Any Fin Is Possible Read online

  To my mom and dad.

  The best parents in the world.

  Contents

  THE CURSE OF THE CAT OF KINGS

  CHAPTER 1 THE LEGEND BEGINS

  CHAPTER 2 NIGHT IN THE MUSEUM

  CHAPTER 3 THE MUMMY WALKS

  CHAPTER 4 A ROOM WITH A TOMB

  CHAPTER 5 BENEATH THE MUMMY’S LAIR

  CHAPTER 6 TRAPPED IN THE ARMS OF ANUBIS

  CHAPTER 7 RIDDLE ME THIS

  CHAPTER 8 A VERY PECULIAR PUZZLE

  CHAPTER 9 STEP INTO THE MUMMY’S PARLOUR

  CHAPTER 10 FRANKIE AND THE SARCOPHAGUS OF DOOM

  CHAPTER 11 PROTECTOR OF THE CAT OF KINGS

  CHAPTER 12 NOT A STONE TO BE SNEEZED AT

  CHAPTER 13 THE MUMMY RETURNS

  CHAPTER 14 THE GREAT ESCAPE

  CHAPTER 15 MAKE YOUR OWN MUMMY

  CHAPTER 16 RAIDERS OF THE LOST TOMB

  CHAPTER 17 A MUMMY’S JOB IS NEVER DONE

  SPORTS-DAY SHOWDOWN

  CHAPTER 1 ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  CHAPTER 2 WHO’S A HOOLIGAN NOW?

  CHAPTER 3 A LUCKY DAY FOR LOSING

  CHAPTER 4 JUST A HOP, A FLIP AND A JUMP

  CHAPTER 5 AN EVIL WAY TO START THE DAY

  CHAPTER 6 ON YOUR MARKS, GET SET, ZOMBIFY

  CHAPTER 7 WINNER TAKES ALL

  CHAPTER 8 WINNERS CAN’T BE CHOOSERS

  CHAPTER 9 SWISHY FISHY FINISH

  CHAPTER 10 THROWING FOR GOLD

  CHAPTER 11 CHOMPING A CHAMPION

  CHAPTER 12 COOL ZOMBIE RUNNINGS

  CHAPTER 13 THE SCIENCE OF SPORT

  CHAPTER 14 FRANKIE, CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

  CHAPTER 15 A FATAL FISHY FINISH?

  CHAPTER 16 WORTH THE WAIT

  CHAPTER 17 IN WITH A SPORTING CHANCE

  MY BIG FAT ZOMBIE GOLDFISH

  MY BIG FAT ZOMBIE GOLDFISH: THE SEAQUEL

  MY BIG FAT ZOMBIE GOLDFISH: FINS OF FURY

  ‘So . . .’ said the museum guide, holding his torch under his chin so it gave his face a creepy glow and showed us way too much of what was up his nose. ‘Who wants to hear about the Curse of the Cat of Kings?’

  The hand of every kid in the room shot up, including mine and Pradeep’s. This History Museum sleepover was turning out to be way cooler than I’d expected.

  ‘Legend has it,’ said the guide, ‘that two grave robbers set off into the Egyptian desert to find the tomb of the Cat of Kings. Their goal: to steal the mummified cat’s treasure! No one knows exactly what happened, but days later the robbers were found wandering through the desert with layers of scarab beetles clinging to their backs!’

  ‘Urrrgh!’ I shuddered. I really hate bugs.

  ‘The robbers had lost the ability to speak – so could tell no one what had befallen them.’ He paused and looked around at our faces. ‘They were the first victims of the Curse of the Cat of Kings. Thus the tomb remained undiscovered and intact . . . until earlier this year when builders unearthed it while digging the foundations for a new MoonBucks coffee shop.’

  ‘The museum arranged for the whole tomb to be transported here,’ Pradeep whispered. ‘It’s still sealed – so the museum scientists can excavate it and do loads of tests and stuff!’

  ‘According to the legend, anyone not “pure of heart” who tries to enter the tomb will suffer the same fate as the Egyptian grave robbers,’ the guide continued.

  I blurted out, ‘So the robbers couldn’t make a single sound?’

  ‘The robbers weren’t mute,’ the guide replied. ‘Instead, the only sound they could make was Miaoooooowwww!’ The guide made a loud miaowing noise that suddenly turned into an ‘Aaarrrraaagh!’ His voice shot up to a squeal. He jumped up and the torch clattered to the floor. ‘Something wet just bit me!’

  Pradeep and I shot each other a look that said, ‘FRANKIE?’

  Frankie, my pet zombie goldfish, really doesn’t like cats. Especially one particularly evil little kitten that belongs to my Evil Scientist big brother, Mark. I guess Frankie was thinking that if a cat’s miaowing at you, you bite it first and ask questions later! I glanced down at the mug of water that Frankie had been sitting in while we listened to the scary History Museum stories. Yep, he was definitely gone. This was bad for three reasons:

  Firstly, even though he’s a zombie, Frankie is also a goldfish, so he can’t stay flopping around out of water for long.

  Secondly, being a zombie goldfish, Frankie has the ability to zombify anyone that looks into his eyes, and we didn’t want to end up with a lot of zombified kids in pyjamas mumbling, ‘Swishy little fishy.’

  Thirdly, when the museum guide squealed, all the kids jumped up from their sleeping bags and started to panic. So there were lots of feet stomping around on the same ground that Frankie was flopping about on.

  ‘I can see Frankie!’ Pradeep said. ‘By the skirting board at twelve o’clock.’

  I looked at him blankly.

  Pradeep sighed. ‘Twelve o’clock means straight ahead!’ He pointed to the orange flash that was Frankie, who was slowly flopping towards us. ‘I’ll block – you take the mug and grab him!’

  We threw ourselves into the mosh of screaming kids and sleeping bags, dodging flapping arms and stomping feet. Frankie made a dive over one particularly flappy kid’s head, bounced off a Spider-Man pillowcase and landed with a splash back in the mug!

  ‘You couldn’t just sit and listen, could you, Frankie?’ I whispered.

  ‘My mum would say that you have a “low boredom threshold”,’ Pradeep added as he crawled over to join us. ‘Come on – we’ve got to find you better hiding place or we’ll be thrown out of the museum and you’ll be flushed down the loo.’

  ‘The loo,’ I said. ‘That’s it!’

  ‘When in doubt,’ we said at the same time, ‘hide in the loos and figure it out!’

  Now, you might think hiding in the loos is a weird plan. But you would be amazed at how many times it has saved Pradeep and me.

  1. When my Great-Aunt Celia (with the pointy prickly chin hairs) came round to visit – hiding in the loo meant successfully avoiding getting kissed.

  2. When Miss Murdock was looking for volunteers to demonstrate country dancing in PE class, Pradeep and I hid in the loos for so long that Mrs Murdock thought we had bladder problems and didn’t make us dance for a whole term.

  3. When Mark and Sanj (our Evil Scientist and Evil Computer Genius big brothers) invented a game called ‘Moron Bowling’, we hid in the loo at Pradeep’s house for most of the day, until Sami, Pradeep’s little sister, had to go and accidentally blow our cover.

  ‘Stealth mode,’ I whispered. Pradeep nodded. We each headed off in a different direction and slunk, snuck, edged, crawled and crept our way out of the activity room, through the main hall and towards the loos.

  ‘We’ve got to get Frankie into something where he’s safe, but he can’t be seen,’ Pradeep said, as soon as we had made it through the toilet doors. ‘What have we got?’

  Both of us emptied our pyjama pockets on to the floor. I had two pencils, a long piece of string from the inside sleeve of my jacket that I’d been pulling out bit by bit for months and only came loose this morning, a folded and paper-clipped fact sheet about ancient Egypt and my lucky-horseshoe-magnet key ring.

  Pradeep had a pouch of kiwi juice left over from the museum packed lunch, a sheet of Egyptian stickers they gave us when we first got here, a laminated card from his mum with an alphabetical list of all his allergies and who to call in an emergency, and his super-waterproof submersible camping torch.

  ‘The torch!’ I said. ‘It’s perfect.’

  Pradeep pulled out the batteries and bulb and stuff from inside. Then he filled it with water from the sink.

  ‘What do y
ou think, Frankie?’ I asked, holding up his mug.

  Frankie jumped straight into the water-filled torch and Pradeep screwed the clear plastic cover back on. Then we each filled our pyjama pockets again with our stuff.

  ‘It sounds like it’s quiet out there,’ said Pradeep, listening at the toilet door. ‘Now Frankie’s safe, we should probably go back.’

  We pushed the door open a crack and peered out. The shadow of the enormous diplodocus in the main hall filled the corridor. Light reflected off the swords of the knights at the entrance to the medieval exhibition and the flicker of the fake fire in the caveman’s cave seemed to be saying, ‘Why go back to the group and do worksheets . . . when you could explore?’

  ‘Let’s take a look around!’ I said to Pradeep.

  ‘They won’t do lights out for a while, I guess,’ Pradeep mumbled.

  Pradeep has an inbuilt fear of breaking rules, which he finds really hard to override. I find it kinda easy.

  We slipped through the door. The rest of the kids were still in the sleepover activity room. Pradeep and I headed the other way towards the Egyptian exhibition. The torch sloshed slightly in my hands as Frankie swooshed about in there, pinging off the spring at the bottom as if he was in a fishy bouncy castle. Suddenly the end of the torch started to glow green.

  ‘Wow, we’ve made a zombie goldfish torch,’ Pradeep whispered.

  ‘Cool,’ I replied, but then I remembered something really important. ‘Um, Pradeep, don’t Frankie’s eyes only glow like that when he senses some kind of trouble?’

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I saw something move towards the giant doors of the Egyptian exhibition. It was the size of a small cat and had bandages trailing behind it. It skittered around a corner and disappeared.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked again but it was gone.

  ‘Did we just see the Cat of Kings?’ My voice shook way more than I expected.

  ‘Oh good,’ Pradeep sighed.

  ‘GOOD!’ I whisper-yelled. ‘How can that be good?’

  ‘It’s good that you saw it too,’ Pradeep whispered. ‘I thought I was seeing ghosts. Or undead mummies . . . or mummy ghosts.’

  The green glow from our goldfish torch got brighter.

  ‘Well, that’s enough exploring for one night,’ I said, trying to sound cool. ‘I think I’m ready for some worksheets now. Maybe some colouring in . . .’ I trailed off, hoping Pradeep would agree with me. But somehow Pradeep’s ‘Fear of Breaking Rules’ dial had been turned all the way up to ‘Be Brave at All Costs’.

  ‘We have to follow it, Tom!’ he whispered. ‘This could be huge. What if it’s the actual Cat of Kings? We could be the first people in the world to see it!’

  There was no point arguing with Pradeep when he got like this. He was acting for the greater good of young archaeologists everywhere. He grabbed the torch and marched towards the huge stone doors that stood on either side of the Egyptian exhibition entrance. One had the face of a cat carved on the front and the other the face of a dog.

  ‘They were really into their pet gods in Egypt,’ I said as I stared at the giant animal faces and then down at Frankie. ‘Do you think there was a god of goldfish?’

  ‘Hatmehit,’ Pradeep huffed.

  ‘Bless you,’ I said.

  ‘No, the god Hatmehit,’ Pradeep answered.

  ‘Bless you again. It must be the dust in here . . .’ I started to say.

  ‘I’m not sneezing! That’s the god’s name – the god of goldfish.’ Pradeep shook his head.

  ‘No way! There’s actually a god of goldfish?’

  ‘Well, she’s a goddess of protection that looks like a fish, which is close enough,’ Pradeep said, and shone the zombie fish torch at the faces on the entrance doors. ‘I think this cat one is called Bastet and the jackal is Anubis.’

  I stared hard at the jackal. ‘It looks like a dog,’ I said. ‘How do you remember this stuff anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Pradeep. ‘Egyptian stuff just stays in my brain. Come on. It must have gone this way.’ Frankie waved his fin at me from inside the torch, motioning for me to follow.

  I took one last look over my shoulder towards the sleepover activity room, then patted the cat god on its nose and followed Pradeep inside.

  Immediately and silently, the doors swung shut behind me.

  ‘Ummm, Pradeep?’ I muttered. I was going to explain that I thought I had just accidently shut us in the Egyptian exhibition with a potentially undead mummified cat and a definitely undead zombie goldfish by disrespecting some long-dead cat god. But then I thought better of it. Pradeep was so focused on looking for the Cat of Kings he hadn’t noticed anyway.

  Inside the Egyptian rooms, the walls were lined with huge stone tablets covered in hieroglyphic writing, and there were cabinets full of scrolls and jewellery. I pressed my face up against the glass. ‘They liked to carve things into bug shapes, didn’t they?’ I said with a shudder as I stared at all the beetle-shaped pins and stuff.

  Pradeep was busy shining Frankie’s torch all around the huge room. But there was no cat mummy in sight.

  ‘Maybe we just saw a shadow?’ Pradeep said, sounding disappointed.

  The entrance to the tomb of the Cat of Kings stood before us. It was big. Really big. I mean, it was the grave of a cat, so I’d been thinking it would be pet-carrier sized.

  ‘It’s as big as a garage,’ I said out loud. ‘Why does one dead cat need all that space?’

  ‘The Egyptians believed that you could take stuff with you to the afterlife. So they probably buried the cat with food, jewels, even servants,’ Pradeep said.

  ‘That’s gotta be the worst job ever. Servant to a dead cat,’ I muttered.

  That’s when we heard a crash. Frankie’s eyes blazed so bright that the whole room was lit by a spooky green glow.

  A flash of white moved behind one of the giant stone statues.

  ‘The cat,’ Pradeep whispered. He ducked underneath the red ropes that were there to protect the tomb and statues from museum visitors, and I followed. ‘We have to be careful,’ he said. ‘We can’t touch any of this stuff. It’s very fragile.’

  There was another crash.

  ‘I don’t think the Cat of Kings knows he’s supposed to be careful,’ I whispered.

  ‘Come on,’ Pradeep said, speeding up, ‘before he gets away!’

  We skidded to a halt next to a huge statue of a pharaoh. In the glow of green light we could see a bandage dragging along the ground behind the stand the statue was on. Then it disappeared.

  ‘It’s gone under the statue,’ I cried. ‘But that’s impossible!’

  ‘How did it do that?’ Pradeep asked. He tapped at the base of the stand. ‘Ah . . . it’s hollow.’

  ‘There must be a secret door or something,’ I said.

  Pradeep pushed and prodded at different bits of the stand. ‘I think it must be a pressure pad,’ he muttered.

  Frankie had started to unscrew the top of the torch from the inside, so I opened it up and let him have a look. He leaped out and slammed himself against the stand, then plopped back into the torch with a splash. On his third slam, something gave way, and a hidden door flipped open like a giant cat flap.

  ‘Frankie!’ Pradeep and I yelled as he tumbled through the door and disappeared. I sprang forward and shoved my fingers in the gap, just as the flap swung closed.

  ‘Oooooowwwww!’ I yelled.

  Suddenly Frankie’s tail appeared out of the darkness. He must have been clinging to the lip of the flap with his teeth and had somehow managed to flip himself out through the tiny gap left by my fingers.

  ‘The pencils!’ cried Pradeep.

  ‘This is no time for drawing!’ I yelled. ‘Get this flap off my fingers . . . it really hurts.’

  ‘We can use the pencils you have in your pocket to prop open the flap!’ he cried. He pulled them out of my pyjama pocket and wedged the flap wide open while I scooped up Frankie and put him back in the torch.
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br />   ‘Are you OK?’ asked Pradeep.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I said, looking at my bruised fingers. ‘But don’t you think we should go back now?’

  ‘This is history, Tom,’ said Pradeep. And with that he threw himself feet first through the flap and down the metal chute.

  ‘I think I preferred Pradeep when he was too scared to break the rules,’ I whispered to Frankie, who just shook his head.

  But I couldn’t let Pradeep face the Cat of Kings alone. I took a deep breath, held on tight to the torch and threw myself head first after him.

  I whooshed down a metal chute and landed on my face, right next to Pradeep. But before I could start yelling at him for jumping down secret passages without knowing what was at the bottom, I heard . . .

  ‘Good evening, I’ve been expecting you,’ followed by an evil wheeze.

  ‘Sanj?’ Pradeep and I said at the same time. We really need to stop doing that.

  Frankie pressed his face against the front of the torch. His eyes were a wild green and his fins were clenched ready for a fight. He hates Pradeep’s Evil Computer Genius big brother, Sanj, almost as much as he hates my Evil Scientist big brother, Mark!

  We seemed to be in some kind of ancient Egyptian evil lair. There were two big statues of Anubis behind us and pharaohs’ heads and stuff leaning against the walls. Sanj’s computer was in the middle of the room on top of a big old cabinet.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Sanj asked. ‘It still needs a bit of work, but it’s an evil home away from home.’

  ‘How did you build this in the museum?’ Pradeep asked.

  ‘Technically we are behind the museum rather than in it,’ Sanj said. ‘This is the old site of the incinerator, which is underneath the alley at the back of the museum, and the chute from the Egyptian exhibition is where they used to put the rubbish.’ He paused. ‘Kind of fitting that you morons fell down a rubbish chute, don’t you think?’ He wheezed his pathetic evil laugh again.