Episode 3: Sascha Martin's Super Ball

Welcome to Episode Three of Sascha Martin’s Ripping News.

It’s all balls.

But it begins with just a single ball, a Super Ball, a ball that must never be dropped … and you can’t know why.

Ha! The secret hasn’t been made that can withstand Mary-Alice Cooper’s need to know. And she won’t take ‘Don’t!’ for an imperative.

Cue the fall … Dun dun dun!

Of Sascha Martin’s Super Ball: his worst disaster yet, by leaps and bounds.

Sascha Martin’s Super Ball looked anything but super.

‘It’s just a stupid rubber ball!’ said Mary-Alice Cooper.

‘It’s not.

‘It bounces really high,’ said Sascha.

‘You should see it.’

And then he added quickly, ‘But you can’t.

‘We mustn’t free it.’

‘Ooh, why not?’

said Mary-Alice, with her interest clearly piqued.

‘Just, because,’ he answered.

‘Pass it round the class!’ Alana squeaked.

Sascha knelt there, undecided if he dursn’t or he durst.

Mary-Alice made a lunge at him, and tried to grab it first.

Sascha dropped the ball, but Luca sat beside him on the floor.

Luca caught it, and you’d think he’d never seen the ball before, because his eyes were full of sparkles, and a glow was on his face.

‘Hurry up!’ said Mary-Alice, with her customary grace.

Luca passed the ball to Aggie (always reading, even now), who forgot about her book and whispered, ‘Golly! Golly, wow!’

Not another word escaped her startled person, whereupon, Mary-Alice said, ‘You’ve had a turn now, Aggie! Pass it on!’

As the ball moved round the children, each received it with a gasp, and a face alight with wonder, as they held it in their grasp.

Then they’d have to give it up, which they would patently resent, and their eyes would stay upon, it as they followed where it went.

Sascha hovered, looking worried, looking always at the ball.

‘Hold it carefully,’ he cautioned them.

‘You mustn’t let it fall.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Mary-Alice, flicking back her hair.

‘It’s a ball.

‘You’re meant to throw it.’

‘No, you’re not, and don’t you dare!’

Mary-Alice rolled her eyes and put a face on that was stern, sighing loudly with displeasure as she waited for a turn

And she wasn’t good at waiting, so she didn’t wait for long.

‘Mrs Mayhem, this is boring.

‘Can I sing them all a song?’

‘Just be patient, Mary-Alice.’

‘Oh my god!’

A roll of eyes.

Then she got the ball at last, and she was silent in surprise.

Such a look of awe transformed her … but she grimly fought it down, and a conflict raged within her till, triumphant, with a frown, she wrenched her eyes away, which all the other children couldn’t do, and she opened up her fingers so the ball would topple through.

‘Oops,’ she said, all eyes and innocence.

The children watched it fall.

‘I’m so sorry, Sascha.

‘Guess we’ll see it bouncing after all.’

Time moved slowly in that moment … far more slowly than before.

Then the ball, in thrall to gravity, went BUMP upon the floor.

Well, it bounced all right, but not alone.

A second ball was rising, from nowhere, and the children found it really quite surprising.

Then both balls hit the ceiling, and they somehow both divided, so four balls hit the floor again, and eight flew up, unguided.

Then sixteen balls, then thirty-two.

The children started counting.

They gave up after sixty-four.

The speed of it was mounting.

Then balls were hitting tables, chairs and windows, walls and ceiling, and bouncing on the children’s heads, and everyone was squealing. And balls were hitting other balls mid-air and multiplying.

The more there were, the more they made.

The maths was terrifying.

Mary-Alice made a dash to where the door was open wide.

Sascha slammed it, trapping all the balls and everyone inside.

‘Let me open it!’ she screamed, but Sascha answered with a shout.

‘Mary-Alice, what would happen if a single ball got out?’

‘I don’t care!’ she said, and scuttled to a window yet agape.

Sascha got there first and held it closed so nothing would escape.

Balls were popping all around them with a bang and crash and boom, like a giant pan of popcorn that was filling up the room.

Then the popping started slowing, for the balls were packing tight.

Sascha, hauling on the window, said, ‘I think we’ll be all right.’

But the room was grimly silent, straining, tense and fit to burst - a catastrophe of Super Balls with children interspersed.

Sascha felt the pressure building of the balls against the glass, as he struggled at the window, trying not to let them pass.

But the window started moving with a slow and solemn creak, and a Super Ball squeezed past him, with a glassy rubber squeak.

Down it tumbled to the playground, just below, where he could see, and he whispered with emotion, ‘Oh my goodness, goodness me!’

Mr Jack and Mrs Barnum had a fear of Sascha’s news, and were outside with their classes poised and ready to defuse whatever fresh disaster Sascha might inflict upon them all.

So they’d seen the classroom filling, and the one escaping ball, and those children moved like lightning, all the fastest and the best.

Mr Jack, in spite of everything, moved faster than the rest, and he leapt, a flying hero, through the air without a sound, and he caught the falling Super Ball before it hit the ground.

Well, you should have heard the shouting, and you should have heard the cheers, and you should have seen those teachers, who had faced their darkest fears.

Mr Jack stood blushing madly, with the Super Ball on show, warmed by all the adulation his admirers could bestow.

In the classroom, Sascha shivered with relief against the glass.

Then he tensed, as something trembled in the prison of his class.

It was just a little tremor, like a mouse within a wall, and at first, he didn’t think that it was anything at all. But the tremor came again, and it was stronger than the first.

Then a flurry of vibrations, in a frantic little burst.

Then it stopped, and there was silence.

Just the moaning of the trapped, and the tumult in the playground where the children cheered and clapped.

Then a roar began, transmitted to the windows and the walls, of a presence moving swiftly through the prism of the balls.

It was coming straight for Sascha.

Oh, he didn’t want to stay … but he had to hold the window, so he couldn’t get away.

Then the monster was upon him, rolling eyes and ruined hair.

It was Mary-Alice Cooper.

‘Oh my god! I need some air!’ And she pushed the window open.

Sascha couldn’t quite believe what she was doing, but she did it, and the balls began to leave.

In the playground, Mr Jack emerged from warm, heroic dreams, to a multitude of shouts amid a plenitude of screams, and a host of fingers pointing with a tremble and a shake.

And he turned to Sascha’s window, and his knees began to quake, for an enormous wave of Super Balls hung poised above his head.

Since there wasn’t time to run away, he stood his ground instead.

And he raised a hand, like Canute, which the Super Balls ignored.

Mary-Alice snapped a photo, which would win her an award.

Then the leading wave of Super Balls exploded on the ground, and erupted and divided with a horrifying sound between a popping and a crashing and a rumble and a roar, and a tremor in the mantle that vibrated to the core.

From that one initial bounce, their mass was multiplied by two, and their number doubled.

Then it all became a witch’s brew of balls that flew together, blew apart with doppelgangers, hit the angled edges of the gardens and the seats where children sit, and all the walls of all the buildings and the gutters and the eaves, and the branches of the trees that used to shade them with their leaves.

And with every new collision, every ball became a pair, racing off as individuals to multiply from there.

Children scattered through the shattered gardens, crushed the flowerbeds, holding battered lids and garbage bins like shields above their heads, running blindly through the compost and the other screaming kids, and the balls were like machine guns as they pounded on the lids.

Only Aggie (always reading), sat untroubled, free of stress, as she read beneath a pink umbrella, toying with a tress.

Sascha stood there, looking thoughtful, in a helpless kind of way, never quick to find an answer when inventions went astray.

But he made a kind of shelter over his and Luca’s head.

It was really just the pages of a picture book, outspread, that both the boys had meant to read, and now they tackled it with zeal, though the angle it required of their necks was not ideal.

Mary-Alice crossed the playground in a froth of fear and rage, and she snatched away the picture book as Luca turned a page.

Then she launched, a ball of fury, through the maelstrom and away, hurling words, quite inappropriate, at Sascha on the way, which were noted down by Mrs Barnum, impotent for now, to be followed up and punished when conditions might allow.

Meanwhile, children who were hiding where there wasn’t so much light, felt the Super Balls that joined them simply dropping out of flight.

Balls that couldn’t even multiply, rebound or push and shove.

But the other balls, still bouncing in the sunlight up above, made it all so dark below them, just by blocking out the sky, that the playground started filling up with balls that couldn’t fly.

Aggie sat alone, now reading with a booklight, by its glow.

As the balls grew deep around her, ever higher she would go.

Higher still, the balls kept bouncing, through the waning afternoon.

Down below, you couldn’t see the sun.

You couldn’t see the moon.

Then, without a hint of warning, all the bouncing simply stopped.

It was shortly after nightfall when the final ball kerplopped.

At the epicentre, Sascha and his teachers, and his friends, struggled up towards the surface.

‘Is it over?’

‘That depends.’

Then, emerging on a summit just as treacherous as dough, they were drawn to Aggie’s booklight, and the pink umbrella’s glow, where they gathered close together, with the darkness pressing near, on a silent sea of Super Balls whose limits were unclear.

All around the land of Super Balls, the ocean lapped and sighed, and the balls around the edges were embarking on the tide.

In the black of night, unnoticed, with their energy suppressed, Sascha’s Super Balls were drifting North and South, and East and West, to the darkly dreaming continents and islands in the deep, where the morning sun would waken Sascha’s terror from its sleep.

And some other little terrors woke at Landfill in the night, underneath a dark umbrella.

‘Oh my god! Who took the light?’

‘Only me,’ said Sascha Martin.

‘And I need it,’ with a yawn, ‘cause I just might have a way to stop the Super Balls by dawn.

The End.

Well, hardly.

The fate of the planet hangs in the balance.

Can Sascha put this right, or will dawn’s bright light reignite the flight of his Super Balls?

Next week, way past bedtime, Sascha crafts a critically cataclysmic collision of cosmic consequence, and suddenly it’s the girls they’re all afraid of.

Where can you run on a mountain made of Super Balls?

How do you hide from a drooling girl?

It’s all slippery slopes and midnight cravings as Sascha battles a pair of apocalypses only he could have created … in Sascha Martin’s Zombie Dust.