Lizard's Leap: Chapter Twenty Two: Kaleidoscope Castle

Kaleidoscope Castle

The children looked at the colourful picture of the castle. It was amazing. They knew it was going to be an interesting leap. Mark had found the picture in a fantasy tales book. It appeared to be an ordinary view of the front face of a medieval castle, but when you looked closer, things weren’t quite right.

‘Let’s do it.’ Vicki said, jumping up and down on the bed with excitement.

They gathered around the frame and joined hands. Their leaps so far had been strange and adventurous, but they knew that this one was going to be different from all that had gone before:

‘Sand Lizard. Sand Lizard, cautiously creep.
Shim. Sham. Shally wham. Lizards leap.’

*

When the world settled, they were standing on the lowered drawbridge of the magnificent castle.

‘Wow,’ Mark said. ‘This is brilliant. I wonder if it’s a real castle with knights and kings and swords and stuff? Maybe we’ll get caught in the middle of some big battle and get to shoot the catapults at the enemy.’

Kerry looked around in awe. ‘Or maybe we’ll meet Guinevere and Sir Lancelot.’

‘And if we’re really, really lucky, we’ll get to drink tea out of little china teacups with the Mad Hatter and Alice and the Knights of the Round Table,’ added Emma sarcastically. ‘It’s not that kind of castle, stupid.’

‘How do you know what kind of castle it isn’t, miss know-it-all? You always think you’re so clever with your sarky remarks and comments. This is magic, Emma anything can happen. One day you might even think before you speak.’ Kerry was on the point of slipping into her customary huff brought on by Emma taking the mickey out of her.

‘Pack it in, you two,’ Vicki ordered. ‘This is supposed to be fun, remember? If you are just going to argue, you might as well go back home and do it.’ She looked up at the castle. ‘Do you think we should pull on that big rope?’

The rope hung at the side of the drawbridge with a sign beside it saying, ‘Here ye pulle.’
‘What are we going to say if someone answers?’ Vicki asked.

‘Kerry can ask for King Arthur and the white rabbit’ Emma said, smirking. Kerry glared at her.

‘I’ll pull it, shall I? Can I? Please, can I be the one to pull it?’ Mark spat on his palms and rubbed them together to the disgust of the girls. He moved towards the rope.

‘Aaahhh-choo,’

Vicki yelped. Emma jumped. Kerry grabbed Mark and Mark nearly fell in the water, dragging Kerry with him.

‘What the heck was that?’ Vicki’s voice trembled and they looked round for the phantom sneezer. There was nobody there.

‘Aaah-choo. Well, you lot were at the back of the queue when they were giving out brains, weren’t you? Up here, Einsteins.’

They glanced up to see a pair of bright blue eyes with tears in them due to the sneezing. What they couldn’t come to terms with was the face that surrounded the eyes. All the features – eyes included - belonged to a gargoyle. An ugly stone face carved into the rock of the castle wall. She was a female gargoyle with tendrils of stone hair and a chipped rock face.

‘Boo!’ the gargoyle said, unconvincingly.

‘Boo yourself,’ Mark replied. After spending several months jumping through crazy
Pictures, into goodness knows what, he wasn’t frightened.

The gargoyle was taken aback by his boldness.

‘I said ‘Boo’. You are supposed to be scared.’

‘Why?’ Mark asked.

‘Well, you just are that’s all. It’s the nature of things. I say boo and you get scared. Been that way for hundreds of years. Don’t see why you should think you can just come along and change things. What are you trying to do, put me out of work? I suppose you want my job, don’t you? You’ve got the face for it. Just because I’m old they think they can throw me in the quarry and replace me with a new-fangled modern gargoyle like you. Well, I’m not going. I’ve been here eight hundred years and I’m not done yet.’ The gargoyle’s bottom lip wobbled and her tears, which had dried to dust, fell again.

Mark sighed. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said kindly.

‘Let’s try it again and we’ll see what we can do.’
The gargoyle smiled revealing stone gums and no teeth. She took a deep breath, puffed her cheeks, and said, ‘Boo!’ in her best intimidating voice—which Mark secretly thought wasn’t very intimidating at all. In fact, he was quite positive that he could do much better. Nevertheless, they screamed and the gargoyle grinned with gummy pleasure and pride. ‘There now, that’s better. See? I’m good for a few hundred years yet.’

Vicki giggled. ‘You’re funny. I like you.’

The gargoyle’s grey cheeks turned pink with pleasure. ‘Hey, GC, wake up. Hear that? This young ‘un likes me. GC, wake up,’ she shouted the last two words.

A few feet away, and parallel to the female gargoyle, a pair of brown eyes opened in the brick; a male gargoyle snorted as he woke up.

‘What? What is it, woman?’ He sounded very angry. ‘For eight hundred years I’ve been trying to grab forty winks and every time I get to twenty-three you wake me up. Have you got some personal aversion to the number twenty-four? What is it this time? Cramp in your jaw again?’

‘Oh, shut up moaning, you old boulder. We’ve got company. Look,’ female face, said.

‘I know, I know. I’m tired, not senile.
Listening to your nagging for centuries would make anyone weary. Now, who have we here, and what do you want? I am the Great Cobble, honourable right gargoyle of Kaleidoscope Castle. That there’s the missus, the not-so-honourable left gargoyle. She’s called Stone Cladding. I call her Og, short for Old Granite. You can call her Og as well, everybody does.’

GC found this incredibly funny and lapsed into gales of laughter.

‘You chiselled old lump of nutty slack …,’ Og began.

‘Oh, be quiet, you bucket of sloppy cement dust.’

Mark was enjoying the argument; he could have listened to them bickering all day and couldn’t stop laughing at them. The others didn’t know what to do to stop the warring gargoyles. This fight had probably been going on for centuries.

‘Ahem. Excuse me, Mr GC? May we come in, please?’ Kerry asked politely while attempting to acquire the butter-wouldn’t-melt look, which usually got her her own way.

The gargoyles stopped fighting mid-sentence and stared down, open-mouthed, at them.

‘Come in?’ bellowed Og. ‘You can’t just come in to a castle like this. There is a certain protocol to be observed. If we just let anybody in, the place would be overrun with all manner of pheasants. And what would be our purpose then, if we just said, ‘Yes, do come in,’ to every rapscallion that pleaded entry? Why, we’d be a laughing stock.’

‘Do you have a lot of pheasants, then,’ Emma asked.

‘Good gracious no. The law of the land says that that no pheasants in rags be allowed within the castle walls. We have a dress code.’

‘We aren’t in rags. I’m wearing my new skirt, it’s Boho.’ Kerry did a twirl to show them.
‘I can see why you’d be ashamed, but there’s no need to cry about it,’ Og said.

‘We aren’t peasants,’ said Kerry, ‘My dad’s a postman. So can we come in please?’

‘Without passing the test?—Unheard of.’ GC said.
‘Oh I like tests. I passed all of my SATS. What do we have to do?’

‘If you don’t know that you’ll never get in, will you? It’s obvious. You have to solve the puzzle. The more puzzles you solve the deeper you can go into the castle,’ said Og. ‘It’s simple.’

‘Where do we find the first puzzle?’ asked Mark, eager to begin the quest. They were all excited.

‘Should we tell them, Og?’ GC asked. Og nodded her head and grinned. ‘Okay, listen carefully because I’m too tired to be repeating myself. Ready?’

They nodded their heads. This was turning into a fantastic leap and they hadn’t even got into the castle.