Phredde and a Frog Named Bruce and Other Stories to Eat with a Watermelon by Jackie French

Author:Jackie French [Jackie French]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730491279
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Ghostly Knight

The pumpkin coach arrived for me at seven o’clock.

I’ve always wanted to ride in a pumpkin coach, ever since I was a little kid and Mum read me that Cinderella story.

Actually, I thought it was a pretty dumb story, all in all. I mean what normal bloke would marry a chick just because she’s got the right shoe size?

But I really loved that pumpkin coach, with the mice who turned into horses and all the rest of it.

So when Phredde asked me to her sleepover I said, ‘Hey, can I come in a pumpkin coach?’ without even stopping to think.

Phredde said, ‘Sure.’

So here it was.

It looked great, the six white horses (I suppose they’d been white mice, not ordinary grey ones) galloping up the gleaming road to our castle, pulling this great gold coach behind them.

Well, it was more orange than gold—pumpkin colour, really—but it still looked wonderful.

I’d taken a lot of care getting dressed, because it’s not every day you get to ride in a magic pumpkin coach drawn by six white horses.

I’d put on my best jeans and my favourite T-shirt, the one that Phredde gave me last Christmas that says ‘A Souvenir of Phaeryland’.

I’d even wiped the grot off my joggers.

I was ready to go.

Gark, our butler, opened the castle door for me and bowed me out, just like I was royalty or something. (Gark really does the butler thing well, even if he is an enchanted magpie.)

Then the driver of the coach (who was really an enchanted rat, just like in the story) let the stairs down for me. (I didn’t like the look of the driver, to be honest, especially his teeth. There was something about the way he twitched his nose too…)

But anyway, the door shut behind me, and Mum yelled, ‘Have a good time and don’t forget to thank Splendifera for having you!’ from an upstairs window, and off we rolled.

It was cool.

The coach was all orange satin inside and only smelt faintly of pumpkin. I could hear the horses hooves going callop callop callop and the rumble of the carriage wheels and then we were down on the main road and people were yelling ‘What the #*@!’ as we rolled past.

It was really great.

I’d have liked the ride to go on forever, but then the sound under the wheels changed and I knew we’d turned up onto Phredde’s road, which is long and curved and made of moonbeams just like ours, and then bump, we’d stopped outside her castle.

The driver helped me down again. He looked even more ratlike now, and he’d grown whiskers too, so I hurried over the drawbridge before he could change back into a rat again—it’s not that I hate rats, it’s just that…well, you know.

Most of the time you have to knock on Phredde’s castle door, but not tonight.

The whole front of the castle was floodlit and the door was wide open and these great things full of flaming candles hung from the ceiling—chandeliers, that’s what they are.

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