Rampage! Read online

  For my mother, Dorothy May Wills, cherished gold.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE THE WICKED WITCH OF THE QUEST

  I JUNGLE BELLES

  II CHISELLED SWIZZLE

  III A RAM, A MA’AM, A DING-DONG

  IV I SCRY WITH MY LITTLE EYE …

  V GREEKS BEARING GIFTS

  VI SNAKE YOUR BOOTY

  VII FLOWER POWER

  VIII IT’S NOT OVER TILL THE FAT LADY SCREAMS

  IX LOOK WHO’S STALKING

  X JAILHOUSE SHOCK

  XI LOVE AND ROAMIN’ ANTS

  XII THE LONE STAR LONE STAR

  XIII SURPRISE, SURPRISE!

  XIV HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO

  XV DEAL OR NO DEAL?

  XVI THE SORCERESS’S APPRENTICE

  XVII IS THIS THE WAY TO ARMADILLO?

  XVIII MAGIC MOMENTS

  XIX THINGS THAT GO BUMP! HISS! RAAR! TIPPITY-TAP! ‘EEK! WHAT WAS THAT?’ IN THE NIGHT

  XX GREAT PUFFBALLS OF FIRE!

  XXI GREECED LIGHTNING

  XXII GLUM AND GLUMMER

  XXII THE RAMMIE DODGER

  XXIV ROSE-TINTED MAGIC

  XXV A FRIGHT IN SHINING ARMOUR

  XXVI ALL THAT GLISTENS

  XXVII LOVE ISN’T IN THE AIR

  IIVIII BY A CREEPY LAGOON

  XXIX GANG RAM STYLE

  XXX CROC AND ROLL

  EPILOGUE HOMEWARD BOUND

  DON’T KNOW YOUR HADES FROM YOUR HARPIES?

  THE LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also available:

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  THE WICKED WITCH OF THE QUEST

  SMASH!

  The ancient amphora of red roses crashed against the wall, narrowly missing an oil painting of Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, before exploding in a shower of shards, water and blooms that slithered to the floor.

  WHAM!

  A two-thousand-year-old Greek urn spun through the air, slammed into a watercolour of Queen Marie Antoinette’s pinkly smiling face, and splintered the glass across her neck.

  CRACK!

  The heel of an airborne stiletto shoe (with the latest sapphire-blue sole) struck the sketch of King Harold, slap-bang in the eye, and sent the picture tinkling to the ground.

  Pausing for breath, Medea the immortal Greek sorceress, surveyed the pictures of all the other famous people, now shattered and hanging wonkily on the walls of her secret room tucked deep beneath her London boutique. Beside each person’s ruined portrait hung a framed sketch of the clothes they were wearing in the picture, showing the sorceress’s designs for their outfits – ones that she had later hand-stitched for them.

  The ones that they had died in.

  She turned to the earliest portrait. A pretty Greek woman smiled back from beneath the broken glass, radiant in a headdress of cream roses, dressed in a snow-bright wedding chiton. Now little more than an image on crumbling parchment, it still gave Medea an icy thrill whenever she looked at it.

  Princess Glauce.

  Her first ‘customer’.

  Faintly soothed by the sweet memory of that success, Medea began walking along the row. Here was Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor, with a wreath of laurel leaves in his hair, draped in the handmade cloak of damson purple, on the day he was stabbed to death. Beside him, a papyrus sketch of Cleopatra clad in the cream linen kaftan she’d been wearing when the poisonous asp bit her. Several pictures along, Anne Boleyn, the English queen, stood quietly glamorous in a silvery-grey gown in front of the executioner’s axe. A cheering General Custer in his buckskin jacket and a big hat with gold stars stitched on its band was next, leading his last charge, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and further along Captain Edward Smith beamed from beneath a gold-brocaded cap as he stood on the top deck of the RMS Titanic.

  Medea smiled coldly as she strolled past the images of each of her celebrity clients.

  Until her gaze fell upon the last ‘picture’ in her collection, nothing more than an empty frame, hanging beside a sketch of a gorgeous pink gown. She glowered at the teasing blank glass and felt a snarl curl in her throat. It should have held a picture of Hazel Praline, the teenage pop sensation, all candyfloss-coloured cheeks and blonde ponytail. She flinched, hearing a thin echo of the girl’s voice, twittering like a Texan sparrow on the stage at Leicester Square, at the premiere of her movie.

  The last time she’d seen her.

  The last time anyone was supposed to see her.

  Three weeks ago.

  Turning away, the sorceress caught her hand on a sprawling vine. Standing in its own gravel bed, it had been a luxury lolling spot for Hex, Medea’s familiar,1 a deadly black mamba snake, who’d loved snoozing in its crags, his coffin-shaped head gorgeously ominous. Actually, as far as the sorceress was concerned, lolling, snoozing and looking ominous were the only things Hex was ever any good at, since he’d preferred them to anything as messy as magic. Which was why she’d planned to dispose of him.

  Horribly.

  Except that he’d even managed to spoil that fun by deserting her first.

  Three weeks ago.

  Swiping the vine with the back of her hand, she sent it clattering to the floor in a storm of snapped branches and scattered stones.

  Now, those of you who weren’t brave enough to read about Medea in my last book might be surprised at this sort of behaviour. After all, you probably expect an Ancient Greek sorceress to be a beautiful woman, trailing the skirts of her long green velvet dresses around a workshop tangled with ivy whilst she gazes dreamily at vials of indigo-coloured potions. Rather than, say, using her private art gallery as a firing range?

  Well, reboot your brain.

  Because whilst it’s true that Medea was certainly beautiful, with wide silver eyes, a tip-tilted nose and long black hair, brightened by a single streak of violet, the only trailing she did was of bitter curses. Stroking was reserved for the snugly-wuggly fur on tarantulas’ tummies and, as for dreamy, well, only about as dreamy as a lizard seconds before it flips out its carpet-roll tongue and snaps up fly-breakfast.

  And I’m afraid it gets worse.

  You see, for hundreds of years, Medea had been horribly busy, stitching the glittering curls from the Golden Fleece into her own range of handmade clothes created for the rich and famous, the special few whose pictures now hung on the walls around her. The Fleece, as you might already know, was a ram’s coat made of dazzling gold ringlets and its rightful owner was Aries, who was indeed a ram, now a ghost ram, and a bald one at that.

  Long ago, the Fleece had hung in a sacred grove in Medea’s homeland of Kolkis, or at least it had until Jason, a Greek prince, arrived with his fifty men, the Argonauts. (The full story is in the back of this book, because frankly I don’t feel like talking about it now.) Falling deeply in love with him, the sorceress helped him steal the Fleece, and together they’d sailed off into the moonlight.

  And lived unhappily ever after.

  Because, you see, no sooner had the confetti been swept from the palace steps than Jason left Medea for another woman, Princess Glauce. Yes, that’s right, the lady in the first portrait. However, in deserting Medea, Jason had unwittingly condemned his lovely new bride to the sorceress’s Changing Room of Doom. Now mixing sorcery and stitchery for the first time, Medea used the Fleece to fashion the most magnificent wedding dress as a gift for Glauce. Beautiful and shimmering, it wreathed the young princess’s body like mist and pooled in pearly ripples at her feet. But, as she cooed over her gorgeous reflection in the looking glass, the gown burst into flames and killed her.

  And the rest, as they say, is history, because ever si
nce that day the sorceress had snipped and stitched through the centuries, feverishly sewing twists of golden wool into the clothes of the richest, most powerful and glamorous people on Earth. Banned by the Greek gods from the Underworld2 for her wickedness, she’d simply vanished for decades at a time, only to reappear years later, bright and talented, at the courts of new kings and queens and emperors, military leaders and film stars alike, creating their most glorious outfits, the ones that they died in.

  Gasp!

  Thud!

  Aaaargh!

  Thud!

  Urgle!

  Thud!

  Like that.

  But all things, even bad things, come to an end, and finally so did the Fleece.

  Three weeks ago.

  Oh, it had been with sadness that Medea had used its last curl in Hazel Praline’s dress, but it had been with mind-numbing, blood-freezing, cat-squealing fury that her plans for creating a hundred more Golden Fleeces to power her evil magic had been foiled. By Aries, together with his best friend Alex, a ghost boy, who’d returned from the Greek Underworld to find the Fleece. Up in modern London, they’d met Rose, who, in case you’re wondering, wasn’t a ghost but an ordinary twelve-year-old schoolgirl, who helped them to defeat a sorceress. Which, when you think about it, makes her rather un-ordinary. A fact that, unfortunately, Medea had already noticed, so that even now after everything that had happened, remembering Rose’s sweet face made the sorceress’s heart flutter like a poisonous octopus in a warm tide. Which is thoroughly bad news, because believe me, being the object of a sorceress’s soft spot is absolutely not what you want to be.

  You’ll see.

  Medea slumped down on to the sofa and clenched her fists. Oh, how she ached to fling deadly curses at Aries and Alex, to squash them like June bugs. Just thinking of Aries with his mad rammy face squashed up against Rose’s wild red ringlets as she hugged him, and that goody two-sandals, Alex, made the blood thunder in her ears. If she ever saw those two again, she’d turn them into toads and stamp on them and paint her bedroom walls with the goo and dye some fabric in what was left over to make a matching set of curtains and, well, you get the picture because, without their outrageous interference, not only would Hazel be nothing more than a downloadable tinkle of songs featuring the late tragic star but Medea would still have serious sorceress power of the cruellest, wickedest and most grimly gruesome kind.

  Because, you see, without power – the particular sort of power that a Golden Fleece provides – sorcery is rather like trying to make a decent brew without a kettle. You end up with a cup of cold water, a sorry-looking teabag and nowhere to dunk your Custard Cream. Thanks to Alex and Aries, Medea had been reduced to the level of a common-or-garden witch, an elementary witchette with a few dribbly-magic tricks that even the most hopeless Brownie working for her first badge in Supernatural Wickedness could pull off.3

  She scowled.

  Was it any wonder that she’d lost it when the police flooded into the theatre that day and she’d punched those officers? It was their own fault for buzzing around her like houseflies and stopping her from getting her hands on the boy and the ram. Whilst those two had scuttled back to the Underworld, where she could never reach them, she’d been arrested, spent a night in a grubby cell on a bunk bed with a scratchy blanket and been sentenced by a judge who looked like a walrus with a beard to three weeks of community service.

  She, Medea of Kolkis, forced to spend the last twenty-one days polishing policemen’s boots, cleaning the toilets at the local library and washing up after banquets at the Mayor’s offices! Giving herself a quick mental shake, she reminded herself that now was not the time to reminisce. There were far more important things to think about. Her Plan B, for finding a new source of magical power. Quickly stepping out of the scattered mess of vine on the floor, she swept her hair into an untidy bun and turned back to the group of portraits from the seventeenth century. A row of snooty women with powdered white faces and tight red lips regarded her as she passed before stopping in front of a portrait of two men. A father and son, they smiled out kindly, sharing the same handsome, heart-shaped faces, shoulder-length dark hair, beard and neat moustache. Walter Raleigh, a nobleman at Queen Elizabeth I’s Court, and his son, Wat, who’d explored the New World4 together. Ever the seamstress, she paused for a moment, admiring her handiwork on their linen shirts and stiff lace ruffs, recalling how the Flanders lace had made her fingers sting. But it had been worth it. Her efforts always were. Chuckling, she recalled the news of their delightful deaths.

  She quickly lifted the picture off the wall to reveal a small safe. A few taps and twists later, the door creaked open and she lifted out its contents: a tattered roll of parchment and a blue velvet bag. The parchment was mottled the colour of weak tea, and steeped in a pungent smoky smell that made her nose tingle. Unfurling it gently, she was delighted to see that the four-hundred-year-old writing and picture, scrawled in chocolate-brown ink, was still clear. Next, she snatched up the bag and glimpsed inside, catching a glint of engraved gold.

  Clutching them both to her chest, the corners of the sorceress’s mouth twitched upwards and her eyes grew dark, flat and dead as a shark’s when it senses a vibration in the water and, with a flick of its tail, turns towards the splashing of swimmers by the shore.

  1 A familiar is a witch’s pet, traditionally a black cat that stalks around looking spooky and catching rats for spells. However, they can be any type of animal and the best ones talk, make pots of tea and answer the phone too.

  2 This is the land of Ancient Greek ghosts, which sits plum in the centre of our Earth like the bubblegum ball in the middle of a gobstopper.

  3 What do you mean, that’s not the sort of thing they do? Don’t be fooled by all that camping in the woods and helping old ladies over the road malarkey.

  4 The New World is the name that was given to North and South America back in the sixteenth century when pioneers were exploring the continents. However, despite its name, it was just as scuffled and dusty as everywhere else.

  JUNGLE BELLES

  Well, that’s quite enough of that.

  Medea is most definitely not my favourite person and, to be honest, I’d rather not talk about her any more, nor murder, man-eaters or mayhem for that matter. To be honest, there’s far too much of that in the rest of this book and I’ve only just recovered from our last little excursion in the summer. But it hasn’t escaped my hawk-like skills of observation that masses of mean words all start with the letter ‘M’. Like murk and menace and mischief and malevolent. (And, quelle surprise, as they say in la belle France, the name of a certain personage.)

  So, excuse me, but I’m going to leave the misfortunes5 of that miserable6 underground mooch-hole7 to tell you about something a lot more exhilarating, which is what Rose was doing a couple of weeks later.

  Rose was flying high above the Amazon rainforest, gazing out of the plane window, astonished at the vast sprawl of jungle beneath her. Down below the whirring propellers of the plane’s pink-tipped wings, ancient teak trees, taller than tower blocks, thrust their branches into the sky. Neighbouring Brazil-nut trees snagged wisps of mist that floated about their crowns of frothy yellow flowers as, blinking, she tried to take in quite how enormously, overwhelmingly gigantic they were. Yet nothing her mother had told her – and what with her mother being an archaeologist who specialised in Amazonia, that had been plenty – had prepared her for the sheer spectacle of the rainforest. Pressing her face up against the sun-warmed glass of the window, she gazed further down their teetering trunks at the canopy, the swell of leaves and vines that lapped about them like an emerald ocean. As she peered, eager to glimpse a troupe of monkeys bouncing over the branches or a toucan circling in the warm air, her mother’s voice floated back into her mind. Did she know that the Amazon was the biggest river on Earth? Or that its rainforest helped the Earth breathe? That quinine, the drug that cured malaria, grew in the bark of its trees? That mining, oil drilling and ranching
ripped it to pieces every day, ruining great swathes of the forest that could never be replaced?

  No, no, no and no.

  Rose bit her lip, thinking guiltily back to those last awkward moments at the airport, wishing again that she’d been able to tell her mother the truth about this trip. But even though she’d always hated lying, despised it so much that it actually made her stomach hurt, she absolutely couldn’t. What? Tell her mother that she’d been given the coordinates of Rose’s missing father, by a magical All-Knowing Scroll? Confess that she intended to head deep into the eastern Brazilian rainforest to find him, even though search parties had given up six months ago, based on the help that a couple of Greek ghosts had given her? Her mother would have gone horribly pale, whipped Rose’s suitcase back from the airport check-in desk and dragged her to some sort of specialist the same morning.

  Rose sighed.

  If only her mother was like other girls’ mothers. The sort who believed what their daughters told them. And noticed them occasionally, instead of dragging them endlessly from one city to the next and one school to the next, whilst switching jobs from one famous museum to the next, elbow-deep in the relics of old Amazon tribes, trying to accept that they’d never see their husband again.

  Rose shook her head. She knew she was being unfair. After all, her mother only did it to distract herself from her own grief.

  Still, as she now reminded herself, trying to soothe her conscience, it was hardly her fault that she’d been forced, yes, that was it, forced, to pretend the trip was simply a thank-you from Hazel, for helping to save the pop star’s life, in what the newspapers reported as ‘a terrible theatre accident’. She bit a fingernail. That bit was nearly true, at least. The trip was a thank you, even if the accident at the theatre had been nothing to do with sloppy stage dressing and everything to do with the whim of a vicious bloodthirsty sorceress.

  Rose shivered.

  Despite the sunshine streaming in through the aircraft window, thinking of the sorceress made her skin prickle icily. She reached for the gold locket around her neck and rubbing its familiar oval smoothness, took a long, deep breath. A present from her parents for her eleventh birthday, it was now the most special thing she owned, because it had been only a few months later that her father had vanished on his expedition.