Free Time-Travel Bath Bomb by Jo Nesbø

metres long, so we wrapped it around both of us.”
    “How . . . sweet.”

    “Sweet, yes. But I knew that by now Cliché would have sent out the alarm and dispatched his hippos. I hadn’t told Victor anything. Why should I? He was in high spirits, we were already far from Paris and soon it would all be behind us. As the sun began to come up, we zoomed past a sign with a name on it and into a village. Victor spotted a petrol station and slowed down. I yelled from the sidecar that he should keep going, that he shouldn’t stop here, that we could fill up the tank in Italy, that it was only a mile or two to the border. But the engine and the long, flapping scarf were making so much noise that he didn’t hear me. So he stopped in front of a big guy in overalls with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth who was leaning against the only pump. Behind him sat another guy who looked exactly like him, tilting a chair back and reading a magazine. Victor said, ‘Fill ’er up’ and didn’t notice that I had unwound myself from the scarf and was hunching down in the sidecar.”
    “Why were you doing that?”
    “Because I’d been able to read the name on the sign as we drove in. And look at those two guys. They had teeth as big as tombstones in those enormous jaws of theirs. They looked like—”
    “Don’t tell me,” Lisa gasped. “Hippos! You were in Innebrède. How awful!”
    “The guy in the overalls starting pumping the petrol, eyeing Victor with suspicion the whole time. Then he called over his shoulder to his twin brother, ‘Hey, what did the boss say that professor guy looked like?’ ‘Tall, thin, ugly beanpole with motorcycle goggles,’ the brother answered without looking up from his magazine. ‘Guy’s name is Proctor.’
    “I was scared because that meant that not only did Cliché know I’d run off, but he knew who I was with. Meanwhile, Victor, who had no idea what was going on, lit up: ‘Wow! Have you guys heard of me? I mean, I knew there was that piece in the school paper about my time-travel bath bomb, and they did take my picture to go with it, but to be recognised so far from Paris, well—’
    “At this point I interrupted Victor and whispered as loudly as I dared, ‘Drive away! Drive away now!’
    “‘But honey, Juliette, these nice men just wanted to—’
    “‘Drive! Otherwise we’ll miss our appointment with the priest!’
    “‘Well, I have to pay for the petrol—’
    “Victor hadn’t noticed that the hippos were closing in, so I stood up in the sidecar, stomped on the starter pedal and turned the throttle as far as it would go. The motorcycle jumped, lurching forward. And I did a backflip out of the sidecar. I landed on my head on the asphalt as the pump hose arched and danced, spraying petrol all over both of the hippos and me.”
    “Oh no, oh no!” Lisa exclaimed, leaning so far forward that she was about to tip over her coffee cup.
    “Oh yes, oh yes,” said Juliette, rescuing the coffee cup at the last second. “I saw stars, but picked myself up and started running – well, staggering – after the motorcycle. With both hippos on my heels. I was spitting out petrol and yelling for Victor, but he couldn’t see or hear me, I could see that he was laughing and saying something to the sidecar. He thought I was still sitting in there and was probably getting a kick out of driving away without paying for the petrol.”
    “Oh no!”
    “I thought I was done for. The two hippos were closing in. The one in the overalls with the cigarette grabbed me by the hair. But then I heard a poof and he was gone.”
    “What happened?”
    “Cigarette smoking and petrol, a bad combination. But the other one was closing in. I could hear the coins jingling in his pockets. His heavy, wheezing hippo breathing. And Victor didn’t seem to be slowing down. He was slowly getting further and further away.”
    “Double oh no!”
    “I was about to give up and then I noticed Victor’s scarf. It