Time and Again Read online

  ‘No, we’d better destroy the Timewatch once and for all,’ said Becky, taking the stone from her brother’s hand. ‘Make sure nobody can ever use it again.’

  ‘Or misuse it,’ added Chris, glancing at Luke.

  ‘I’m really going to enjoy this,’ Becky grinned, kneeling down. ‘Been wanting to do it for ages.’

  Time and again she hammered the stone onto the watch, shattering it into smithereens.

  ‘There!’ she said with satisfaction, standing up. ‘Now Luke can pick up all the pieces and we can go home.’

  Surprisingly, he did so without any argument, but then tossed them into the river before they could stop him.

  Chris whistled for Tan and winked at his sister. ‘Of course, there’s still one more thing you have to do, Luke,’ he said with a smirk.

  ‘Oh, yeah – and what’s that?’

  ‘Start thinking what you might say to people about what you got up to in the last hour,’ Chris told him. ‘That hasn’t been wiped out, remember…’

  About the Author

  Time travel! What a mind-bending concept it is. Just imagine having your own time machine and being able to travel back into the past – or even forwards into the future! Impossible? Well, not in the world of science fiction, one of the main areas of interest in my writing. I may be better known for all my sports stories for children, but I’ve written many time-travelling tales too.

  Time and Again began as an idea in one of my notebooks before I let the characters loose on the page – or at least on the computer screen – and then they helped me to write the story during the drafting process.

  By pressing a red button on an old watch, the children experience a time slip of one hour. Not long, maybe, but many things can happen in that extra time, especially when they are able to change what originally took place – for better or worse.

  I have always enjoyed writing and had my sights set on a career in journalism after graduating from Leicester University in the early 1970s. Instead, I somehow found myself teaching in primary schools for about 20 years. The best part of the job, as far as I was concerned, was being able to run various sports clubs and coach the youngsters in a wide range of activities like football, gymnastics, cricket and athletics. It turned out to be very good experience for writing for children and I left teaching to concentrate on doing just that. I must have had about 80 books published since the first one appeared in 1980.

  My wife, Joy, and I love rough collie dogs, like Lassie in the stories, and we now share our home in a Leicestershire village with one called Rocky. He always gives us a good excuse to leave our desks and enjoy walks in the local countryside and along nearby canal towpaths.

  “The bony hand zoomed right out of the screen and grabbed him.”

  When James is kidnapped by aliens, he

  can’t believe his luck. They want to

  transform his feeble human body and

  James can have whatever superpowers he

  likes. He chooses super-speed, super-brains

  and super-strength. But James soon starts

  to realise he might have got slightly

  more than he asked for…

  “It’s just as well Yours Truly has a breathtakingly

  brilliant, scintillatingly surefire gem of an idea

  up her sleeve.”

  There’s never a dull moment in the Bell

  household. Fresh from success on Broadway, they

  now star in their very own reality TV show. Plus

  there’s the mystery of Ken Undrum’s long lost

  love to solve, the Nativity play to rehearse, and

  Bryony has special plans to make sure the

  coming Christmas will be full of surprises…

  “Those who enter Inverscreech should be wary.

  Those walls contain some deep, dark secrets.”

  Young ghosts Spooker, Goof and Holly are

  off to a remote Scottish castle to make a

  video about how to haunt. But the castle

  turns out to be less lonely than expected. The

  arrival of a bunch of Americans and a series

  of spooky goings on give the ghosts rather

  more to deal with than they bargained for…

  First published 2005 by

  A&C Black Publishers Ltd

  37 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QZ

  www.acblack.com

  Text copyright © 2005 Rob Childs

  Illustrations copyright © 2005 Nicola Slater

  The rights of Rob Childs and Nicola Slater to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Print ISBN 978-0-71367-420-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-40815-340-6

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the prior permission in writing of the publishers.