Questionlesse he will be dead: Warning- Don't try this at home....

By Colin F. Harrison

Razi is a fourteen-year old who is left on his own for three days after his older sister goes off on a 'shopping trip'. Razi finds a book of potions published in 1614, and sets about finding the ingredients for a very special potion. As he comes to terms with new magical powers, he has to deal with a nasty accident, a gang of violent racists, and an angry Rottweiler that wants to track him down and kill him. But the greatest danger of all comes from the woman whom Razi unwisely summons from the green fire, and whose only mission is death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781446157039

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Copyright Information

Title: Questionlesse he will be dead

Subtitle: Warning- Don’t try this at home

By Colin F. Harrison

©  All Rights Reserved    2024

978-1-4461-5703-9

Imprint: Lulu.com

Questionlesse he will be dead 

©Colin F. Harrison 2024 

Chapter One  

Nollymay Tangeray

Given that Razi was only fourteen, and that Amabel was leaving him on his own, you could be forgiven for thinking that Amabel was uncaring, irresponsible, neglectful and possibly crazy. In fact, that was not the case. Amabel loved her brother.  She cared for him deeply, in her own way.

Was she irresponsible? Sometimes. She didn’t neglect Razi, though, and she wasn’t crazy. In fact, she had an IQ of 160, which made her one of the ten cleverest eighteen-year-olds in England.  OK, maybe she was a little crazy. But she could foresee many things that might happen, and she reckoned that Razi would be fine on his own for a day or two. Of course, she couldn’t have foreseen his accident, nor that he would get involved with a violent gang and nearly get killed. Nor did she foresee that Razi would bring the green fire, and the beautiful, gentle tinkling noise that foretold death. 

It all began one lazy summer afternoon, when without any warning, Amabel said, ‘I’m going shopping. Should be back in about three days, if I can get everything I need.  There’s plenty of food in the freezer, and there’s some money in the tin in the airing cupboard if you need it.  Go and see Winifred if you have any problems. You can play on my computer if you get bored.  And don’t forget to feed Cat.’

Razi jumped off the sofa, suddenly alert and angry. ‘No! You can’t go! You’re my big sister. You’re supposed to look after me!’ 

But Amabel was already halfway out of the kitchen door. 

He followed her out as she climbed on her bike.  ‘Amabel!  Where are you going?’ 

‘Green is a lovely colour....’    

This odd saying was typical of her: simple, but meaningless. At least to Razi.  It certainly didn’t have much to do with the colour of her clothes- she was setting off on her trip wearing an old red T-shirt and orange velvet trousers. Fashion sense was not Amabel’s strong point.  For a young woman, she was either incredibly unfashionable, or else years ahead of her time. 

‘Where are you going?’ he pleaded.  

‘Never you mind!  Just don’t get into trouble, and if anyone asks where I am, tell them I’ve gone shopping.  I’ll be back before you know it.  Byeeee!’ 

And she was off, pedalling and wobbling up Gallowstree Lane on her old black bike.  She turned back for a moment as she got to the top of the hill, to yell a final instruction, ‘And don’t go poking about in my room!’   

Razi ran after her. ‘Where are you going?’ Amabel half turned and called back to him, but her answer was lost on the wind. He thought he heard the words ‘Wickham Market’ and ‘brain theory talk’, but the words didn’t make any sense. Wickham Market was only about twenty miles away- not a three-day journey. And what about the ‘brain theory’? Whoever went to talks on the brain when they were going shopping? 

He gave up running and watched, expecting at any moment that Amabel’s flared trousers would get caught up in her bike chain and send her crashing into a ditch.  But this did not happen, and she disappeared round the corner at the top of the hill, with the red and orange of her clothes making her stand out against the greens and browns of the fields like a hummingbird. 

Who knows whether any brother understands his sister?  Razi certainly didn’t understand his.  How could someone go shopping for three days?  How could someone go off for three days on an old bike, taking nothing more than a tiny backpack that would hardly hold a toothbrush? She hadn’t even allowed him to have his own phone. They had a land line, but it was never used, and Amabel was determined that he should not have a mobile phone. ‘No way!’ she’d said. ‘Do you want anyone in the world to know exactly where you are to within half a metre, all the time? No way. Besides, there are better ways to communicate.’ What these better ways were, she didn’t say. 

Many fourteen-year-old boys imagine they would love to have a house to themselves for three days.  But Razi wasn’t so sure.  For a start, Church House was on the edge of Offton, a tiny village in Suffolk, two miles from the nearest shop, eight miles from a supermarket, and fifteen miles from the town of Ipswich.  It might as well have been fifty miles, since no buses came through the village. On top of that, Razi didn’t have a friend in the world.  Amabel had taken him out of his boarding school and brought him back to Offton at the beginning of the summer holidays.  She had bought him a mountain bike, but he hadn’t been out on it much. Razi had honey-coloured skin and curly dark brown hair, and once, when he had been cycling back from the village shop, some teenagers had yelled out at him.  He thought they had called out ‘Go home, Arab!’.  At the same time, he had heard a sound in the bushes near where he was pedalling. Was it a bird moving in the branches, or had someone been throwing stones at him? He didn’t know for sure, and it hadn’t happened again. But the memory made him uneasy. 

Church House was over four hundred years old. It had been in Razi’s dad’s family for over a hundred years. Amabel had told him that the oldest part of it had once been a cottage used by young priests while they learned how to become a vicar, and there was still a path running from the end of the back garden down to the church. There were some houses on the far side of the church, but the children who lived in them all seemed to be friendly with each other, and they looked at Razi in the way locals look at tourists- as if you are not worth getting to know.  He didn’t mean to be snobbish, but Razi wasn’t too sure he wanted to get to know them, either.  They all seemed to wear army clothing, and looked as if they couldn’t wait to join the army and start shooting at people. 

So up to this point he hadn’t met anyone his own age, and he was not due to go to his new school and have a chance to meet any possible friends for another four weeks.  Their only close neighbour was their great aunt Winifred, who looked as if she was at least a hundred years old, and who lived in Grind Cottage, a cottage quite close to theirs, on Gallowstree Lane. To be honest, Razi was a little afraid of her, and he tried to avoid the cottage as much as he could.

Razi didn’t know where his parents were. He hadn’t seen them for seven years.  He knew that they were both scientists, and that this was why they had all been living in an apartment near Geneva, in Switzerland. But then, during the summer, Amabel had told him, ‘Razi, we can’t see mum and dad at the moment. They are working on a very important project. They send their love, and they’ll be in touch as soon as they are able.’ Then some people from London had come, and arranged for Razi to go to a boarding school in Derbyshire that allowed him and a small number of other students to stay over the holidays as well as term time. The staff at the school had been friendly and sympathetic, and Razi had made friends with three other boys who also stayed on at the school over the holidays. But Amabel didn’t want to talk about their parents. Whenever he asked her, Amabel simply answered, ‘Green is a lovely colour....’   

Razi did not know it, but Amabel knew what had happened to her parents. Although that is not strictly true. No one knew new exactly what had happened to James and Maria Paxton, not even the other scientists who were working with them on the secret antiproton decelerator at CERN when they disappeared. One day there was delight in their research group at the discovery that it was possible to possible to fire antimatter particles backwards through space and time into the sixth dimension. But the project, and the lab, were top secret. The research group would not be allowed to publish their findings for decades. The map of the experimental zones at CERN didn’t even show the BETA lab in which the group worked. The researchers had agreed to calm down and meet for a drink in the pub later to discuss how to move the experiment forward. But James and Maria had stayed behind in the lab, and never made it to the pub, leaving behind a note that said ‘We’re off to the sixth dimension, on the green wavelength. Hopefully we’ll be back before you know it! J & M xxx’.  They had not been seen since. 

The people from the UK Secret Intelligence Service who came to Geneva from London to take care of Amabel and Razi had shown Amabel a photo of the note, and they also explained that there could be no publicity about their parents’ disappearance. It was decided that both children would go to boarding schools in England, and that an ‘auntie’ from the SIS would give them money, keep an eye on them from a distance, and make sure that they were OK. Everyone agreed that it would be too upsetting for Razi to be told the truth. They had no close relatives, but the SIS had made Winifred their guardian, and she organised the upkeep of Church House.

For what seemed to Razi like years now, apart from some school friends whom he was unlikely to see again, there had only been Amabel and him.  He remembered the people from London, and a silver car, but that was some years ago. And now he was in Suffolk, living over the hill from Winifred.  Amabel was now old enough to be at university, but she had left her boarding school and Winifred had managed to get her into the local independent girls’ school for an extra year to take a fifth A-level, and had organised a place at the local comprehensive for Razi. 

So, how long do you think it took Razi to get bored, play with Amabel’s computer, discover that she had changed the modem password so that he couldn’t get onto the Internet, get bored again, and to begin to risk his life?   The answer is about forty-five minutes.   The risking his life bit was a mistake, but he should have known that messing with her precious book would lead him into trouble. 

He had known about the book for years.  He had seen Amabel taking it out and reading it when she needed to make him some medicine, but whenever he got close, she would tell him to go away.  Once, when he was about eight, he had asked her what the book was called.  She had smiled, and said the oddest thing, which he thought sounded like: ‘Nollymay tangeray’.  When he asked her to tell him more, she waved him away, and said, ‘It means Keep your sticky fingers to yourself, otherwise you will regret it.’   

She kept the book in a large metal trunk in an area that was part of the roof space, and that could only be reached through a small door on the far side of her bedroom.  The roof space contained boxes of the kind of junk that