Eddy Stone and the Epic Holiday Mash-Up Read online

  When Eddy Stone finds a pirate in his gran’s bath, his miserable summer holiday turns into a treasure hunt.

  Setting sail in a ship-shaped shed, crewed by an old lady and a grumpy penguin, what could possibly stop them?

  All aboard for an EPIC adventure…

  “Charming, surreal and batty.” Lenny Henry

  “Wonderfully told adventures.” Stephen Fry

  Cover

  About this book

  Dedication

  1. A Rotten Holiday Becomes Epic

  2. A Deal Is Struck and So Is Eddy

  3. The Legend of Grungeybeard

  4. Everything a Pirate Captain Could Need

  5. Sun, Sea and Sick

  6. What Lurks in the Shadows?

  7. Learning the Ropes

  8. The Most Terrifying Sound in All the Ocean

  9. Onwards and Upwards. But Mostly Upwards.

  10. There Is Nothing Like a Good Plan

  11. Contains No Celery

  12. Something Fishy in the Air

  13. Noise Annoys

  14. Story Time

  15. A Lot of Guts

  16. If Fireworks Had Flavours

  17. Another One

  18. A Green and Sticky Situation

  19. Backwards Spoken Are Sentences Some

  20. Friends and Foes

  21. Things Go Really Badly

  22. Things Get Even Worse

  23. Lovely Crunchy Heads

  24. Down in a Dump

  25. Nobody Escapes

  26. Pluck and Pluckability

  27. A Trip to Rocky Island

  28. X Marks the What?

  29. Everybody Dies

  30. Parrot and Carrot

  31. Twelve Miles Due West

  32. Meet the Princess

  33. The Treasure Beyond Price

  34. How Would You Like to Be Killed?

  35. Small Man, Big Book

  36. Getting It Right By Getting It Wrong

  37. The Morning After the Night Before

  A Treasure Map

  The Captain’s Seasick Sea Shanty

  The Poet Tree’s Poem for the Captain

  Eddy Stone and the Alien Cat Mash-Up

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The noise that interrupted Eddy Stone’s breakfast was like a cow falling off a wardrobe.

  “What the—?”

  Eddy thought he knew every strange sound in his gran’s old seaside cottage – the hot-water tap that coughed like a cat with a furball, the fizzle of the dodgy light switch on the landing, the moaning wind that blew through the crack in his bedroom wall. But this was something new – a deep bellow and a heavy THUMP that rippled the milk in his cereal bowl and rattled the cups on the kitchen dresser as it rumbled from the floorboards to the rafters. He didn’t know it yet, but that noise meant that nothing was ever going to be the same again for Eddy.

  Or for the little lump of plaster on the kitchen ceiling.

  For over three hundred years, the little lump of plaster had quietly hung around, while generations of people had gathered beneath it to laugh and to argue, to choke on stray fishbones, or to ask if there was any more custard. Dogs had snaffled scraps from unguarded plates, cats had chased mice between chair legs, and on one rainy Thursday afternoon a boy called Walter had removed all his clothes, painted himself green, and told his mother that when he grew up he was going to be a frog. In all that time, the little lump of plaster had done absolutely nothing.

  But today was going to be different. Today, this was going to be the little lump of plaster that could.

  Over the years, it had gradually loosened its grip on the boards above, until only a crust of paint and a smear of old cobweb were holding it in place. And this was its moment. With that mighty thump that had so surprised Eddy, the little lump of plaster broke free.

  Down it tumbled.

  Down towards excitement.

  Down towards adventure.

  Down towards Eddy Stone’s head.

  “Ouch!”

  Eddy reached up to rub the bump where something had just…

  “Urgh!”

  The something landed in his cereal, splashing milk onto a picture of a galleon in the book that he was reading.

  “Oh, great.”

  What Eddy wanted for his breakfast was a delicious bowl of Choccy Puffs (with extra added vitamins). What Eddy now had for his breakfast was a not-so-delicious bowl of Choccy Puffs with extra added ceiling – a dirty great chunk of it, oozing flakes of paint and matted strands of spider’s web. The milk had already turned a dingy, dodgy shade of grey.

  The little lump of plaster’s adventure was over. But if you had asked it whether that brief moment had been worth waiting for, what do you think it would have said?

  It would have said nothing at all, of course. Because it was just a little lump of plaster.

  This summer holiday is rubbish, Eddy thought. Why did Mum and Dad have to send me here? I’ve only been in Tidemark Bay for four days and it’s a total disaster. I mean, could it get any worse?

  The world took a second to come up with an answer to Eddy’s question. And then half the plaster on the kitchen ceiling fell down.

  Eddy peered through a cloud of dust at the bare beams and exposed floorboards overhead. And then, he heard the voice. A deep, stranger’s voice, where no voice should be, singing about a-heaving and a-hauling where the south winds blow-oh! It wasn’t a something that had made that great thump, Eddy realized. It was a someone.

  Ever so slowly, and ever so quietly, Eddy crept upstairs. The singing was coming from the bathroom.

  Ever so carefully, and ever so gently, Eddy pushed open the bathroom door. The someone was sitting in the bath – with no water, and no bubbles, but with a full set of clothes. Very unusual clothes.

  Ever so “Oh my gosh!” and ever so “What the heck?” Eddy stood and stared. It was a pirate.

  There was a pirate sitting in the bath.

  “But. What? How? Wow!” Words came tumbling and jumbling out of Eddy’s mouth – along with a fountain of half-chewed bits of Choccy Puffs.

  The pirate took off his three-cornered hat and blew the bits of Choccy Puffs away. Then he scraped the bits of Choccy Puffs out of his tangled black beard, flicked the bits of Choccy Puffs off the gold braid on his green coat, picked the bits of Choccy Puffs out of the tops of his long black boots, and brushed the bits of Choccy Puffs from his red and white striped breeches.

  “Are you really a pirate?” asked Eddy.

  The pirate coughed a single Choccy Puff from his throat and spoke in the slow voice you might use if you were trying to explain long division to a particularly stupid goat.

  “No,” he said. “I’m a fairy princess! Swab me down with a bucket of bilge water, what does it look like?”

  “Pirate,” said Eddy.

  “And now that’s sorted,” said the pirate, “I’ve got a question for you. How can anyone sleep in this metal bed? It’s harder than a stale ship’s biscuit.”

  “It’s not a bed,” said Eddy, “it’s a bath.”

  “Stinky fish!” shouted the pirate, jumping up and banging his head on the sloping bathroom ceiling. “I swore that I’d never set foot – or any other bit of me – in one of those things. ‘T’ain’t natural.”

  He hopped over the side of the bath.

  “Be careful where you put your feet,” Eddy warned him, “the floorboards are a bit iffy.”

  But he was too late. The pirate’s left boot hit the floor. The floorboard gave a soggy shrug and got out of the way. The boot carried on straight through, followed by the rest of the pirate’s leg.

  �
��Look out below!” shouted the pirate. “That wood is as rotten as last Christmas’s kippers. How did you let it get so bad?”

  Eddy perched on the side of the bath. “Not me. It’s my gran’s place. My mum and dad said they were far too busy at work to look after me all summer, so they packed me off here to get rid of me. They said I’d have lots of fun and fresh sea air. Well that was a load of rubbish. There’s no fun – not unless you count the local kids throwing sticks and apple cores at me. But Mum and Dad were right about the fresh sea air – there’s masses of it blowing in through the missing windowpanes. My gran has let the cottage get into a terrible state,” explained Eddy, picking at a patch of rust on the bath. “I think the whole place is going to fall down soon.”

  “And this floor is making an early start,” said the pirate, struggling to pull his leg out of the hole.

  “Gran doesn’t even notice how bad it is,” said Eddy. “She doesn’t notice anything these days. She’s got really scatty. Last night she put gravy granules in my hot milk instead of cocoa. Sweet and meaty – urgh! I can still taste it. But even if she did notice how bad the house is, I don’t see what she could do. Putting all this right would cost a fortune.”

  “A fortune!” the pirate yelled. “That must be why I’m here! To save this cottage!”

  With an almighty heave, he freed his leg from the hole in the floor – and from his boot, which stayed behind, dangling down into the kitchen below. He toppled onto his back, legs in the air. A grubby big toe, sticking out of the end of a moth-eaten sock, wafted under Eddy’s nose.

  “I had a dream last night,” the pirate continued, “and that dream told me that I would meet someone who had need of a fortune, then set out on a quest. And in my dream I found a map. And not just any old map – a treasure map!”

  “Treasure?” said Eddy. “I like the sound of that!”

  “And not just any old treasure map. Oh, no. A word appeared in my dream, a word written across the sky in letters of fire. And that word was a name. And that name was…” The pirate leaned forward and said in a long, low whisper, “…Grungeybeard! And I don’t need to tell you what that means.”

  “Well,” said Eddy, “you could give me a clue.”

  “You can’t mean you’ve never heard of the richest pirate who ever was?”

  “I’ve read loads of books about ships and pirates,” said Eddy, “and I’m sure none of them ever mentioned a Grungeybeard.”

  “Never mind your books. We are going to find his buried treasure!”

  “We!” said Eddy. “You mean – me?”

  “I’ll need a good cabin boy. Instead of having no fun here, why don’t you come and have buckets of fun with me? Have you got the guts and the gumption for an adventure? And if we’re really lucky, maybe we’ll get to fire a massive cannon and explode a few things while we’re about it.”

  “Adventure! Treasure! Explosions! No more beefy cocoa! You bet!” said Eddy. Suddenly the summer holiday didn’t seem so terrible after all. “Oh, but I suppose I’d better ask my gran first.”

  The pair padded downstairs. As the pirate hauled his dangling boot down from the hole in the kitchen ceiling, there was a cry of “Lovely plums!” from the front room.

  “That’s my gran,” Eddy explained.

  “If she’s got plums in there I wouldn’t say no,” said the pirate. “I’m feeling peckish and a nice bit of fruit would go down a treat.”

  “It’s not fruit,” said Eddy. “It’s her fruit machine. When I was little, she owned the biggest amusement arcade in Tidemark Bay. They called her the One-Armed Bandit Queen. But then people stopped coming to the arcade and she had to close it down. I think the strain of that was what made her go scatty. Now she’s just got one machine in the front room. And there’s a giant jar full of old ten-pence pieces that she feeds into it, and when she runs out she unlocks the machine and puts them back in the jar and starts again. She spends hours on it every day.”

  “The One-Armed Bandit Queen,” the pirate repeated. “She sounds like quite a woman. But do you mean that she only had one arm and was the queen of a gang of bandits, or that she was the queen of a gang and the bandits in it only had one arm apiece?”

  “No,” said Eddy. “It wasn’t like that. You pull a handle and…” He could tell from the way that the pirate was looking at him that he wasn’t making any sense. “It’s a bit hard to explain. But if you’re hungry, there’s some cold chicken in the fridge. I’ll get it.”

  Eddy’s gran had said he could help himself to anything he wanted, so he didn’t think she’d mind if the chicken got eaten. In fact, he didn’t think she would even notice if the chicken got eaten.

  He lifted the bird out of the fridge – and jumped back in surprise.

  “Yow!”

  He hadn’t expected to find a set of false teeth behind it. They grinned at him from the butter dish.

  “You all right, lad?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just my gran mixing things up again. I suppose that explains why there was a slice of pork pie in a glass of water in the bathroom last night.”

  “I wondered about that,” said the pirate. “It weren’t much of a breakfast. That soak didn’t improve the flavour.”

  Eddy handed him the chicken.

  “I’d better take these teeth to Gran. And a couple of pickled onions. She loves them. I bet she has forgotten to eat anything this morning.”

  Eddy found his gran in the middle of a particularly tricky nudge to line up three oranges. He waited until she had finished before asking her, “Is it all right if I go off today for an adventure with a pirate?”

  His gran was used to Eddy’s imagination. Yesterday he had told her he was off to meet a spaceman and zap aliens on the beach. The day before he had gone to the woods with an explorer to find a lost jungle tribe.

  “That’s fine,” she said, adjusting her teeth. “It’s nice that you’ve made so many imaginary friends. Just make sure you’re back in time for tea. And don’t lose your socks.”

  “Okay,” said Eddy. “But he’s not imaginary. He’s real.”

  “Of course he is. And has this pirate of yours got a name?” She crunched a pickled onion.

  “I don’t know,” said Eddy as he left the room, “I’ll ask him.”

  “A name!” said the pirate, as they set off down the lane. “Course I got a name. I’m Mad Bad Jake McHake. But you can call me Captain.”

  “Are you really mad and bad?”

  “Well, I get very grumpy if I accidentally button my beard into my trousers when I’m getting dressed. And what do they call you round here?”

  “Round here they usually call me ‘Oi! Cityboy Snotface!’ Or just ‘Oi!’ for short. But at home my friends call me Eddy. Eddy Stone.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the Captain.

  As they approached a bend in the lane, two heads popped up from behind the hedge in front of them.

  “Oi, Cityboy Snotface!” shouted the bigger boy.

  “Oi!” added the smaller boy.

  “I’d bet my boots they must mean you,” the Captain said to Eddy.

  They did.

  There was a sudden blur of arms, and two squishy tomatoes hurtled towards Eddy.

  Luckily, the first tomato missed him. But the second tomato was not so fortunate. It splatted onto his T-shirt in a mush of seeds.

  The two boys howled with delight and ran off across the field.

  Eddy pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped the mess.

  “I can’t wait to get away from here,” he said. “No one wants to be friends.”

  “You needs to stand up for yourself,” said the Captain. “Show them they can’t just walk all over you.”

  “The first time the local boys threw sticks at me,” said Eddy, “I thought about throwing them back. But what’s the point? They’d just go and get bigger sticks. And there are more of them than me. But I won’t have to put up with it much longer. Not once we start our treasure hunt.”

>   They walked down into the town. Tidemark Bay had once been a busy holiday resort full of people eating fish and chips and getting so much sun that they had to go and lie down with the curtains closed in their hotel bedrooms. But these days, people preferred to get onto planes and go and eat fish and chips on foreign beaches and get so much sun that they had to lie down with the curtains closed in foreign hotel bedrooms. They thought this was much more exciting.

  These days, Tidemark Bay looked as lonely and lost as a sheep in a supermarket.

  “First thing we need,” said the Captain, “is to find that treasure map.”

  “Great,” said Eddy. “Where do we look?”

  “In my dream there was an old junk shop with a window full of broken furniture and a big old machine that no one knew the use of. And it was owned by someone who had no idea what to charge for anything. And in the back of the shop, under a layer of dust and a glass case with a stuffed lobster dressed as a soldier and a copper jelly mould shaped like an octopus, there was a shabby old sailor’s chest with a secret compartment with the treasure map inside.”

  They turned the corner. In front of them was an old junk shop with a window full of three-legged chairs and a cupboard with no doors and a big old machine with sign on it that said: Antique potato peeler? It had a price ticket, on which the shop owner had written £39.50 and then crossed it out and put 75 pence and then crossed that out and put 18 Euros.

  “Aha!” said the Captain. “Follow me!” He stepped inside.

  “Can I help you, dearie?” asked the grey-haired lady who owned the shop.

  “Just having a snout about, thank’ee,” answered the Captain.

  A sudden gleam from the back of the shop caught their eye. A shaft of sunlight glinted off a copper jelly mould shaped like an octopus. The mould was standing on a glass case containing a stuffed lobster dressed as a soldier. And underneath, coated in a thick layer of dust, was what looked very like a shabby old sailor’s chest.

  “Leave this to me,” whispered the Captain. “Shops like this charge you a fortune if they knows you’re after a particular thing. You have to pretend that you really want to buy something else, and just mention that you might also be a little bit interested in, say, a shabby old sailor’s chest. That way, you get a better price.”