meant he wouldn’t have to explain that at least to Dot and Reg. Something else was worrying him though. First of all, what if Boxing Day caught up with him? After all, he knew where he lived. Secondly, how was Christmas going to happen if Father Christmas, who seemed to have lost the plot anyway, didn’t have any Christmas Spirit left because Miles had gulped down the lot? Miles began to feel guiltier and guiltier, and his feet got slower and slower, as he came up the road towards the bungalow with a feeling of dread creeping up from his boots into the pit of his stomach.

It was still early morning when Miles crawled through his bedroom window on the ground floor and Dot and Reg were in bed, fast asleep, glasses of water next to their bed, their dentures rattling in the glass, in time with their snores.

As he’d suspected, he had visitors.

The moment he had picked himself up from the floor three figures appeared, standing by the bed.

The one Miles noticed first was a huge man with a flowing beard and a large bearskin thrown over his shoulders. He 116

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had a smile on his face and a pair of crinkled blue eyes, whose colour reminded Miles of the sea in the Caribbean.

Behind him stood Father Christmas, even he looked tiny by comparison. Father Christmas mouthed the word ‘SORRY’ at Miles from behind his companion’s back. He looked very guilty indeed, and Miles began to think that perhaps he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Even if he had tried to shoot him the last time they had met. And he didn’t believe all that stuff about reindeer burgers anyway. He was beginning to learn that you didn’t judge people the first time that you met them. After all, Peter, or Boxing Day, or whatever his name was, had seemed great until Miles had discovered that he was just using him to get to The Bottle.

The third person was no more than a shadow in the back of the room. Miles squinted a bit and could just about make out the face of a young man.

Nobody said anything for a bit. It was Christmas Eve: outside Miles could hear the streets coming to life and people getting into their cars to go to work for the last time before Christmas Day. Right now his mother would be leaving her hotel in the Midlands to drive down to Wendover for the next three days. The large man in front of Miles heard the noises too. He sat down slowly on the bed and rested a frankly huge arm on Miles’s shoulder.

‘What can all those people expect is going to happen tomorrow?’ His voice was like a rumble, deep and very rich.

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The sound of it seemed to fill up the whole room.

‘Dunno,’ said Miles and stared at his feet. He didn’t exactly know what this man was saying. After all, everyone knew that presents weren’t delivered by Father Christmas, or whoever, every year. So what was the Christmas Spirit all about? Christmas just happened now on its own, or made up by large companies; it seemed nothing to do with them. But the minute that thought entered Miles’s head he knew he was somehow wrong.

‘You are wondering what all the fuss is about aren’t you?’ the large, kindly man asked, smiling. ‘Nobody believes in me anymore, but Christmas seems to happen anyway, every year.’

‘Are you the real Father Christmas?’ asked Miles, suddenly forgetting to feel shy. The man laughed slowly and gently.

‘No, Miles,’ he said, ‘this is the real Father Christmas.’ He pointed at Father Christmas who was still standing behind him. ‘I am Nicholas.’

‘Saint Nicholas!’ said Miles. ‘We learnt all about you in class. Is it true that you used to drop things down chimneys?’

‘Hush now,’ said the man smiling again. ‘Yes, some of it is true and some of it is legend. But all of it is good, so I suppose that I really can’t complain.’

‘No,’ replied Miles, ‘Miss Geelong says that without you and Charles Dickens we wouldn’t have Christmas.’

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‘That’s not entirely true.’ He paused. ‘Father Christmas also needs his Christmas Spirit, Miles.’ At that Miles suddenly felt bad again.

‘I’ve drunk it all,’ he mumbled, handing The Bottle over, expecting the worst.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Nicholas, ‘it will be filled shortly.’ And he held The Bottle up. Slowly it began to fill. When it was full Nicholas handed it back to Miles. ‘Would you give this back to its rightful owner, please,’ he said quietly but firmly. Miles hesitated for a second and then took The Bottle in his hand.

He crossed the room nervously to where Father Christmas was standing.

‘Here you are,’ he said, holding it up to the old man with a white beard. ‘Sorry I pinched it.’

‘That’s okay,’ said Father Christmas. ‘Sorry I threatened you with a burger.’

‘There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though,’ said Miles, his curiosity getting the better of him finally.

‘What’s that?’ asked Father Christmas, bending down.

‘How come, if you don’t really deliver presents, you need the Christmas Spirit?’ At this Father Christmas moved his eyebrows about and thought for a bit.

‘It’s like this,’ he said at last, ‘it’s all about Christmas Spirit, that’s what I am doing when I stop time, like you did, and go around the world. I am delivering Christmas Spirit, as much as I can to all the houses around the world. Oh, and 119

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sometimes the odd present.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Miles.

‘Well,’ said Father Christmas with a smile, ‘have you ever got a present, usually quite a small one, and you can’t figure out where it came from and no-one remembers buying it for you?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Miles, ‘that sometimes happens.’

‘It’s usually quite a small one,’ Father Christmas continued, ‘one that you didn’t think you needed. But it’s funny how those are the presents that you often keep for years, although you have no idea who bought them for you.

Usually they lie in a box, half-forgotten, sometimes for years; until, one day, you come across the gift by chance and it brings you back, just for a moment, lost in the memory of a Christmas passed.’

‘I see,’ said Miles, ‘and that’s you, is it?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Father Christmas.

‘So, am I going to get anything this year?’ asked Miles, biting his lip, knowing that he didn’t deserve anything after his antics.

Father Christmas chewed his beard for a bit. ‘Well, records show you’ve been pretty good for most of the year, and although you’ve slipped a bit in the last few days, I think we can make a special exception for extreme circumstances.

You can’t keep all this stuff, of course,’ he said waving a hand at all the things Miles had stolen, and at that they all faded, 120

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then disappeared, ‘but this year you will have a greater present than ever. When your mother comes home, I think this time she will tell you that she is staying for good.’

Miles paused. It didn’t take him long to realise that this was the best present he could have. It was so simple and he had been so stupid. All the computers and roller blades in the world were okay but at the end of the day it was just STUFF. It didn’t mean anything unless it was given properly.

Not just because you felt that you had to give it. And especially not if it was stolen.

He didn’t know why but he started to cry quietly, once again. He hated crying, and he usually felt ashamed. But somehow this seemed all right. Just then, there was a movement at the back of the room, like a shadow stirring, and Miles looked up to see the young man standing in front of him. Miles also saw that Nicholas was kneeling, his huge head bowed, and that he looked almost shy, as if this young man was in some way more important than him, and perhaps a little frightening.

Slowly, the room and everything else besides went quiet.

‘Stop crying, Miles,’ said the young man, in a voice so gentle the sound seemed to take ages to come and his lips seemed hardly to move. ‘If you understand all this and if you believe in me you will never truly be sad again, I promise you this.’

And with that he reached up his hand and wiped Miles’s tears from his face. As the man took his hand away the 121

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morning sun caught the flat of his hand and Miles saw, for the first time, that the palm had a tiny scar in its very centre.

There was now nothing to say, and anyway Miles couldn’t get his voice to work. The three visitors smiled at Miles in turn for one last time and slowly vanished.

And I’ve got nothing more to say either, except that when Miles turned to close the bedroom window he paused for a bit and then smiled to himself as he heard the voice of a robin calling in the crisp morning air.

THE END

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Epilogue Fred was now standing by the window now, looking out at the frozen lake. As he finished the story, he turned to Kit, to see that she had fallen asleep; he had no idea for how long.

As quietly as he could, he crossed the room and put another log on the fire, then left, shutting the library door behind him.

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