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A Quick Guide to the Story
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It looked as though Joe was going to have a fairly boring Summer holiday until he met Sarah in the library and she introduced him to her Aunt Fifi. Her aunt was unusual - for a start she had once been a dancer in Paris, but she was also a medium and put people in touch with "The Other Side". Now that should have been creepy - talking to the dead and all that - but somehow it didn't seem to be. For a start the people on the other side didn't seem to think that they were dead, and besides they were the weirdest lot Joe and Sarah had ever met.
Aunt Fifi's Spirit Guide was Chief Thunder Head, a Red Indian who was rather too fond of the fire water, and he put Sarah and Joe in touch with such an odd bunch of people on the Other Side that they started to wonder just where some of them were coming from. Could it be true that Hadrian's Wall was actually contracted to the Emperor Hadrian's brother-in-law Alphonse? They were introduced to Alphonse Hadrian by Thunder Head who offered to take them to the Wall but they wound up by mistake in China, only to find that the Great Wall was actually a Great Fence. Could it really be true that both the Mongols and the Chinese then contracted Alphonse Hadrian to build them a Great Wall - which, of course, he got wrong, just like he had the last one?
Then there was the sinister Shaman, who they met in the camp of the Great Khan - just who was he and what did he want? Having finally left Ancient China after several weeks - which only seems to have been half-an-hour in Aunt Fifi's house - they were then taken on a trip to meet the real discoverer of America, only to find themselves on the ship of the hopeless sailor Leif the Liability and his crew of the lost and the mad, aiming to prove the world was flat by sailing off the edge. How was it that they ended up in Japan and missed America - where had it gone? And what was the Shaman doing in Japan?
With lots of questions that needed an answer going round in his head, Joe went on holiday to the seaside and met up with Aunt Fifi and Sarah again. That was all well and good - but then Thunder Head made an appearance on the pier and they all wound up at the End of the Pier Show - and learned a little more about the Chief. They still wondered why he talked like a cartoon Red Indian while his wife, Leaping Elk, spoke perfectly normally.
So far they hadn't answered any of their questions and a trip to the Other Side - to Thunder Head's Happy Hunting Grounds - offered a few answers at least, some of them provided by the strange and eccentric scientist Mr. Jordan, who was building an inter-dimensional drive out of scrap and who also kept blowing himself up. Once again the sinister Shaman made an appearance and this time he kidnapped Sarah and Aunt Fifi. Even more serious, he seemed set on freeing one of the nastiest creatures of legend, a beast born in the first fires of Creation and who looked likely to end life as we know it. Where had he found a lot of robots to help him and why did they look like small dinosaurs?
A rescue mission had to be mounted to save life on all the Earths of time and space - and Aunt Fifi and Sarah. All that stood between a thousand worlds and destruction was a former Paris dancer, two children, a Red Indian Chief and his wife (the former stars of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show), a mad scientist with a habit of blowing himself up (worryingly, it was his engine that was to power the ship), a collection of Mongol warriors with bows and arrows, and the crew of the lost and the lonely gathered together by Leif the Liability. The only ship they had to cruise the stars and travel untold distances in the vastness of all time and space was the Nemesis, a wooden sailing ship that had once bumped into Japan. First they had to take on the massed might of the Shaman's lizard-shaped robots on a moon orbiting a blasted and ruined Earth to rescue Aunt Fifi and Sarah. The final struggle with the forces of chaos and destruction unleashed by the Shaman took place in Blackpool, naturally, in the magnificent setting of the Tower Ballroom, before an invited audience including the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress. They were about to see the performance of a lifetime, never to be repeated.
This is story for children aged ten upwards, or anyone who has a vivid imagination. |
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