KENNETH ‘the Mystic o’ the Highlands’

McKINLEY

presents

THE DREAMINATOR

Live Your Perfect Dreams!

Dream Your Perfect Life!

MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!

100% Safe — 100% Restful

— 100% Money Back Guarantee

There’s a picture of a grinning middle-aged man with a luxuriant swept-up hairstyle, the goldish colour of a pound coin; he has dazzling teeth of a whiteness I’ve never seen for real. His eyes peer out from the picture over the top of round, coloured glasses. The design of the label looks pretty old-fashioned. Definitely from way before I was born.

I ease up the lid of one of the packages and there is another label resting on top of the contents.

USE ONLY AS DIRECTED IN THESE INSTRUCTIONS

Underneath this is a clear plastic bag containing lots of bits and pieces: strings, sticks, a plastic hoop made to look like bamboo, feathers, a circular disc the size of a saucer with threads woven in a pattern, like the head of a tiny, intricate tennis racquet.

There is yet another sheet labelled:

ASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS

On the other side is a drawing of the finished object, which at least gives me something to go on. Bit by plastic bit, taking about twenty minutes and watched by an awestruck Seb, I shove ‘Stick A’ into ‘Slot B’, and thread ‘String C’ through ‘Hole D’ and so on until I have something that looks exactly – okay, almost exactly – like the illustration. I hold it up for Seb’s approval, dangling it from my finger, and he sighs in admiration.

‘Awethome!’

Round my finger is a hook leading to a short plastic chain attached to the top of a pyramid about twenty centimetres square, but without a base. The sides of the pyramid glitter a dull gold (‘suffused with crystals of pure pyrite’ according to the sheet). From each base corner comes a wire: from these hangs the plastic-bamboo hoop. The woven disc with the coloured glass sits in the centre of the hoop, and from the hoop hang feathers and beaded wires with tiny, jewel-like stones at the end. Just visible inside the rim of the hoop is another wire that leads to a small, empty battery pack sitting inside the pyramid. Dangling from the centre of the whole thing is a wire with an on-off switch.

It is a strange cross between one of those mobiles that you hang above a baby’s cot and a wind chime. It’s quite pretty, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing.

Seb reaches over and plucks the thing from my hands.

‘Hey! Careful!’ I say.

Seb stares at the Dreaminator, allowing it to hang from his finger, and then at me. There’s something in his eyes that I don’t like: an accusing look.

‘You nicked it, didn’t you? I know you did.’

That’s the problem with Seb. He’s far, far too smart. I can beat him in a fight, but he’s clever with stuff like this.

‘There’s two of them,’ he says. ‘Put the other one together and let me have it, or I’ll tell Mam you’ve been stealing stuff.’

I don’t really have a choice, do I?

I sigh. Then, sullenly, I get to work on the second package. And it’s maybe exactly then that everything starts to go wrong.

Like I said – sort of Seb’s fault, really.