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  Teddy Sparkles coughed to draw attention to himself. He was glittering with magical energy, just as he always did, right before granting wishes.

  ‘I bet that stupid alien bear can’t even get the spell right anyway,’ Missy sighed. ‘His kind are supposed to manipulate the timelines and everything, but I bet he can’t create the futures for you three that I’ve suggested …’

  ‘Oh, but I can!’ shouted Teddy Sparkles crossly. ‘How dare you underestimate me, Missy! How dare you put me down! Look, here! I’m doing magic now! I’m granting those wishes RIGHT NOW!’

  It was true, there was a very odd trembling in the air, rather as if invisible lines of force and influence stretching way into the future were activating and shimmering and obeying his mysterious will. Esme found herself growing rather frightened as the very air took on a golden hue.

  Missy snapped her carpet bag shut and announced, ‘Well, I’ll be off, then. I’ll see you all later. Much later, I hope.’

  And with no more ado, she swept out of the schoolroom.

  The children listened for her slamming out of the front door and marching out into the street. But instead she went back upstairs to her room, climbed inside her vast, Victorian wardrobe and shut the doors behind her. Then there was the most extraordinary noise, and after that silence fell in the attic of their house in Queen Square.

  Missy had vanished from their lives.

  ‘Good!’ Teddy Sparkles bellowed. ‘She’s a dreadful woman!’ Then a thought seemed to strike him. ‘But if she’s gone … then I’ll never get home! I’ll never get back to Ursino Six! I’m stuck here … in a world of human beings …!’

  The magic faded abruptly from the room, and the three children hurried to gather round the little bear in order to comfort him.

  Several decades went by. War years. Terrible years for London.

  Bombs were dropped by the enemy, even on the fancier districts. Great houses were destroyed as well as much humbler ones. Vast armies of children were sent out to the countryside, to new homes, far away from danger, it was hoped.

  The children grew up.

  The house in Queen Square still stood, and the family retained ownership, even as the children moved away, into their own lives. Their father grew old and fussy, looked after by his serving staff. He complained that no one ever came to visit him.

  The children forgot. Life after the war was tough and complicated. They had careers to build. Families of their own to raise. Gradually they came to take up positions in the adult world. Important positions. Powerful positions.

  And the strange events of that particular summer – when Jack was 10, Esme was 8, and Peter was 5 – faded away from their minds completely. Perhaps some lingering enchantment rinsed through their memories, reducing their adventures to mere echoes of stories told to them once upon a time by a peculiar stand-in governess who came, briefly, to stay.

  The children grew into their thirties and then their forties. Their own children started growing up to question the world and the order of things. They came to visit their tetchy grandfather in Queen Square, and they loved the dusty, antiquated mausoleum where he lived. By the early 1960s hardly anyone lived in places like that. Houses such as his had been carved up into flats. The grandchildren themselves – four of them: Lucy, Dinah, Eric and John – all lived in modern, comfortable homes in the suburbs. But the cousins loved going to visit Queen Square whenever they could, especially at Christmas, when the ancient cook laid on a marvellous feast, and told them stories about the old days.

  Christmas Eve 1962 saw all the children and grandchildren converge upon the old townhouse. It was snowing in London, and the whole day had been dark since lunchtime.

  Eric – who was youngest and most fanciful of all the cousins – said it was the kind of day that magic might happen. The others scoffed at him, but Eric was sensitive. He was alert to things that everyone else in his family had seemingly forgotten.

  It was Eric who was looking up into the drifting snow, on the pavement outside the house, and it was Eric who spied the woman falling out of the sky.

  ‘The what?’ John laughed, and called his cousins outside so they could all laugh at Eric’s latest ridiculous notion.

  ‘It’s true!’ yelled Eric. ‘Just look! Look up there! It’s a woman! With an umbrella! Dressed so old-fashioned in a duster coat and a little hat with flowers on … Can’t you see …?’

  She was drifting down through the snowy darkness to land on the pavement beside them. The children stared at her in wonder.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, lips prim and eyes piercing. ‘I imagine your parents must have told you all about me?’

  Missy asked that the whole family be gathered in the drawing room of the old house. Once they were all sat before her – some of the older ones wearing amazed expressions – she smiled broadly.

  ‘Hello, again everyone. Don’t I look magnificent? I haven’t changed a bit, have I?’

  Esme was aghast. ‘You … You really haven’t …!’

  Her husband – a corpulent man called Alan – spluttered: ‘Look, who the devil is this woman?’ He glared round at his wife’s family. ‘What’s the matter with you all?’ They had always been a strange bunch. Rich and powerful, of course, but strange all the same.

  ‘Not now, Alan.’ Jack – who had become rather gruff and looked very like his father these days – decided to take charge. ‘Look here, Missy. What is it you want with us? Tell us your business and then leave us in peace.’

  The old man by the fire was struggling to concentrate on what was going on. He glowered at Missy. ‘Isn’t that one of the servants?’

  Missy sighed happily. ‘Now, don’t rush to be rid of me again, children. I’ve come back to see how you are. You’ve all been terribly successful, haven’t you? You’ve all done very well for yourselves, hmm? And you all know, don’t you, that it’s only down to one person …’ She simpered. ‘Me.’

  Peter’s wife was scared, clutching his arm. ‘What’s going on, Peter? Who is this person? What does she mean?’

  Absentmindedly Missy took out her lipstick and adjusted the setting. She wondered about blasting one of the children’s spouses into nothingness. Just for the thrill of it. Just to focus their attention a little. She pointed the deadly lipstick at Peter’s wife and it hummed menacingly.

  ‘Don’t you dare vaporise anyone,’ said Jack warningly.

  ‘You do remember then,’ said Missy. ‘You remember your old governess and what she can do, don’t you?’

  All the blood had rushed out of Esme’s face. Oh God, she thought. It wasn’t just some childish game we used to play; Miss Pratt really had been shrunk to the size of a doll, and the adventures we shared, they … they were all real. She looked at the others and their children. We knew the whole time that we were deliberately not talking about Missy. We reaped the rewards and benefits of the things she made us wish for, all the while pretending that it was just a silly game.

  But Missy was real, and now here she was, back again.

  Esme took a step forward and made her voice level and brave and professional-sounding, as befitted the CEO of Galactico Chemicals. ‘What do you want from us?’

  ‘I think it’s time for some payback,’ said Missy crisply. ‘And, to that end, what I’d like very much is if you combined all your power and influence, and arranged things nicely for me. What I’d really like is enough super-duper weapons and bombs and stuff like that in order to take over the entire world. All right?’

  Everyone in the drawing room gazed at her as if she was bananas.

  ‘That’s right, I am,’ she grinned. ‘Bananas. And you’re going to help me take over the entire world, aren’t you?’

  Up in the attic of the house in Queen Square, Teddy Sparkles was absolutely furious.

  Though his powers were diminished he could hear every single word of what was being said downstairs. His magnificent alien brain had detected the arrival of the loathsome Missy as soon as she had manifested i
n this time zone. He knew she was back, and he knew why.

  He would have warned the children and their own children, had he been in a better mood but, quite frankly, after three decades of being locked away in this drab and dusty place, he wasn’t of a mind to help anyone at all.

  His fur was lustreless, as were his topaz eyes. His golden sparkles could raise barely a shimmer these days. His toes had been nibbled by squirrels. He had almost given up the will to live.

  He would never see Ursino Six again …

  But still there was a fleck of hope in his heart. He still had powers. Not magical powers, although they were so amazingly advanced and beyond the ken of human beings that they might as well have been. Like other adepts on his home world, he had astonishing mental abilities that allowed him to see the warp and weft of reality. Like certain other Ursine mystics, he could refashion reality – both past and future – to his own liking. The children he had known here in Queen Square had believed he was granting wishes: it was their way of understanding the immense complexity of what he was actually doing when he cudgelled his brains and focused his will upon the workings of the multiverse …

  Teddy Sparkles began to shimmer and glow just then, as he remembered how wonderful his powers had been. Yes, he had altered reality and subsumed it to his mighty thoughts. And – if he tried his very best – he still could! He could make the very cosmos tremble …

  The door flew open and one of the children came bustling into the room. No longer a child, Esme was well into middle age now and looked very harassed. He knew at once that she had come searching for him, so he coughed loudly to draw her attention to where he was lying on the nightstand.

  ‘Oh, Teddy Sparkles! The most dreadful thing has happened …’

  The bear did his best to sound reassuring. ‘I know, Esme. I know.’

  Her lined face was stained with tears as she clutched him to her bosom. ‘How could you know?’

  Teddy Sparkles couldn’t help glowing with pleasure at the sensation of being held and hugged once more. So many years! He had lain here so long, alone, neglected in this attic room that had once belonged to Missy and many servants before her. All through the Blitz and the years of Austerity. He had heard life crashing and booming and murmuring along below him, and everyone, it seemed, had forgotten Teddy Sparkles.

  ‘Oh, Esme,’ he said, becoming more emotional than he had meant to. ‘How could you just forget about me? How could you leave me here?’

  ‘I … I don’t know … I’m so sorry …’

  ‘I fixed everything up, didn’t I? I gave you everything you wished for … You’ve all grown up to be exactly what you wanted to be …’

  Her expression darkened. ‘Not really, Teddy. You see, Missy told us to wish for those things, didn’t she? I never wanted to run a chemicals company. And the others … they’re doing jobs they hate too. Oh, we have power and influence, but none of us are happy. It’s all Missy’s doing.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Teddy Sparkles. ‘None of you are happy?’

  Esme dissolved into tears. ‘And now Missy is back … and she’s making the most ghastly demands of us …’

  ‘There, there,’ said Teddy Sparkles, patting her heaving shoulders with his tiny paws. ‘I will help you. I will do my level best to help …’

  ‘Ha!’ There came a brutal snort of laughter from the doorway.

  Teddy and Esme looked up to see Missy framed there in silhouette.

  ‘Hello again, Teddy Sparkles,’ she said. ‘I’ve come back to take over the world. What do you think of that?’ She peered more closely at the little bear. ‘You do look a bit shabby, dearie. All the effort maintaining your timeline manipulations has taken its toll on your poor plush.’ And then she cackled threateningly and stared at Esme. ‘The world, please. Hand it over. And be snappy about it.’

  The thing was, it was all entirely possible. Missy had thought it all through very cleverly, and it turned out to be all too straightforward for the children to give her what she wanted: the wherewithal and the means to take over the entire world.

  ‘You could give me an island in the middle of the Baltic Sea, with a secret underground lair!’ she cried, delightedly. ‘And I’d have all the codes and things at my fingertips, for employing the world’s various hideous super-duper weapons and setting them off, at deadly cross-purposes, all over the globe! With access to the resources of Galactico and the knowledge of the Secret Services, I’ll be able to hold the whole world to ransom!’

  At this, she began hooting with laughter, and everyone watched in dismay.

  ‘We can’t let you do this,’ Jack said gruffly. ‘You’ve used us, Missy. We can’t allow you to take over the whole world …’

  ‘Never!’ gasped Peter. ‘You’d do awful things with it. You’d make slaves of the whole human race …’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ she agreed. ‘Honestly, you’ve no idea how many times I’ve tried to do this over the years, and met with ignominious failure every time. But this time, that precious Teddy Sparkles has seen to it that my global success is inevitable!’

  Everyone looked at Teddy, who hung his head in shame. ‘I did try to warn you all how dreadful she is,’ he sighed.

  The children’s father had completely lost his mind in terror. ‘Boop,’ he said.

  ‘We’re loyal to our country and our planet,’ said Esme bravely. ‘We’d all rather die than give in to your demands.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ smiled Missy.

  ‘Let’s not be rash, Esme, dear,’ said Peter. ‘Let’s not get all noble and self-sacrificial before we have to …’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she snapped.

  ‘Well, perhaps Missy won’t be quite as bad as you think she’ll be. If she was the sole Mistress of the World, we wouldn’t have any discord or Arms Race or nasty things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, would we?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Missy shrilled. ‘Because you’d all be subsumed to my superior will!’

  Esme gasped. ‘Peter, I can’t believe you’re even considering the idea of helping her take over the world …’

  That was when Teddy Sparkles interceded. He was standing beside the children’s father and he was glowing strangely, as if he had managed to gather together the last vestiges of his magic power. ‘No one will take over anything!’ he boomed, in his old, sonorous voice.

  ‘Teddy …?’ gasped Jack.

  Suddenly Missy looked furious. ‘Don’t you dare!’ It was as if she recognised the nature of those waves of elemental power rippling through the air from the little bear’s body. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘What is he doing?’ gasped Peter.

  ‘Boop!’ said their father, rocking in his chair.

  Suddenly the atmosphere in the room turned quite strange. One moment it was simply the drawing room, with the decorated tree and the cards arranged on top of the blazing mantelpiece, with the whole family arrayed against the interloper. Then the room was swaying and spinning. It felt as if it was pulling itself free from the rest of reality …

  ‘Mum? Dad …?’ Eric stared wildly at the grown-ups. The other cousins were just as perplexed and horrified by what was going on. One moment all the adults had been shouting impossible things, and now this … The room was bucking and rocking like it had been set afloat on a stormy sea. Eric struggled to the window and drew back the net curtains. The blizzard was coming down thickly now over Queen Square … so thickly they could no longer see the park through the window …

  ‘It isn’t there any more!’ screamed his cousin, Alice. ‘It isn’t there!’

  ‘We’re going back!’ boomed the voice of Teddy Sparkles, full of regret. ‘Back and back and back through time …!’

  It took a while, and it was a bumpy ride, but Teddy Sparkles managed to rewrite history.

  He sent Missy spinning violently away from the Earth with a huge, desperate effort of will. Caught off-guard, she howled in outrage and swore further vengeance on his threadbare head.

  Esme felt herself changin
g … She felt the nature of reality metamorphosing all around her, but above all she felt her own being unravelling. She found her own life reversing and unbecoming …

  ‘Nooooo!’ she yelled as she regained her distant youth.

  All around her, her family members were doing the same. Her husband vanished in a puff of possibility: the same became of her brothers’ wives. Most awful of all, their children simply popped out of existence, as if they had never been born.

  Esme wailed in dismay. ‘Noooo, Teddy Sparkles …! What have you done?’

  ‘I am turning back time!’ he bellowed, through the turbid chaos. ‘I am using my incredible time-engineering talents to give you all another chance!’

  Esme wept for her lost family and the life she had known. Perhaps she had hated being head of a global technological empire, and perhaps she felt her life had been unduly influenced by Missy, but she had loved her children, and her husband had been quite bearable.

  ‘Do you mean …’ cried Jack, ‘that we’ll have to live our lives all over again?’

  ‘You will get another chance!’ Teddy shouted. ‘Isn’t that wonderful? No one else ever gets an opportunity like this …!’

  A furious lightning flash heralded the sudden return of Missy. Teddy Sparkles had managed to keep her at bay for seven crucial minutes, but now she was back in their midst, and snarling.

  She spat and swore at Teddy Sparkles. She crossed the swaying room in three strides and picked him up in both taloned hands. ‘I had world domination within my grasp, you horrid little brute!’

  ‘It’s done. You can’t stop it, now, whatever you do to me.’ He laughed feebly in her face; his time-engineering efforts had wrung him out. ‘We are going back. You will be a servant again, Missy! And this time I will refuse to grant your wishes …!’

  His hollow laughter rang inside her head for the rest of the journey back to 1925.

  Esme cried out in surprise as they arrived with a sudden bump.

  It took a few moments for them to come to their senses. The children stared at each other in wonder.

  ‘Look at you both,’ Jack said hoarsely. ‘Look at me …’