Free Many Worlds of Albie Bright by Christopher Edge Page B

away. But what’s really creepy is that every one of these animals is dressed in clothes like it’s a real person.
    There’s a walrus wearing a wedding dress and it looks like it’s getting married to a polar bear in a three-piece suit. A monkey in a waistcoat is riding on the back of a mountain goat and they’re both being chased by a koala in an old-fashioned car. I can see a model school filled with skunks, sitting in rows behind desks in their black-and-whiteuniforms. There’s even a team of kangaroos playing cricket against a couple of crocodiles, all of them dressed in white jumpers. These weird scenes are displayed on platforms all around the room, each one getting higher as the walkway curves around the exhibition.
    “Pretty freaky, eh?” Wesley says, inspecting the display at the front of the room. “It says here that this Montague Wilkes guy stuffed all these animals himself to remind him of home when he was travelling around the world back in the olden days.”
    I’m feeling a bit homesick myself but this spooky exhibition isn’t making me feel any better. It’s like a zoo where the animals have eaten all the visitors and then dressed up in their clothes.
    “And there’s the furry freak we’re looking for,” Wesley says, pointing towards the platform in the centre of the room.
    I look up to see an animal orchestra arranged around the stage. There are penguins playing violins, a racoon with a bassoon, ferrets with trumpets and an animal that looks like a civet – a small jungle cat I’d seen Snake Mason catch on Wild Survival – playing the clarinet. Whoever put this orchestra together really liked to give the animalsan instrument that rhymed.
    And standing on a high podium in the centre of the platform, surrounded by the stuffed musicians, is a duck-billed platypus dressed in a white tuxedo. His flippers are spread wide and it looks like he’s holding a long wooden stick.
    I feel a rush of adrenalin as I eye the goal of our mission. It’s time to steal a platypus.
    At first I don’t know how we’re going to get up on to the orchestra platform. The museum has put up a see-through guard rail to protect the stuffed animals from any nosy visitors – or maybe the other way round – and this is way too high to climb over. But then Wesley wheels a ladder up the walkway.
    “Here we go,” he says with an excited grin, pushing the ladder into position. “They must have left this out from when they were putting up the exhibits.”
    “Leave it to me,” I tell him, putting my foot on the first rung of the ladder. Above my head, the duck-billed conductor is waiting on top of his podium, ready to start the band. “I’ll get the platypus.”
    As I climb the ladder I can’t stop myself from grinning. For the first time since I got here, I’m incontrol. My head’s buzzing with excitement. I’m going to steal an antique platypus and I don’t even care if I get caught.
    When Mum first got ill I tried so hard to do the right thing all the time, not wanting to cause her any worry or make things worse. But even though I kept everything bottled up inside – the bullying at school, my dad’s disappearing acts – this didn’t help to make Mum any better and I just had to watch her fade away. But in this universe there’s no Mum for me to worry about any more. Here, I can do what I like – just like Bad Albie does.
    At the top of the ladder, the platypus seems a bit further away than it looked from the floor but it looks twice as freaky. Dressed in a white tuxedo, with a black bow tie knotted beneath its enormous beak, its beady eyes stare back at me suspiciously.
    “Have you got it?” Wesley calls out.
    Holding on to the ladder with one hand, I reach out for the platypus. It’s about as big as my backpack, with a couple of nasty-looking spikes near the front of its flippers. My mouth is dry and I can feel my heart thudding in my chest as I grab hold of its shiny brown fur. And that’s when