The Accidental Time Travellers

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

“Oh, hi Mum.”

“Don’t you ‘Oh hi Mum’ me, answer the question. Where have you three been? I’ve been looking for you since ten o’clock. You were supposed to bring me your bedding, but as I knew you wouldn’t do it I thought I’d come and get it myself, but when I came in there was no one here, and that contraption of yours was gone as well. No hi-fi, no chairs, no you. Nothing. I thought maybe you’d taken it all to Freddie’s, so I went round there, but you hadn’t, so that lovely young lady Anna’s downstairs, just as worried as I am. She’s been wondering what to say to your parents, but at least now she won’t have to worry about that. I’d better go down and let her know you’re here. We were about to call the police. I’ve been calling your phone, but it just goes straight to voicemail, and young Freddie here left his behind. I think you’d better come downstairs and tell us both exactly what you’ve been doing.”

“OK, Mum. Sorry. We’ll be down in a minute.”

What on Earth was he going to tell them?

“What do we do now?” said Freddie. “We can’t tell them the truth, they’ll never believe us.”

“True. But can you think of a good explanation as to how we moved all of this and brought it all back again without anyone noticing? I’m guessing she and Anna have been here, and one of them would have noticed if we’d just got back with a pile of wood and some chairs, carried it all upstairs and then nailed it all back together again without any noise.”

“Good point.”

“Thank you. It doesn’t help, but thank you anyway.”

“This means we haven’t got back.” Jess said quietly.

“Sorry, Jess? I didn’t catch that.”

“This means we haven’t got back to the right time,” she said a little louder. “If we had gone to tomorrow, and then got back OK, then Mum would not have noticed that this was missing. We’d have gone, come back and as far as she’s concerned, it had always been here. But it vanished, as did we. We haven’t existed for the past six hours.”

Now there was an interesting thought. For six hours they had not been anywhere on the planet.

This was really cool.

But what wasn’t really cool was the fact that they now had to explain what had happened.

Jack sat thinking for a few moments, then made his decision.

“I’m going to tell them the truth.”

“What?” said Freddie and Jess together.

“I’m going to tell them the truth. Let’s face it, whatever we say is going to sound unbelievable, but at least this way we can’t get caught out because we can’t remember what lie we told the first time around.” Jack had been in that position a few times before, and it was never comfortable.

“But they won’t believe us, and we’ll get into even more trouble because they’ll think we are making it all up just to hide something,” said Freddie, clearly unhappy with Jack’s reasoning.

“OK. I’ll leave it up to you to explain then, shall I?”

“No, I wasn’t saying that. I’m happy for you to tell them, I just don’t think the truth is the best idea.”

“Well, I do. Come on, we’d better get this over with.”

So the three of them filed downstairs to the kitchen, Jack leading the way. Mum was standing up, with her back leaning against the sink, and her arms folded. She looked quite scary.