Warning! The Past is Broken
Nicholas Dore
eBook
(, Aug. 28, 2012)
It looked as though Joe was going to have a fairly boring Summer holiday until he met Sarah in the library and she introduced him to her Aunt Fifi. Her aunt was unusual - for a start she had once been a dancer in Paris, but she was also a medium and put people in touch with “The Other Side”. Now that should have been creepy - talking to the dead and all that - but somehow it didn’t seem to be. For a start the people on the other side didn’t seem to think that they were dead, and besides they were the weirdest lot Joe and Sarah had ever met. Aunt Fifi’s Spirit Guide was Chief Thunder Head, a rather unreliable Red Indian, and he put Sarah and Joe in touch with such an odd bunch of people on the Other Side that they started to wonder just where some of them were coming from. Could it be true that Hadrian’s Wall was actually contracted to the Emperor Hadrian’s brother-in-law Alphonse? And how on Earth did they wind up instead at the Great Wall of China, only to find it was really the Great Fence? Was it really true that both the Mongols and the Chinese then contracted Alphonse Hadrian to build them a Great Wall - which, of course, he got wrong, just like he had the last one? Then there was the sinister Shaman, who they met in the camp of the Great Khan - just who was he and what did he want? Later they were then taken on a trip to meet the real discoverer of America, only to find themselves on the ship of the hopeless Leif the Liability and his crew of the lost and the mad, aiming to prove that the world was flat by sailing off the edge. How was it that they ended up in Japan and missed America - where had it gone? And what was the Shaman doing in Japan?With lots of questions that needed an answer going round in his head, Joe went on holiday to the seaside and met up with Aunt Fifi and Sarah again. That was all well and good, but then Thunder Head made an appearance on the pier and they all wound up at the End of the Pier Show - and learned a little more about the Chief, a former star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. They still wondered why he talked like a cartoon Red Indian while his wife, Leaping Elk, spoke perfectly normally.To find answers they visited the Other Side, to the Chief’s Happy Hunting Grounds, to ask a strange and eccentric scientist for help; his knack of blowing himself up was worrying but his odd invention of a method of crossing between other worlds might give a clue. Once again the sinister Shaman made an appearance and this time he kidnapped Sarah and Aunt Fifi. Even more serious, his plot to control all the Earth-Worlds of the Other Side seemed set on freeing one of the nastiest creatures of legend, a beast born in the first fires of Creation and who looked likely to end life as we know it. Where had he found a lot of robots to help him and why did they look like small dinosaurs? A rescue mission had to be mounted to save all the Earths of time and space - and Aunt Fifi and Sarah. All that stood between a thousand worlds and destruction were a former Paris dancer, two children, a Red Indian Chief and his wife (the former stars of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show), a mad scientist with a habit of blowing himself up, a collection of Mongol warriors with bows and arrows, and the crew of the lost and the lonely gathered together by Leif the Liability, all on a wooden sailing ship cruising the stars, taking on an army of robots and the forces of chaos and destruction unleashed by the Shaman. Why does the Grand Finale of the titanic struggle for all of time and space take place in the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, before an invited audience including the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress and to full musical accompaniment? This was going to be the performance of a lifetime, never to be repeated. This is a story for children aged ten upwards, or anyone who has a vivid imagination.
