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- Herausgeber: Little Tiger Press
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Serie: Skeleton Keys
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
The fifth tall-but-true tale in the darkly comic series SKELETON KEYS from the award-winning duo behind STITCH HEAD.Greetings! My name is Skeleton Keys and these fantabulant fingers of mine can open doors to hidden worlds… Join me for the puzzling tale of Lucky – an unimaginary who seems to have mislaid the very human that imagined him…When Skeleton Keys discovers newly unimagined Lucky all alone, he's determined to reunite the little creature with the boy who imagined him. But Stanley is nowhere to be found…The search leads them to the Kingdom – a hidden world for unimaginaries. As they scour the streets for any sign of Stanley, the Kingdom comes under attack from a rampaging gorilla. Lucky is convinced it's the work of Stanley's wild imaginings. But what is Stanley up to and can Skeleton Keys track him down before the entire place is reduced to rubble…?Perfect for fans of David Walliams, AMELIA FANG and THE NOTHING TO SEE HERE HOTEL.Praise for THE HAUNTING OF LUNA MOON: "Guy Bass's smart tale offers some excellent twists, with Edward Gorey-style illustrations by Pete Williamson enhancing the comedy-Gothic atmosphere." – Financial Times
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To Ruth, What would I do without you? I cannot imagine! ~ Guy Bass
To Saoirse, enjoy! All the best ~ Pete Williamson
Contents
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Introduction
Greetings! To pottlers, do-to-dos and fly-a-ways! To the imaginary and the unimaginary! To the living, the dead and everyone in between, my name is Keys … Skeleton Keys.
A moon or more ago, before even your wrinkliest relatives were considering being born, I was an IF – an imaginary friend. Then, by a waft of wild imagining, I was suddenly as real as rabbits! I had become unimaginary.
Today, Ol’ Mr Keys keeps a watchful eye socket on those IFs who have been recently unimagined. Wherever they appear, so do I! For these fantabulant fingers of mine open doors to anywhere and elsewhere … hidden worlds … secret places … doors to the limitless realm of all imagination. And each door has led to an adventure and then some! The stories I could tell you…
Of course, that is why you are here – for a story. Well, fret not! Here is a hum-dum-dinger of a tale to send your brain into a 2tailspin. A truly unbelievable, unbelievably true tale I can only call The Wild Imaginings of Stanley Strange.
Stanley imagined his IF five years ago, five days after his fifth birthday. He named him Lucky, and the pair of them have been best friends ever since. Stanley never goes anywhere without imagining Lucky – and Lucky wants nothing more than to be Stanley’s favourite figment. Truth be told, Stanley and his IF are inseparable.
3So then, how is it that Lucky suddenly finds himself as real as cheese and all alone? How can he be real if Stanley is nowhere to be found? How can an IF become unimaginary if there is no one there to unimagine him? I cannot imagine! But strange things can happen when Strange imaginations run wild…
Our story begins upon a hill. The night is dark and there is no shelter from the cold, cruel wind that batters and buffets the land. A lone figure wanders hither and thither, wondering how he came to be there and what became of the boy who imagined him… 4
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“Stanley?”
Lucky’s cry was lost to the whipping wind. All he could see were hills, stretching out across the far-reaching darkness. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out here, or how long Stanley had been gone. But most of all, why did everything feel so different … so real? The wind was bitter and unkind and chilled him to the bone. Lucky had never felt anything like it. He called his friend’s name again but Stanley was nowhere to be seen.
Plump sheep dotted the landscape, braced 8against the wind. “Excuse me, have you seen Stanley?” he asked one of them but the sheep just gazed at him in bafflement. Indeed, Lucky was an odd-looking creature – no taller than the sheep itself, with stubby arms and legs and a covering of vivid orange velvety fur. His monkey-like face was bright blue, and black stripes covered a pouch on his belly. A bushy orange tail went all the way up from the small of his back to the top of his head.
“Have you seen Stanley?” Lucky asked another sheep. After quizzing three more, he rubbed his forehead and found a painful bruise as big as an egg. How did he get that? Lucky’s mind raced with questions but one repeated over and over in his head.
Where’s Stanley?
The wind seemed to push against him as he trudged across the hill. Then, after a moment, he spotted something – no – someone. 9
They were coming straight for him.
“Stanley…?” Lucky whispered, his voice swallowed by fear. “S-Stanley? Is that you?”
“Boo,” said a voice. Lucky froze as a figure stepped out of the fog-laden gloom.
It was a girl. She wore a striped dress and had pigtails in her hair, and everything about her was as grey as an old television show.
And her head was on back to front.
“Y-you’re not Stanley…” Lucky whimpered, edging away.
“I’m Daisy, dummy,” the girl said with a glower. “I can turn invisible. What can you do, except look like an orange?”
“Daisy! What have I told you about niggling the newly unimagined?” said another voice. From behind the backwards-headed girl emerged a far grimmer figure – a living skeleton in a tailored suit. He peered down at Lucky, eyeballs floating impossibly in his skull. 10
“Fret not, figment,” said the skeleton, the words clattering out of his mouth. “You have nothing to fear from us.”
“Speak for yourself,” said the girl. She turned on Lucky. “We’ve been wandering around looking for you for hours, you tangerine.”
“Daisy, do resist the urge to be yourself 11for the moment,” suggested the skeleton, before turning back to Lucky. “My name is Keys … Skeleton Keys, and this is my partner-in-problem-solving, Daisy,” he said. “Like you, we are inventions of imagination made suddenly, wildly real. We are unimaginary!”
“Unimagine-dairy?” Lucky said, trying to wrap his mouth around the word.
“Fantabulantly so!” replied Skeleton Keys. He tapped the side of his skull with his fingers and Lucky saw that each digit ended in a bone key. “And although Ol’ Mr Keys was on the other side of elsewhere, I felt the twitch, that eerie rattling of my skull which told me that an IF had been unimagined. You, figment.”
“I’m not sure I want to be unimagine-dairy. I feel all … solid,” said Lucky, poking his face with a furry finger. The thought of being out in the real world made him feel more lost than ever. He glanced up at Skeleton Keys and, not 12for the last time, asked, “Where’s Stanley?”
“Stanley? Is that the ankle-sprout who imagined you?” replied the skeleton.
Lucky nodded, his eyes wet with tears. “His name’s Stanley Strange,” he said, wiping his nose with a furry forearm. “He’s got glasses and a stripy hat and he’s my biggin best friend in all the world.”
“If he imagined you, he has a lot to answer for,” Daisy grumbled.
“My twitch became most itchy-twitchy not three hours ago,” Skeleton Keys explained to Lucky. “In that very moment, Stanley Strange must have imagined you so well that you suddenly became as real as elbows. Such is the wonder of wild imagining!”
“So, where is he?” Daisy asked, eyeing Lucky suspiciously. “Did you eat him?”
“What? No!” Lucky cried. He rubbed the bruise on his head. “I saw him. He was 13standing right in front of me … and then he wasn’t. Like he vanished!”
“Confuddlement is quite natural for the recently unimagined,” explained Skeleton Keys. “Do you remember your name, figment?”
“Lucky,” he replied, shivering against the cold. “I’m Lucky.”
“Lost on a hill in the dark? Doesn’t seem very lucky to me, Stan-fan,” Daisy sneered.
“Stanley called me Lucky,” said Lucky, swelling with pride despite Daisy’s withering words. “Stanley likes eggs and toast shoulders and pretend karate and he can draw a proper robot in five minutes flat and … where is he? Where’s Stanley?”
Skeleton Keys pulled the collar of his jacket around his neck as the wind whistled in and out of his skull, and stared across the hill.
“That, little figment,” he said, “is what we are going to find out.”
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“Fret not, figment! Ol’ Mr Keys will find your friend,” Skeleton Keys declared, striding across the hill as if he was quite sure which way to go. “Humans are an unpredictable lot, but they cannot simply vanish.”
“Stanley did!” Lucky replied, hopping after the skeleton like a kangaroo. “I was all snuggled and safe in the back of his mind – my second-best place to be after the front of his mind – then suddenly I was out here in the dark and the cold, and there was Stanley! But then he wasn’t…” 17
“Maybe your ‘friend’ got sick of your constant yakking and left you here,” Daisy grumbled, following huffily behind them.
“Not a chance in one million!” Lucky said. “Stanley says I’m his biggin best friend in the whole biggin world, even though I’m not real. Which I s’pose I am, now.”
“Does Stanley ever tell you to shut your face?” Daisy tutted.
“Yep!” replied Lucky happily. “Stanley says I could talk the stripes off a tiger, which is his seventh favourite animal. One time I was saying all the flavours of crisps, one time I was counting clouds, one time I tried to say the alphabet backwards, one time I—”
“Shut up,” Daisy grunted and tried to catch up with Skeleton Keys. “Do we really have to find this mango’s friend, bone-bag?”
“We help whomever needs us, Daisy,” said the skeleton. He stopped in his tracks and 18spun towards Lucky. “Let us start by retracing your steps, figment. What is the first thing you remember after you were unimagined?”
“I-I’m not sure I remember the first thing I remember,” Lucky began. “But I saw Stanley – at least I think I did. There was light … big and biggin bright and he was staring right at it. I ran towards him – ran towards the light – but then I banged my biggin head. By the time my brain had stopped being bumped, I was all on my own. No light … and no Stanley. I must have wandered off and got myself well and biggin lost.”
“Ugh, just admit you ate him and we can all go home,” Daisy said.
“What if he’s lost forever and ever and ever and ever?” exclaimed Lucky in a sudden panic. “What if I never find him?”
“Perhaps we need to go back further – to before you were unimagined,” suggested 19Skeleton Keys. “Do you remember how Stanley came to be amble-rambling upon these hilltops?”
“Same reason he always comes here,” replied Lucky. “Stanley wanted to see the door.”
“What door?” huffed Daisy.
“The one at the top of the hill,” replied Lucky. “The Door to Nowhere.”
“Nowhere?” Skeleton Keys repeated. He froze, his unblinking eyes suddenly wider than ever. “A door to nowhere, figment? Are you certain?”
“Stanley goes biggin loads – he likes to doodle his doodles there,” replied Lucky. “Stanley says he likes the Door to Nowhere ’cause it doesn’t make sense. Why have a door that goes to nowhere?”
“Sticks ’n’ stones, of course! How could I have been such a saddle-goose?” whispered Skeleton Keys, whirling around as if desperate to get his bearings. “In this confuddling gloom I did not realize where we were, but of course … this is where I left it.”
“Left what?” Daisy asked, eyeing the skeleton 20suspiciously. “Ugh, you look like you’ve just remembered that you did something stupid.”
“Is it that-a-way?” the skeleton mused, holding up a single, key-tipped finger as if checking the direction of the wind. “No, this-a-way!”
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