Mr Majeika Vanishes Read online

  HUMPHREY CARPENTER

  Mr Majeika Vanishes

  Illustrated by Frank Rodgers

  PUFFIN

  Books by Humphrey Carpenter

  MR MAJEIKA

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE DINNER LADY

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE GHOST TRAIN

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE HAUNTED HOTEL

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE LOST SPELL BOOK

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE MUSIC TEACHER

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE SCHOOL BOOK WEEK

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE SCHOOL CARETAKER

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE SCHOOL INSPECTOR

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE SCHOOL PLAY

  MR MAJEIKA AND THE SCHOOL TRIP

  MR MAJEIKA ON THE INTERNET

  MR MAJEIKA VANISHES

  THE PUFFIN BOOK OF CLASSIC

  CHILDREN’S STORIES (Ed.)

  SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT THE BORING BITS

  MORE SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT THE BORING BITS

  Contents

  1. Hamish Comes Out Top

  2. The Silly Crime Squad

  3. A Very Unusual Fence

  4. Changing Jody

  5. Bottled Up

  6. Wilhelmina Falls in Love

  With thanks to children from the Willows School

  and Stratford Preparatory School, Stratford-upon-Avon,

  for helping to invent these goings-on at

  Wizardford-upon-Sky

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 1997

  Published in Puffin Books 1998

  21

  This edition published 2006 for Index Books Ltd

  Text copyright © Humphrey Carpenter, 1997

  Illustrations copyright © Frank Rodgers, 1997

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194445-6

  1. Hamish Comes Out Top

  It was the beginning of a new term at St Barty’s School, and the end of the holidays, but no one in Class Three minded, because they had the most exciting teacher in the world.

  Mr Majeika had been a wizard before he became a schoolmaster, and though he wasn’t supposed to do magic nowadays, you never knew what would happen in Class Three. People kept getting turned into things like frogs and lobsters, or sometimes the whole class went off on a strange trip, time-travelling, or meeting ghosts. Some days were quite ordinary, but you could count on at least one exciting thing happening each term.

  The only person who didn’t love being taught by Mr Majeika was Hamish Bigmore, the silliest boy in the class. So Thomas and Pete, and their friend Jody, began to think that something was wrong when they arrived for assembly, at the start of the first morning of term, and saw that Hamish had a nasty smile on his face.

  “What’s up, Hamish?” asked Thomas.

  “Have you had a nice holiday?”

  “Pretty boring,” snapped Hamish. “But I’m going to have a really great term. Just you wait and see!” And he laughed a nasty laugh.

  Mr Potter came into the school hall, and went on to the platform with the other teachers. “Where’s Mr Majeika?”

  whispered Jody. “It’s not like him to be late.”

  “And who’s that woman standing next to Mr Potter?” whispered Thomas. “I’m sure I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

  “Of course you have,” said Pete. “It’s –” But at that moment, Mr Potter called for silence.

  “I hope everybody had a lovely

  holiday,” he said. “We have a change to the staff this term. Mr Majeika has left us, and he is being replaced by –”

  There was a loud groan from everyone in Class Three – everyone except Hamish Bigmore, who was smirking all over his face. “Told you so,” he said to Thomas, Pete and Jody. “It’s the best news for years and years and years.”

  “No it isn’t,” said Jody. She felt like crying, and indeed Melanie, who cried all the time, had already burst into tears, and was howling at the top of her voice.

  “Boo-hoo!” she sobbed. “What’s happened to Mr Majeika? He wouldn’t have left us without saying goodbye. There must be something wrong.”

  “Be quiet, all of you,” called out Mr Potter. “There’s nothing wrong at all. Mr Majeika has retired. He was quite old, you know.”

  Thomas, Pete and Jody looked at each other. “He wasn’t old at all,” said Pete. “There’s something funny going on. And I bet Hamish is behind it.”

  “Quiet!” called Mr Potter again. “I haven’t finished. As I was saying, Mr Majeika has already been replaced. And I have some very good news for you. It’s not easy to find good teachers at short notice, but among our parents we have one person who used to be a teacher, and now I’m very pleased to say she’s decided to start teaching again. Many of you will have recognized her, here on the platform. Class Three are very lucky, because she’s going to be their new teacher. I am talking, of course, about Hamish’s mother, Mrs Dulcie Bigmore.”

  There was one loud shout of “Hooray!”, which came, of course, from Hamish. Everyone else groaned, and Pete even muttered “Boo!”

  “That’s rude,” Thomas said to him. “We don’t know what Hamish’s mum will be like as a teacher. Maybe she’ll be very good.”

  “Maybe the sky will turn green,” said Pete. “If you ask me, there’s only one person who’s going to enjoy being taught by Mrs Bigmore. And I bet you can guess who that is.”

  It didn’t take long for Pete to be proved right. As soon as Class Three had settled down for the first lesson, Mrs Bigmore said, “Good morning, everyone, and this morning we’re going to start with Maths.”

  “No we’re not!” shouted Hamish.

  “Maths is boring. I’m not going to do any Maths this term.”

  “Oh, but Hamish, please,” said his mother. “Mr Potter has given me a list of things I must teach you all, and Maths is at the top of it.”

  “Give me the list,” said Hamish, snatching it from his mother. He looked through it. “Maths, English, story-writing, reading aloud, French, Geography, History – this is rubbish!” And he tore the list up into little bits.


  “Now, Hamish, you’re really being very naughty,” said Mrs Bigmore.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” asked Hamish, pushing his face very close to his mother’s. “Eh? Eh?”

  Mrs Bigmore backed away from him nervously. “I – I – I won’t give you any chocolate at break time,” she said feebly.

  “You won’t need to,” shouted Hamish, “because I’ve already pinched it from your handbag.” And out of his desk he took an enormous bar of chocolate, and began munching it at once.

  “Oh dear,” sighed Mrs Bigmore. “I should never have taken on this job.”

  “Please can I make a suggestion?” asked Jody. “Mr Majeika always used to begin each term by telling us to write down what we’ve done in the holidays. Shall we do that?”

  “What a good idea,” said Mrs Bigmore.

  “But I expect Hamish won’t want to.”

  “Oh yes I will” said Hamish grinning.

  “Here goes.” And for the next ten minutes, to everyone’s surprise, he was quiet and well-behaved, writing on a piece of paper.

  “Time’s up,” said Mrs Bigmore after the ten minutes were over. “Who’d like to read out what they’ve written?”

  Hamish’s hand shot up, but Mrs Bigmore said, “We’ll keep you till last, Hamish, sweetie. It’s always a good idea to keep the best till last.”

  Thomas and Pete looked at each other. “What a wonderful term this is going to be,” said Thomas.

  Melanie read out hers first. It was all about the baby rabbits she had at home, and what she gave them to eat, and how much she liked playing with them. When she had finished, Hamish said some very rude things to her about it, and of course she cried.

  One by one, everyone in Class Three took a turn at reading what they had written. Some people had been away for interesting holidays. Someone else had been in hospital for an operation. Pandora Green had moved house, and she had written a funny piece about how her small brother had got lost during the move, and had finally been found asleep in a laundry basket in the movers’ van.

  Finally, it was Hamish’s turn. “Like my

  mum said, the best comes last,” he remarked, grinning. Then he read out: “ ‘This holiday I had a very exciting time, because I was captured by aliens from outer space. They were little green men who came out of a flying saucer, and they kidnapped me and took me off to Mars, but I stole their ray guns and shot them all dead, splat, splat, splat, splat. Then I

  steered their flying saucer back to Earth. The end, by Hamish Bigmore.’ ”

  “Hamish, darling, that was wonderful,” cooed his mother. “Such imagination! Such wonderful writing! I’m sure my darling Hamish is going to be a brilliant and famous author when he grows up.”

  “I wish aliens from Mars would capture him,” muttered Pete. “And we were supposed to write what really happened. I hope she makes him do it again.”

  But of course Mrs Bigmore didn’t. “Hamish gets top marks,” she said, just as the bell rang for break time. “Well done, Hamish, darling!”

  As they all went into the playground, Jody said to Thomas and Pete: “This is awful. We’ve simply got to find out what’s happened to Mr Majeika. I’m sure Melanie’s right – he wouldn’t have left us on purpose without saying goodbye.”

  2. The Silly Crime Squad

  “The first thing to do,” said Pete, “is to discover where he lives.” They went and asked the school secretary, and she gave them an address about half a mile away.

  “That sounds very ordinary,” said Thomas, as he and Pete and Jody set off to look for it, when school had finished that afternoon. “I thought Mr Majeika would have a really weird, wizardly sort of home. Maybe a hollow tree, or a haunted castle.”

  “Well, we’ve only got the address, 27 Lower Barty Street,” said Jody. “Who knows, when we get there, it may be a tree or a castle.”

  “Or maybe a tent,” said Pete. “I think a wizard like Mr Majeika ought to live in a multi-coloured tent, spangled like the stars, which glows mysteriously in the night, and makes a faint humming sound.”

  But 27 Lower Barty Street turned out not to be a hollow tree, or a haunted castle, or a humming tent, just a very ordinary house, though it was rather tall and narrow.

  There was a name under the doorbell. It said “Mrs Carrot”. “What a funny name for Mr Majeika to give himself,” said Thomas. “Perhaps he’s trying to hide from someone.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Pete. “I expect Mrs Carrot is the lady who owns the house. Mr Majeika probably just has one floor of it.”

  He was right about Mrs Carrot. When she came to the door, she had carrot-red hair, and she said that yes, Mr Majeika was one of her lodgers. “But he’s not here now, my friend. He went off one night last week.”

  “Went off?” said Jody. “What do you

  mean? Walked out of the house and didn’t come back?”

  “Oh, it was much odder than that, dear,” said Mrs Carrot. “Some people came and took him away.”

  “People? What sort of people?” asked Thomas. “It wasn’t a boy called Hamish Bigmore, was it?”

  “And maybe a nasty old witch called Wilhelmina Worlock?” added Thomas. “She’s always trying to do some harm to Mr Majeika.”

  “No, dear, I don’t think there was a witch among them,” said Mrs Carrot. “But why don’t you all come up and have a look at his room? Maybe he’s left a note for you.”

  They went up the stairs behind Mrs Carrot. “Has he only got one room?” asked Thomas.

  “Yes, dear. He lived very quietly, and never made any noise. Only, sometimes I would hear him chanting to himself, in a sort of sing-song voice. I expect he was speaking poetry.”

  “Spells, I reckon,” whispered Jody to Pete.

  They reached the top of the stairs, and opened a door. Mr Majeika’s room was in the rooftop, and had a nice view over the town. There was a wizard’s hat on top of the bookcase, and some big books which looked like spell-books, and something that might be a magic wand, but mostly it looked very ordinary. It was also very untidy. Clothes and papers and other things had been thrown all over the floor.

  “Mr Majeika is always very tidy at school,” said Jody. “I’m surprised he lets his room get into such a mess.”

  “Oh, but he doesn’t, my friend,” said Mrs Carrot. “I often come in here to do a

  bit of sweeping and dusting, and I’ve never seen it in such a mess as this. I thought I could hear a bit of a struggle going on when they took him away.”

  “Who was it, Mrs Carrot?” asked Thomas. “What did they look like? And did they come in a car?”

  “No, dear,” said Mrs Carrot. “They came on a magic carpet.”

  “Goodness!” said Jody. “Weren’t you surprised?”

  “Well, I suppose I was a bit,” said Mrs Carrot, “but I’m used to lodgers having peculiar friends. Mr Christmas, who used to live across the landing, had a pet bear which he kept in the bathroom – quite a nuisance it was, when you wanted to take a bath – and Miss Hoopoe on the floor below used to be an astronaut in America, and once one of her friends came to visit her in a sort of spaceship. So I wasn’t as surprised by the magic carpet as some people might have been.”

  “Was it a very big one?” asked Pete.

  “Big enough for five or six of them to sit on it,” said Mrs Carrot. “There was a sort of ghost in a white sheet, and a vampire, and an Egyptian mummy, and a space alien, and even a dinosaur. And they were all in uniform, like policemen. Come to think of it, there was a revolving light on the carpet – it was like a Hallowe’en pumpkin with a candle inside – which was going round and round like the blue light on a police car.”

  “Look!” said Jody. She had been picking up the clothes and other things that were lying about the room, and had found a piece of paper. “It’s Mr Majeika’s handwriting.”

  On it he had written, in a great hurry, by the look of it: “Someone has played a trick on me and the Wizards’ Silly Crime Squad is tak
ing me away. Please help. Try the bike.”

  “I’ve heard of the Serious Crime Squad,” said Thomas, “so I suppose the Silly Crime Squad is for catching people who’ve done silly things. But it’s not like Mr Majeika to commit a crime.”

  “He says someone played a trick,” pointed out Pete. “But what does he mean by ‘Try the bike’? Does he have a bicycle, Mrs Carrot?”

  “No, dear,” said Mrs Carrot. “He always used to walk to school.”

  “But the first time he came to school,” said Jody excitedly, “it was on a magic carpet which turned into –”

  “A bike!” shouted Thomas and Pete.

  They recognized Mr Majeika’s bicycle at once in the school bike shed. It had strange red and green markings. “I’m surprised no one has stolen it,” said Thomas. “It’s not locked up.”

  “The thing to do,” said Jody, “is to try and get it to change itself back into a magic carpet. Then we could ask it to take us to Mr Majeika, and we can rescue him.”

  “You try, Jody,” said Thomas. “You’re good at remembering Mr Majeika’s spells.”

  “Yes, there was that time when you managed to make a Hoover, and a wheelchair, and even a van fly,” said Pete.

  “I bet you can make this become a magic carpet again.”

  But she couldn’t. However many words and phrases Jody repeated, that she had heard Mr Majeika say when he was doing magic, and however often she waved her hands over the bike, or clicked her fingers, nothing happened. The bike just went on being a bike.

  “This is awful,” said Thomas. “I’m sure Mr Majeika thought we could do it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left the note for us. And we know he needs rescuing.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Pete. “The note didn’t say, ‘Try turning the bike back into a magic carpet.’ It just said, ‘Try the bike.’ So why don’t we?”

  “All right,” said Jody. “You try it.” So Pete got on it, and rode around the playground. It was quite a nice bike to ride, except that the back tyre was almost flat.