I don’t think the professor can have had steamroller lessons because he manages to take out all the lamp posts, plunging the town into near darkness as he goes. It doesn’t slow him down, though, and no matter how hard we run I don’t think we can catch up with him. We race through the bungalows at the edge of town, until we pass between the ancient black boundary stones and are past the sign that says ‘Thank you for driving carefully through Bywater-by-Sea’.
‘Tom. Shrink him,’ yells Eric. ‘There’s nothing else for it.’
‘But Grandma’ll kill me,’ I say.
‘She’ll have to kill you, then,’ he says. ‘Do it.’
So I stop at the side of the road and although it’s dark I can see the smoke from the chimney of the steamroller and a few sparks.
I put my thumb and finger together to make an ‘O’.
Click.
But when I look up, the steamroller’s still there, still chugging away from us.
‘Eric,’ I cry. ‘He must be too far away from me, I can’t shrink him!’
‘What?’ Eric stops. He raises his hand and where a torrent of water should be, nothing happens.
‘Jacob,’ shouts Lily. ‘Try and firebomb him.’
‘Really?’ says Jacob. ‘Your own dad?’
‘Yes – really,’ she says. ‘Go on.’
Jacob raises his shoulders and points his finger in the direction of the steamroller. ‘Go, flames, go – do your worst.’
But nothing happens. Not even the tiniest spark.
‘Tilly? Can you help?’ I shout through the darkness and then I realise that the tiny black thing scuttling around my feet is what used to be the giant pink puppy.
‘He shrank,’ she says from right next to me. ‘He’s gone all small and cute.’
‘I don’t understand,’ says Jacob. ‘Why can’t we do anything?’
‘Must be a glitch of some sort,’ says Eric, waving his arms at the signpost.
We stand panting, watching the steamroller grind out of sight. I listen for the last hum of the engine. When it’s gone, I’ll know that we’ve lost – that the professor will get to London, with the secret of the castle at his fingertips. He’ll sell the rock, the dust, make his fortune and ultimately destroy the village.
I droop, wishing that at least one of us had been given the power of flight or that I’d had the intelligence to grab a bicycle on the way past the house.
But the engine doesn’t die away completely. It gets louder, and within seconds we see the steamroller thundering back towards us, rumbling down the middle of the road and showing no sign of stopping.
‘Jump!’ I yell. I throw myself in the ditch, poking my head up over the side to watch it pass, but when it’s level with the sign to the town, the thundering steamroller falls to murmuring and finally stops.
The professor climbs down from the seat. He looks exhausted. Defeated.
We walk towards him. Tilly’s puppy tugs gently at his trouser leg.
The professor turns to Lily. ‘It doesn’t work.’
‘What do you mean, it doesn’t work?’
‘Watch.’ He reaches into his pocket for a small rock and a grater. Carefully, he begins to grate the stone. A steady confetti of dust falls. He walks back and forth past the boundary stones. I notice that when he’s on the village side, the dust glitters and sparkles; the grass turns purple, grows and dies all in a second. Outside the village, the dust falls as … dust.
Nothing happens.
I hold my finger and thumb together to make an ‘O’ and try to shrink a boulder lying on the road outside the village boundary.
Click.
Nothing happens. I try the same thing inside the village boundary and the boulder turns to a pebble in my hand.
I look up at the professor. ‘You’re saying it only works within the boundaries of Bywater-by-Sea. That any of it only works in Bywater-by-Sea. Us – the rock, the meteorites. All of it?’
He nods, unable to speak. From his pocket he takes a matchbox. He strikes a match and holds it against the dust lying on the road. It burns, letting off a golden sparkling smoke, very much like a roman candle firework, and sizzles across the ground, but not a single inch outside the boundary of the village.
He looks up at me. ‘It only works in the blasted village. It’s useless outside, utterly useless.’