The magic light switch - chapter 1

Prologue

In every child's bedroom - there are secrets. Some of those secrets are special hiding places, made by the children who sleep there. Some, however, nobody knows about. What most people don't know, and never notice, is that in every bedroom there exists a secret and magical light switch. It sits there right next to your own light switch, but you can't see it - it's invisible.

Only certain, very lucky children ever find the magic light switch. For our hero, Ben, it was all to do with being scared of the dark...

Chapter 1 - Jubilee Road

In an ordinary house on Jubilee Road, the smell of a cooking dinner drifted out of the kitchen. It floated down the hall and lazily climbed the stairs, before finally pushing its way under the door to Ben's bedroom.

Ben Gull was a perfectly normal eleven year old boy - he liked watching football matches, enjoyed playing on the computer and, more than anything, he loved playing in his bedroom. If you saw his room, you might almost think that he never left it – there were cups, plates, crisp packets and all sorts of other mess, scattered wherever you looked. He had enjoyed playing in that messy bedroom, in his house in Islington, for all of his life. And he loved it... even if he wasn't very good at keeping it tidy.

Ben preferred playing on his own rather than going outside with friends. As an only child, he'd invented lots of imaginary friends to play with and, with those superior allies, he'd staged wars, fights and robberies; had run-ins with dragons and giants - anything where there were pretend explosions or fires, and people got horribly hurt. His bedroom was the perfect setting for all these adventures, and everything he needed was right there: from the posters on the wall about films he wasn't allowed to see, to the toys that no longer worked quite as they should, from being played with too much. The great thing, Ben believed, about slightly broken toys, is that they always broke in new and interesting ways. One of his favourite toys was an Einstein figure, which spoke in slow-motion and fell over all the time. He enjoyed pretending to blow that one up a great deal. Another favourite was a literal one-armed bandit: a gun-slinger who had lost one of his arms during a nasty battle in a puddle one day. He'd afterwards re-named him Slow-Draw McGraw because he couldn't reach his gun any more. That toy also fell over a lot.

Ben's bedroom meant everything to him.

He was currently busy playing with his soldiers, who were jumping around on his rather threadbare carpet/battlefield and somehow kept getting bits of themselves blown up in the process. Ben had developed the somewhat warped idea that all wars took place on huge marshy battlefields where tanks and people would stroll around in a great big game of "hide-and-seek". And perhaps he wasn't far off, really. Either way, he was having fun enacting this particular game on his carpet, using buckets and giant robots to hide his troops behind.

Ben and his parents lived very happily in that ordinary house on Jubilee Road... until about a year ago, when they found out they were being forced to move home.

Ben had sulked when he'd first been told. He'd lived in that house all his life and was angry that he was being forced to leave behind his school, his friends, his home – and especially his bedroom. He eventually decided that the best thing to do would be to not think about it at all. His dad said, jokingly, that he was being an ostrich: that he was putting his head in the sand, hoping things would go away if he couldn't see them and didn't think about them. Well, if that was true, he'd been "being an ostrich" for a long time now and it suited him just fine.

The smell of dinner, which continued to pour in from under the door, finally became too much for Ben and, with his stomach growling, he gave up the game he was playing and decided to go for food. He raced out of his room, down the stairs, and into the kitchen.

"I was just going to call you," Ben's mum told him, surprised that she hadn't needed to shout upstairs the three or four times that it usually took before he'd venture out of his room.

"I'm starving!" Ben announced, bouncing into the kitchen. He sat down at the small kitchen table whilst his mum served up his meal of fish fingers and chips.

"Well, put on your sauce or whatever and you can go and watch telly," she said, placing his dinner in front of him. Ben, appreciatively, smiled at her, while he plopped a huge blob of tomato sauce onto his plate.

Television was one of Ben's favourite ways of being occupied when he couldn't, for whatever reason, be in his room. Sitting at the dinner table, listening to his mum and dad drone on about their day, or having to field awkward questions about what he'd been up to or how his school day had been, was more like torture. So, gratefully and happily, he strolled off into the living room to watch cartoons and eat his dinner.

Just a little while later, a call came from the hallway: "Hey everyone! Dad's home!"

Ben's dad looked in on the living room ("Hello!") before stealing a particularly juicy chip that Ben had been purposefully saving ("Oy!") and then going off into the kitchen. Ben could hear his parents talking softly. He was surprised when, just a few minutes later, they came through to the living room. They both sat down: his dad in the armchair and his mum on the sofa next to him. Ben got that horrible feeling he got whenever he was in trouble. Any second, he thought, and they were going to start being all patient and calm with him until he broke down and confessed to whatever minor crime they suspected him of doing. However, Ben wasn't in any trouble at all. What his dad wanted to talk about was something much more serious:

"I went down to the council meeting today about us having to move," said Ben's dad in a tone that Ben wasn't sure he liked. His dad looked sad.

Chapter 2