There are many famous detectives in
the world. There's Sherlock Holmes. There's Hercule Poirot. There's Slightly Jones. But the tale I'm going to tell you today is
about a detective who is not quite so well-known - but she jolly well should
be. Because she saved the day in one of
our planet's darkest hours by solving the strangest and most awful - the most
horrifying - the most mind-boggling - the most MYSTERIOUS case imaginable -
The Case of the Disappearing Books.
Meet
MRS FOURARMS. As her name suggests, Mrs
Fourarms had twice as many arms as you might expect. She had four arms, and one of the many
advantages to having 4 arms - and 4 hands - is that Mrs Fourarms could stroke
all 3 of her cats and read a book at the same time. Or she could stroke 2 cats, read a book and
drink a mug of hot chocolate. Or she could
stroke 1 cat, read a book and knit a jumper.
Mrs Fourarms loved knitting,
hot chocolate and her cats but she especially
loved reading books. She read books of
stories and poems and facts, and she used books to solve every problem that
came her way.
Take
choosing names for her cats, for example.
When they first came to live with her, Mrs Fourarms just couldn't decide what names her cats
should have. So she came up with an
ingenious solution. She picked a book
off her shelves at random, then she closed her eyes, opened the book and pointed
at a word. Then she opened her eyes and
- hey, presto - that word was her first cat's name. Two more times, and job done!
Fortunately,
cats don't mind what you call them, as long as you say their names in a loving
tone of voice. I say fortunately, because the 3 words Mrs
Fourarms pointed at were NUMPTY, EEJIT and SCANDINAVIA. 3 interesting
cat names.
Mrs
Fourarms lived a very happy and contented life with Numpty, Eejit and Scandinavia until, one grey morning, she woke up to a
nightmare! On the radio and the
television and in the newspapers there was just one headline:
Shock! - Horror! - World Wide Disaster! - All of the Books Have Disappeared!!!
And
it was true. In Mrs Fourarms' house all
the books on the shelves and on the bedside table and on the coffee table and
on the stairs were gone!
"Oh
my prancing PONY!" exclaimed Mrs Fourarms.
"Oh my hairy CATERPILLAR!
This is awful!"
Her
house felt empty and sad. She was
halfway through a book on PHOTOSYNTHESIS - she was just getting to the exciting
bit, where the tree was just about to give off oxygen, but now! Now she'd never know if that really
happened! Maybe the tree decided to give
off prussic acid instead. Or peanut
butter. She wanted to know how it turned
out! She sat and stroked her cats, but
it wasn't enough. Her 4th hand wanted a
book!
It
was the most dreary, DREICH day you can imagine. The sky was full of grey clouds, it was
drizzling down with rain, and all over the world, every face was sad, from the
smallest baby to the oldest person alive, and there was nothing on the news
except reports about the disappearance - which nobody could understand.
"Where
on earth can all the books have gone?" wondered Mrs Fourarms.
But
then she noticed something strange. All
3 of her cats had gone out into the garden, even though it was raining, and
they were sitting there, staring fixedly up at the clouds in the sky. Mrs Fourarms went out to have a look too but
all that there was, was, well, clouds and sky.
But the cats went on staring. It
was as if they could see something LURKING up there ...
"And
maybe," thought Mrs Fourarms, "maybe they can."
And
she started to think like a detective.
"Hmmm,"
thought Mrs Fourarms.
"I
wonder ..." she thought.
And
right then and there, Mrs Fourarms hatched a plan.
She
went indoors and started to knit an enormous woollen net with two of her hands,
and with her other two hands she started to make a stack of fake books out of
cardboard. She didn't stop, not even for
a mug of hot chocolate, and by the time the sun was starting to set, she was
ready.
"Right,"
she said. "Let's go catch some book
thieves."
She
laid the pile of fake books enticingly on the grass of her garden and hid
behind a bush. She didn't have long to
wait.
She
could hear rustling in the dark and then 2 voices whispering.
"I
thought we got all the books - how did we miss these ones?"
"Who
cares? Let's be having them!"
"Stop
thief!" cried Mrs Fourarms and she jumped out from behind the bush and
flung her woollen net. She turned on the
torch she'd brought with her and there, tangled up in the woollen net, were 2
aliens! They had more arms and eyes than
you could count, and all of their arms were flailing about and all of their
eyes were blinking like crazy.
"What
do you mean thief?" they cried.
"Oh dear - are the books overdue already?!"
"What
do you mean, overdue?" said Mrs Fourarms.
"This isn't a library!"
"What
do you mean, not a library?" the aliens said. "We've got our card - our library card -
look - here it is! We put Earth names on it and everything!"
Mrs
Fourarms scratched her head, totally puzzled.
"I don't understand," she said. "Look, I'll take the net off and you
come into the house and we'll have some hot chocolate and you can explain what
on earth you're talking about."
And
that's what they did. It took a bit of
time and a lot of questions before Mrs Foursome could DIGEST their amazing
story, but at last she understood.
The
aliens were Readers. They travelled the
universe in a spaceship shaped like a cloud, in search of things to read. When they scanned Earth, they thought they'd
come to the best library ever - a whole world
full of books!
"Though,
to be honest, it's not the most organised
of libraries we've ever visited," said the first alien.
"Positively
HIGGLEDY-PIGGEDLY," the second alien agreed.
"But
lovely, though - really!" they hastened to add, for they were very polite.
They
came at night because they were nocturnal aliens, so night was their day, and
they'd beamed all the books in the world up onto their spaceship shaped like a
cloud.
"We
chose Earth names," said the first alien, "to go on our ILCs - our
Intergalactic Library Cards."
"Yes,"
said the second alien. "I'm
Catherine CANTANKEROUS Cartwheel, and this is George BLOODY Gobbets the
3rd."
"Oh,"
said Mrs Fourarms. "Those are, um,
interesting names. How did you go about
choosing them?"
Catherine
Cantankerous Cartwheel looked proud.
"That's the ingenious bit.
What we did was, we took a book at random out of the piles of Earth
books we borrowed, see, and we closed all of our eyes and opened the book at a
page and pointed at a word and then did it again until we had all the words we
needed to make ourselves Earth names."
Mrs
Fourarms agreed that this was really cunning!
"We
couldn't help but notice that you have 4 arms," said Catherine Cantankerous
Cartwheel. "Are you perhaps an
alien too?"
"No,"
said Mrs Fourarms. "I'm just
different."
"Fair
enough," said George Bloody Gobbets the 3rd.
"So,
now, could we all have our books back?" asked Mrs Fourarms gently.
The
two aliens looked sad. "Of course,
only, we've not finished reading them all.
Almost, but not quite. We've only
just got to a really exciting bit in a book about photosynthesis and trees ... Could we have just a teeny, tiny extension
...?"
"One
more night, then," said Mrs Fourarms.
"And then you beam every one of the books back to where you found
them, and we'll say no more about it."
And she wrote the next day's date down on their library card.
"Thank
you very much," said Catherine Cantankerous Cartwheel and George Bloody
Gobbets the 3rd. "We'll just beam
back to our spaceship now and get on with our reading. Thank you for the hot chocolate."
And
they were true to their word. The next
morning, when Mrs Fourarms woke up, there was just one headline on the radio
and the television and in the newspapers:
Joy! - Delight! - World Wide Celebration! - All of the Books Have Reappeared!!!
"I
think they should name a day after this wonderful event," someone
suggested, and everyone agreed that this was an excellent idea. And they decided to call it World Book Day.
Mrs
Fourarms celebrated World Book Day by doing some of the things she loved -
stroking Eejit, Numpty and Scandinavia with 3
of her hands and holding the exciting book on photosynthesis with the 4th. She heaved a big sigh of relief.
"Case
closed," she murmured with a smile.
