The Beast of Buckingham Palace. David WalliamsЧитать онлайн книгу.
his ankle.
“OUCH!”
With no chance of catching up with them, he thought of Richard the Lionheart, and called out, “I C-C-COMMAND YOU TO ST-ST-STOP!”
Not only was Alfred out of breath, but he was not used to giving orders. As a result, the words came out wonky. Despite Alfred being royal and these being the royal guards, the pair of faceless fiends ignored him. The Queen turned her head and shouted back to her son.
“PLEASE, ALFRED! I DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE THIS.”
There was a look of terror in her eyes. A look the boy had never seen before. His mother had always been a wonder at pretending everything was tickety-boo when it clearly wasn’t. She would always make up stories to cover what was really going on.
The sound of an explosion in the middle of the night was “nothing more than a thunderstorm”. She would then stroke Alfred’s head until he drifted off back to sleep.
After his grandmother had mysteriously gone missing one night from the palace, Mother would make believe that Grammy had written postcards to him. She was the “Old Queen”, his father’s widowed mother, and much loved by the boy. Alfred always called her “Grammy” because when he was little he couldn’t say “Granny”. His mother would read these postcards aloud to him as she put him to bed at night.
It was only when Alfred grew older that he suspected his mother had written all the postcards herself.
When he asked whether they would ever set foot outside Buckingham Palace, the Queen would take her son on an imaginary flight around the world.
“Hold my hand and together let’s fly up, up, up into the air, across London, across the sea, over the pyramids of Egypt, down the Grand Canyon of America, along the Great Wall of China and back to Dear Old Blighty in time for tea.”
In his mind’s eye, the boy would see everything his mother described. The adventures gave him hope that one day he would be able to leave the palace.
Just then Alfred felt something – or someone – SLAM down on his shoulders.
DOOF!
He took a sharp intake of breath, but he was so shocked that no sound came out of his mouth. Two large gloved hands were holding on to him. Alfred turned round. It was another royal guard who had somehow crept up on the boy after he’d stumbled on the rug. Silent, just like the others, he picked the prince up with ease and dragged him back to his bedroom.
“L-L-LET ME GO! I SAID, L-L-LET ME G-G-GO!”
Alfred was powerless to resist. In moments, he was deposited back in his bedroom, and the door shut behind him.
SHTUM!
He lingered behind the door and listened. Outside, the guard waited for a while before the sound of footsteps betrayed his movements. In his head Alfred counted to a hundred. As much as he wanted to race through the numbers, he knew that was a foolish idea. He needed to count until he thought the coast would be clear.
“Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred.”
On one hundred, he opened his bedroom door slowly and silently. Then he peeped out and checked that no one was around. The corridor was clear. So he tiptoed down it, before hurrying down the long, sweeping staircase, and across to the grand ballroom. This room once played host to the world’s most extravagant parties. Now it was a ghost of a room. The chandelier was hanging by a thread, the silk curtains drooped on the floor and damp had blotted the walls with dark, ugly patches. Desperately out of breath, the sickly boy stumbled again. This time he fell flat on his face.
BANG!
“OOF!”
Alfred noticed there was some kind of powder on his hands and face. At first, he thought it was dust – the palace was encrusted with the stuff. But it wasn’t dust. This had a smell to it that was different. Chalk!
Scrambling to his feet, he noticed that there were faint chalk markings all across the vast floor. It was as if the boy were standing at the centre of a life-sized chessboard. Someone had tried to rub the lines and markings off, but traces were left behind. Alfred bent down. There were words and symbols, but, despite his love of books, he couldn’t recognise any of them. What’s more, there were burn marks on the wood, and a large discoloured area where something heavy had been moved.
Alfred shivered as he realised something: there were strange goings-on in the palace.
The boy stood up and walked slap bang into someone.
D
O
O
F!
Or, rather, not someone, but something.
THE OCTOBUT.
A robot programmed to do all a butler’s duties, it was meant to make life easier, but it actually made it harder. Much harder. It looked not unlike an octopus, if an octopus were made of metal and trundled across the ground. Crucially, though, it did have eight arms, each one with a special attachment for performing different tasks. Hence the name: “Octo” for “octopus”, and “but” for “butler”, although its name made it sound more like it was an octopus’s bottom.
“Good morning, Mr President!” jabbered the Octobut. It was always getting things wrong.
“Oh, hello, Octobut,” whispered Alfred. “I wasn’t expecting to bump into you. Please can you keep your voice down?”
“Roast chicken,” replied the robot, before announcing, “You will be pleased to know I have boil-washed your underpants.”
With that, the Octobut flung a gigantic pair of unwashed men’s underpants at the prince. They must have belonged to some humongous old man.
WHOOSH!
They landed SLAP BANG in the boy’s face.
“Thank you, Octobut,” whispered Alfred as he removed the still-stinky underpants from his nose.
“Now, are you ready for your game of croquet?”
“No!” hissed the boy.
The robot swung its croquet-mallet arm so hard it bashed the wall.
BANG!
So hard that the arm itself came loose.
It fell to the floor with a CRASH.
With seven arms rather than eight, it was now not so much an Octobut as a Septemabut.*
Outside the ballroom, Alfred could hear the bootsteps of royal guards growing nearer.
STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!
The soldiers were just outside the tall wooden double doors that led into the ballroom.
“You go that way!” urged the boy, spinning the Octobut round to face in their direction. “The pope needs his toenails