Ron woke up with a start, and flung away the recipe book which had somehow closed shut on his neck. He stood up and looked around the Soup Shack. The wind was howling outside, but there was no wolf.
“What are you looking at?” he said to the spiders who were all standing on the table looking at him.
“You were screaming!” said Fred.
“You had your head in the recipe book!” said Sir Wellington Moonboots.
“Yes, well, I had a bad dream, that’s all!” said Ron irritatedly. “Go back to sleep.”
“We’re all wide awake now!” said Sir Welly. “We’re going to have a game of spider-crackit!”
“Do you want to play?” said Fred.
“No, thanks. I’m going to bed,” said Ron yawning. He went to the little back room and climbed into the hammock, where he soon went to sleep to the sound of the spiders cheering and jeering as they got engrossed in their game.
The rest of the night passed without incident...
.... until Ron found a secret passageway and had a strange encounter....
It was so strange that Ron thought it was another dream. He had been asleep for a while - a few hours in fact, as the spiders had finished their game - when he woke up and remembered something odd he had seen in Benny’s Big Book of Recipes. It was a recipe called “Soup for A Secret” and it had just one instruction: “Take two tins of egg powder.”
“Yuk!” Ron remebered thinking at the time. Even I, who can only make burnt toast, know that you can’t make soup with egg powder! And anyway, it’s not like Benny to leave something incomplete like that - very un-policebirdman-like!
Ron knew there was no egg powder in the kitchen because he had searched everywhere in there when he finally found the tomato sauce and the spaghetti (which the wolf scoffed). And he was sure he hadn’t seen any in the box delivered by the grocery blimp the day before. Then Ron remembered the tiny room where they had been briefly imprisoned by the Spy before she escaped. The pantry! Ron went to the pantry. The doorknob was still missing after Benny had blown it off with the dangerous spice-mixture. Ron looked along the shelves: mustard - glue - quick-setting cement - Benny’s old policebirdforce bicycle clips - drawing pins - pickled cabbage - pickled cucumbers - cocktail sticks x 1000 - candles - fish-food - egg powder! This is it! “Take two tins of egg powder!”
Ron took the tin of egg powder from the shelf, and sure enough there was another identical tin behind it. Ron took that and looked into the space. There were no more tins, but there was a switch. Ron put his wing-hand in and flicked the switch....
© David Severn 2012
© David Severn 2012
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